In order to further dismantle skeptical counterclaims that ADCs are nothing but grief-fueled hallucination, let’s look at additional cases that refute this explanation. These are cases in which:        

1. The person reporting the ADC has no emotional attachment to the animal
2. The ADC is timed specifically at a point where it seems to “rescue” the person from danger
3. The person experiencing the ADC is a skeptic
4. The ADC is coupled with physical changes in the environment that match what is being seen

I’ll give an example of each.

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No Emotional Attachment

In 12 cases, the person who had the ADC had no emotional attachment to the animal.  These cases also defeat the common skeptical explanation, since, if a person has no emotional attachment to an animal, they would have no reason to subconsciously concoct a hallucination to relieve them of emotional pain. They’re not in emotional pain.   

Scott Smith relates this example:

While working in San Diego, Mary Seiler had to go through the drafting department of her company one morning in order to make photocopies.  It was well-lighted and full of people.  As she passed by one drafting table, something caught her eye. 

Mary says, “I looked down and to my surprise, I saw a gray cat with yellow eyes materialize.  It leaped up and rubbed itself against the legs of the draftsman, who seemed oblivious, then disappeared.  I was shocked!  I was alert and observant and noticed that the cat seemed to lack depth but had width and breadth.” 

She approached the draftsman and blurted out, “Do you own a cat?”  He responded that he used to, but it had been run over two weeks before.  He confirmed her description of the cat, and he thanked her for telling him, since he had felt the cat’s presence many times before, but he thought he was imagining things.

Scott Smith, The Soul of Your Pet

Scott remarks, “Clearly, a busy drafting room with the witness preoccupied with routine business would hardly be the right environment and timing to have hallucinated a ghost, especially of an animal. It stretches credibility to believe that Mary imagined this, then just happened to be lucky to ask someone who had lost a cat recently and to have described it correctly.” 

For those who might wonder if Mary was psychic or often had these sorts of experiences, no.  She only had this one experience, many years ago.

Scott relates eight other accounts in his book. You can find similar reports in the works I cite by Vincent Gaddis, Sylvia Barbanell, and Bill Schul. 

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“Rescue” ADCs

In a few cases, the ADC is timed in such a way that it seems to warn a person of danger. Here is one such account, from Bill Schul.

A man named Robin Deland had a dog named Jeff, a collie who passed away six months before this event. Deland was driving at night along a narrow, winding dirt road in the Colorado mountains.      

Deland had started up a sharp incline when suddenly a dog appeared in his headlights, only a short distance ahead in the road.  The animal stood there unmoving and Deland had to break to a stop.  He sat frozen in his seat, because the dog, now only a few feet away and clearly detailed in his car lights, was Jeff. 

They were extremely close.  Deland knew every hair on the dog’s body.  And Jeff was extremely large for his breed.  He had a massive head but a somewhat short nose for a collie.  Deland is quite certain that his rendezvous on a rocky mountain precipice was with Jeff, even though the dog had died six months prior.

Deland felt “awed and bewildered.” He got out of his car and walked toward the dog. He tried to touch him, but the dog turned around and walked up the road toward the peak of the incline.  Deland followed. 

He topped the incline, and just beyond, silhouetted by the moonlight, was a massive rock slide, burying the road.  If his car had reached that point, it would have been certain death.  There would have been no way he could have kept from plunging off the cliff in a drop of several hundred feet.

Bill Schul, Animal Immortality

Deland stood there for several long minutes, staring at the rock slide and the depths below. He was shaken. He looked around for Jeff, but there was no sign of him.  

Deland has no doubt that it was Jeff he saw. He is also convinced, that, were it not for Jeff’s appearance, he would have died.  He had saved Jeff’s life earlier, and he is convinced that Jeff came back to return the favor.

Bill Schul adds, “Hallucination? If Deland is hallucinating, isn’t it rather strange that the nonexistent Jeff so appropriately saved his life?” 

See Bill Schul and Scott Smith for other rescue ADCs like this. They are difficult to explain as hallucinations based on grief, because the person is not experiencing grief at the time, and the ADC seems perfectly timed. It’s hard for me to see this as anything other than an animal intervening to prevent harm to an old friend.

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Appearances to Skeptics

Sometimes, atheists have NDEs. We take those stories more seriously, because what atheist would consciously or subconsciously concoct a story that violates their worldview?

Same thing here. Sometimes, an ADCs is experienced by someone who has no belief in such “nonsense” and has always been skeptical. These are not people in grief, and their worldview does not include belief in an afterlife generally or animal afterlife in particular. They would have no motive, conscious or subconscious, to manufacture a hallucination that would upend their way of organizing their lives and understanding reality.  

Here is an example from Kim Sheridan. 

