Friedel’s Conversations with the Dead:
The Fascinating Story of Friedrich Jürgenson,
Pioneer of EVP, by Anabela Cardoso and Anders Leopold

Reviewed by Edgar E Müller Friedel’s Conversations with the Dead is a very interesting book about the Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) and its legendary frontal researcher Friedrich Jürgenson. As a matter of fact, it is a kind of hybrid book consisting of two parts, written by two authors with different backgrounds, on different occasions. Nevertheless, the two parts are amalgamated into a logical unity providing an excellent framework for understanding Jürgenson´s achievements in the field of EVP.

The book has 280 pages and contains 17 chapters plus a considerably amount of additional information. The historically first part of the book saw the light of day in 2014 as a book in Swedish having the title My Friend on the Other Side: The Book about Friedrich Jürgenson. The author was Anders Leopold a journalist and close friend of Jürgenson and his book is based upon over 20 years of very tight personal contact with the experiments of Jürgenson. A couple of years later the second part was created by Dr. Anabela Cardoso the internationally well know EVP researcher who happens to be a great admirer of Jürgenson and his work. She did the translation into English, re-editing of the text and most of all complementing the original book with necessary background description of EVP.

The book is particularly well structured and covers

Jürgenson´s childhood and various professions as well as it covers his adult life characterized by extensive EVP experiments. The description of Jürgenson´s personality and devotion runs all through every chapter of the book giving the readers the opportunity to get to know him as a person and to understand why he decided to what he did.

As we know to day, the 12 of June 1959 was a key date in the modern history of EVP research, that is to say when Jürgenson quite unintentionally and unconsciously recorded the voices of his dead mother in a small Swedish village called Mölnbo. The reader is guided from that historic moment forwards through most various stages of Jürgensons life consisting of indefatigable work, enthusiasm, success, disappointments and controversies.

During the past decades I read practically everything available about Jürgenson written by others and, needless to say, by him, consequently I thought that I knew him but I was wrong. I knew his work very well, but did not know him as person. Only this book gave me the possibility to understand him and his motives.

An important element of the book is the impressive number of references and descriptions of

well know researchers in the field, maybe the most important being the investigation of Prof. Hans Bender which resulted in a report stating that he and his team could not find a natural explanation to Jürgenson´s recordings.

A unique feature of this book is undoubtedly the fact that the reader gets access to a huge number of transcripts of Jürgensons recordings. In addition, his innovating theory of a fourth life dimension is presented. Furthermore, the reader is given the possibility to perceive the very special relationship between Jürgenson and his communicators on the other side.

Friedel´s Conversation with the Dead may be appreciated by readers having quite different backgrounds and reasons to read it. For instance people involved in research into the survival hypothesis and particularly those working with EVP will find a reference book for a decisive milestone of the history of EVP. Others may be inspired by Jürgenson´s achievements to start experiments with EVP.

It should also be mentioned in this context that Dr. Cardoso is worthy a great praise for taking the initiative and carrying out of an enormous job to make the Swedish book available to hundreds of millions English speaking people.