Spontaneous Mediumship - Seeing Dead People

In the discussions on the death of physical mediumship it has been said, on several occasions that you cannot have mediumship without a medium. I have two issues with this.

1. Psychical Research is full of examples of spontaneous mediumship. People who are not mediums experiencing contact with loved one's, friends and acquaintances at the time around their passing into Spirit. Some go on to be mediums others never have an experience, of any kind, again.

2. We do not know who amongst us has mediumship abilities, our movement and its mediums (even with all the non aligned psychics out there,many with no mediumship ability) represent a tiny percentage of the population there must be so many we do not know about who have an ability which will never be unfolded. This may explain some of the spontaneous events but not all. Given I believe everyone has some level of psychic ability it is hard wired in us genetically (and in 12 years running open development groups, teaching psychometry and dowsing as well my experience backs this up) we all have a capacity to sense the natural forces around us even bend spoons (I always get a 25% success rate with attendees, in map dowsing a 95%-100% success rate).

I did a talk about spontaneous mediumship in October last year because when I was asking spirit what to talk about my google alerts popped up a review of an article by Bruce Greyson from the Division of Perceptual Studies.

Here is the talk which used loads of extracts, unfortunately the bits where I left the script are not included so its more a précis collected from the various articles and books I cross referenced. It also, given it is a Spiritualist Centre and we want to highlight evidential mediumship, to give a fantastic example of a message through the direct voice medium Emily French.

This was the basis of a talk I gave on Sunday 19th October at the Centre
Seeing Dead People Not Known to have Died).

This was a direct take from a Google Alert I had gathered as part of my constant information hunt. This drew my attention to recent article from an enewsblog called Epoch Times (http://m.theepochtimes.com/n3/1021080-visions-of-dead-loved-ones-not-yet-known-to-have-died/ ). This reviewed a paper of this title written by Dr Bruce Greyson, from the Division of Perceptual Studies, Departments of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Studies University of Virginia Health System. (http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/greyson-publications/Peak%20in%20Darien-A-H.pdf )

For interest this was the Department where Dr Ian Stephenson wrote his very important papers upon previous lives based upon children’s memories of previous lives.

Dr Greyson’s paper was Subtitled “Peak in Darien” Experiences because the author notes that

“There is one type of vision of the deceased that cannot be attributed plausibly to expectation, which challenges most directly the hypothesis that NDEs are subjective hallucinations and bears most directly on the question of the post-mortem survival of consciousness. Some experiencers on their deathbeds see, and often express surprise at seeing, a recently deceased person of whose death neither they nor anyone around them had any knowledge, thereby excluding the possibility that the vision was a hallucination related to the experiencer’s expectations.

Such NDEs have come to be called “Peak in Darien” cases, after a book by that name published in 1882 by Frances Power Cobbe (Murphy 1945:. Cobbe took the title from a poem by John Keats (1994), reproduced at the beginning of this article. The poem describes the surprise of the Spaniards, who, upon climbing a peak in Darien (in what is now Panama), expect to see a continent laid out before them, but are faced instead with another ocean. Cobbe appropriated
Keats’s metaphor of the unexpected view from the peak in Darien to describe surprising visions of the dying, hidden from others at the deathbed:

The paper goes on to describe three types of “Peak of Darrien” experiences

1. Cases in which the Deceased Person Seen Was Thought by the
Experiencer to Be Alive

In the publication in which she coined the term “Peak in Darien” (1882),
Cobbe described a woman who, as she was dying, suddenly showed joyful surprise and spoke of seeing three of her brothers who had long been dead. She then apparently recognized a fourth brother, who was believed by everyone present to be still living in India. One of those bystanders was so shocked by the fourth brother being seen that she “rushed half-senseless from the room” (Cobbe 1877:378). Sometime thereafter letters arrived announcing the death of the brother in India, which had occurred prior to his dying sister recognizing him. “The Peak in Darien 1877”

In another 19th-century example, psychologist Edmund Gurney and classical scholar F. W. H. Myers reported the case of two brothers, ages three and four, who died of scarlet fever on successive days. Harry, the younger brother, died on November 2, and David, the older brother, died 14 miles away on November 3. David’s family took care to keep him from knowing about Harry’s death, and they felt sure that he did not know. Nevertheless, about an hour before he died, David sat up in bed and, pointing, said distinctly, “There is little Harry calling to me”.

Gurney and Myers also described the case of John Alkin Ogle, who, an hour before he died, saw his brother who had died 16 years earlier, calling him by name. Ogle then called out in surprise, “George Hanley!”— The name of a casual acquaintance in a village 40 miles away—before expiring. His mother, who was visiting from Hanley’s village, then confirmed that Hanley had died 10 days earlier, a fact that no one else in the room had known (Gurney and Myers. 1889:459–460 On Apparitions Occurring Soon or after death Proceedings of SPR).

2. Cases in which the Person Seen Died Immediately before the Vision

Alice Johnson reported a case in which Mrs. Hicks, on her deathbed in England, had a vision of her absent son Eddie, who happened to be dying at the same time in Australia. A few days before Mrs. Hicks died; she looked earnestly at the door to the room and said to her nurse, husband, and daughters, “There is someone outside, let him in.” Her daughter assured her there was no one there and opened the door wider. After a pause, Mrs. Hicks said: “Poor Eddie; oh, he is looking very ill; he has had a fall.” Her family assured her that the last news they had heard from him was that he was quite well, but she continued from time to time to say, “Poor Eddie!” Sometime after she died, her husband received a letter from Australia announcing their son’s death. He had suddenly become feverish the day of his mother’s vision and was found dead, having fallen from his horse at about the time of his mother’s vision (Johnson, 1899:290 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research” in 1899:290).

