Mediumship: Attestation
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to take it for granted, as a starting point, that there are some reliable, credible mediums. If you blanch at this idea and think I’m a loon, I’d suggest checking out the vast literature on this subject. Here are some places to begin:
- The Afterlife Experiments by Gary Schwartz, PhD
- Is There An Afterlife? A Comprehensive Overview of the Evidence, by David Fontana, PhD
- Science and the Afterlife Experience by Chris Carter
- Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Afterlife, by Leslie Kean
- A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife, by Victor Zammit
- Julie Beischel, PhD, and her colleagues at Windbridge Institute, who have done careful research on mediumship, using triple- and quadruple-blinded studies (a level of control that goes far beyond that used in most scientific experiments).
Suffice to say that there is plenty of good evidence that some people (albeit a small number) can provide accurate, specific information about deceased people that they could not have obtained through normal means, and by doing so, they have provided good evidence of the afterlife existence of those “deceased” people.
What about Animals?
What about animals, though? Mediums have provided good evidence for human survival into the afterlife. Have they done the same thing for animals?
Yup. Mediums have provided good evidence for animal afterlife. I’ll talk about that evidence under three headings:
- Mediums, including evidential ones, attest to animal afterlife
- Specific evidential cases from mediums
- Controlled scientific research
Mediums Attest to Animal Afterlife
Many mediums have reported that “deceased” animals appear in their readings. I found reports like this dating back to the 1800s (e.g., AD Mattson, Hugh Benson). They have become more and more common over the past two centuries.
I’ve been reading afterlife literature for a couple decades now, and I’ve probably heard or read at least a hundred mediums say that animals show up in their readings. In fact, I haven’t heard one of them deny it.
Kim Sheridan interviewed dozens of mediums for her book, Animals and the Afterlife. Kim said the mediums “always stated that of course there were animals in the afterlife.” She added that she attended many public readings, and at every reading, at least one animal came through.
So animal afterlife seems almost universally attested to by mediums. As I say, I’m not aware of a single counterexample (i.e., a medium who says they have never encountered an animal in their readings or that animals do not exist in the hereafter.
The sheer volume of this testimony is impressive. Hundreds, possibly thousands of mediums are all saying the same thing — that animals appear in their readings and exist on the other side. How do you explain the overwhelming consensus among such a wide variety of mediumistic practitioners, stretching back at least two centuries? That is a tremendous amount of converging evidence, all consistently pointing in the same direction.
The skeptics, of course, would say they are all frauds — just telling people what they want to hear, making lucky guesses, researching social media for information, etc. Indeed, there is fraud in this area, and I encourage people to be reasonably skeptical (as opposed to rigidly, dogmatically skeptical), but is it reasonable to say that all of these reports come from frauds? Every last one of them? They are all engaging in trickery and deceit? Really?
Let’s put on our skeptic hat and say half of them are frauds. That still leaves us with hundreds, probably thousands of consistent reports, all saying the same thing. In this connection, remember the white crow principle.
“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
William James
In other words, if you want to demonstrate evidence for animal afterlife, it’s not necessary that every medium report is reliable. There just needs to be one that is.
Evidential Medium Attestation
“Evidential” mediums are a subset of mediums who bring through specific details about the departed, which they could not have known or just guessed.
Evidential mediums are different than normal, non-evidential mediums. For example, a normal, non-evidential medium might say “Your grandmother is here, and she’s saying she loves you.” No specific details are given that could not have been assumed or guessed. In contrast, an evidential medium might say, “Your grandmother is here. Her name is Jill or Jane. She has a strong, dominant personality. She’s showing me a picture you have of her that you looked at recently.” The medium has given specific details that could not be guessed or assumed. That is why they are called “evidential” — they bring through specific evidence that helps establish that they are in communication with the “deceased” person.
Many times, evidential mediums have also demonstrated their accuracy under very difficult conditions. That is not to say they are infallible. Even the best evidential mediums “only” have accuracy rates of 85-90%.
Here are the evidential mediums I’m aware of: John Edward, John Holland, George Anderson, Suzanne Northrup, Suzanne Geisemann, James van Praagh, Joanne Gerber, Mark Anthony, Thomas John, Hollister Rand, and Suzanne Wilson. There are many more, but those are the ones I’m aware of. In some cases, these mediums have undergone rigorously controlled scientific testing (e.g., see the work of Dr. Gary Schwartz or Windbridge Institute). In other cases, the testing has been more informal.
The important point is that each of these evidential mediums have stated that animals come through in their readings, and that animals exist in the afterlife. All evidential mediums say that; there are no exceptions that I’m aware.
So, we have unanimity of opinion — not only among mediums generally, but among a select group of evidential mediums, who have repeatedly demonstrated their reliability and accuracy.
I’ll discuss scientific research and specific evidential cases next: