Rest in Peace Garrett Husveth


I only just heard today that Garrett Husveth, a long time paranormal researcher, died on April 30, 2011.  He was only 43!  According to the Bernardsville News he died at home, after a long illness.

Garrett was one of the first people I met when I started researching my book about the Duke Parapsychology Lab.  He’s been investigating the unexplained, particularly in New Jersey, for a long time, and I went to him to learn about EVP (electronic voice phenomena, thought by some to be the voices of the dead). He was just so kind and generous. From my book:

Skeptics answer that the recordings are in fact white noise that only sound like voices.  However audio engineers and linguistics experts and others have been working for decades on speaker identification and evaluation systems and they know what human speech looks like.  A forensics audio examiner was once hired to determine whether a sound from a recording of a fatal accident was a door loudly squeaking or a woman screaming (it was, sadly, a woman screaming).  Garrett Husveth, the President of Latent Technologies, who conducts forensic audio analysis for corporate clients and who also records examples of EVP says, “Forensically, we can prove that they are voices.”

I also learned from the Sturges Paranormal website that Garrett was a contributing editor of Ghosts of Central New Jersey: Historic Haunts of the Somerset Hills, by Gordon Thomas Ward. A book on paranormal investigating based on his 21 years of field work.”

In fact, the last time I saw Garrett was in 2009, when he and Gordon generously interviewed me for their Haunted New Jersey podcast series.

I had no idea that he was ill and this is just so shocking to me.  According to the Bernardsville News, Garrett “is survived by his wife, Krista, and their two daughters, Elisabeth and Katherine; by his parents, Ray and Susan; and by his two brothers, Jason and Ted, and two sisters, Kate and Lara … In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be given in support of the children’s future education.  Checks should be made payable to Barbara Oberding, with ‘Husveth Children’ written in the memo portion, and sent to Peapack Reformed Church, Box 253, Gladstone, N.J., 07934.”