This belief has resulted in a flood of books, shows, and spiritual advisors who draw people in by claiming they can communicate with their dead loved ones. Their demonstrations are often impressive, but it is important to know if they are real. To know for sure we should find out what does the Bible say about communicating with the dead.
![Communications From The Dead Communications From The Dead](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4CX3xfUkAIH4OT.jpg)
Christoph Niemann
One way to imagine dying is like time travel, except instead of journeying into the future or seeing Ancient Rome, you go to eternity, see nothing, and never come back.
We have no idea where people go when they die; it's what makes death so scary and awful. But the sense that they obviously go somewhere—that the person in front of us, situated in the time and space we share, suddenly gets transported to another realm; that their consciousness flickers, then vanishes—also makes death incredibly inconvenient from a logistical standpoint.
This became apparent after the railroads were built. If a train engineer died suddenly on the job--poof!—he would be instantaneously swapped out for a lifeless lump of matter while the huge steel machine he'd been driving kept barreling down the tracks. To get around this problem, the railroad companies devised a “dead man's switch”: a pressure-sensitive lever or pedal held down by the engineer as he drives. “If the guy suddenly plotzes,” neuroscientist David Eagleman explains, “he'll release the switch and stop the train.” Eagleman had this antiquated technology in the back of his mind when he sat down to write a short science fiction story called “A Brief History of Death Switches.” The story begins with a familiar problem: “At the beginning of the computer era, people died with passwords in their heads.”
It was an administrative nightmare, with emails, photos, diaries, and financial information locked away for all eternity simply because people kept crossing into the beyond with the only set of keys. Eventually, Eagleman writes, a solution emerged: software called Death Switches that would detect a person's demise and send prewritten, postmortem emails to next of kin, sharing passwords. But it didn't take long, Eagleman goes on, for people to realize they could communicate more than passwords. They could say good-bye or get in the last word of an argument.
As it turns out, Eagleman wasn't just writing fiction. In 2006 he launched a real-life startup, Deathswitch, to provide the service. Subscribers are prompted periodically via email to make sure they're still alive. When they fail to respond, Deathswitch starts firing off their predrafted notes to loved ones. The company now has thousands of users and effectively runs itself. Among the perks of a premium Deathswitch account is the ability to schedule emails for delivery far in the future: to wish your wife a happy 50th wedding anniversary, for example, 30 years after you left her a widow.
![Communications From The Dead Communications From The Dead](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125534190/166818397.jpg)
Death is the original other dimension—a parallel universe that, for millennia, we have anxiously tried to understand. As software, Deathswitch is relatively simple, but as a tool in that millennia-long project it can feel spine-chillingly disruptive. Eagleman has jury-rigged a way for people to speak from beyond that inviolable border and—for those of us still sticking it out on this side—to feel we're being spoken to. It's another example of technology enabling things that previously would have seemed magic.
Now that so much of our lives gets converted into data that outlasts us, this kind of trans-dimensional communication may be more useful than ever. (Google has even launched its own prosaic version of Eagleman's service: the Inactive Account Manager, which helps users plan their “digital afterlife,” apportioning out access to Gmail, Google Drive, etc., just like heirlooms being distributed in a will.) But Eagleman sees the value of Deathswitch as stretching beyond the utilitarian. The system is completely encrypted and anonymous—even he can't see inside the black box. Still, he likes to imagine the many sensational messages, waiting to be delivered: unexpected declarations of love, confessions of secrets or crimes, or the location of buried cash.
There are all kinds of ways in which the dead differ from the living, psychology professor Richard Wiseman told me recently. 'And one of them,' he said, 'is that dead people tend to be rather particular about who they talk to. The dead,' he added, 'prefer chatting to people who are imaginative. Creative. Highly sensitive.' The professor gives a barely perceptible nod in my direction. 'You know: the credulous, the gullible and the deluded.'
Wiseman is an unusual academic: a former professional magician, he is now Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and recognised as Britain's most eminent psychic sceptic. It was possibly an error of judgment to tell him that communication with the dead is an area in which I have had some personal experience. Or – to use a phrase that tends to recur whenever we discuss this subject – so I believe.
It happened six years ago, during an interview with the British medium Sally Morgan: a psychic who, on the strength of having seen both her televised and theatrical shows, I had concluded was not just a strikingly prolific channeller of spirits, but also the biggest charlatan on the block: a title which, in this area of human endeavour, is not easily gained.
