The Estes Method has become a popular technique among paranormal investigators. You’ve probably seen it in ghost-hunting videos: someone sits blindfolded, wearing headphones connected to a spirit box, while another investigator asks questions they can’t hear.
Sometimes, the person wearing the headphones calls out a word or phrase that seems to answer one of those questions.
It certainly makes for interesting viewing. But does the technique actually provide evidence of communication with spirits, or are investigators simply finding connections between unrelated sounds?
The Estes Method deserves a closer look because it attempts to address a genuine problem in paranormal investigation: the influence of expectations on what people believe they’re hearing.
Where Did the Estes Method Come From?
The Estes Method was developed around 2016 by paranormal investigators Karl Pfeiffer, Connor Randall and Michelle Tate at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. The technique takes its name from Estes Park, not from an individual researcher.
It was designed to improve traditional spirit-box sessions by separating the person asking questions from the person listening for responses.
The idea is straightforward. If the listener doesn’t know what’s being asked, they’re less likely to interpret random sounds as answers to specific questions.
The method subsequently gained wider attention through paranormal documentaries, including Hellier, and has become a regular feature of investigations around the world.
How Does It Work?
The technique generally involves two investigators.
The first, often called the receiver, wears a blindfold and sound-isolating headphones connected to a spirit box. The second investigator asks questions aloud.
The receiver repeats any words or phrases they believe they hear, without knowing what questions are being asked.
The team then considers whether those responses relate to the questions.
For example, an investigator might ask how many spirits are present, and the receiver might respond with the word “three.”
That sounds interesting, especially if the receiver genuinely couldn’t hear the question.
However, as we’ve discussed in our article on how spirit boxes work, these devices generally scan radio frequencies, producing fragments of broadcasts, speech and static.
The Estes Method changes how investigators interpret those sounds. It doesn’t change their underlying source.
What Does the Estes Method Get Right?
One genuine advantage of the method is that it reduces a particular source of bias.
During a conventional spirit-box session, everyone hears the questions. If someone asks for a name, listeners naturally become more attentive to sounds resembling names.
Separating the receiver from the questions helps reduce this influence.
That’s a sensible improvement.
It also encourages investigators to distinguish between the person collecting apparent responses and the person interpreting them.
However, reducing one source of bias doesn’t eliminate the others.
And that’s where the method becomes less convincing as scientific evidence.
The Problem of Auditory Pareidolia
One of the biggest challenges is auditory pareidolia — our tendency to recognize familiar patterns in ambiguous sounds.
It’s similar to seeing faces in clouds or shadows, something we’ve explored in our article on why we see faces everywhere.
When listening to distorted speech, radio fragments or static, our brains may organize unclear sounds into recognizable words.
Research published by Michael Nees and Charlotte Phillips in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2015 demonstrated that expectations can influence whether people report hearing voices in ambiguous audio.
This creates a problem for the Estes Method.
Although the receiver cannot hear the questions, they usually know they’re participating in a paranormal investigation. They may also know the location’s history or the identities of its alleged ghosts.
Those expectations can still influence what they hear.
A blindfold doesn’t remove prior knowledge, and headphones don’t prevent the brain from interpreting random sounds as meaningful speech.
Coincidence and Selective Interpretation
Another difficulty is determining whether apparently relevant responses are genuinely unusual.
Imagine an investigator asks ten questions during a session, while the receiver repeats 40 words and phrases.
Most of those words seem unrelated to anything. But two or three appear to fit the questions remarkably well.
Naturally, those are the responses everyone remembers.
The irrelevant words may be forgotten or edited out of a video, leaving viewers with the impression that the receiver repeatedly provided accurate answers.
This isn’t necessarily deliberate deception. It’s simply how human memory and attention work.
There’s also the problem of interpretation.
If the receiver says “cold,” that word could be connected to questions about temperature, death, emotions or even the weather.
The broader the interpretation, the easier it becomes to find apparent connections.
Without recording every question and response, and deciding beforehand what qualifies as a meaningful answer, it’s difficult to determine whether the results exceed what chance might produce.
Does the Estes Method Provide Scientific Evidence?
