Everybody knows about stories of ghosts haunting spooky old houses. Catholics are familiar with apparitions of the saints. There are also forbidden practices like going to a medium.
What each of these has in common is that they involve one form or another of contact with the departed.
But none of these is the most common form of contact. Around half of the people you know have had an experience they have never described to anyone. Maybe you’re one such person.
The experience goes like this: Someone close has died. It may have been a parent, a spouse, a child, or a friend. Then—days, weeks, or decades later—that person suddenly shows up. He’s present for a few moments, and then he’s suddenly gone again.
In a 1985 study, 54 percent of participants said this had happened to them, but they had never told another human being about it until a researcher asked.
Those who have these experiences sometimes wonder whether they’re losing their minds, and they keep quiet for fear that everyone else will wonder the same thing.
As a result, these experiences are seldom discussed, and only with people who are close and trusted.
Researchers call these experiences after-death communications, or ADCs, and they are an increasing subject of scientific study.
To understand them, we have to be clear about what they are and how they differ from other, similar experiences.
Suppose you go into the hospital and suffer a cardiac arrest; then the doctors restart your heart. Technically, everything you say to anyone after that is an after-death communication, since you clinically died and then got revived. But most of us wouldn’t call the conversations you have after you get out of the hospital after-death communications.
There are also ways that communication with the dead is supposed to happen through a person or a thing, such as going to a medium or using a Ouija board. ADC researchers typically consider those mediated experiences different phenomena. They focus instead on cases where the living person isn’t trying to receive a communication from the next world. ADCs are spontaneous—they’re just something that happens.
That brings us to a pretty standard definition: ADCs are spontaneous and direct forms of apparent contact with the deceased. They are spontaneous because no one is trying to make them happen. They are direct because nothing is mediating them, like a human medium or a device of some kind. For my purposes, that includes telephones. (Believe it or not, telephone calls with the dead are reported, but they’re a subject of their own.)
ADCs are also different from deathbed visions. Lots of people who are nearing death report communications with deceased relatives who come to welcome them into the afterlife. But what happens on a person’s deathbed is different from the after-death communications people receive as part of their normal lives.
Similarly, apparitions of saints and ghosts in haunted houses aren’t included. They typically involve someone that you didn’t know, whereas ADCs typically involve someone who was close to you in life.
How common are ADCs? Exactly how many people have them isn’t clear. In her 2011 dissertation A Systematic Review of Research on After-Death Communication, Jenny Streit-Horn reviewed the literature and estimated that between 30 and 35 percent of people in America report having had one at some point in their lives. She also estimated that 80 to 85 percent of people who are grieving have at least one during the first year of bereavement.
How can both be true? One factor is that not everybody enters the grieving category. In a marriage, either the husband or the wife is likely to die first, and parents tend to die before their children. So some people die first and never go through the grieving process. But Streit-Horn discusses a larger factor: many people forget the ADCs they’ve had, particularly if they weren’t strong, dramatic ones.
There are other estimates. Between 2018 and 2020, a team that included a researcher named Evelyn Elsaesser conducted an international study with an online survey in English, French, and Spanish that got about a thousand responses. A summary of the study by Elsaesser and her colleagues, Investigation of the Phenomenology and Impact of Spontaneous and Direct After-Death Communications, published in 2020, estimates that 40 to 50 percent of people have experienced one or more ADCs.
The research to date indicates that a broad swath of people have them. They can be members of any religion or of no religion. They may be somewhat more common among older people, which makes sense because older people know more people who have died.
Women report them much more frequently than men, but many researchers think this is a data reporting artifact and that men may have them just as often. They just don’t talk about them as much.
Most people who have ADCs have more than one. In the international study, only about 10 percent reported having a single ADC, whereas 80 percent said they had more than one.
Streit-Horn found the reluctance to talk about them throughout the literature. She writes that “many people have expressed hesitation and even fear regarding having the experience and/or sharing it with others.” She also notes that “the studies on ADCs related to bereavement generally arose from professionals’ and researchers’ surprise at observing the ADC phenomenon in the absence of any observed mental illness.”
That’s really important to know. Having an after-death communication is not a sign of mental illness. It’s a normal experience that a large percentage of the population has, particularly in the active grieving phase after someone has died.
Why do these experiences happen? The two principal reasons appear to be to comfort the living and to deliver messages.
The research shows the comfort. The international study asked whether the ADC gave people comfort and emotional healing, and 73 percent said it did. Sixty-one percent said it made it easier to accept the person’s loss. And 91 percent said they treasured the fact that they had had the experience or were very glad they had had it.
The messages are the other reason. In their summary on the international study, the researchers write,
Regardless of the type of ADC, the very essence of these contacts is the message that is perceived. . . . Each message is obviously unique because it is addressed to a particular person and shaped by a common past and a common history. However, we can schematize the contents because, in their essence, the perceived messages are relatively homogeneous.
Reassuring messages basically reassure the living that the deceased loved one is fine: “I’m fine, don’t worry about me.” Reaffirming messages are affirmations that they continue to love us and that we will be together again: “I love you, I will always be by your side.” Resolving messages deal with unfinished business, like settling old conflicts and offering apologies.
Why should a Catholic care about any of this? Because ADCs are basically apparitions of people we know. Instead of having an apparition of a major saint—like Jesus or Mary—people have apparitions of those they love, who typically show up to tell them they love them and that they’re happy and okay in the afterlife.
The Christian faith acknowledges that God can let people have communication with him, with the good angels, and with the saints. We refer to these as visions and apparitions, among other terms, and they are gifts from God.
Some Christians believe that such visions are not for our present age, but that’s a minority position within Christianity. And with 40 to 50 percent of the population reporting after-death communications, that’s very significant evidence that these experiences are for today.
So an after-death communication is a spontaneous and direct experience of contact with someone we knew who has died, and something like 40 to 50 percent of people have had at least one.