NDES increased perception: Rawette excerpt #10

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness - "Another strike against the hallucination explanation for NDEs is the sheer number of cases in which NDErs experience increased perceptual abilities. While it frequently can’t be verified that this increased perception happened precisely at a time when their bodies were in cardiac arrest or had no brain function, the mere fact that, while their bodies were compromised in some way, they were able to experience more than they would be able to when their body is functioning normally is a crucial indication that perception and bodily function do not always go hand in hand, and can even be inversely correlated.

"For instance, in a case reported by Dr. John Lerma, an 82-year-old man had an NDE in which he experienced floating out of his body in the hospital trauma room. From a position near the ceiling, he saw a coin sitting on the right corner of the eight-foot-high cardiac monitor. He could see that it was a quarter dating from 1985. After he was resuscitated, he asked his doctor, Lerma, to check whether the quarter was really there, so he could know whether his experience had been real. Using a ladder, Lerma verified that the 1985 quarter was just where the patient had seen it.

"In another case, this one reported by Drs. Kenneth Ring and Madelaine Lawrence in their article 'Further Evidence for Veridical Perception during Near-Death Experiences,' a patient at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut reported having an NDE in which she was pulled upward through the floors of the hospital until she was up above the roof looking at the city skyline and her attention was drawn to a red shoe. A skeptical physician later went onto the roof and discovered a red shoe there.

"Other NDErs have had verified perceptions of things as unexpected as their wife and daughter discussing taking cuttings from a tree in a hospital courtyard, a person they thought was a health nut buying a Snickers bar from a vending machine, both of their grandmothers suddenly taking up smoking, and details about the amputation of a leg in a nearby operating theater.

"Janice Miner Holden reviewed 93 reports of physical events observed during NDEs and found that 86 were fully accurate, 6 contained some error, and only 1 was entirely wrong. Some researchers have attempted to do controlled studies of perception during cardiac arrest by placing hidden targets high up on hospital shelves, out of the normal visual field of patients. So far, these studies have only had 12 patients who reported leaving their bodies during an NDE, and none of them reported noticing the target."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

NDE verified perceptions: Rawlette excerpt #9

Almost everyone is familiar with near-death experiences (NDEs), in which people momentarily die (or come close to dying) and then, upon regaining consciousness, describe having had experiences such as floating out of their bodies, seeing the whole scene from up above, going into a tunnel where they met deceased loved ones, seeing a review of the events of their life, and even entering a beautiful, light-filled realm where they met God. Surveys indicate that somewhere between 4 and 15% of the general population has had a near-death experience, and among those who have survived cardiac arrest, more than one study has found the proportion of those experiencing an NDE to be as high as 23%. While attempts to explain NDEs without appeal to survival of bodily death abound, none of these purported explanations is able to account for all of the characteristics of these experiences.

Verified Perception During Cessation of Brain Function

One of the most common skeptical explanations for near-death experiences is that they are the mere hallucinations of a dying brain. That is, (1) the body of the person having the near-death experience is not actually dead during the experience, just dying, and (2) their experience is just a hallucination created by the brain in this extreme state. One of the most important pieces of evidence that refutes this explanation is the existence of cases where NDErs report seeing or hearing events that can be verified to have taken place while they were in cardiac arrest and without brain function.

Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf H. Smit have collected a number of cases of verified paranormal perception during NDEs in their 2016 book The Self Does Not Die, and they devote an entire chapter to cases of awareness and perception during cardiac arrest. One example involves a man who was found “unconscious, stone cold, and apparently clinically dead out in a meadow.” Medics tried to resuscitate him on the way to the hospital but were unsuccessful. On arrival at the hospital, his body was “ashen gray, with livor mortis (in which blue-black discoloration occurs where blood pools in the lowest areas of the corpse) and blue lips and nails.” He had no blood circulation and no heart rhythm. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit emphasize that activity in the cortex of the brain ceases about 15 seconds after cardiac arrest, eliminating the possibility of any complex conscious experience. By the time this man was brought into the hospital, he had been in cardiac arrest for a great deal longer than 15 seconds. At the hospital, a nurse removed the man’s dentures before continuing resuscitation efforts. It then took an additional hour for those resuscitation efforts to be effective enough for the patient to be transmitted to the ICU. About a week later, the patient spoke to the nurse who had removed his dentures and said that he had watched the nurse remove them. Not only that, but he said he’d seen the nurse put them on the pull-out shelf of a cart that had lots of bottles on it. The nurse confirmed this was what he had done: he’d put the man’s dentures on the pull-out shelf of the crash cart.

