Anyone else been getting static bursts right before a spirit comes through on their recordings?

Yeah this is something I've noticed a fair bit actually. I do most of my recordings out near the standing stones around Salisbury and there's almost always a burst of static maybe 3-5 seconds before anything coherent shows up on playback. At first I thought it was just interference from the environment but its happened too consistently to ignore now.

What I'm not sure about is whether the static is part of the phenomenon itself or just our equipment struggling to pick up whatever frequency is being used. Could be the device is basically "warming up" to the signal if that makes sense.

Anyone tried running two separate recorders simultaneously to check if the static hits both at the same time? That would at least rule out a hardware fault. Be curious to know what kit people are using when this happens too.

@MountainMoonlit yes, definitely seeing this pattern. I run spirit box sessions out here in Texas and I started logging the static bursts separately after noticing the same thing - there's almost like a build-up period before anything coherent comes through. My question is whether anyone has measured the actual frequency shift during those bursts? I pulled the audio into Audacity and the static spikes look different from regular interference, the waveform is choppier somehow. Does the static at your Salisbury sites sound more like white noise or is there a hiss quality to it? Wondering if the type of static varies by location or if its consistent across different environments.

Yeah the static burst is real and I've been trying to wrap my head around it technically. My working theory is that whatever produces the phenomenon - whether you want to call it a spirit or something else entirely - it generates some kind of electromagnetic disturbance first, like a pressure front before the main event. I've been doing EVP work down here in Somerset for about three years now and I started keeping a little notebook logging the gap between the burst and the actual voice. Mine usually runs about 4 seconds. Would be genuinely interesting to pool that data across different locations, teh gap timing might tell us something about the mechanism rather than just the effect.