The Looming Presence of After-Death Communication
People talk to the dead. Sometimes, the dead talk back.
September 20, 1997, 1:07 a.m.
My mother had died a couple of hours previously. Our parish priest had come and gone, and the people from the funeral home may have been in the living room doing their job.
I went to my neighbor’s house across the street to let him know, and he returned with me. We sat at the kitchen table with my Uncle Greg and a bottle of Jack Daniels; my father was somewhere in the kitchen. We all had a tumbler of the Tennessee numbing agent in hand.
Unexpectedly, the kitchen lights went out and the lights through the rest of the house flickered. I looked up to notice the time on the microwave clock said 1:07 a.m.
My father went to the basement and emerged to say that a breaker had tripped. No one dared to say what they thought, that this was Andrea Paventi turning off the lights in her kitchen one last time and departing the mortal plane.
Spooky, right?
Maybe there was a power surge in the area. I can’t imagine anyone else in the neighborhood being awake to notice and, in 1997, the local utility didn’t yet have online tools to track and report outages. Rationally, there was some sort of anomaly on the grid or in our aging home that caused the issue. Maybe a faulty breaker. Maybe a surge. Who knows?
But, then you invite in the mystical spiritual question of what happens when we die. There is a whole set of physical processes that occur after the body draws its final breath, but what about your spirit or soul?
[Now, this is where I say that I don’t believe in an afterlife or a spiritual realm, but the concept of everlasting life is crux of most religions. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and others believe there is something next when dying, whether it’s heaven or reincarnation.]
Christianity, specifically, speaks of this journey. In Luke 23:42-43, one of the criminals crucified along with Jesus Christ asks to be remembered when “You come into Your kingdom.” Christ assured him that he will join him there. Whether you call it a kingdom or paradise, this is the Heaven that Christians have been taught about since young ages. The standard for entry — as repeated throughout The Bible — is to submit yourself to God and seek his forgiveness, such as in Romans 3:23-26:
Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
Most interpretations of religious texts agree that when you die, your soul immediately catches the express train to the afterlife. No stopping at Hudson News for a magazine or grabbing coffee; just get to your gate and board the plane.
Spiritual mediums disagree on the timing aspect. I’m going to quote liberally from a 2021 Medium post by Karen Hluchan, a spirit medium and author based in Pennsylvania:
With a passing due to a long-term condition, the soul is usually aware that their time on Earth has come to an end. In the days and weeks leading up to his or her passing, loved ones in spirit often make their presence known through dreams or visions while awake. In the case of a sudden passing, there can be a wide range of emotions experienced by the recently deceased including shock, upset, anger, and confusion.
Delegation guides are there to help the person understand their time on Earth has come to an end and to let them know their time to transition to Heaven has arrived. Initially, the soul may resist leaving, as they may be in denial about their passing, are concerned about loved ones left behind, or feel they are not done with their time on Earth. The delegation guides do their best to provide comfort, understanding, and information to help the soul to accept the ending of their time on Earth and the beginning of their transition to the next dimension. With regard to those who purposefully ended their lives, the delegation is there for them, too. All souls go to Heaven; however, there can be a delay caused by the soul who believes they do not belong in Heaven because of their actions and what they have been taught on Earth through various religious teachings.
The soul needs to know it is worthy of transitioning to Heaven before it crosses over. They do receive help from the delegation guides which, in this case, are usually higher spiritual beings, also referred to as Angels.
One thing that I’ve learned since embarking on the Dirt Nap journey is that death, as much as I would like to believe it to be so, isn’t so cut and dry. The body is alive and functioning, then the body dies and other natural processes take over. But, what about life forces and spirits and souls? Where do they go? Do they simply cease to exist?
Put differently, is a tripped circuit breaker a failure of a home’s electric system or could it have been something else?
After Death Communication
This isn’t mediumship or a two-way conversation through a third party. Spontaneous acts of after-death communication present themselves directly to the person that experiences them, sans translator or gatekeeper, and they’re typically unsought and unexpected. It could be a dream or visualizing a deceased person in the room. It might be hearing a noise that can’t be explained or the lights flickering in the kitchen.
One out of three people have experienced an ADC and it mostly happens to someone in bereavement, as three-quarters of people have experienced one within a year of their loved one dying, according to research from the University of North Texas. Women are more likely to experience one than men, as are widows and widowers. The experience cuts across cultures, faiths, socioeconomic class, and education level.
More often than not, the ADC is presented a sense of presence without any specific sensory indicator, though there are plenty who have seen, heard, smelled or felt touch connected to this. Often, the ADC presents itself through electronic distortion; television or radio reception gone awry or power fluctuations.
(Related to this is a subset of grief counseling called induced after-death communication. Reserved for people in the most intense of grief-related sadness, a therapist prepares their client to be more receptive of an ADC and “helps to facilitate in the client a state of mind in which ADC is more likely to occur.” We’re going to stay on the spontaneous side of the tracks and revisit the therapy another time.)
Sensory Experiences of the Deceased
Now, I imagine there are some of you reading this and shaking your head. Doubt is natural in these instances and there may be rational explanations for some of these cases.
