As a paranormal investigator, you've probably come across the term pareidolia before. This is the tendency for the human brain to perceive a familiar or meaningful image in an object or pattern where, in fact, there is none. This becomes most relevant in ghost hunting when investigators see what looks like phantom faces in a blurry photo, which in reality aren't paranormal at all. It's just our minds seeing something that's not really there.

Pareidolia is a form of apophenia, which is a more general term for the human tendency to seek patterns in random information, and this applies to audio too. Just like with vision, we are all susceptible to hearing words that are not actually in the sounds we are hearing. This can occur by misinterpreting words that are being said or by hearing words in random noise.

Auditory pareidolia isn't the only thing that might cause you to misidentify...