Ghost box

A Ghost box (also known as a Frank's box) is a device used to supposedly communicate with the dead. In reality, it's just an intentionally-damaged radio.

It's fun to pretend
Paranormal
Fails from the crypt
v - t - e

How it's made

Ghost busters get a radio with a frequency scanning function, disable the bit that stops it scanning when it finds a station — and presto, instant ghost box. The radio then permanently jumps though available frequencies, playing each one for a fraction of a second. The various sounds from snatches of transmission, static, white noise and interference are then interpreted (using some of the most extreme pareidolia and a big dose of imagination) as words and communication from spirits on the other side.[1]

Why they think it works

The spirits are seemingly unable to just pick one frequency, stick to it, and speak clearly, but must instead speak on lots of different ones in quick succession in cryptic syntax.[2][3][4]

The inevitable app
“”This is NOT a toy app! It is intended to be used for serious paranormal research. That is why we have decided NOT to publish this app in the Play Store for the masses. If you are here, you are probably more serious about the paranormal than most...
—"Jason Profit"[5]

Instead of buying an intentionally malfunctioning radio in order to pretend you're communicating with spirits, you can buy a smartphone app that creates the same effect. This small miracle of pseudoscience is marketeered by the aptly-named "Jason Profit".[5]

gollark: Our cluster management systems just automatically select for productivity.
gollark: See, wage growth cost us capital which could otherwise be fed to our capital generators, so we just use orbital mind control laser backscatter to nondestructively extract neural patterns from arbitrary people, then execute them in parallel at a few thousand times real time speed on our computing clusters.
gollark: We have employees, we don't really *worry* about them.
gollark: We mostly just offload doodling to specialized neural networks.
gollark: You doodle *manually*, even?

See also

References
  1. The many voices of Frank's Box Skeptoid
  2. Frank's Ghost Box Ghost Tech
  3. Island Paranormal Investigators
  4. Looking to buy a Franks box or “Ghost Box”? Latest model Ghost Box radio to hit the market is the BEST yet! Greenvilleghost.com
  5. CrossTalkEVP 2.0 for Android.
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