Grave Robbing 21st Century Style...

My friend of mine queried today how long it would take before some shyster claimed to have contacted the recently deceased singer Prince using a so-called spirit box. I think she knew the answer was less than 24 hours after his death was announced, and I also think she knew exactly who it would be.

Step forward Steve Huff of Huff Paranormal, who, unsurprisingly is using a celebrity death to once again sell some piece of shit device to "contact the dead".  I'm not going to spend any length of time debunking the "V2 Wonder Box" or whatever, as far as I'm concerned it's core operations aren't far removed from his last hokum technology, which I commented on here.

As for Steve's comments. As you can see in the screen grab above, Huff can't even keep this own claims straight, between creating the featured video and posting it on facebook the 90% of original words have increased to 99%. Apparently this "proves" that spirits are at work. Huff clearly doesn't understand what the word proof means.

The methods used by Huff are identical to  those I exposed in my review of his "Impossible Box", the device pulls phonemes or fragments of language from radio samples, randomly sampled the meaning is provided by the listener's own mind. Audio pareidolia in other words. Once again, listening to the samples before reading Huff's onscreen transcriptions reduces the samples to nonsense or gives completely different context.

You can listen to the footage on Huff's FB page here. Try to do this without viewing Huff's captioning.

If you have an ounce of decency all this is probably leaving a bad taste in your mouth, of course, Huff has an answer to this.

"As for those who say this is disrespectful I have to 100% disagree."

We know you disagree, you've pulled this shit several times in the past.  He did the same when Robin Williams and Joan Rivers died and also when Debbie and Mark Constantino died, an act which brought him a huge amount of condemnation and cries that he should be expelled from the paranormal community. As with the Constantino case, Huff once again claims his refusal to allow a period of mourning for these celebrities before picking over their bodies is because their spirits are "easier to contact" within 24-48 hours of their death, Of course, Huff provides no evidence of his claim or even justification beyond "It's this way because I say so".

"...if they have something to say, it is much easier for them to say it within the 1st 24-48 hours (from what I have found over the years of research I have done). I am a researcher, and this is what I do..." 

He's a "researcher" so I guess we should just take at his word, right?

Hey Steve. Steve. You know what researchers provide in order to be taken seriously? They provide research. Evidence. Studies. Peer-reviewed papers. You're not a researcher. You're a fraud.

A pretty fucking despicable one too. Of course, he doesn't let that stop him from adopting the moral high ground, it's those that call him tasteless that are in the wrong:

"....anytime someone tries to take a voice away from anyone, living or dead, I question their motives."

Huff is trying to persuade us he's giving the dead a voice. He isn't. He's putting words into their mouths, an insult to those that actually knew those people. This is nothing new in the paranormal, physics and mediums have been making similar claims of public service for years. Like Huff their protestations of moral certitude are often accompanied sounds of coffers being filled.

These are modern-day grave robbers. Picking over corpses of the dead at the expense of those that loved them, pilfering not the physical trinkets left behind but something more precious, the memories they leave those who loved them. They exploit and pervert something that can never be replaced.  The most insulting thing about what Huff does, and what physics and mediums do, is they strip all the character from the people they claim speak through them. Listen to Huff's messages from Robin Williams for a case in point. The messages Huff claims to have received could have come from anybody, or crucially, nobody.

In the video above Huff exposes himself in a rare moment of honesty, at 3:18 Huff admits that he has no way to verify that this is Williams he is speaking to. That being the case all the bullshit falls away. This is horseshit, in awful taste.

You know my comparison of Huff and his ilk to grave robbers is very unfair.... at least grave robbers never  had the audacity to claim they were doing the dead a favor when they defiled them.