Barbara Meyers had a white poodle, Skila. Barbara saw a chiropractor for her own issues, but Skila developed some spinal problems, so she asked her chiropractor if he could work on Skila. This was not normally a part of his practice, but he “reluctantly” agreed. 

The chiropractor was “a true skeptic – more than a skeptic, in fact.”  He had never owned a dog, a cat, or any animal.

Skila loved the treatment.

It was just marvelous.  He would do the adjustment, and she would go rickshaw all around the office, run down the hallway outside the exam room and run back and jump into his arms with an obvious, “Thanks a lot!”  He always knew when we were there even before we were in, because he could hear her coming down that hall.  She would always go down the hall and look for him. 

Kim Sheridan, Animals and the Afterlife

Eventually, however, Skila passed away.  Barbara continues:

About six months after she died, I received a very agitated phone call from him [the chiropractor], and he told me the following:  He was in his office at the end of the at the end of the building, working at his desk, and there were a few patients waiting out front and the secretary.  He heard something in the hallway.  It wasn’t the footsteps of his secretary or patients coming down.  He was compelled to get up, and when he got up and peeked out his office door, Skila was walking down the hallway as she had done so many times before.  It was not a feeling or an image or some kind of shadowy sensation. It was what is known as a solid visitation.

He was stunned.  He called me, not so much to tell me that Skila had come to visit him, but because he thought he was having a breakdown.  You see, he was a person (since I knew him for so many years and we talked about many things) believed that all of this “stuff,” as he would call it, was simply the effect of a grief-stricken mind.  But that day, everything changed for him.

He was so upset.  It was really a frightening experience for him.  There was nothing menacing about it – there she was, coming down the hallway to see him.  She was there.  He thought he was having hallucinations and a mental breakdown.  It happened again a number of days later. 

There is no way to explain this as the chiropractor inventing a comforting hallucination for himself. He has no reason to do this. The initiative is coming from the dog, not from the chiropractor.

In a nice postscript, Barbara adds that the chiropractor was so emotionally impacted by the ADC that he decided to adopt a dog.

The dog became the love of his life, as well as everybody else in the family.  When she was diagnosed with cancer, how he cried.  What he wouldn’t have done and did do for her.  And this was the man who had never patted a dog on the head.    

Kim Sheridan, Animals and the Afterlife

Kim relates a couple other similar accounts, as does Scott Smith. If you are a skeptic who wants to explain away ADCs as comforting fantasies designed to avoid the “harsh reality” of death, you’ll have to account for events like these, which contradict people’s belief systems and do not leave them relieved, but instead disturbed.

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Physical Movement

In this case, physical movement coincided with the visual ADC. This is rare, but it is worth a mention, since it is another form of corroboration.    

Katherine had a cat named Demi, who passed away.  She said that when Demi was alive, “She often climbed the bookcase in my bedroom, and she would knock over the three small pictures I had placed there.”  Katherine reported this event occurred shortly after Demi died.

One day, as I was lying on my bed, halfway between sleep and consciousness, something caught my eye, or so I thought.  I looked over toward the bookcase where Demi loved to climb.  In my state of grief and grogginess, I simply thought that I had imagined the black blur as it moved down from the bookcase.  I continued to lie on my bed, hurting from the huge loss of my friend, and once again wishing that I could know she was alright.

Something made me fully wake up and look up to her favorite shelf, where I had the three pictures.  When I did, I knew I had not imagined that black blur, because every one of those pictures had been knocked over, exactly as she had done many times during her life.  I smiled through my tears to know my dearest friend had come to comfort me one last time. 

Kim Sheridan, Animals and the Afterlife

You can’t dismiss this as grief-induced fantasy or hallucination, because there are physical changes in the environment — and not just any physical changes, but ones that match the characteristic behavior of the animal.

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Conclusion 

We began with simple one-on-one visual ADCs. There are some reasons to grant them credence, but ultimately you have to decide whether to trust the person’s word or not, because there isn’t any additional corroboration.

We also looked at cases (which form the majority, 63%) which have additional validity indicators — that is, corroborating evidence, beyond just the person’s word, that helps to bolster its credibility.

Each of these types of cases refute the hypothesis that the ADC is nothing but a subconsciously generated hallucination designed to alleviate grief.

What hardened skeptics do at this point is claim that the people reporting ADCs are just lying. If that’s all you got — “everybody is lying!” — then you’ve run out of ideas. I call it the skeptic’s last stand.

In any event, I’m not writing for people like that, and I doubt they’re reading this anyhow. I’m writing for the people who might encounter skeptics and have to deal with their condescending, pat dismissals. Don’t let them throw you. There is plenty of solid evidence for animal afterlife.

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