Having skeptics around is a good thing. We need them to keep things balanced and honest. Let’s not kid ourselves, there is a history of fraud in this area. We don’t want to be naive or gullible.

If we’re going to believe in animal afterlife, we don’t want that to be a blind faith, or a faith that is just based on emotion and hope. We want beliefs that are based on reason, evidence, and experience. Our beliefs are made stronger when we allow them to be exposed to scrutiny and counterarguments.

With that in mind, let’s review some of the main skeptical claims about mediumship. Here are the most common skeptical explanations for what is really happening, in cases of evidential mediumship:

• Fraud. The medium is engaging in blatant trickery and deceit. For example, the medium has arranged for paid actors to be planted in the audience and to enact rehearsed scripts supposedly demonstrating an impressive reading. Or perhaps they researched the person on social media before the reading, then conveyed the information as if it came from a deceased relative. They are outright frauds.
• Cold reading. This is a more subtle form of fraud. “Cold reading” refers to a number of different tactics, often used in combination, to make it seem as if the medium is getting information from spirit, when actually they are getting it from the person in front of them. Mediums (or anyone, really) can pick up on details the person reveals, subtly guide self-disclosure with their questions, make observations of their non-verbal behavior (e.g., emotional state), use reasonable inferences, and then combine all that with rhetorical flourish and stage presence to give an impression that the information is coming from the great beyond.
• Lucky guesswork, combined with selective reporting. The medium is just reporting the times he/she happened to guess correctly. They are leaving out all the times they got it wrong. Given that mediums conduct hundreds of readings, they are bound to get some things right. It’s just the law of probability, combined with selective reporting of “hits.”
• Telepathy. The medium is not getting information from a deceased spirit. Instead, the medium is getting the information by reading the mind of the person in front of them, the person getting the reading.

Let’s look at each.

Fraud

There is a history of fraud in this area, to be sure. Wherever money is to be made, and there is little oversight, you will find fraud. No surprise there, and if you choose to engage a medium, it’s good to be careful and do your research.

However, if you want to perpetrate fraud in this area, choosing evidential work doesn’t make much sense. It is much easier to be a general, non-evidential medium who reports feel-good messages and basically tells people what they want to hear. That’s easy money. If you’ve got some good interpersonal and stage skills, you can also do cold readings, which are mostly vague messages and just feeding back what the client leaks.

But doing evidential work? That’s not easy. That requires clear evidence of accuracy. You are held accountable for your results. Your accuracy is tested. That would be the last thing a fraud would want. Frauds hide and evade. Deceit depends on obfuscation and vagueness.

Evidential mediums do the opposite — they aim for specificity, accuracy, and clarity. They train themselves to get that, and they are disappointed when they can’t. They are willing to put their readings on the line and to be held accountable for their accuracy.

In addition, people inclined to fraud in this area tend to have a certain personality profile. This isn’t invariable — it isn’t true of all frauds — but many seem to cultivate a “guru” persona, leak narcissism behind a facade of humility, and make exaggerated claims.

Frauds also use anxiety and fear to drive business. The classic example here is a medium who tells you that you have a curse on you, and for $200, she can remove it.

Evidential mediums, by and large, do not fit this profile.

Although we need to be aware of the possibility of fraud, I don’t think it’s a very good explanation for the vast majority of evidential mediumship.

Cold Reading

To be sure, some mediums do use cold reading. If you’re shopping for mediums, it’s good to know about these techniques, so you can spot the cheaters. Here are some common techniques:

• “Fishing” questions that pull a lot of information about the deceased or your relationship with them.
• Vague, general statements that could apply to anyone.
• High-probability guesses. For instance, saying to a large audience, “I have a father figure. I’m getting a ‘J,’ like John or Jack. Does that make sense to anyone?” Of course it does.

Cold reading doesn’t work as an explanation for most evidential cases, though. First, most good evidential mediums will constrain your responses; they will ask you to not volunteer information and just answer yes/no or something similar. They do that because, if you blurt out, “Oh, it’s my grandma Sally!” then the medium can’t reveal it, which means you don’t get evidence that your grandmother is still alive on the other side. The medium knows this is critical information, so he/she will ask you to limit the information you give. That is the opposite of what happens in a cold reading.

You also don’t see the telltale signs of cold reading in the medium reports discussed here — fishing for information, vague and broad statements that could apply to anyone, etc.

In addition, people practicing cold readings usually do so in a group context and rely on close observation of non-verbal communication. Most of the evidential data reported here was gathered in one-on-one settings, and much of it over the phone, where there is limited opportunity to observe non-verbal behavior.

Lucky guesswork and selective reporting

In this counterargument, the skeptic says that the medium is just reporting the times he or she happened to guess correctly, and leaving out all the times they got it wrong. Since mediums conduct hundreds of readings, they reason, they are bound to get some things right, and those are the ones they talk about. We don’t hear about all the times they miss.

