Experiencing dead loved ones as apparitions

Psychiatrist Raymond Moody, knowing many bereaved family members long to see deceased loved ones, making an unexpected discovery. In a bookstore, browsing in the psychology section, and knocking a book off the shelf entitled Crystal Gazing. The author, Northcote Thomas, describing in 1900 the practice in ancient cultures of communicating with the dead, by gazing into pools of water or crystals or mirrors. Known in history as scrying. Moody, building a dimly lit booth with a mirror tilted so subjects wouldn’t see their own image but might see an apparition of a deceased loved one. Then inviting students and colleagues to join in this experiment. 

His first participant, a forty-four-year old nurse, hoping to see her husband who had died two years earlier, but instead seeing her father, who “actually emerged from the mirror to talk with her.” A man, reporting somehow “entering” the mirror and meeting with two deceased cousins. Concluding, “It seemed as though they were waiting for me.” A stunned woman, exclaiming her grandmother came out of the mirror into the booth and hugged her. Moody, reporting in his 2012 book Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife, that 80 percent of those using the apparition booth reported seeing “departed loved ones.”

Recalling his response to an interviewer’s question: What do you think happens when we die? Moody writes: “My mind flashed back to the thousands of people I have listened to over the years as they told their story of near-death and the miraculous journey they took at the moment they almost died.” Moody, also remembering his journey to the brink of death,” recognizing, “I was very experienced in both objective and subjective research into life after death.” Then answering: “I think we enter into another state of existence or another state of consciousness that is so extraordinarily different from the reality we have here in the physical world that the language we have is not yet adequate to describe this other state of existence or consciousness. Based on what I have heard from thousands of people, we enter into a realm of joy, light, peace, and love in which we discover that the process of knowledge does not stop when we die. Instead, the process of learning and development goes on for eternity.”

Raymond A. Moody with Paul Perry, Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife (HarperCollins, 2012), 180, 197, 226, 245.