After-Death Communication: Ruickbie excerpt #12

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

The range reported of apparently intentional contact between living and deceased, covering sound, smell and touch, as well as full-blown apparitions, has led to a new term “after-death communication.” The element of communication is key, but this can be interpreted as any sort of sign that is taken as communication, typically between the deceased and someone who was known to them in life, and is taken as a sign of continued existence after death.

High levels of ADCs have been reported in the research. Before publishing their 1995 book, Hello from Heaven, Bill and Judy Guggenheims had received 3,300 firsthand accounts of ADCs through their website. One meta-analysis of thirty-five studies published from 1894 to 2005 involved 50,682 participants from twenty-four countries, to give an estimate of 30–35% spontaneous incidence of ADCs in the general population, with 70-80% of the bereaved having an ADC within a year of bereavement, concluding that “ADCs are both common and normal.” A study published in 2020 estimated an incidence of 40–50% in the general population. Additionally, a therapeutic approach found that about 75% of people can have an induced ADC.

While many of these experiences are personally convincing, they do not always offer objective evidence of the survival of consciousness beyond death. The SPR’s Census produced eighty first-hand accounts of “death-coincidences” – recognized apparitions occurring within twelve hours of death, typically in such cases the witness is unaware that the person seen has died. The authors of the report concluded that apparitions of the deceased occurring at the time of death could not be due to chance alone, noting that this confirmed Gurney et al.’s earlier conclusion that “apparitions at death, &c., are a result of something beyond chance.”

Ken R. Vincent’s re-analysis of the Guggenheims’ published cases identified 65 out of 353 as “evidential cases” (18.4%). Vincent’s own analysis of 1,667 cases from the After-Death Communication Research Foundation database, identified 336 (20.1%) as evidential: 180 (10.8%) where the apparition was seen before the witness knew that person was dead; 99 (5.9%) in which apparitions conveyed information unknown to the witness that was later verified; and 57 (3.4%) involving multiple witnesses.

A study by Elsaesser et al., [Investigations] identified 20.9% of cases as involving a shared ADC, with the receipt of information previously unknown being a factor in 24.3% of cases. This study also found that 20.7% had had a “crisis ADC” within twenty-four hours of death (before or after), noting that “they are particularly significant, and even evidential, since experiencers claim that they have been informed of the death of a family member or friend by the deceased themselves.” Most of the ADCs in this study occurred to people during the day and whilst they were awake.

Evidentiality was relatively consistent, ranging from 18.4% to 24.3%. These were not laboratory experiments designed to give evidence of the afterlife, but personal experiences probably intended to provide reassurance to loved ones; nevertheless, it is striking how many of them are evidential and are so in a number of different ways. As Prof. Erlendur Haraldsson concluded after his own ADC survey [The Departed Among the Living], “When all the accounts we have collected are considered, it seems impossible to reject all of them as deceptions and mistaken perceptions. Something real is there.” 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.