In a previous post, I looked at after-death communications, or ADCs—that is, spontaneous and unmediated experiences of apparent contact with a loved one who has died.
A 2020 study by a researcher named Evelyn Elsaesser and her colleagues, “Investigation of the Phenomenology and Impact of Spontaneous and Direct After-Death Communications,” reports on an international online survey of about a thousand people in English, French, and Spanish and estimates that 40 to 50 percent of people have had at least one.
In a future post, we’ll look at how likely these experiences are to involve genuine contact with the departed—that is, we’ll evaluate them from an evidential standpoint.
For the moment, we’ll just look at what these experiences are like, starting with the less intense ones and moving to those that are more compelling.
A basic way of classifying them is between direct and non-direct communication. Non-direct communications involve perceiving something other than your departed loved one, which serves as a symbol that your loved one is trying to communicate with you. Direct ones involve perceiving the loved ones themselves and may or may not involve the physical senses.
William and Judith Guggenheim are a pair of researchers who gathered a huge number of accounts of ADCs for their book Hello from Heaven. Of symbolic ADCs, they write,
Many people reported receiving a sign which affirmed that their deceased family member or friend had survived physical death and continues to live in another dimension of existence. We call these symbolic ADCs or ADC signs. They are a relatively common type of after-death communication. . . . Typical symbolic ADCs include butterflies, rainbows, flowers, many different species of birds and other animals, and any number of inanimate objects.
One of the reasons butterflies are a common sign is that they are a symbol of change and survival. Caterpillars go into chrysalises and emerge as butterflies, which makes them a natural symbol of survival beyond death.
Perhaps coincidentally, the ancient Greek word psuché not only means things like “life” and “soul.” It also means butterfly.
The Guggenheims report an account from a woman named Caroline, whose twenty-four-year-old daughter Lindsey was killed by a drunk driver. At the funeral,
while Father was saying the final prayers, a big white butterfly landed on Lindsey’s white casket and stayed there the whole time. When the service was over, Sister Therese hugged me and said, “Oh, Caroline, did you see the white butterfly too? A butterfly is a symbol for the Resurrection!” I never knew that meaning before, and this put me at peace.
Not all symbolic ADCs involve butterflies. Three weeks after her nine-year-old son Sean died in an accident at his school, a woman named Sunny found a dime under his dresser drawer. She used to give Sean an allowance for being a good son, and he would give her a dime back, saying, “This is for you, Mom. This is your allowance for being a good mother!”
According to the Guggenheims, over the next nine years Sunny and her husband found a total of 640 dimes. That works out to three dimes per person per month. I don’t think I’ve ever found three dimes a month—especially not for nine years.
What should we make of experiences like these? They aren’t as compelling as direct perceptions of the departed loved one, but I wouldn’t dismiss them. God can give people meaningful signs, and that includes signs that their loved ones are okay in the afterlife.
However, because such signs are so personal, it’s hard for third parties to know what to make of them. Because symbolic experiences involve coincidences, they will be less convincing to skeptics, though the more unlikely the coincidence would be by random chance, the harder it would be to dismiss.
Next come what are known as sentient ADCs. In Latin, sentire means “to feel,” and a sentient ADC is one where you feel the person’s presence without any sensory impressions. The Guggenheims write,
People reported having an intuitive awareness or inner knowing that their deceased loved one was with them in the same room or area. It was a distinct, almost physical sensation that he or she was nearby. The presence felt familiar and conveyed the identity and personality of the one who had died.
The international study found that about a third of experiencers—34 percent—had sentient-only ADCs. Of those, 68 percent said they could tell where in space the person was located relative to them, and three quarters thought the loved ones were trying to send them a message by their presence.
Then there are ADCs that involve actually sensing the departed loved one, such as auditory ADCs, in which people hear the loved one’s voice.
In the international study, 44 percent reported hearing it. Of those, 48 percent said it came from outside them, “as in a conversation between living people,” while 57 percent said it was telepathic. The Guggenheims note that the messages are generally “brief and to the point,” and they compare them to telegrams, “which typically contain twenty-five words or less.”