In another case, exceptionally well-documented, a woman named Pamela Reynolds was undergoing surgery for a brain aneurysm when she had an NDE. Throughout the procedure, Reynolds was under anesthetic, had her eyes taped shut, and had loud clicks and white noise playing in her ears through earbuds, but she nevertheless found herself able to perceive events going on in the room around her. Reynolds experienced herself as floating above her body and over the surgeon’s shoulder, and she was later able to accurately describe the specific type of saw used by the surgeon as well as the case that contained its interchangeable blades. She also reported hearing someone remark that the arteries in her right groin were too small and then someone else suggest the left groin. She was surprised by this conversation as she hadn’t known that her brain operation would involve draining the blood from her body through her groin.

Nevertheless, the exchange she described had taken place, even though multiple persons who had been present in the operating room at the time confirmed that there should have been no way for her to perceive these things. Interestingly, Reynolds never reported hearing the loud clicks that were playing directly into her ears at the volume of a lawn mower or a subway train going through a station. That is, her perceptions of sound did not seem bound to what was being received by her ears.

Now, the verified perceptions just described occurred in an early stage of Reynolds’ surgery. What is even more impressive than this is what she experienced near the end of the procedure, because by that time, not only was she completely anesthetized, but her body had been cooled to a severely hypothermic temperature, her heart and breathing had been stopped, and blood was drained from her head. It was during this part of the procedure that Reynolds reported perceiving two more things she shouldn’t have been able to. The first was that the operating room staff was listening to the song “Hotel California,” and the other was that they “shocked” her twice while restarting her heart. One of the neurosurgeons in attendance confirmed that the staff had indeed listened to “Hotel California” and that her heart had to be restarted twice. This is not a number that could have been easily predicted, as the number of necessary attempts varies.

Some might argue that perceptions like those of the dentures and of Reynolds’ resuscitation efforts could be obtained by the NDEr after resuscitation, by using psi to look into the past and see what happened while they were unconscious. However, it’s hard to see any independent motivation for this hypothesis, beyond the desire to cling to the notion of brain-dependent consciousness at all costs. Furthermore, if time is no barrier to our capacity for psi, this implies that our consciousness can transcend time, and in that case, it’s not clear that the concept of death—of our being alive at one time and dead at another—is even coherent. If we can access the past psychically, then there is an important sense in which survival necessarily exists, as the “past” consciousness of our loved ones is still accessible to us in the present.

  

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Apparent calls from the dead: Rawlette excerpt #8

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — Besides three entire books dedicated to this topic—D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless’s Phone Calls from the Dead, Callum E. Cooper’s Telephone Calls from the Dead, and Laurent Kasprowicz’s French volume Des coups de fil de l’AU-DELÀ?—I have come across examples of phantom phone calls in at least 11 other sources.

Typically, in these cases, someone answers a ringing phone and hears their deceased loved one speaking to them from the other end of the line. The message is usually very short, although sometimes an actual conversation takes place. The voice of the deceased is generally (but not always) recognizable. As with apparitions and dreams, these calls sometimes come to more than one person at approximately the same time, and they sometimes come to friends or neighbors of those for whom the calls appear to be intended, as if to emphasize that the calls are not just figments of a grief-fueled imagination.

