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Are you bored with all your projects? Do you need another electronic gadget to waste your time and money on, CR4er? Has your spouse not complained enough about all of your unfinished projects? Well, have I got a proposal for you!
 "I'm listening..." ...via Bret Contreras
No matter your personal feelings on Thomas Edison, it is widely accepted that he was an innovator who thought outside the box. Some people hated him because of his personal dispute with Nikola Tesla, some people loved him because he invented a chair that wouldn't tip over, and some people really, really wanted to talk to him from the other side of the grave, apparently.
Or so Edison believed. In the October 1920 issue of The American Magazine, Edison lays claim to his development of an "apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us." So, essentially Edison wanted to build a ghost phone. Shortly afterward, an interview in Scientific American mentioned Thomas was working on a prototype. However, no schematics or drawings were found (or, allegedly went missing) for this device, so it remains unclear if Edison actually went to work on such a machine. The clearest detail of the subject is that it utilized a very sensitive valve that had intensified results. At least he thought the technology was there, and had a peculiar interest in the macabre.
So, that was almost a century ago. Where are we on the whole ghost phone thing today?
Well, no one has been able to reproduce Edison's spirit phone. However in 1979, two friends built what they called The Spiricom. It was a set of 13 tone generators that spanned the range of the human male voice.
As George Meek, a self-made air conditioning industrialist, believed, "Well, all the spiritual universes-and there are hundreds of them-they're all sharing this space with our physical universe, like radio signals sharing this room." It was through The Spiricom that Meek, and his friend Bill O'Neil, believed they could tune in to the multiple frequencies of the spirit world. When Meek or O'Neil spoke into the machine, their voices would become distorted, much like that annoying thing Peter Frampton uses.
 "It's for you." ...via Vigilante's Blog
Anyway, the men claimed to be able to talk to many spirits and ghosts on The Spiricom, notably Dr. George Jeffries Mueller, a NASA scientist who offered feedback on The Spiricom's design. O'Neil and Meek recorded 20 hours of conversation with the deceased Dr. Mueller. Follow this link for an example of O'Neil's and Mueller's conversation.
The Spiricom is assembled as so:
 ...via World ITC
Unremarkably, much controversy surrounds The Spiricom and the work of Meek and O'Neil. Attempts to replicate The Spiricom have been unsuccessful, and it's believed that O'Neil's supernatural medium abilities helped produce the original results. Yes, their haunted telephone sounds sketchy at best.
Their results are not completely unfounded, as electronic voice phenomena (EVP) is an 'accepted' symptom of a spiritual haunting. Supposedly, ghosts communicate on low-frequency radio bands that are better observed by recording and replaying. By creating a Droste effect on a static television channel, it's believed that spirits are able to communicate and even appear through the TV.
I'm no expert, but I imagine its something akin to that "They're here." scene from Poltergeist.
If you want a jump start on the Halloween hi-jinks, I suggest going over to this page on Youtube which has a brief explanation of trans-communication with spirits through electronics.
As far as the spirit phone goes, I doubt a concept has been derived that already allows humans to communicate with the dead. That doesn't mean it won't happen however. Edison did predict the advent of robots, reinforced concrete, and synthetic gold.
 ...via Answers
Resources
Wikipedia - EVP
About Paranormal - Edison and the Ghost Machine
World ITC - The Research of George W. Meek
Ghost Tech - Spiricom
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Re: A Suggested DIY: The Ghost Phone!