This one is pretty easy to dismiss, when you look at the probabilities. Let’s take an example from Karen Anderson, a well-regarded animal medium with a background in law enforcement. In this example, Karen is reading for a woman whose cat, Choo Choo, has passed away. 

“Choo Choo is showing me her whiskers and keeps brushing them against my face, and it tickles.  Choo Choo says this is how she wakes you up.  Do you understand this message?” 

“Oh my gosh!  Do I understand it?  Yes, I do!  Choo Choo would wake me up every morning with her whiskers. I miss her so much. Does she know how much I love her?” their mom asked, choking back the tears.

“Yes, she does. She says you talk to her all the time and that she still wakes you up with her whiskers,” Karen said.

“I thought I was going crazy, but I can still feel her whiskers brush against my face. Is that really her?” their mom asked, barely able to talk.

“Yes, that’s her. She says she helps you wake up on time,” Karen said.

“Unbelievable. I just can’t wrap my head around how this is possible.”

“Now Choo Choo is showing me a plate of sushi.   Does that make any sense to you?”

“Yes!  Sushi was her name when I adopted her from the shelter.  It didn’t suit her, so I changed it to Choo Choo.  Nobody knows that, Karen.  How did you know?” 

“Choo Choo told me.” [the reading continues, with more evidential data about a different animal]

Karen Anderson, The Amazing Afterlife of Animals

That’s a good, evidential reading. Karen gives detailed and specific information about a deceased cat she has never met, namely:

• A characteristic behavior of the animal (whiskers brushing against a face)
• The timing of the behavior (morning)
• The purpose of the behavior (to wake her up)
• The fact that the woman is still experiencing that same sensation
• The cat’s name prior to adoption, which is unusual (Sushi), and which she had told no one

Now calculate the probability of correctly guessing all of those details. We’ll have to use rough estimates, but I’d say say the chance of correctly guessing the first detail is around 1 in 10; the chance of correctly guessing the second details is around 1 in 20; the chance of correctly guessing the third is around 1 in 20; the chance of guessing the fourth is around 1 in 30; and the chance of guessing the fifth is around 1 in 300. I’d say those are reasonable, even conservative, estimates, but feel free to plug in your own if you like. Then multiply, because she she has to get all the details correct, not just one.

That’s 0.1 x .05 x .05 x .033 x .0033. My calculator doesn’t have enough decimal places for that result. The odds of her guessing all those details correctly is 0.00000002. That’s 1 in 36 million.

That’s one hell of a lucky guess.

Another reason to disbelieve this explanation is that it assumes the medium is hiding all the times they got it wrong, which of course would vastly outnumber the times they got it right, if they were just engaging in guesswork. No medium could establish a reputation and career if their accuracy rate was that low.

This explanation just isn’t realistic.

Telepathy

This is a reasonable alternative explanation, put forth by knowledgeable skeptics. The idea is that the medium is not getting the information from a discarnate spirit; the medium is getting the information by reading the mind of the person in front of them.

This is a complicated subject, which I can’t do justice to in this brief space. However, I’ll offer two reasons to be skeptical about this explanation.

First, mediums themselves tell us that they can readily tell the difference between information coming from a live person or animal and information coming from a “dead” one. There is something qualitatively different about the processes.

In fact, Dr. Beischel and her colleagues at Windbridge have conducted research that supports this distinction. They found evidence of both qualitative and quantitative differences in these two modes. They also found differences in brain scans during the two different modes.

So the telepathy explanation requires us to believe that experienced mediums are mistaken about where the information is coming from. They only think the information is coming from a dead animal, but really it’s coming from the person sitting across from them.

But to do that, we would have to ignore what these mediums themselves say — and these are people who have often spent decades honing their craft — and also dismiss the research supporting the distinction between these two modes. I just don’t see a justification for doing that.

Second, we have plenty of cases where the medium conveys information that is not known or understood to the sitter at the time.  These cases refute the mind reading hypothesis. After all, how can the medium be getting the information from the person’s mind, if the information is not in that person’s mind to begin with?  

Here is one example from Karen Anderson: 

A deceased dog named Nellie told me to say ‘Wolfman Jack’ during a session.  It took a while for her mom and dad to figure out who she was referring to.  After about a month, they discovered that an old friend who went by the name of Wolfman Jack had passed away.  He loved dogs, so it only made sense that he and Nellie were together on the other side.

In this case (and there are many others), the clients are stumped by the information, because it is unknown to them at the time. It only makes sense much later, after they learn more. Telepathy can’t explain this, because the information is not in the clients’ mind.

I think the telepathy explanation is worth consideration, and it may be happening in some cases. However, I don’t think it is a good explanation for the full range of evidence. If you’d like to read more, see the sources I mentioned in “General Medium Reports.”

What Remains?

So, if we can rule out these skeptical explanations — if the information isn’t being produced by fraud, cold reading, lucky guesses, or telepathy — then where is it coming from?

I, and many others, would suggest it is coming from where the mediums are saying it’s coming from — from discarnate individuals, including animals, on the other side.

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