THE WHISPERING SEANCE
THE ECHO FRAGMENT
ECHO AND NARCISSUS
THE SOCIETY FOR UNEXPLAINED AUDITORY PHENOMENA
THE CARLYSLE SISTERS
THE VEOKA ARCHIVE
DERRICK
AUTUMN TREMOND
THE EDISON CONSPIRACY
MARISSA MARS
THE TERESA MONOLOGUE
THE BOOK OF ECSTASIES AND TRANSFORMATIONS
The whispering seance ritual has only been described once in a pamphlet written under the name Z. A. Duffy and dated 1877. There was a popular vogue for spiritualist and occult seances from 1850 to roughly 1900 resulting in a great deal of amateur experimentation such that no modern scholar can confidently assert how widespread this particular ritual was or if it even existed in the first place. According to the pamphlet, this event was a regular occurrence at a single private home in Bordentown City, New Jersey. Participants sat separately facing away from each other at varying angles around the room and whispered quietly to themselves. These whispers precipitated an experience of clairaudience in the participants as they began to hear sounds that were not occurring naturally within the room but derived, rather, from some supernatural source. Duffy leaves the nature of that source open-ended in his pamphlet. Dark Pool Project director Rob C. Thompson has written an article questioning the authenticity of Duffy’s pamphlet. Thompson, one of the world’s only scholars of nineteenth-century spiritualist medium and historian Emma Hardinge Britten, notes that Britten cataloged most of the spiritualist and occult phenomena occurring in the Western world in two books devoted to the subject and made no mention of the whispering seance. This is particularly curious since Duffy specifically mentions having met and discussed the whispering seance with Britten and Britten had purchased a cottage for her mother in Burlington, not far from Bordentown City.
For more see The Veoka Archive
Daniel Allen Zachery, an apparent pseudonym for a medieval of classical scholar, reported the discovery a fragment of text from an unascribed ancient Greek play based on the story of Echo and Narcissus. The fragment was purportedly discovered in the collection of Catherine, Countess of Caithness at Castle Mey in northern Scotland. Caithness was a sometime member of the Theosophical Society, defender of spiritualist mediums, and author of a book promulgating a blend of spiritualism with eastern reincarnationist thought, sympathetic to Allan Kardec’s spiritist movement. The fragment includes dialogue and a stage direction indicating that the audience should “attune themselves to the voice of the shadows.” Zachery argues that participants in this drama would have been members of an ancient cult who performed the text in order to make contact with some sort of supernatural entity. Zachery ascribes this idea to a medieval author he calls Pseudo-Albertus, a writer who was not the Dominican friar and alchemist Albertus Magnus but wrote under his name. There is no evidence of such an author advancing any such theory outside of Zachery’s own piece.
For more see The Veoka Archive
Narcissus is supposed to have been one of the most beautiful men to have ever lived. The mountain nymph, Echo, fell in love with him but Narcissus showed her no interest. Having caught sight of his own reflection in a pool in the forest, he’d become enamored of himself and refused to move. He spent his time wasting away at the water’s edge gazing at himself. For her part, Echo wasted away as well out of unrequited love for Narcissus. Ultimately the beautiful Narcissus was transformed into the flower that bears his name. Echo became so obsessed with Narcissus that after awhile she only spoke to repeat his words, and she faded and vanished until all that remained was the sound of the echo itself.