More recently, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described a Native American woman who was struck by a hit-and-run driver on a highway and, before dying, was comforted by a stranger, who stopped his car to help her. When he asked her if there was anything he could do for her, she said: “If you ever get near the Indian reservation, please tell my mother that I was OK. Not only OK, but very happy because I am already with my dad.” The woman died a few minutes later, before an ambulance arrived. The stranger was so moved that he drove far out of his way to the Indian reservation, where the mother of the victim told him that her husband had died of a coronary 700 miles away, just one hour before the car accident had occurred (Kübler-Ross 1983:208–209 On Children and Death).

3. Cases in which the Deceased Person Seen was Unknown to the Experiencer

Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings described the case of a 48-year-old man who had a cardiac arrest. In a NDE he perceived a gorge full of beautiful colours, lush vegetation, and light, where he met both his stepmother and his biological mother, who had died when he was only 15 months old. His father had remarried soon after his biological mother’s death, and the experiencer had never even seen a photo of her. A few weeks after this episode, his aunt, having heard about this vision, visited and brought a picture of his mother posing with a number of other people. The man had no difficulty picking his mother out of the group, to the astonishment of his father (Rawlings 1978:17–22 Beyond Deaths Door).

Pediatrician Melvin Morse described the case of a 7-year-old boy dying of leukaemia, who told his mother that he had travelled up a beam of light to heaven, where he visited a “crystal castle” and talked with God. The boy said that a man there approached him and introduced himself as an old high school boyfriend of the boy’s mother. The man said he had been crippled in an automobile accident, but in the crystal castle he had regained his ability to walk. The boy’s mother had never mentioned this old boyfriend to her son, but after hearing of this vision, she called some friends and confirmed that her former boyfriend had died the very day of her son’s vision (Morse and Perry 1990:53 Closer to the Light).

Putting some perspective on this Dr Ian Stevenson, in reporting one such case, noted some of the difficulties in his investigation. Although several witnesses may hear the dying person relate the vision, they rarely make any written record of the event before receiving corroboration that the person seen in the vision had indeed died. This lapse permits the explanation that the whole story might be a retrospective falsification of memory. Stevenson did not himself believe that to be plausible in all Peak in Darien cases, but acknowledged that the difficulties of obtaining reliable testimony dissuade many researchers from investing the extraordinary effort, time, and patience required to sift the evidence carefully (Stevenson 1959:22 The uncomfortable facts of extra sensory perception).

Clearly the documented evidence provides very clear support to the view of Spiritualists have established through the process of mediumship, that we survive beyond physical death with our memories and personality intact. These are not examples of that but of the kind of spontaneous mediumship recoded by many in regard to a sensation of contact from loved one’s as they pass to the Spirit Realms. They also, through the words of the people experiencing the event who are not mediums, support those messages mediums do bring back from relatives now in Spirit, about their experiences meeting loved one’s just before their death.

To highlight an example of the type of message that Spiritualist medium’s have received, from a book “ONE HUNDRED CASES FOR SURVIVAL AFTER DEATH” , edited by A. T. BAIRD, published in 1944. This assembles many cases of similar events, categorised over 11 subjects from visions in dreams, on death bed through to mediumship of many kinds including direct voice phenomena and materialisation. This is well worth a read and will shortly be up on the centre’s elibrary ( http://www.nasm.org.au/library.html ).

So to finish an example of direct voice mediumship, case no 81
The Randall Case, from Edward Randall’s book, The Dead Have Never Died
Mr. Edward C. Randall, a lawyer in Buffalo, experimented for twenty years with Mrs. Emily S. French, a very frail and deaf old lady. The medium's deafness was a distinct advantage to Mr. Randall; it created a natural test condition for the medium that the lawyer could not improve on.
"Often," he wrote, "we sat alone in my house and the voice that broke the stillness was not the voice of Mrs. French, nor were her vocal organs used by another. She, being deaf, often failed to hear the voices of spirit people and spoke while they were speaking, such interruptions causing confusion."
In his investigation of Mrs. French over 700 sittings were held, and when she died in 1912 he wrote regarding her:
"The memory of Emily S. French comes like a benediction. She made me her friend by being honest; I made her my friend by being fair and so we worked for twenty years and more to learn how to expel the fear of death from the human heart. She was the noblest woman I have known; she was both honest and brave; she enriched herself by aiding others."
On May 26, 1896, Mr. Randall held a sitting with Mrs. French. At ten o'clock that morning the Brown Building in Buffalo, then being repaired, collapsed and the city was full of rumours that many people had been killed. The number was put at six or seven, but there was no way of ascertaining the truth until the debris could be removed and this would require many days.
At the sitting that evening, four voices announced themselves : William P. Straub, George Metz, Michael Schurzke (a Pole), and Jennie M.Griffin, claiming that they had lost their lives in the fall of the building.
This fact was verified some days later.

I admit that, in including Emily French I do so with some trepidation because the essential proof of her work comes from many one on one session's with Edward Randall (including the one quoted above) which makes up the bulk of his book The Dead Have Not Died. I am always less satisfied by non corroborated material. However, I know Emily S French is one of Marc Demarest's favourite subjects so I expect that the truth will, eventually, out whichever way it falls.

Very interesting, thank.

spirit world sometimes use so-called ordinary people when there is no access to trained mediums- simpel as that