Consider a case reported by Dr. John Lerma. A hospice patient of his named Mary Esther had just passed away, and the nurses were attempting to call her son, but his line was continually busy. While Lerma was at the nurses’ station asking for an update on their attempts, the phone rang. The caller ID said the call was coming from Mary Esther’s room. The nurse answered but quickly passed the phone to Lerma. She appeared frightened by what she’d heard on the other end. Lerma says he heard a lot of static and a faraway voice that repeated the phrase, “Tell my son I’m okay.” The nurse said it sounded just like Mary Esther. They then rushed into her room to see who might have placed the phone call but saw no one there besides her dead body. Thirty minutes or so later, Mary Esther’s son arrived at the hospital. He said he, too, had gotten a call from his mother. It had happened after her death but before he was aware she’d died. She told him over and over, “I am okay. I love you. Don’t worry about me.”

This next case, taken from Kasprowicz’s book, is an example of a more extended conversation, one in which the deceased passed along important information about a dangerous medical situation. An American man named Russell Reynolds had just been driven to a motel in Boise, Idaho, to prepare for undergoing open-heart surgery the next morning. His caregiver was with him in the motel room when the phone rang. She answered but got an odd look on her face and told Reynolds it was for him. Reynolds had no idea who it could be since he hadn’t told people about his trip. A male voice on the other end of the line asked if he was Russell, and when he said yes, the man told him not to go see his surgeon the next day. “It’s not your turn to die,” he said. Reynolds asked who was speaking, and the man replied that his name was Oscar. The only Oscar that Reynolds knew was a coworker who’d died of cancer the year before. Reynolds could hear a bunch of other voices in the background of the call and asked where Oscar was. Oscar replied, “I’m between heaven and earth.” Then he again repeated that Reynolds shouldn’t have the surgery, that it wasn’t his turn to die, and the line went dead.

Reynolds went to the hospital the next day as planned but asked to speak to his surgeon. A few minutes later, Reynolds noticed the surgeon pacing outside his room. When he finally came in, he told Reynolds the surgery was going to be postponed. Another doctor spoke with Reynolds later and explained that the surgeon who’d been scheduled to operate on him had lost his last three patients. Reynolds then had open-heart surgery a week later with a different surgeon, and there were no issues.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Dreams of the deceased: Rawlette excerpt #7

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — Dreams are a very common means by which people believe themselves to have contact with their departed loved ones. The wishful thinking hypothesis can be hard to dismiss with regard to most dreams, but some do contain elements that can be independently verified, as we are about to see.

I’ll first point out that many of those who believe they’ve had contact with their deceased loved ones in dreams remember these encounters as being much more vivid than an ordinary dream, to the point where they often don’t think they should be called “dreams” at all. “I was asleep,” says one such experiencer, “but I was not dreaming.” This man says he encountered his deceased daughter in a place “beyond” dreaming and that leaving it felt like the opposite of waking from a dream. The realm where they met “was like being in the middle of eternity.” This feeling of a hyper-real dream is not in itself proof of anything, but it is one small piece of evidence that the process that creates these dreams of after-death contact may not be entirely the same as the process that creates our normal experiences during sleep.

As with apparitions, stronger evidence for survival is offered by dreams that happen before the death is known, provide information the dreamer wouldn’t otherwise have had, and/or happen to more than one person at a time. Let’s look at some examples that fit both of these last two categories.

A month or two after his father’s death, Robert Waggoner had multiple dreams in which his father was showing him a suit in his (the father’s) closet, apparently wanting Robert to get something important out of the pocket. Waggoner didn’t want to bother his mourning mother about the matter, but when he heard from his niece that she had also had a dream about his father wanting her to get something out of the closet, he decided to investigate. Even though much of his father’s clothing had already been donated to charity, there were one or two suits left, and in one of their pockets was discovered a whole set of cherished family photos.

