Hearing My Dead Dachshund at Hollywood’s Most Haunted Spot, The Roosevelt Hotel
6 min readOct 28, 2019
I don’t believe in ghosts, at least I haven’t been totally convinced of them, even though I am a skeptical member of the UFO & Paranormal Activity Research Society (formerly the Mutual UFO Network) and go to monthly meetings there to learn and hear about psychic and paranormal phenomena.
I’ve lost two Dachshunds that I was particularly close to, Rudi and Pepe, and have written about them in the past. With four other Dachshunds now at my home, Pepe and Rudi aren’t always on my mind, but are always in my heart.
But then, there was that very odd time, at the top of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel during a press conference for the movie White Noise about recording voices from the beyond.
I was going there fairly skeptical, and knowing about all the legends of the hauntings at the Roosevelt, just down the hill from our house.
When I heard the familiar dog whimper, I made some news myself, among the EVP world. See this story: http://evprecording.blogspot.com/2005/01/reporter-gets-evp-at-hollywood.html
The story is no longer on the website I wrote it for, but here is a copy:
‘White Noise’ Shines Spotlight on Psychic Craze
By Mike Szymanski
January 5, 2005
The setting is arguably the most haunted location in Hollywood. At the Roosevelt Hotel, where the first Academy Awards were held, there’s an unexplained cold spot in the grand ballroom.
Marilyn Monroe’s ghost has been seen by hotel workers for decades in the mirror where she primped and dabbed her lips just before making an entrance to a premiere across the street at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Montgomery Clift’s trumpet playing can still be heard on the 14th floor where he lived during the height of his career.
I, personally, was witness to a psychic who was making a TV show about Hollywood hauntings and felt the cold spot — which seemed simply like an errant air conditioning duct — but I couldn’t explain how the hairs on my arm raised like static electricity only in that spot. That was the best they got out of the hotel at the time, but it was strange enough for me.
So, when Universal publicists held mini press conferences for “White Noise,” it was appropriate to have it at the honeymoon suite of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard at the Roosevelt Hotel along with Tom and Lisa Butler, who were consultants for the film.
The Butlers seem like an average couple, but they’ve got computers and recording devices with them almost at all times since they’ve discovered Electronic Voice Phenomenon. At the unusual interview session, they asked the handful of skeptical journalists to sit in a circle and one by one repeat the name of someone who has died, and afterward they will play the tape back and listen for any voices.
I relate a story to the Butlers about when recording my grandmother’s funeral on a mountaintop in Switzerland, we played it back and heard a woman’s voice saying “It doesn’t matter” in German. Family members are convinced it’s my grandmother, so I asked for my grandmother “Martha” when it was my turn.
“We hear stories like that all time, and people don’t realize it doesn’t take any sophisticated equipment to do this,” says Lisa. “Believe me, I didn’t believe it at first either.”
Working as a manager in Kansas City, Lisa read a book by Sara Estep, “Voices of Eternity” and then tried to do her own recordings. She got a distinguishable voice after three days and was both thrilled and mortified.
“You have do be quiet about paranormal things living in Kansas City, but it changed my life,” Lisa says.
Her husband adds, “I am the electronic engineer, I help get the recordings and make them more clear, but I don’t think I’m psychic or anything.”
With more than seven billion audio devices in the world, the idea of EVP is that sometimes voices from beyond the grave can be recorded and recognized — if people listen for them. When Niall Johnson researched the phenomenon for his screenplay, he found out that Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein believed that electronic devices may eventually record messages from the dead.
In the movie, Michael Keaton plays an architect, Jonathan Rivers, who’s wife Anna, played by Chandra West, disappears. Then, Rivers meets up with Ray and Sarah (played by actors Ian McNeice and Deborah Kara Unger) who have heard EVPs of Anna and seek out Jonathan to tell him that his wife is dead.
The actors working in the movie are hesitant to buy into the phenomenon, but they’ve heard many of the scratchy voice recordings that the Butlers and others have made.
“It’s a universal response to want to talk to the other side,” says Keaton. “It’s a role I wanted to play. I’m intrigued by this architect who has such a trained logical mind who cannot come to terms with this reality.” Unger adds that working on the film has made her more aware of the supernatural, “We are very naive about energy and mass and time and space and consciousness. I never say good-bye to people, I always imagine I will see them again.”
Director Geoffrey Sax and producer Paul Brooks have discovered a world of ghost-hunting groups in virtually every major city, with conferences that attract as many as 4,000. The Butlers have started the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena (www.aaevp.com) which now have 300 members, but there are groups in 15 other countries, with Germany having 700 members, France with 1,700 and Brazil with 3,000 members who actively record spirit voices. With the recent tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, people have used EVP to try to contact friends and relatives and find out what happened to them and if they’re dead.
“I don’t want to sound ridiculous about this but I’m just trying to entertain the possibility that we may be on the verge of something culturally extraordinary,” says producer Brooks.
Many of the spirit recordings are available to be heard on the Internet; ranging from a few words to whole sentences, such as the woman who gets recordings when her Krups coffee maker percolates. (See www.coffeepotghost.com.)
The Butlers say that the explanation from Keaton’s character in “White Noise” accurately describes the phenomenon, but the movie turns into a dangerous thriller, and that’s not accurate. “There’s nothing dangerous about doing these recordings,” Tom smiles.
Now, the Butlers have written books and they tour the world talking about EVP. They also moved to Reno.
“We have devices that make the hearing better, but we don’t necessarily know who is speaking,” says Lisa.
Her mother died five years ago without knowing they were dabbling in
EVP, and after one of their conferences, the Butlers listened to the recording and heard “I miss you, Lisa” very distinctly.
“I recognized immediately that it was her mother’s voice,” says Tom. “There was no way to explain it.”
As they’ve become better at recording voices, the Butlers discovered that it helps to go to known haunted places, like the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. After an hour of recording the session with skeptical journalists, a few phrases such as “It’s fascinating” or “Hello” seemed to come out on the tape. However, nothing much except scratchy sounds came when I repeated my grandmother’s name “Martha.”
Yet, when someone else named the word “Pepe,” there was a distinct grumbled barking that couldn’t have been recorded 14 floors up in the hotel. I didn’t tell anyone at the time, but I gulped because the dog sounded very distinctly like my irascible dachsund, Pepe, who died a year ago.
“Sometimes you don’t get the person you’ve called for, sometimes it’s someone completely different,” explains Lisa. “Who knows?”
Rudi was a remarkable dog, too, and arguably I was closer to him than to Pepe.
When he died, I had hoped that perhaps there would be some contact with my dear old friend. My psychic friend said that maybe he would reach out to me somehow, but I’ve yet to experience anything even remotely to the experience with Pepe above.
But then, there’s always tonight.