Since then, Psychic Sally, who was unavailable for interview, has established herself as the most popular medium in Britain, playing to capacity audiences at venues across the country. Earlier this month I saw the former dental nurse perform at Brighton's Grand Theatre. A peaceful demonstration outside the sold-out 950-seat venue, was led by two men carrying placards which read, 'Equal Rights For Gay Ghosts.'
This slogan referred to a contretemps with a critic called Mark Tilbrook, who had been handing out leaflets before a performance by Morgan in London this April. Tilbrook only recently released video footage of the encounter, in which Morgan's husband John, a former greengrocer whose ample physique means that he strikes as imposing a figure on the terrestrial plane as his wife does in the ether, approached Tilbrook. Standing shoulder to shoulder with his son-in-law, Daren Wiltshear, he asked the sceptic: 'Are you on drugs? Or has one of your boyfriends shagged you too much? . . . I'm gonna knock you out sooner or later. So fuck off before I do you.'
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Morgan is, according to his wife's 2008 book, My Psychic Life, 'the reason the sun rises.' In a statement released shortly after this grotesque footage appeared on YouTube, and just before the Brighton show, Sally Morgan asserted that she was, 'utterly ashamed and devastated at the behaviour of my husband John and my son-in-law, and neither will have anything to do with my work . . . right now I have no idea what is going to happen to my marriage.'
Meeting Psychic Sally
My own encounter with Morgan, now 63, was less confrontational and yet equally disturbing. In those days the medium, who now occupies a large property outside London, was living in New Malden. Walking up the path to the suburban house, where there were no visible lights, no open windows and no signs of recent occupation, I recalled what Sergeant Bilko says to Rupert Ritzik, in an episode of The Phil Silvers Show, as they approach the apartment of a psychic who, they hope, might enable them to make their fortunes at roulette. 'It's very quiet,' Silvers says. 'The blinds are all closed. Nothing is stirring. She must be in.'
The reading that Morgan gave me, though, was far from comic, even if, in the long-standing debate over mediumship, she hardly represents an obvious choice as a witness for the defence.
In one to one readings, Morgan works – or did at that time – from photographs. I'd taken a few along, including one of my father, who died while I was a student. A few weeks earlier, in a conversation with my brother, I had raised the possibility that my dad might have been claustrophobic: he was clearly uneasy in crowds, for instance, at packed football stadiums.
Morgan picked up a photo of my parents taken many years ago. 'Your father is showing me something in his left hand,' she says, 'A chain. Could be a key-ring.' As I recall thinking at the time, this sort of stuff is the classic material of so-called cold-reading, whereby generalities are dispensed until the sitter blurts out precise information. Then: 'Your dad would like you to know that he was claustrophobic but he didn't realise that at the time. They weren't sure what that condition was called.'
The evening before I met the psychic, who ran a small laundry before experiencing an epiphany in her local Wimpy Bar, I had been whining to friends about how ill-at-ease I felt in the flat landscape of the southeast, having grown up within striking distance of the Peak District. Pretentious and absurd as this may sound, I had been advancing the theory that I somehow found it easier to write fiction in a place with a view of mountains. Morgan took a sheet of paper and drew four or five undulating lines on it.
'You would be very, very happy living in an area which is hilly,' she said. 'Or mountainous. Mountains would inspire you. Your work would flow more easily if you had a vista. This knowledge calls to you. And until you relent and accept that . . . well, if you do, that will change your life for ever.'
Years earlier I'd had a conversation with the late Lord Soper, the prominent Methodist minister. He described mediumship as 'spiritual fascism. People are looking for answers outside their known world,' he'd said, 'When what they should be doing is taking responsibility for their own life.'
'You know,' Morgan said, after I mentioned this, 'it's not easy, living with this ability. I am not a bad person. I am not mad. I am not unhinged. I happen to do an extraordinary job as well as I can.'
It was when I handed her a photograph of an ex-girlfriend – again without mentioning whether this person was alive, dead, or a relative – that I felt Morgan really caught fire.
'There is a mental side to this girl.'
'I'll say.'
'Some people might describe her as a nut. There is a very strong sadness in her, and a sense of having been abandoned. Some people destroy relationships before they have run their course because they think they are going to end anyway. She has that feeling.' Then, informing me that she has my late father at her side, she picks up the family picture again.
'Who is Joan?'
'My mother.'
'And Michael John?'
'My brother.'
'Is your mother in spirit?'
'No, she's in Manchester.'
'Well,' Morgan says, 'your mother's mother lost a small child.'
'Not so far as I know.'
'You'd have to ask her about that.'
And when I did, as I later tell Wiseman, my mother told me that she had had an older brother who died very shortly after being born.
In the MagazineDowntimeCulture