Can the dead speak? Prof treads unusual academic ground – after-death contact

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Text messages from a dead loved one.

The sensation of being hugged.

A familiar whiff of perfume while walking in a forest.

These are common ways people say they experience so-called after-death communication (ADC) from a loved one, a phenomenon that one London professor is bringing into a place it’s rarely found – the world of peer-reviewed, academic study.

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“I’ve had an interest in the survival hypothesis – the hypothesis that consciousness can continue to exist, at least for a time, after the death of the physical body – since I was a child,” said Imants Baruss, a psychology professor at Western University’s King’s University College and author of Death as an Altered State of Consciousness: A Scientific Approach.

The text book is published by the American Psychological Society, and used by his students.

For the last two years, he and his students has been researching after-death communication as experienced through cellphones, funded by a $44,500 BIAL Foundation grant.

“Rarely is this a phone call from the dead, although those do sometimes occur,” Baruss said. “Usually it’s something more elaborate like a text message that a person never wrote themselves and was never sent. The phone starts playing a song that is important to the deceased person or a voicemail message.”

Baruss also studies the hundreds of phone apps on the market “intended for use of talking to the dead,” he said.

“We’re trying to see if any of these apps work,” he said. “Do they allow you to actually have communication with a deceased person or not?”

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So far there “has been nothing convincing,” Baruss said.

But what Baruss sees as the most important aspect of his research is the awareness it raises.

“A lot of people are having (these) experiences of all kinds and we’re not acknowledging that,” he said. “People are acknowledging that among themselves but they’re not being acknowledged by academics or mental health professionals.”

When they do discuss them with mental health workers, often the workers believe “there is something wrong with the person,” Baruss said.

“The problem is people having these experiences don’t know where to go, don’t know how to interpret them or what to do with them and that needs to change,” he said.

He said mental health professionals and other providers of services in the community need to be educated about these types of experiences “so they can provide something helpful or useful for these people instead of something that is disparaging, or gaslighting them.”

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Mark Shelvock is a London-area grief and trauma therapist who authored a Psychology Today article about contact with dead loved ones. He says accounts of such experiences are more common than one might think.

“It’s incredibly common for people who have experienced a death-related loss to have an experience that the dead are around,” Shelvock said, noting studies on various populations have found between 31 to 82 per cent of people report experiencing one.

“(Research shows) more people than not end up having these experiences,” he said. “I help normalize people’s experiences.”

Other common forms of after-death communication include dreams, or being struck while seeing animals such as a cardinal or dragonfly.

“They get this felt sense experience or a sense of connection to their deceased person and it’s a really special experience,” Shelvock said. “People are not having hallucinations – that term is not appropriate.”

For Shelvock, experiencing after-death communication has been helpful to many of his clients.

“From a therapist perspective, many of these experiences are in fact therapeutic,” he said. “People feel more connected to their deceased loved one.”

HRivers@postmedia.com

@HeatheratLFP

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Have you ever experienced what researchers call after-death communication with a loved one? Would you like to share your story (anonymously or otherwise) with The London Free Press for a future article? If so, please contact Heather Rivers, hrivers@postmedia.com

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