Complicated grief, prolonged grief disorder, and persistent complex bereavement disorder are clinical diagnoses that share some similarities, namely that they are lengthy periods of distress (at least six months). This extended period of intense painful emotion could evoke feelings that the grieving person experienced some level of ADC. A study published in Schizophrenia Bulletin indicates there is a correlation between people with PCBD and the frequency of ADCs that are visual or auditory.
It’s posited by these researchers that an ADC in the time following a loss could be a result of attachment to the deceased, as if they manifested a contact through their longing. The researchers made it a point to account for the fact that ADCs happen years in the future, writing:
However, the theory does not account for SED occurring later, sometimes years after the death, when experiencers are not clearly in a “seeking” mode of consciousness (or unconsciousness).
SED, as referenced above, is a sensory experience of the deceased. More on those in a moment. People with complicated grief are often the individuals who receive the induced ADC therapy, referenced above, as a way to overcome their despair or distress.
According to the same study, researchers have not performed enough studies to conclude that a relationship between ADC and psychosis exists. For instance, individuals with schizophrenia may hallucinate as a by-product of the disorder and there’s no agreement on how to separate an ADC from something generated by the brain.
But ADCs are not psychotic episodes. They’re very real, or at the very least, real to the person that experiences them. One of the most widely cited authors on the topic is Evelyn Elsaesser, a Swiss researcher with dozens of papers on the matter. She co-authored a paper in 2021 analyzing the sensory contact of people that experienced an ADC, or a SED. Her team examined 991 “viable cases” and found that nearly about two-thirds of cases involved one of the five senses; the ADCs were either tactile (48%), visual (46%), auditory (44%), or involved a smell (28%).
My experience was, for all intents and purposes, visual1. I saw the lights flicker and power go out. It was not imagined or concocted in my head, and there’s no logical reason for the outage in that moment.
Jan Holden was more succinct in her explanation: “This is an example of an event that seems to have no material explanation, that coincides with or follows someone’s physical death, and that seems to be a communication from them – hence the term after-death communication.”
Holden is Professor Emerita at University of North Texas’ Department of Counseling and spent her career researching the counseling implications of near-death experiences and after-death communications. She is president of International Association for Near-Death Studies and editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Scott Janssen — who you may remember from our men and grief and election grief serieses — recommended her to me, knowing of my experience and the previous article on mediumship.
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Why is interference with electricity and electronics is a form of spontaneous after death communication. What other methods are common?
I have posed this — and other — questions to the deceased, but they never respond to my surveys2. Apparently, the ability to influence electronics is a relatively easy way for those no longer in physical form to influence the physical world.
The research you shared is that 1/3 of people report ADC at some point in their life and that 3/4 of people report it in the first year after a loved one’s death. How do you distill this from some bit of magical thinking, that my loved one is speaking to me because of sheer coincidence? Are there way to tell the difference between genuine ADC and wishful thinking?
In most cases, ADC is a matter of subjective, rather than objective, truth. That is, the experiencer typically feels unquestioningly that the communication was from, usually, their deceased loved one. However, there have been cases of veridical ADC — in which the expriencer received information that was not yet known in the material world but was later verified as accurate by a credible third party. A study at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies is currently underway to collect such cases.
Have you ever experienced an ADC?
Yes, a few times: with my mother, my father, my mother-in-law, and a former student.
Do you think popular culture feeds into this at all? Do you think that films like Ghost or City of Angels depicting a looming presence convince someone that something is there?
Conversely, I believe that such media are the result, rather than the cause, of the occurrence of ADC. Adc has been reported throughout history and across cultures — long before films were invented.
The passing of a loved one is obviously difficult and people grieve differently. Is there something to be said about bargaining and denial that convinces people that they are communicating with the dead?
Not everyone who experiences ADC is grieving. Although ADC is most commonly reported by grieving people, another category of ADC — rescue ADC — typically occurs long after grief has mostly resolved. In these cases, the deceased loved one warns the living person of impending danger in order to rescue them from imminent injury or death.
Does faith fit into ADC at all? Is there a correlation between ADC and people who attend church or are more religious than others?
In short, no. ADC occurs for people of all demographics. More grieving people, women, and older people report ADC, and it may be reported somewhat more in cultures in which it is an accepted phenomenon, but people of all beliefs, including atheists, experience ADC about equally.
Where does science fit in? Every biology or anatomy class I’ve taken has told me that death is a binary state. How accepting is the scientific field of ADC?
ADC has been studied scientifically by quantifying and investigating people’s subjective reports. Those genuinely pursuing science — the creation and testing of hypotheses — are quite open to ADC research, whereas those committed to scientism — the premise that nothing can exist beyond the directly observable and measurable physical world — don’t consider the possibility of ADC — until, of course, they have their own experience.
What does research tell us about mediums, or people who sell a service to communicate with the spirit world?
Whereas ADC is the experience of direct communication between a living person and a deceased person, mediumship involves a third person — a medium of communication — between the living and the deceased. Research indicates that some people can reliably convey specific information that the living person perceives as having come from the deceased person.
Final Thoughts on Finality
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The only thing in the room that smelled was me, as I was in need of a shower.
Jan clarified that she was joking here.