For more see The Ancient History Encyclopedia
Identified only by their last names in the “whispering seance pamphlet” by Z. A. Duffy, MacFarland and Vandermeer are regarded by T. Carl Rasmusen as the founders of the Society for Unexplained Auditory Phenomena. Vandermeer was a Dutch mesmerist who taught MacFarland the technique for the whispering seance, warning him that identifying or attempting to identify the source for the disembodied voices produced through the seance would permanently sever the participant’s ability to contact these voices. MacFarland brought the whispering seance to the United States, specifically Bordentown City, New Jersey. MacFarland believed that the disembodied voices were, in fact, segment of the individual’s own consciousness that had someone managed to separate from the controlling personality through the ritual of the seance. For more see The Veoka Archive
T. Carl Rasmusen believes that Alexander MacFarland was a direct descendent of the MacFarland mentioned in the Duffy pamphlet. Alexander MacFarland was born and lived in West Trenton, less than twenty minutes from the center of Bordentown City. This geographic link, along with the connection in name, is certainly suggestive if not definitive evidence of their possible connection. Alexander MacFarland was the sole member of the Society for Unexplained Auditory Phenomena and a kind of second founder, beginning the organization some time before 1985 when he was called to investigate the New Hope Sound Demon plaguing the Carlysle family of New Hope, Pennsylvania. MacFarland concluded in his report that the unusual happenings surrounding Melissa and Teresa Carlysle were likely paranormal in origin. He went on to marry Melissa Carlysle in 1989 and died in 2005. For more see The Veoka Archive
Theodore Carl Rasmusen is the current president and sole member of the Society for Unexplained Auditory Phenomena. Rather than conducting in-person investigations, Rasmussen functions as a kind of historian and archivist, cataloging the events of Alexander MacFarland’s investigation into the New Hope Sound Demon in 1985 as well as a series of similar occurrences in College Park, Maryland in 1997. Rasmusen believes the events in New Hope and College Park were caused by the same variant of paranormal phemenona, a variant as yet uncategorized by paranormal investigators. Rasmusen hopes to be the first to document and characterize these phenomena under a single name. For more see The Society for Unexplained Auditory Phenomena
After a failed application process to join T. Carl Rasmusen’s branch of the Society for Unexplained Auditory Phenomena, third-grade teacher Emma Guile has created her own branch under the same name in the small town of Trappe, Maryland. To date, Guile has not conducted any investigations but in her mission statement she has expressed her intention to pick up where Alexander MacFarland left off in 1985. For more see The Veoka Archive
In May 1985, Melissa Carlysle began experimenting with a tape, referred to by paranormal investigator Alexander MacFarland as the “Z. A. Tape.” Melissa was nineteen at the time of these event and attending the local community college. MacFarland had been invited to investigate Melissa Carlysle by her mother after the girl was found with her sister—naked or wearing only underwear in the home end zone of the New Hope Solsbury High School football field on the 20th of August 1985. The mother reported that Carlysle had managed to turn on both the public address system and field lights by mysterious means. In the presence of the investigator, Carlysle demonstrated an ability to conjure a voice which spoke under white noise coming through the stereo system in her bedroom. MacFarland also reported seeing two shadowy beings after making contact with Carlysle’s skin. Rumors circulated that Melissa and her sister were possessed or otherwise haunted by demons, and Melissa chose to leave the town of New Hope as early as November of that same year.
There are conflicting accounts of Teresa’s involvement with Melissa’s “Z. A. Tape;” however Teresa herself seemed to indicate in an interview with Alexander MacFarland that she had not become involved with Melissa’s experiments until the night of August 20th 1985 when she walked in on her sister listening to the tape. Teresa apparently only ever listened to the tape on this one occasion, but she began conducting her own unusual ritual in the backyard of the house she lived in with her mother and sister around a circular burn mark on the patio. She gathered three rocks, chosen according to instructions she received in a dream, and the rocks conveyed messages to her of peace and healing that only Teresa was able to hear. Teresa, who was seventeen at the time of these events, was accused of disinterring corpses, and left the town of New Hope after her high school graduation.
Curated by Louis D. Veoka. The Veoka archive is a compilation of articles centered on innovations in audio-based paranormal research, founded by Louis D. Veoka, an apparent pseudonym who makes no original contributions to the blog other than copies of historical resources which he appears to type out by hand. Contemporary contributors include T. Carl Rasmusen, chronicler of the New Hope Sound Demon, medieval historian Daniel Allen Zachary (also a possible pseudonym), and Rob C. Thompson, director of the Dark Pool project.