A man named Philip heard his fifteen-year-old daughter Tina on the night of her funeral, when two or three hundred of her friends were gathered at the house:
I was passing through the hallway downstairs when I heard Tina say, “I love you, Daddy!” I wheeled around because this was an audible, external voice. I am a board-certified psychiatrist, and I’m not given to hearing things that are not there.
Touch is involved in tactile ADCs. In the international study, 48 percent said the loved one took the initiative by touching them, and 80 percent of those said the touch was transmitting some sort of message. About a quarter said they also tried to touch the loved one, and 43 percent of those said they felt resistance when they did. They didn’t just perceive their hand going through the loved one.
Some touches are simple, but others are more complex. A woman named Cathy, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Theresa had died in an automobile accident, reports,
One day, I lay on my bed facing the wall. I was just wishing to die. Suddenly, I felt Theresa sitting behind me on the edge of the bed. She began stroking my forehead and hair, just as I had so often done for her. . . . This lasted a minute or so, and then she gradually went away. I was totally joyful to have this contact, and it actually kept me going.
While some tactile sensations could just be due to imagination, tactile impressions that go on for that long would be less likely to be just a momentary subconscious manifestation.
Smell is also involved in these experiences. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said a fragrance characteristic of the deceased made them think the loved one was present.
Three or four weeks after her husband Russell died of a heart attack at forty-two, a woman named Brenda was sitting at her desk at work when she smelled roses, as strongly as if there were a bouquet on her desk. There were no roses anywhere in the office. Russell used to send her roses at work.
Finally there is sight, the sense humans rely upon the most. Of all reported ADCs, those where a living person actually sees the departed can be the most compelling.
In the international study, 46 percent of respondents said they saw the deceased, and 60 percent said their eyes were open at the time. Sixty-two percent said the loved one seemed solid, like a living being.
How the person appears is also interesting. Only 17 percent said the people looked the same as at the hour of death, while 55 percent said they looked different.
Often people see the person at a younger age and in full health. Experiencers also report their loved ones being free of the limitations they had during this life. About six weeks after her eighty-two-year-old mother died of a stroke, a woman named Hannah was sitting in the front room.
Suddenly, I saw her walk into the room! The first thing I noticed was that she was walking normally. Ten years before the end of her life, she was forced to have both legs amputated above the knee. Mother had both her legs again, and she walked right over to me and sat on the arm of the overstuffed chair.
Religious figures sometimes appear in these experiences. Three years after her nineteen-year-old son Dean was killed in a motorcycle accident, on what would have been his graduation day, a woman named Wendy reports,
All of a sudden, I saw a picture of my son with a man who appeared to be Jesus. . . . Dean had on a black graduation cap and gown, and Jesus was wearing a long white robe and had long hair and a beard. They were both smiling, and Jesus seemed pleased.
People who appear in ADCs can also express concerns for the living. After a young family friend named Ryan drowned, a woman named Louise saw him standing at the foot of her bed. He asked her to tell his mother to have an altar call at his funeral: “I’ve got lost loved ones that I want to be saved.” His mother did, and his brother Eddie came forward to reconcile with God.
Sometimes experiencers get a glimpse of the afterlife, with houses, gardens, and flowers. I don’t think these would be literal descriptions. The afterlife is a purely non-physical realm, so it doesn’t literally have houses and gardens and flowers.
My understanding would be that these are familiar images meant to help us understand something of what the experience is like. Like the imagery of the heavenly city in the book of Revelation, they are meant to give us a non-literal taste of what a much larger reality is like.
So after-death communications take many forms, from symbolic signs to full visual encounters, and in them loved ones often appear free of the limitations they had in this life.
However, this just tells us what people report in these experiences. It doesn’t tell us whether they involve actual contact with the departed. We still need to consider whether they could have purely normal explanations—like being impressions that are just a product of grief.
That’s a subject we’ll take up in the next post in this series.