Despite its popularity, there is no convincing body of independently replicated, peer-reviewed evidence demonstrating that the Estes Method enables communication with spirits.
That doesn’t mean investigators are inventing their experiences. It means the technique hasn’t been shown to produce results that reliably exceed what might be expected from ordinary radio signals, chance and psychological influences.
There’s also a more fundamental issue.
The method assumes that spirits can manipulate radio transmissions to communicate. That mechanism itself remains scientifically unverified.
Even if an experiment produced an unusually high number of relevant responses, researchers would still need to rule out ordinary explanations before concluding that a supernatural source was responsible.
Similar problems affect traditional electronic voice phenomena (EVP) investigations, where unclear recordings are sometimes interpreted as messages from the deceased.
How Could Investigators Improve the Method?
The strongest criticism of the Estes Method isn’t that investigators should stop using it. It’s that better controls are needed before its results can be considered reliable evidence.
Several improvements would be relatively easy to introduce.
Use predetermined questions. Prepare questions before the session and avoid changing them based on the receiver’s responses. This reduces the risk of unconsciously steering the conversation toward apparent matches.
Record everything. Capture the questions, spoken responses and original spirit-box audio. Include irrelevant responses and periods when nothing meaningful happens. Our article on isolating EVP responses for easier listening offers useful audio-processing advice, but investigators should always preserve the original recordings.
Introduce control sessions. Compare responses during genuine questioning with responses recorded when no questions are being asked. The testing procedure should be established in advance.
Use independent evaluators. Give anonymous transcripts to people who weren’t present and ask them to match responses with questions. Include unrelated questions to test whether the apparent matches exceed chance expectations.
Repeat the experiment. A single remarkable session may be intriguing, but consistent results obtained by independent investigation teams would carry considerably more weight.
None of these measures would automatically establish paranormal activity. They would, however, make it easier to determine whether something genuinely unusual was happening.
Is the Estes Method Worth Using?
I wouldn’t dismiss the Estes Method entirely.
As an exploratory investigation technique, it can be engaging and may encourage investigators to think more carefully about how expectations affect their observations.
Its creators recognized a legitimate weakness in traditional spirit-box sessions and attempted to address it.
That’s worthwhile.
But we shouldn’t confuse an attempt to reduce bias with a scientifically validated experiment.
The technique still leaves considerable room for auditory pareidolia, coincidence and subjective interpretation.
And an apparently intelligent response doesn’t necessarily establish intelligent communication.
For recreational ghost hunting, the Estes Method can certainly be interesting. For serious paranormal research, it needs stronger controls and more rigorous evaluation.
Conclusion
The Estes Method offers an interesting approach to one of the longstanding problems in paranormal investigation: how to prevent expectations from influencing what investigators believe they’re hearing.
Separating the listener from the questions is a reasonable step, but it doesn’t eliminate the other weaknesses associated with spirit-box recordings.
If investigators want to establish whether the method produces meaningful results, they need predetermined questions, complete recordings, independent assessment and repeatable experiments.
Ultimately, perhaps the most useful question isn’t whether the Estes Method works, but what evidence would convince us that it does?
That’s the question serious investigators should be asking.
Sources and Further Reading
- Newkirk, Greg — Newkirk Museum of the Paranormal. The History of the Estes Method. An account of the technique’s development and its original investigators. Read the article.
- Stevens, Hayley (2024). The Estes Method Is an Update to the Ghost Hunter’s Spirit Box, With All the Same Flaws. The Skeptic. Read the article.
- Biddle, Kenny (2019). ‘Groundbreaking’ Ghost Experiment Breaks No Ground. Skeptical Inquirer. Read the article.
- Nees, Michael A., and Phillips, Charlotte (2015). Auditory Pareidolia: Effects of Contextual Priming on Perceptions of Purportedly Paranormal and Ambiguous Auditory Stimuli. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29(1), 129–134. Read the study.
- McGill University, Office for Science and Society (2022). How to Be a Better Ghost Hunter. Read the article.
- Knibb, Ashley (2026). The Estes Method: Modern Ghost Hunting Tool or Just a New Twist on an Old Idea? Read the article.