In a case collected by Dianne Arcangel, two people who had never met both had repeated dreams of the same deceased person, a man named Murphy who had owned a vacuum cleaner shop. He had been a mentor to one of them and a father or stepfather to the other. Both of them described the same setting in their repeated dreams: a house in oddly vivid/fluorescent colors with a picket fence and a sign in the yard that read, “At Peace with Jesus.” Furthermore, they both saw Murphy standing on the sidewalk with the sign to his left. The dreamer who’d been mentored by Murphy, a man by the name of Charles Vance, says that Murphy repeatedly asked him to tell his widow to look at a specific location in their house—“in the hall, at the dead end, just south of the bedroom to the right of the light socket”—because he’d left something inside the wall there. When Vance finally got up the courage to share this message with Murphy’s widow, she opened the wall in that location and discovered a stash of thousands of dollars that no one knew Murphy had ever had. Besides being a tandem dream that provides new information, this dream also comes to a bystander, someone who was not a family member of the deceased and was not the primary intended recipient of the information communicated.

There are even tandem dreams that demonstrate some level of interactivity and the evolution of the deceased’s consciousness through time. In another case collected by Arcangel, the deceased demonstrated evolution of consciousness by the adoption of a new strategy in pursuit of his goal. A woman named Debra dreamed of her deceased stepfather coming to say goodbye. When she told her mom about the dream, her mom “became very pale, saying, ‘I dreamed about him too, but I told him I was afraid. I said, ‘Go tell Debbie.’”

Interactivity and the adoption of a new strategy by the deceased is also evident in the following case collected by David Ryback and described in his book Dreams That Come True. A single mother and her two children (one of whom was Ryback’s informant for this case) were all ill and needed the help of the mother’s parents to move to a warmer climate. However, the mother and her father were in one of their frequent periods of not speaking to each other, and so she refused to ask him for help. Then one night she dreamt that her deceased grandmother came to her door and said, “Bill [the father] will help, if you just let him know. Call him.” The young woman refused, insisting her father would have to make the first move. She woke up thinking how weird it was that her grandmother had referred to her dad as “Bill” instead of “Wilbur,” the name she’d always called him while she was alive.

A couple days later, she got a letter from her dad, asking her to call. They patched up their relationship, and both the woman’s parents came to help her move. On the road to their new home, she asked her mom whether her grandmother had ever used the name “Bill” to refer to her father and learned that she had started calling him this about three months before she died. The young woman then decided to tell her mother about her dream. When she did, she discovered that, on the same night, her father had also had a dream visit from her grandmother, where she told him it was urgent he contact his daughter and said it was up to him to make the first move, because his daughter wouldn’t do it. That’s when he got up to write the letter his daughter soon received.

One final point with regard to dreams: as with living people who remember appearing to others during out-of-body experiences, there are living people who remember appearing to others in dreams and whose appearances have been confirmed by the dreamers in question. For example, dream researcher Fariba Bogzaran reports that she intentionally set out to dream of visiting an old friend who lived in another country and whom she hadn’t seen in almost 20 years. She succeeded in dreaming about the old neighborhood where they’d grown up together, and then she decided to try making her way to her friend’s new house, which she’d never visited in waking life. “I find the street where she lives and walk towards her house,” says Bogazaran. “The color of the door is pale blue. I ring the bell and she opens the door. I am overjoyed to see her. We cry and hug each other with overwhelming emotion. Embracing her feels absolutely real. The intensity of the experience wakes me up.” The next morning, Bogzaran wrote a letter to her friend with a detailed description of the dream. On the same day, her friend wrote her own letter, describing her own dream that included greeting Bogzaran at the front door.

Dreams like the above show that it’s possible to interact with other people’s consciousness through dreams and make it all the more plausible that dreams of the deceased are sometimes genuine communications.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Perceiving OBE apparitions: Rawlette excerpt #6

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — let’s look at apparitions of living people—people who are not near death but nevertheless have “out-of-body” experiences (OBEs) in which other people perceive them at a remote location.

