A Ghost of Brother Johnathan's by Elizabeth Eagan-Cox

up steaming mugs of hot cocoa. I looked over at the piano, where both cats were curled up underneath it, cozy and snug on a small braided rug. They were oblivious to what had taken place.
    Fatigued and emotionally spent, I envied the cats’ serenity. I took out my sound recorder and gave it a cursory listen. It was clean of any electronic voice recordings, exactly as I expected, because my recorder was not used in the session. I wanted to record all discussion about this evening so I set my unused recorder on the coffee table in front of where Luke and I sat on the sofa. Both of Luke’s recorders were on the table. I flipped the switch on my recorder.
    “Marta Kellerman’s home. Eleven at night. Myself, Marta and Luke Landry are sitting in the front living room, the room Marta’s calls the piano room. Marta’s two cats are in this room with us, they are peacefully asleep on a rug underneath the piano. It is just we three people. We will now discuss what took place this evening in the basement of this home.”
    I gave a brief but full description of the occurrences, including the voices that had replied to my questions and the bright orb activity, and the shattering of the mirror. Next, I asked Luke, and then Marta, to state what they had experienced. Not surprisingly, their observations matched mine. I then asked Luke to play his recorders. First up was the recorder that had been placed in the space between Luke and myself, behind us on what I identified as the laundry window side of the basement.
“Did you hear that? Back it up Luke,” I said.
    “Okay, I’ll reverse it to two minutes before you told me back it up. Here we go.”
Silence and then, “Shaaannon… Shaaannon.”
Luke said, “Clearly, that is your name, or someone with the same name. Marta, did you hear it?”
“Loud and clear. But who would call out to you?” Marta asked of me.
“I haven’t the vaguest idea. Luke, continue playing that recorder.”
A few more minutes of silence, then Luke stopped the recorder and interrupted. “Okay, this next part is toward the end, immediately before the orb appeared and the mirror cracked.” He resumed playing the recorder.
“Keep walking!”
More silence and then the recorder stopped, it had reached the end. Luke turned off the recorder.
“That last EVP, that was a man’s voice. And it sounded like a command,” I said.
“Oh, I agree, that was a man all right. He sounded angry, or impatient,” Marta offered.
“What about the other EVPs on the recorder and when we heard them live, could either of you discern if the voices were male or female?” asked Luke.
I answered, “Hmm, seemed to me that when several voices answered in unison, it was a mix of male and female. But when it was a single voice, saying ‘Here,’ I believe that was a soft female voice, but the male voice we just heard say ‘Keep walking,’ that was different from the other male voices. What about you, and Marta?”
Marta said, “Yes, I agree. I think in the unison of voices, there was one female voice, and the rest were males.”
“Intriguing, my opinion is just the opposite. I heard more female voices and maybe only one or two male voices,” Luke countered.
I considered these differences for a moment and suggested, “Perhaps the spirits are playing to our individual genders? Just a guess. Anyway, Luke, play the other recorder now.”
Luke picked up the recorder we had just listened to and set it aside on the lamp table that was at his end of the sofa. He switched on the second recorder. We listened through thirty-five minutes of static silence, not so much as a whisper.
“Odd, indeed,” Marta said.
“In my experience it is often this way. For whatever reason, one recorder will pick up an EVP and another, of the same age, make and model, and placed nearby, does not catch a single sound,” I explained.
Luke packed up both recorders and set them beside my purse on the coffee table. “I’ll go over these again tomorrow, when