The
Paranormal Place

Researcher and EVP Innovator Sarah Estep

Guiley Rest in Peace by Rosemary Ellen Guiley
Today I attended the funeral and burial of a great lady: Sarah Estep, the founder of the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena. Sarah died on January 3, of kidney failure, following a two-week illness. She was 81.

Everyone who has ever done EVP for investigations, research or personal study owes Sarah a huge debt. She has left behind a phenomenal legacy: the AA-EVP, an international research organization she established in 1982; a classification of voices; a library of thousands of recordings she herself made over the years; and inspiration and passion that have fueled countless researchers.

I became friends with Sarah several years ago, when I lived a few miles from her home in Annapolis, Maryland. She was warm, witty and wonderful company, and she generously let me listen to many of her EVP recordings, and even experiment with her original reel-to-reel setup, shown in the photograph I took of her in her study. She possessed a great store of knowledge, and a zest for investigating the unknown, especially the afterlife and survival. Things come full circle in remarkable ways. The casket that now serves as the final resting place of Sarah's physical form was also the beginning of her remarkable study of the afterlife. As a child, she once sneaked peeks into caskets at the funeral parlor owned by her grandparents in Altoona, Pennsylvania. It seemed obvious to her that death was an end, final.

Later in life, she undertook EVP experiments to prove to herself that there is no survival after death. Night after night she recorded without results. Just as she was about to give up, she recorded a clear female voice that said, "Our world is one of beauty." She was a believer.

One of her most remarkable EVPs was, "Death no more a casket."

Sarah is now on the Other Side, discovering wonders that we here on this side only glimpse. Undoubtedly we will hear much from her - she's quite determined when she sets her mind to a task.

The service for Sarah was lovely, and daughter Becky gave a moving eulogy. Three white doves were released at graveside in Annapolis. Among those attending were Tom and Lisa Butler, who have led the AA-EVP at its Reno headquarters since 2000, and Richard Shenk, a longtime AA-EVP member and researcher from Delaware.

Sarah's last public appearance was in 2006, at the AA-EVP conference in Atlanta. She delivered a marvelous speech on her career in EVP, and was recognized with a lifetime achievement award.

The AA-EVP is establishing a memorial fund in Sarah's name to help continue research. Contributions may be made to the AAEVP, PO Box 1311, Reno, NV 89507.

Sarah Estep was five years old when she saw her first dead person. The corpse in a casket convinced her that death is the end, a finality - there is no survival into an afterlife. Many years later, Estep had another profound experience: the voice of a dead person speaking to her on an audio tape. That experience propelled her into the exotic world of EVP - electronic voice phenomena, the recording of voices of the dead, angels, ETs and other entities.

Today Estep is recognized as one of the world's leading EVP experts. She has collected thousands of EVP recordings, and she founded the American Association-Electronic Voice Phenomena, an organization she led for 18 years. In addition, Estep has had ET contact experiences and past life recollections, even photographing an ancient tomb in Egypt where she believes she was buried in a previous life. And she has definite views on the afterlife.

For someone who started life with the certainty that death is the end, it's been a long, mysterious and rewarding journey.

Estep remembers well her pivotal point at age five, when she looked down at a corpse awaiting burial. Estep and her family lived in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Once a year they would visit her father's parents in Westfield, New York, where they owned a funeral home. The family lived upstairs on the second floor, where Estep and her parents stayed. Five-year-old Estep was taken into a room where bodies were prepared for burial. There she saw a man laid out in a casket. Fascinated, Estep would sneak into the room to peek into other caskets.

"I'd slip in and very quietly close the door behind me," she recalled. "I'd walk over to the casket and I'd stand on my toes and put my hands on the edge and look down into the face of a dead person. I'd just stand there and look at them. I wasn't at all frightened. They were dead and I knew they couldn't hurt me. But I became convinced that once you die, you go into a hole in the ground. Death is a casket. I grew up thinking there was no life after death. There was no heaven, no anything. I didn't dare tell my parents or anyone. I didn't like that feeling, but I couldn't think anything else because I'd seen all these dead people."

Estep's turnaround came in 1976, when she read The Handbook of Psi Discoveries by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder. There were two chapters on EVP, talking about the work of Konstantin Raudive, Friedrich Jurgenson, Harold Sherman and Walter and Mary Jo Uphoff. The evidence for survival challenged and intrigued Estep. She decided to try EVP herself, using a large reel to reel tape recorder belonging to her husband, Charlie. She committed herself to a week of trials. If she got no results during that time, she would abandon the effort.

Every morning., Estep went down into her basement and tried to capture voices on tape. She returned late at night to check for results. She asked the question over and over again, "Is anybody here?" For five nights, nothing happened. "I was bored to death," Estep said. "I thought that if someone was listening on the other end, they must be as bored as me."

On the sixth morning, she changed her question to "Please tell me what your world is like." A female voice of the highest quality, Class A, replied, "Our world is one of beauty."

Thankful and delighted, Estep decided to continue her EVP experiments, only to be greeted by silence for nearly a month. Just as she was ready to quit again, she heard voices say, "Don�t give up" and "Keep it up." After several months of more experimentation, Estep recorded voices nearly every time she tried. Many were Class A.

Estep taped seven days a week and received three to four messages a day. She kept up her practice until 2000, when she cut back to occasional taping. Her vaults now contain 25,000 recordings, about 22,000 of which are dead human beings now living in the realm of spirit. About 2000 seem to be extraterrestrial, and the remaining 1000 are beings from other worlds or dimensions.

About 90 percent of all the voices sound male. "I�m not sure why that is," said Estep. "Perhaps it has to do with the technology of EVP."

In 1982, Estep founded the American Association-Electronic Voice Phenomena, one of the largest nonprofit organizations devoted to the study of EVP. She directed it until 2000, when she turned it over to the leadership of Tom and Lisa Butler of Reno, Nevada.

In 1996, the Dr. A. Hedri Foundation for Exopsychology and Epipsychology awarded Estep and George Meek first prize for Epispsychology, in recognition of their accomplishments.

Some of Estep's most profound past-life EVP experiences occurred during her three trips to Egypt, where she feels she had several past lives. She even found a desert cemetery where she believe she was buried more than 2000 years ago. She took a recorder into tombs and pyramids and captured voices. In an ancient cemetery, a female voice said, "I buried you." In a small pyramid she got a voice of a boy, perhaps about 12 years old, who said, "Mother." In the Great Pyramid in Cairo, she was called by name. Voices asked if she could be trusted, and other voices answered, "Yes, she is a good person."

About six years after her first EVP results, Estep received a comment from the dead on her long-ago experiences as a child, when she concluded that "death is a casket" and the final end to everything. A clear class A voice told her, "Death no more a casket."

"So they knew me from the time I was five or six, " Estep said.

Estep has written two books, Voices of Eternity, published in 1988 and now out of print, and Roads to Eternity, published this month by Galde Press. Roads to Eternity is accompanied by a CD featuring spirit and ET voices from Estep's collection. The voices speak on either the forward or reverse sides of the tapes. Some of the reverse voices are from scientists such as Charles Darwin and Arthur Stanley Eddington. The CD includes some of Estep's many contacts with Beethoven, and features a musical chord and a minute of music from one of Beethoven�s compositions, which is slightly changed from the original.

Estep's work has inspired many people to explore EVP and undertake research that someday may provide definite answers to the realm that lie beyond death, and to other places in the universe.