One especially detailed case comes from a late-19th-century volume of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. In October 1863, a man by the name of S. R. Wilmot was sailing from Liverpool to New York when his ship encountered a lengthy storm. After eight days, the weather abated, and Wilmot was finally able to have a restful night of sleep. He recounts,

Toward morning I dreamed that I saw my wife, whom I had left in the United States, come to the door of my state-room, clad in her nightdress. At the door she seemed to discover that I was not the only occupant of the room, hesitated a little, then advanced to my side, stooped down and kissed me, and after gently caressing me for a few moments, quietly withdrew.

Upon waking I was surprised to see my fellow passenger, whose berth was above mine, but not directly over it—owing to the fact that our room was at the stern of the vessel—leaning upon his elbow, and looking fixedly at me. ‘You’re a pretty fellow,’ said he at length, ‘to have a lady come and visit you in this way.’ I pressed him for an explanation, which he at first declined to give, but at length related what he had seen while wide awake, lying in his berth. It exactly corresponded with my dream. ...

The day after landing I went by rail to Watertown, Conn., where my children and my wife had been for some time, visiting her parents. Almost her first question, when we were alone together, was, ‘Did you receive a visit from me a week ago Tuesday?’ ...

My wife then told me that...[on] the same night when, as mentioned above, the storm had just begun to abate, she had lain awake for a long time thinking of me, and about four o’clock in the morning it seemed to her that she went out to seek me. Crossing the wide and stormy sea, she came at length to a low, black steamship, whose side she went up, and then descending into the cabin, passed through it to the stern until she came to my state-room. ‘Tell me,’ said she, ‘do they ever have state-rooms like the one I saw, where the upper berth extends further back than the under one? A man was in the upper berth, looking right at me, and for a moment I was afraid to go in, but soon I went up to the side of your berth, bent down and kissed you, and embraced you, and then went away.’

The description given by my wife of the steamship was correct in all particulars, though she had never seen it.

In this case, not only does the person who appears in a remote location experience traveling to that place, but she ends up being perceived there by two separate people, including someone to whom she has no emotional connection. Clearly, she is not just a dream in her husband’s mind. She’s an actual figure in the room, perceived from multiple angles doing exactly the things she remembers.

This account is consistent with more recent reports of out-of-body experiences. For instance, Loyd Auerbach relates having a “very vivid dream” in which he went to visit the house of a friend named Danita. She told him a couple days later that, at the same time as his dream, she saw him in her home and touched him. Her dog also appeared to react to his presence. Two weeks later, a similar episode occurred, this time while Auerbach was in a waking state:

I was at another friend’s bachelor party, becoming very bored.... I stood in the kitchen, fixing a drink and feeling a bit strange. Having felt the same way before when I had a few other experiences (my best psychic state appears to be boredom), I suddenly had the sensation of being in two places at once. I was in Mike’s kitchen and I was also standing in my friend Danita’s living room.... We had a short conversation, partly about the bachelor party, partly about other things, and I recall her saying she knew I was having an OBE and was only “dropping in.” I mentioned that I’d write down a few notes when I “got back” to Mike’s, and said good-bye. I found paper and pen, wrote a few notes (time, conversation details, etc.), which coincide with what Danita remembered about the situation.”

Another case of apparent physical contact during an OBE comes from the classic 1886 volume Phantasms of the Living, in which the Rev. P. H. Newnham reported a very clear and vivid dream in which he visited his fiancée’s family and put his arms around his fiancée’s waist, at the top of the staircase just as she was going to bed. He woke from the dream just before his clock struck 10pm. The next morning, he wrote a letter to his fiancée with a detailed account of his dream. The same morning, she wrote him her own letter, in which she asked, “Were you thinking about me, very specially, last night, just about 10 o’clock? For, as I was going upstairs to bed, I distinctly heard your footsteps on the stairs, and felt you put your arms round my waist.”

In 1956, Hornell Hart and his collaborators published a study in which they compared apparitions of the deceased to apparitions of living OBErs. After comparing the rates of incidence of 23 basic traits in living-person OBE apparitions to their rates of incidence in apparitions of the deceased, they concluded that the evidence pointed to these two types of apparitions’ being the same phenomenon.

