“If You Exist Somewhere, I’m Going to Find You”: Ellisa Beaver on Grief, EVP and Searching for Her Son

Towards the end of his life, Ellisa Beaver’s teenage son Matthew was sleeping more and more.

He had been diagnosed with cancer at 14 and was receiving hospice care at home. He was 17 when he died. As his illness progressed, there were moments when he would wake and tell his mum things she did not understand — or things she believed he could not have known.

One day, he woke and asked for his sister.

Ellisa went to fetch her daughter, but Matthew stopped her.

“No, not that sister. My other sister.”

He was adamant. Ellisa had another child who, in her words, “never was physically born”. She began to wonder whether Matthew believed he was seeing that sister.

Hospice staff had explained to her that a person approaching death can sometimes appear to have, as she put it, “a foot in this world and a foot on the other side”. Whether that explains what Matthew experienced is impossible for me to say. It was, however, one of the moments that made Ellisa wonder if there was more happening than she could see.

Another time, Matthew woke distressed and told her he had something important to say. He wanted her to write it down. According to Ellisa, he described a major earthquake, a tsunami and nuclear reactors melting down. This was in 2009. When the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster happened in Japan two years later, she connected the details with what Matthew had told her.

Ellisa interprets that experience through her belief that time may not work in the same way for consciousness outside the physical world. Other explanations may be possible. For her, though, these moments “cracked me open to feeling that there’s more”.

Then Matthew died, and Ellisa was left with a kind of grief most of us can barely imagine.

“That destroyed me,” she said.

After some years, when she felt able to begin searching, she made herself a promise:

“If you exist somewhere and I can find you, I’m going to find you.”

Looking for Matthew

I wanted to speak with Ellisa because that search did not remain a private one. It eventually became Healing Grief with EVP, the name under which she now shares her experiments in electronic voice phenomena and offers sessions to bereaved people.

EVP — electronic voice phenomena — is the term used for voices or speech-like sounds found on recordings which were not heard in the room at the time. Some people interpret them as communication from the dead. Others suggest radio interference, audio artefacts, pattern recognition or other explanations. Ellisa believes at least some of the recordings she receives come from people in spirit.

Before EVP, she tried mediumship courses and experimented with a pendulum. She was interested in any method that might help her reach Matthew. Then somebody on a mediumship course mentioned electronic voice phenomena, and Ellisa joined a group that was experimenting with it.

“I never looked back,” she told me. She has now been practising for about ten years.

The defining moment came in her car. It was a birthday, she was in a good mood, and the air conditioning was blowing. She called out to Matthew while running a recorder. With this form of EVP, she explained, she does not normally hear an answer as it happens. She listens afterwards.

On playback, she says she heard: “Mum, your attention. I’m trying to get your attention. Mum, attention.”

For Ellisa, those words were distinct and personal enough to feel different from wishful thinking. “You hear it, but it also resonates in you,” she said. It was the moment she felt she had found him.

That does not make the recording independently verified evidence of Matthew’s survival, of course. But it explains why Ellisa continued. She was not approaching the subject as a ghost hunter or paranormal investigator. She was a mother trying to find her son.

From a private search to other families

Ellisa initially used her Healing Grief with EVP Facebook page to share the communications she believed she was receiving from Matthew. After a couple of years, she asked other bereaved mothers if she could try recording for their children.

“Everyone said yes, and I would work on it and it would work. And then I just kept doing it.”

She says she has now carried out hundreds of sessions, many involving children who have died, although people also approach her hoping to hear from a husband, wife or another loved one.

The voices do not necessarily sound as they did in life. Ellisa looks instead for the way somebody addresses a family member, a direct answer to a question, a familiar turn of phrase or information which feels specific to the person receiving it.

Sessions can be arranged remotely; Ellisa is in the United States and has worked with people in several countries. She may ask for the names of relatives, pets or significant details so that she knows what to listen for. Sometimes a client gives her a particular question, although she says a direct answer does not always arrive. She often prefers to leave the invitation open: “What do you want Anthony to know?”

Ellisa is enthusiastic about her results, but she was also clear about the limits. Not every response is clear, and not every question is answered.

For her, the work has become a calling. She believes Matthew helps to facilitate some of the connections, because his name sometimes appears in recordings when she has not been asking about him.

The aim, she said, is not to cure grief. She does not believe grief can simply be removed. It is to “soften it” by helping someone feel that the relationship may not have completely ended.

What sound becomes a voice?

There is no special “EVP machine” in Ellisa’s setup. She uses ordinary recording software called WavePad and supplies a background sound which she believes can be altered to form words.

That sound might be wind, running water or what she calls “gibberish”: tiny pieces of human speech chopped up and rearranged until there are no intact words. When she listens back, she says she sometimes hears fluid sentences and relevant answers within that noise.

Her interpretation is that spirit is manipulating sound from the physical environment. It is important to be clear that this is an interpretation, not an established scientific explanation of what is happening.

Ellisa also advised caution about commercial EVP apps and spirit boxes. She has not used them herself and therefore did not claim to know exactly what they produce, but she does not regard them as the most reliable way to test the phenomenon.

I had already been looking at an EVP device on Amazon, so naturally I wanted to know whether anybody could have a go.

“Very honestly, I don’t know if anybody can do it,” she said.

Some people report waiting a long time before hearing anything they consider meaningful. Ellisa’s advice was to remain sceptical about your own recordings and ask: “Is this authentic, or is it a fluke?”

“I didn’t like that dog food for years”

The conversation took a turn I had not expected when Ellisa began talking about animals.

I lost my own miniature poodle nearly three years ago, and the grief can still catch me. So when Ellisa said she also experiments with communication involving animals, living and dead, it became very personal for me.

She believes animals can communicate through what she describes as “spirit interpreters”, who pick up signals from the animal and translate them into human language. Again, that is the explanation she says she has received through her work. It is not something we can present as fact.

My immediate thought was slightly less serious: if my dog came through, would she say, “Anthony, I didn’t like that dog food for years. I tried to tell you”?

Ellisa said the messages she attributes to animals can indeed be funny and blunt.

She described recording around a problem with her dog Bodhi’s foot. Before a veterinarian had confirmed what was wrong, Ellisa asked whether it was an infection or a tumour. She says the response included: “I have in my toe tumour.”

While the foot was being treated, the dog was having medicated soaks and wearing a protective sock. According to Ellisa, further recordings included “foot soak pain”, “I don’t like that” and “I like sock”. There was also a reference to receiving extra bones.

Ellisa saw this as specific information related to what was happening at home. Later, Bodhi received a cancer diagnosis. She hopes to continue including what she interprets as his responses when making decisions about his comfort and care, alongside veterinary treatment.

She has also experimented with living animals while they are asleep or sedated for surgery, and with non-verbal people while they sleep. Ellisa’s broader belief is that she is not communicating only with the dead, but connecting with consciousness — including people in comas, people with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and non-verbal children.

These are substantial claims, and the interview did not provide independent evidence with which to assess them. They are best understood as the direction Ellisa’s personal research has taken, rather than medical or scientific conclusions.

A conversation in real time

Towards the end of our conversation, Ellisa showed me an experiment she had carried out with fellow researcher Tony Rathman using a system called Staticom 3.0. Unlike her usual method of recording and then listening back, this was intended to allow responses to be heard in real time through customised white noise.

The sound was rough and difficult to make out. Ellisa believed she heard phrases referring to “stations” used for communication, followed by “We see you, sister” and “He lives”. She interprets these as references to technical or transmission stations outside our physical world.

I was trying to absorb all this while also keeping the interview moving. At one point I admitted, “I’m overstimulated.” Later, after another demonstration, my rather more technical response was: “My head is about to blow off this body.”

Ellisa and Tony believe the technology has the potential to develop into clearer, two-way conversation. In the excitement of the moment, we both talked about it changing the world. For now, the recordings shown in our interview may be fascinating, but they do not by themselves establish who or what produced the voices.

When I asked whether the scale of that possibility frightened her, Ellisa hesitated. She did not feel she knew enough yet to give a firm answer. She wants to continue documenting the process and believes there may one day be a film about it.

I also asked what she would say to people who remain sceptical.

“I am not here to convince anybody, honestly.”

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my interview with Ellisa Beaver on the Anthony Larkin Podcast. We explored her search for Matthew, how she works with electronic voice phenomena, her experiments involving animals and the possibility of real-time communication.

https://youtu.be/ukExbckFnZo

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