SPOOKY BOX / HOW SPIRIT BOX APPS WORK
HOW SPIRIT BOX APPS
ACTUALLY WORK.
A spirit box app does one of three things: it hops between radio stations streamed over the internet, it plays banks of recorded sound fragments, or it reads the phone's sensors and picks a word from a list. There is no radio in the app unless it streams one, and the words come from chance and your own ear.
What a hardware spirit box does
A spirit box, also called a ghost box, is a radio made to sweep across the band without stopping. Frank Sumption built the first, Frank's Box, in 2002: an AM receiver sweeping back and forth across the band, with white noise mixed in. What comes out is static broken by scraps of speech and music.
The SB7, the common handheld model, sweeps the AM or FM band forward or backward at a speed you choose, from 350 milliseconds per step down to 50, and fills the gaps between steps with synthetic noise. You ask a question out loud and listen for an answer in the fragments. Nothing in the box chooses words.
The three kinds of spirit box app
A phone has no sweeping receiver in it, so an app gets its sound in one of three ways. The examples below are named from their own store listings.
- Radio-stream sweepers hop between radio stations the phone receives over the internet. Signal, by the developer of Necrophonic, says on its listing that it sweeps internet radio stations. Spirit Box Radio, by Michael Weber, says it scans live radio stations, not pre-recorded radio; how they reach the phone is not stated on its listing. Both are listed as paid apps, and sweeping internet stations needs a connection.
- Sound-bank and phoneme apps play recorded audio stored inside the app. Necrophonic, by Chris Rogers, says on its listing that its eight banks are made of phonemes, partial words, reversed audio and foreign-language speech, and that beyond basic sounds such as na and ma they contain no real words or phrases. It is listed as a paid app. No radio or sensors are involved; any word you hear is one your ear assembles.
- Sensor and random-word apps read the phone's sensors and speak words from a list. Spirit Talker, by Spotted Ghosts Ltd, lists the magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope, orientation sensor, barometer and compass, and says its responses are based on real sensor data and not random; it is listed as a paid app. Ghost Radar: LEGACY, by Spud Pickles, says it takes various readings on the device and speaks a word when a pattern stands out; it is free with in-app purchases and shows ads.
There is no radio in the app
That is the plain truth. A phone can play a station it receives as a stream, but it cannot sweep the AM and FM bands the way a box does, and a sound-bank app or a word app uses no radio at all. When a listing says live stations, read that as streaming; when it says words, the words are in a list inside the app. Two listings above say so themselves: Spirit Box Radio's calls the app entertainment, and Ghost Radar's says its results cannot be verified.
The skeptic's view
Skeptics have a short account of the hardware: a sweeping radio produces random fragments of speech, and a listener who has just asked a question is primed to hear an answer. The effect is called audio pareidolia, and the writer Ben Radford has called the ghost box a modern version of the Ouija board. The apps are the same story. A streamed sweep is still random fragments, a sound bank is random fragments by design, and a word app is a list with a rule for when to read from it. No reading on a phone and no word it speaks shows anything beyond that.
How Spooky Box approaches it
Spooky Box is an app of the third kind, with no radio in it. It reads the sensors already in an Android phone (magnetic field, motion, pressure, temperature and humidity where the phone has them) and spends the first five seconds of a session learning the room's normal readings. After that, a bigger shift away from normal makes the next word likely to come sooner. The sensors decide the moment. Chance decides the word, drawn from a built-in bank of more than 3,500 words that do not repeat within a session.
It shows its work. Under every word is the reason it came up: Magnetic shift +14.2 µT, Pressure shift, or Spontaneous, meaning no reading stood out and the word came by chance alone. Readings taken while the phone is handled are thrown out, and hands-off mode pauses words until it is still. Record or film a session, and tap any word in the log afterwards to hear the room from just before it. Sessions cost nothing; one optional one-time unlock adds custom words, two voice effects, older archived sessions and export, with no ads and no account. The word is still random, and the app is entertainment in the spirit box tradition. More in the spirit box app guide and the ghost hunting guide.
Try it
Spooky Box is on Google Play for Android 8.0 or later, and an iPhone version is coming next. Set the phone down, ask a question, and weigh what you hear against the reason under it. The home page has a scripted session preview.
Read next
- A spirit box app that shows its work: how it chooses a word and what each reason means.
- Ghost hunting with a phone: what a phone's sensors can and cannot measure.
- Waverly Hills Sanatorium: its history, the reports, and how to run a session there.
Questions
How does a ghost box app work?
Ghost box and spirit box mean the same thing. An app with either name hops between radio stations streamed over the internet, plays recorded fragments of speech and noise stored inside the app, or reads the phone's sensors and picks a word from a built-in list. The listing usually says which.
Do spirit box apps have a real radio in them?
No. A phone has no sweeping receiver, so the most an app can do is play radio it receives as a stream. Sound-bank apps and word apps use no radio at all. Spooky Box has no radio in it either: it reads the phone's sensors and speaks a word from its built-in bank.
Are the words from a spirit box app random?
In a word app, yes: the word is drawn from a list by chance, and the sensors can only set the timing. In Spooky Box a bigger shift in the room's readings makes the next word likely to arrive sooner, the word is random from a bank of more than 3,500, and its reason is shown under it. No word or reading shows anything more than that.
Spooky Box is paranormal entertainment. It uses device sensor activity and a word engine to create atmospheric sessions. Generated words and sensor readings do not establish the presence of spirits or verified communication.