Simple Visual ADCs
An After-Death Communication (ADC) occurs when a person experiences the presence of a deceased loved one. ADCs involving deceased humans are well documented and number in the tens of thousands. ADCs involving animals are less common but still prevalent.
ADCs can happen through any of the senses. You might see your deceased pet lying in a familiar spot, hear their feet walk across the floor, or feel them jump in bed.
We’ll focus on visual ADCs first, because they are the most common type.
How Common?
I found 105 visual ADCs reports in the literature involving animals. That’s 68 dogs, 31 cats, 3 horses, one bird, one rabbit, and one rat.
You’ll notice that these are all animals that humans keep as pets. I haven’t seen any ADC involving wild animals. That makes sense, since ADCs typically happen in the context of an emotional bond between a person and their pet, and part of the function of an ADC seems to be to communicate a message (e.g., to say “I’m okay” or “see you later”).
With wild animals, that bond to a human being doesn’t usually exist, so there would be less reason for an ADC. That’s not to say it’s impossible. I just haven’t see any reports of of it.
I want to point out that I only looked in the published literature, so when I say there are 105 reports of visual ADCs, I’m just referring to what is in the literature, not to what is on the internet. There are many more ADC accounts on the internet — probably several hundreds — but I limited my search to the published literature, in the interests of time and sanity.
If you’re interested, the online reports of ADCs can be found at the After Death Communication Research Foundation (ADCRF) and also at various online discussion forums devoted to pet loss or the afterlife.
The ADCRF website is worth a mention. It has 1747 ADC reports at this point. Most of these reports focus on ADCs with deceased people, but there are animal ADCs mixed in. Unfortunately, there is no way of sorting the accounts by human vs. animal, so you would have to read all 1747 narrative reports to pick out the animal ones.
Fortunately, Dr. Julia Assante has stated that 16% of the ADCRF reports involve pets. That gives us a ballpark estimate — 280 — of the number of ADC reports involving animals.
There are also several hundred reports scattered among various online pet loss or afterlife discussion forums. Gathering that data would have been an endless and somewhat depressing task, so I passed.
In any event, although I found 105 cases in the literature, there are several hundred more scattered online.
Types of ADCs
Of the 105 published cases, 39 of them (37%) are simple, one-on-one encounters, with no additional corroborating evidence. The other 66 cases (63%) have some additional validity support, specifically:
- Cases where there are multiple witnesses to the ADC (18)
- Cases in which the person does not know the animal is dead (21)
- Cases where the person has no emotional attachment to the animal (12)
- Cases where an animal also reacts to the phenomenon, in addition to a human (6)
- Other validity indicators, such as appearances to skeptics, “rescue” stories, or ADCs with co-occurring physical movements (9)
One-on-One Encounters
Let’s start with the simple one-on-one encounters, since those are the most common.
Here is a typical example. A woman had a dog named Princess, whom she had to euthanize. This occurred a short time later.
“I woke up in the middle of the night and Princess was at the foot of the bed, looking at me. She looked so beautiful. I sat up and reached, wanting to hug her, and she disappeared. I wasn’t dreaming; I was totally awake. […] I know that when she came to me that night, she did so to let me know that she is okay and that they do continue living on.”
from Kim Sheridan, Animals and the Afterlife
You see this pattern a lot in ADC reports — the person is in bed, they see (or hear, or feel) the animal, and they have a feeling that the animal has come to them to relay a message — that they are okay. Note that although the woman was woken from sleep, she states she was completely awake during the ADC.
One more example, this one from Scott Smith’s The Soul of Your Pet.
Geraldine had a dog, Maeve, who had died three months earlier.
We were retiring for the night and I was already in bed reading. Our new puppy, Prince, was getting into his sleeping place. I looked down to see how he was doing. To my surprise, there was Maeve, lying curled up close to the bed. She looked comfortable and natural, as if there were nothing unusual in all this.
From Scott Smith, The Soul of Your Pet
Again, the woman reports being fully awake, although it occurred around bedtime. Also, the ADC occurred three months after the dog’s death, so it can’t be dismissed as some sort of grief-driven hallucination (another common skeptical argument). The woman is relaxed and describes the dog as appearing quite normal and natural, which is also typical of these reports. That also distinguishes them from dreams, by the way, which tend to have unusual if not bizarre content.
Yay or Nay?
In general, when you’re dealing with simple one-on-one encounters, you have to either take the person at their word or dismiss it. There isn’t any other corroborating evidence, so you really just have their report to go on. Either you trust that the person is reporting accurately, or you don’t. Maybe you think they’re imagining it, are mistaken about what they saw, are exaggerating, or whatever.
However, I’d like to point out a few reasons why you might consider giving at least some of these people the benefit of the doubt.
First, some of these people have allowed their full names and locations to be published in a book, thus exposing themselves to ridicule by family, friends, and colleagues. If people are willing to risk social embarrassment and ridicule, they are probably reporting truthfully. What would be the incentive to go public with a visual ADC report. No one is getting rich and famous from these stories.
Second, in about a third of these cases, the person sees their animal not just once, but several times. Some people report seeing their deceased animals 4 or 5 times (I counted these as a single ADC, to be conservative). Although you might dismiss a single instance as the result of fatigue, imagination, a bad burrito, or whatever, it’s harder to do that when there are multiple sightings over an extended period of time.
Third, in some of cases, the person is distressed by the fact that the ADC occurs with an animal to whom they are only moderately attached, yet does not happen with an animal they more deeply love. If ADCs were merely a matter of grief-driven fantasy, the reverse would be true.
Fourth, some of these ADCs occur months or years after the animal’s death. The grief has dissipated, so they can’t be explained as grief-induced fantasies.
And fifth, ADC reports of animals resemble ADC reports of deceased humans. They are similar in form. Reports of ADCs involving deceased human beings are extensively documented, so extending that phenomena to pets is not much of a stretch. Same phenomena, different species.
But ultimately, you have to either take these people at their word or dismiss them. It’s up to you.
There are plenty of cases with additional validity support, though, where you don’t have to just rely on the person’s word. I’ll talk about them next:
Visual ADCs with Corroborating Evidence