I want you to understand that I do not need what I am going to share with you here to be true. I have been accused of being an advocate or proponent of mediumship because I personally need it to be real. I have been called, among other much more terrible things, “a believer”.
In reality, it would have been easier for me if I discovered that mediumship was just an entertaining parlor trick. I would have preferred to learn that death was the end and that the people we have lost are gone.
As a scientist, however, I had to go through the process of collecting data before I could draw conclusions. And now, actually, with the death of someone close to me, I could personally examine the phenomenon of mediumship in a manner that would have been a stretch if the only dead person I knew was a school acquaintance or some distant uncle.
I met with the medium in her home. She was a wife and a mother of three living in a Phoenix suburb who just happened to be a medium. She was about my age and did not look at all like a cartoon stereotype of a psychic: no crystal ball, no incense, no excessive bead accessories. In fact, she was wearing the same long denim skirt that I had at home.
The reading contained many specific and accurate items. For example, the medium spoke about our deceased pet Dalmatian being with my mom and of Colorado where we sometimes vacationed. She also spoke about the symptoms of my mother’s psychiatric diagnosis, her siblings, her birth month, and where she was buried. The scoring system I used at the time demonstrated an accuracy level of 93%. Some information that I didn’t understand was later verified by my aunts.
Most of the people in my life were supportive when I shared the story about the reading I’d received. I was surrounded by scientists and our training (ideally) prevents us from drawing conclusions without sufficient data. So, mostly I heard things like, “I don’t really know anything about mediums, but that sounds like an interesting experience that you had.”
However, a few were—actually, one guy in particular was—convinced that I’d been duped by a con artist, because there was no way that what I described could be real. (His religious ideology may have bullied his scientific training into submission.) This closed-mindedness was motivation enough for me to want to bring mediums into a laboratory setting and test the phenomenon under controlled conditions.
The general hateful reactions and ongoing derision regarding mediums as a whole I’ve seen since have kept that motivation at full steam. I get it. There are frauds. But claiming that every person in a group is represented by a fraudulent subset of that group is, frankly, bigotry. The right thing to do is act rationally, bring it into the lab, and check it out.
After my mediumship reading, what I knew was that there was clearly more to know.
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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