The real White Noise!
By
Chris Gaede
Is the ghost of John Belushi tooling around the Gable Lombard suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, and trying to contact us? EVP researchers Tom and Lisa Butler of the A.A.E.V.P. spent some time on Sunday May 15th in the famous room 1200 of the hotel, seeing if they could contact someone from beyond. Here’s a sample of what they heard when they played back their recorder (the voice you hear leading the discussion is Tom Butler, the other voice is…maybe John Belushi?
LISTEN
HERE (.mp3 file)
LISTEN
HERE (.wma file)
Okay,
now that I have been labeled a crackpot, I guess I should back up
and explain how I came to be in the hotel with the “most star
studded bumps in the night.”
Universal
Pictures invited JoBlo.com out to the renowned Hollywood Roosevelt
hotel to celebrate the May 17th release of the Michael Keaton fright
fest WHITE
NOISE on
We spent the evening with Tom and Lisa Butler, directors of the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena. The Butlers have been heading up the A.A.E.V.P. since 2000, but have been documenting E.V.P. for the last 15 years. The Butlers are featured on the extensive extras on the WHITE NOISE disc, so they were the natural source to turn to for a closer inspection of E.V.P.
Believe what you want, that’s it’s fake, or that these are just radio waves, whatever. The point is that these transmissions have no logical reason to be on these tapes. Maybe the fact that you can only hear the voices in playback will cause the peanut gallery to groan en masse, who knows. But, the Butlers are by no means flakes, crackpots, or scam artists. They are down to earth people who seem to be researching these phenomena out of their own spiritual and scientific curiosity, and not for celebrity or financial gain.
The evening started off with some demonstrations of E.V.P. that the Butlers have captured. It’s creepy stuff, voices saying “WHERE’S MOM?”, and the like. We were also treated to stories about the hotel from an employee, who has worked at the hotel for four years. Again, another rational, sane person. She told of strange happenings in room 928 involving a singing voice, even though no one was in the room. She asked one of the maids, who responded that she heard the singing all of the time. Garcia also claimed that the door of the Gable Lombard suite flew open on its own as she tried to enter. I would say her creepiest story involved getting phone calls from cabanas with no phones…or phone lines. One of the voices even asked her if she was wearing tights. I guess it’s better than someone asking you if you’re wearing kulats, because those are so 1999, but still….that’s just creepy. She said that she called security to check it out, but of course, no one was in the room.
Then it was on to the main event. We were led in groups up to the famous Gable Lombard suite, as in Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. I guess they used to…hang out there, and maybe still do. The Butlers spent some time trying to contact spirits in the two places in the suite where they had recorded voices previously. One spot was right in the middle of the bedroom. Of course, it was near an outlet in the floor, maybe somebody tried a marriage of a fork and an outlet, and found themselves on the wrong side of consciousness?
The suite was amazing, with a jaw dropping patio that looks out over Hollywood Blvd. It’s not hard to see why old Hollywood royalty would come there to hang out, high above the ticket buyers that put them on top to begin with. Honestly, I couldn’t help staring out the window at the people STILL camped out for STAR WARS: EPISODE 3 outside Graumann’s Chinese Theatre, where the film is NOT playing, nor will it ever be playing.
From the suite, you can see them huddled in their own “Camp X-Wing”, hoping against hope that the movie gods will change booking schedules at the last minute, so that the final STAR WARS film will end where it all began. Sorry guys, it ain’t happening, but I hear Lucas is sending a phalanx of Stormtroopers to offer you guys an escort to the Arclight on Wednesday night to see the movie there. C’mon, just go, it’ll be fun. BTW, has anybody called this “Camp X-Wing” yet? Maybe I should trademark that or something...
Anyway, back to ghosts. We returned downstairs to listen to the E.V.P. that the Butlers recorded in the Gable Lombard suite the day before. It was mostly hard to decipher, but still a little unsettling. But my favorite was the recording at the top of this story. It could be anything. The journalists gathered seemed to agree that the first part was indeed “JOHN”. It might not be as convincing when you play it back on your computer, but when I heard it in person, it sounded like “JOHN BELUSHI” to me. It’s up for debate.
Personally,
I think it would be totally tits if John Belushi’s ghost was
kicking it in the heart of Hollywood. And mind you, the BLUES
BROTHERS and ANIMAL HOUSE were also Universal releases. Could he be
stumping for his old employers from beyond the grave, perhaps
helping to promote the WHITE NOISE
All I’m trying to say is this: the Butlers are cool people doing cool work that you should check out. And John Belushi rules, and I wish he wasn’t dead. I get a little bummed every time I drive by the Chateau Marmont, where he died. So if I wanna believe that it could be his voice on the tape, I’m gonna believe it. It’s good for a smile. Interested in their book "There is No Death and There are No Dead", click on the cover below.
Oh
yeah, WHITE NOISE is a fun movie, check out the
WHITE
NOISE PUTS THE FRIGHTENERS ON YOU
Source: JoBlo.com
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