So, not only do reciprocal apparitions of OBErs demonstrate that, during our lives, we have a degree of consciousness that’s not limited to the physical location of our body, but they also support the view that apparitions of those who have died—which show the same characteristics—are expressions of that same non-local consciousness, unlimited by the death of the body with which it was previously associated.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Apparition communication: Rawlette excerpt #5

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — It’s true that apparitions are frequently quite brief, often amounting to little more than a prolonged look before the apparition disappears. In fact, in half of the accounts collected by Haraldsson, the experience lasted no more than a few seconds. However, there are also many cases of much longer apparitions, some of which hold conversations and interact in other complex ways that would seem to require that they be more than a mere freeze-frame of some aspect of the person’s pre-death consciousness.

In one case, a woman named Shirley was struggling to figure out how to get the pension money she was owed after her husband died suddenly of a heart attack. Her husband appeared to her, and she heard him speak, although she didn’t see his mouth moving. Over several minutes, he took her step by step through the pension paperwork, and her check was subsequently processed without a problem.

Johann Kuld’s deceased wife came to him in their bedroom, opening the door as she entered. She told him not to be scared, and he held her hand, which he said had a normal, warm temperature. He asked her where she’d been. “Soon after I died in the hospital they let me stay there to look after a woman who was very ill,” she said. “Since then I have been to many places. Now this time is over, I am leaving. I have come to say goodbye.” They lay down in the bed together, and she stroked his cheek and whispered to him. He eventually fell asleep, and when he woke up, she was gone.

Dr. Melvin Morse reports in his book Parting Visions a case of an interactive apparition that occurred before it was known that the person appearing was dead. A man was out fishing when he noticed his brother-in-law walking down the path toward him. They conversed for several minutes, and then the brother-in-law said he had to go and walked into the woods. Some minutes later, it occurred to the man that his brother-in-law couldn’t have actually been there. When he got home, he discovered that, while he’d been out fishing, his brother-in-law had died in a car accident. And that wasn’t the only time this deceased man visited his family. “He was a carpenter by trade,” says Morse, “and visits his wife’s son frequently with helpful suggestions about woodworking projects.”

The longest interaction with an apparition I’ve found in the literature was investigated in the 1980s by Loyd Auerbach, the same parapsychologist who smelled the anomalous cigar smoke after his friend’s death. In this case, a family purchased a home after the death of a woman, Lois, who had lived there her entire life since birth. Soon after the new owners moved in, four different members of the family began seeing the apparition of an elderly woman in the house. But it quickly became clear that the 11-year-old son, Chris, was having the most frequent and extended encounters. He told his parents that Lois had been appearing to him every day, telling him the history of the furniture in the house (some of which they had purchased along with their home) as well as helping him with his homework. (When he got older, she even gave him advice about girls.)

When Auerbach arrived at the house to investigate, the apparitions had been going on for well over a year, and Lois seemed to be present throughout Auerbach’s visit, though visible only to Chris. The family, along with Auerbach and “Lois,” all sat down in the living room, and everyone proceeded to ask Lois questions about herself, with Chris informing them of her answers. Auerbach recorded all of the information and subsequently verified with a surviving relative the accuracy of the details pertaining to her former life. Auerbach says this experience was a turning point for him. He concluded that it made much more sense to believe that the deceased Lois was actually there communicating with Chris than that Chris was some kind of super-psychic who only got information about this one dead woman, while also occasionally managing to make her visible to his family members.

In another, older interactive case, an elderly woman named Anne Simson in Perth, Scotland, was visited over and over by the apparition of a woman whom she recognized as someone who used to do business at the barracks near her house. The apparition said she was indebted to someone for three and tenpence and to find a Catholic priest, because he would pay the debt for her. Simson finally tracked down a priest named Charles McKay and asked him to take care of the matter. After making some inquiries, McKay found a grocer who told him that the deceased woman in question did indeed owe him a debt. When McKay asked him the amount, the man replied that it was three and tenpence, which the priest immediately gave him. A few days later, Simson came to McKay’s house to tell him that she had seen the apparition again, but that this time the woman said she was at peace. This incident apparently impressed Simson so much that she decided to convert to Catholicism.

