Discarnates. The observed phenomenon involves everyday discarnates and a close sitter-discarnate relationship. In a valid research design, I can’t ask a medium for information about, say, Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. I did not have a close personal relationship with him—and don’t know anyone who did—so I would not be able to identify him during a mediumship reading. Also, the mediums’ lived experience is that the right discarnates find them and not vice versa. They don’t have a Heaven phonebook to ring up whoever they want. They connect discarnates with sitters. Because I have no connection to discarnate Professor Feynman, there’s no logical reason to think he would want to connect with me during a mediumship reading. So, I stuck with everyday discarnates and their everyday sitter loved ones in my design.
Sitters. To fully establish an optimal mediumship research environment, we need to include the sitters in the experiment. The information reported in a mediumship reading is a personal conversation between two people with an emotional connection: the discarnate and the sitter. As I have previously noted elsewhere, even if I asked you to tell me everything there is to know about your deceased loved one, truly meaningful information may still come up in a mediumship reading that you hadn’t thought about in years. If I tried to act as an independent judge and score that forgotten information based on what I had collected from you, I would erroneously label it as inaccurate. Only you can decide what is identifying and accurate about your discarnate. It doesn’t matter what any of your friends, what any skeptic, or even what I think; it is a reading for you, not for any of us. Only people who were close to the discarnate are qualified to assess the accuracy and meaning of a reading. Thus, in my experimental design, I was only concerned with accuracy scores provided by sitters. That’s how it works in a natural, regular reading.
Mediums. The experimental design must also include people capable of the tasks requested of them. This involves pre-screening participants. If we wanted to study the phenomenon of high jumping, we would find some good high jumpers. We wouldn’t just look for people claiming to be high jumpers on Craig’s List, or invite some people off the street and tell them, “Go jump over that bar.” If those people couldn’t clear the bar, we wouldn’t have learned anything at all about high jumping.
In 2008, my team was fortunate enough to receive a research grant to establish a squad of credentialed mediums to participate in research. These mediums were tested, screened, and trained over several months using an intensive, peer-reviewed, 8-step procedure. Upon successful completion of the eight steps, mediums are termed Windbridge Certified Research Mediums (WCRMs). WCRMs agree to volunteer their time as research participants. This includes giving me feedback about protocol designs as well as participating in studies. Because certification is a time- and resource-intensive process, we stopped certifying mediums after the granted project was complete.
At its maximum, my team included 20 WCRMs. After the retirement of a couple, our current team includes 18 WCRMs. The reference I made above to “some mediums I know” who provided responses to the question “Do you believe in an afterlife?” are some of the WCRMs on my team (in the order their responses appear here): Samara Anjelae (SA), Dave Campbell (DC), Nancy Marlowe (NM), Debra Martin (DeM), Marisa Ryan (MR), Joanne Gerber (JG), Ginger Quinlan (GQ), Laura Lynne Jackson (LJ), Doreen Molloy (DoM), and T.L. Nash (TN). When I collected their responses in March 2021, they gave me permission to publicly share their names as part of “a secret media project” I wouldn’t tell them anything about. I had never asked them those questions before. If this essay makes it into the world, I hope the WCRMs are pleasantly surprised to find their responses here.
Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).
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