Social media account curated by “Derrick.” At least one member of the Dark Pool Project team believe that this account is run by one or several of the actors in the project and reflects some of the darker themes from their meditation experiences.
This conspiracy theory is articulated in a blog curated by Trevor Alden. This blog advances the unsubstantiated theory that Thomas Edison trafficked with demons through his phonograph invention. While it is true that Edison was a member of the occult-inclined Theosophical Society, there is no evidence that he had any interest in demon conjuring or worship. The cases of Edison-inspired possession listed here cannot be corroborated.
In our final episode, we feature a portion of Teresa Carlysle’s interview with Alexander MacFarland. The eighteen-year-old Teresa was apparently very much attuned to current events as we can hear in her list of the “everything” that “sucks now.” We tracked down each of her references. (1) “India poisoned.” This is an apparent reference to the Bhopal disaster which took place in December 1984. A gas leak on the evening of December 2 into the morning of December 3 at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant exposed over 500,000 people to methyl isocyanate gas and killed 4,000 that night. It’s considered one of if not the worst industrial disaster of the twentieth century. (2) “Earthquakes in Mexico.” On September 19 and 20, just before MacFarland interviewed Teresa, earthquakes killed between five and eight thousand people in and around Mexico City. The earthquake began at the Michoacan seismic gap in the Pacific Ocean with first shockwaves arriving in Mexico City at 7:19am. (3) Although by no means a disaster, Teresa also makes reference to Jefferson Starship to frame her comments about rain. Jefferson Starship’s lead singers were Marty Balin and Grace Slick. Slick sings the lyrics to “Hyperdrive” from Jefferson Starship’s 1974 album Dragonfly: “Because I felt it I believe it / Because there are things I've never seen that I believe / So I'm going to place my face right in the triangle door / Till I can move right on through instead of just standing here looking at the floor. / And if it rains again tonight, I can think light years ahead…”
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In 1997, Autumn Tremond conducted a series of experiments involving elements mirroring the work of Teresa and Missy Carlysle. She came to the attention of researcher T. Carl Rasmusen through an editorial posted in the University of Maryland student newspaper in 1997 complaining about demonic activity in her boyfriend, Gregory Vandermeer’s, dormitory room on campus. Dark Pool Project director Rob C. Thompson had been familiar with Tremond’s work years before he began collaborating with Rasmusen and may have indirectly pointed Rasmusen toward his discovery. Tremond’s work is detailed in “The Book of Ecstasies and Transformations.” In the version recovered through Thompson’s and Rasmusen’s research, Tremond has included a series of narratives pegged to each of the book’s twelve chapters. This is all we know of her process developing a ritual to enter an alternate dimensional space; a feat she claims to have been successful at on more than one occasion.
According to the narratives of Autumn Tremond, Marissa Mars was the leader of a small club of students including Tremond and Gregory Vandermeer who experimented with “The Book of Ecstasies and Transformations.” Mars also had a regular radio show on which she played experimental audio in the small hours of the night. Mars was committed to completing an interdimensional journey but was apparently unsuccessful in her attempts which embittered her toward the more successful Tremond and Vandermeer. A series of essays have been attributed to Mars, but it’s unclear whether any of them were actually written by the historical Mars. It’s possible that her name has been appropriated by detractors of undertakings like the Dark Pool Project in order to organize resistance under a single pseudonym.
The Book of Ecstasies and Transformations in the version used by the Dark Pool Project has been compiled over the course of roughly a century. The original text consists of four short axioms and eight slightly longer “tokens” broken into two sets: the tokens of the vessel and the second tokens. This text came into the Project’s possession via the Vandermeer family who first imported it to the United States from Canada in the early part of the twentieth century. Gregory Vandermeer played some role in exposing Marissa Mars and Autumn Tremond to the text and Mars and Tremond then proceeded to add their own commentaries and narratives to the version as we know it now. The final addition, the responses of the actor, are the work of Project director Rob C. Thompson based on experiments he conducted in graduate school with undergraduate student and performer Ana Pavon.