It’s actually not unusual for an apparition to express a goal and take steps toward achieving it. In fact, a 1944 study by E. P. Gibson found that the deceased generally have more apparent motivation to manifest in apparitional form than the experiencers of the apparitions have motivation to perceive them. We’ll see another excellent example of goal-directed apparitional behavior at the end of the section on mental mediumship.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Verifying apparitions: Rawlette excerpt #4

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "As we’ve seen, one type of new, verifiable information that can be provided by an apparition is that the person appearing is recently deceased, as well as the manner in which they died. But sometimes the information provided is about someone other than the one doing the appearing. For instance, a widower named Gary confided in researcher Dianne Arcangel that he was starting to have a lot of vivid after-death encounters. He was puzzled in particular by something that had happened while he was washing his car in preparation for trading it in. He told Arcangel, 'I saw my wife standing there as plain as day. She said, Don’t bother. Just enjoy your family and friends because you’ll be with me soon. Gary was in great health and actually starting to enjoy life again, so he didn’t know what to make of his wife’s comment. Nevertheless, only hours after Gary told her this story, Arcangel got a call from Gary’s work informing her he’d just been killed in a car accident.

"In another case, a woman named Lois Miller had gotten up to go to the bathroom during the night, and when she returned to bed, she suddenly saw her deceased mother near her, surrounded in light. 'She was facing toward my father’s bedroom,' says Miller, 'and she was motioning to him to come with her.' Miller’s father died unexpectedly two days later, while taking a nap in his recliner.

Non-Survival Hypotheses That Could Explain Apparitions

"While hallucination induced by grief and/or wishful thinking is not a sufficient explanation for the above types of apparitions, that doesn’t mean that survival of death is the only remaining option. Some parapsychologists have suggested that apparitions could be a sort of telepathic projection that the dying person produced before they were dead. That is, even when the apparition is experienced hours or days later, the leave-taking message could have been generated by the dying person’s consciousness while they were still alive and not made its way into the receiving person’s conscious awareness until sometime later.

"However, this is not a good explanation for apparitions with multiple simultaneous percipients, as it seems unlikely that all of the persons involved would have had their internal blocks to receiving the telepathic message removed at exactly the same time. It also seems unlikely that a dying person would have sent telepathic messages specifically to the people or animals who would happen to be bystanders when the person they were emotionally connected to received their delayed telepathic communication. Furthermore, the telepathic residue hypothesis has difficulty explaining apparitions that come to people who never knew the deceased, or who hadn’t even been born by the time the deceased died. And the telepathic residue hypothesis is stretched to the breaking point when it comes to the great number of apparitions that occur many years after the associated death. For example, half of the apparitions in Haraldsson’s collection occurred more than a year after death, and 18% occurred more than ten years later.

"To account for these sorts of cases, we might formulate a new hypothesis. Let’s call it the 'hologram hypothesis. On this hypothesis, what the dying person creates in their last moments is not a telepathic message to specific loved ones but rather a semi-physical object of some kind that can later appear at a particular place and pass on a message by looking/sounding like the deceased person. This would be something like a psychic hologram of the person that would outlast the death of their physical body. The hologram’s objective rather than telepathic nature would explain why it is sometimes perceived by bystanders and why apparitions sometimes happen long after the death of the person involved.

"One problem with the hologram hypothesis is the fact that, as we’ve seen, apparitions sometimes provide new information that was not only unavailable to the experiencer of the apparition but also unavailable to the deceased person while they were dying. But perhaps an even bigger problem is that the hologram hypothesis can’t explain the many apparitions that are actually interactive."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.