One day, not long after her husband died, Ann Dowdy was sitting by his grave having a one-sided conversation. She was crying and asking questions that got no replies, when all of a sudden an olive fell from the tree above her head and landed squarely on the headstone. "Maybe it's an answer," Dowdy thought at the time.
Five years later, as she prepared to move away from south Texas and remarry, she sat at the grave again, saying goodbye. And as she sat — there was no wind, she recalls — an olive fell off the tree and landed on the grave.
Were the two olives a sign, or just a coincidence? A message, or just something that happened to fall off a tree? With no way of text messaging us from beyond the grave, would the dead be forced to rely on something as inconclusive, as inconsequential, as a tiny fruit in order to communicate such a momentous piece of information ("I'm still here!")? Dowdy, now living in Salt Lake City, is certain what happened in that Texas cemetery was significant. She had sat at the grave many times, she says, but the olives only fell "when I needed a confirmation."
Butterflies, rainbows, garage doors that go up and down for no reason — these are the kinds of stories the living tell about signs they believe they have received from the dead. Often these are stories shared tentatively, if they're shared at all, kept close to the chest for fear that they will be debunked by skeptical listeners.
Even in grief support groups, says Phran Ginsberg, stories about the dead communicating with the living are sometimes discouraged. That's what happened in the Compassionate Friends group she and her husband attended after their teenage daughter Bailey died in 2002. Unable to talk during the regular meetings about the ways they felt their children had contacted them, the parents would stand around afterward and hold a "second meeting" in the parking lot.
"The consensus was that we who were the so called 'believers' were experiencing a more positive movement through our grief," Phran says. "The knowledge that our kids were still with us gave us the hope we so desperately needed just to survive each day."
So Phran and Bob began what they call Afterlife Discussion Groups in their home state of New York in 2003. There are now groups in eight states, and the Ginsbergs hope there will be at least one in every state, including Utah, within a couple of years. All that's needed, Phran says, is "10 to 20 people in drivable distance of each other, and a facilitator." In 2004, the Ginsbergs incorporated the nonprofit Forever Family Foundation to coordinate the groups and support research into survival of consciousness.
Here's one of the stories Bob tells about his daughter: About a year after Bailey died, Phran started noticing that whenever she drove past the accident site, a sound came out of the radio, even if the radio was off. Bob describes the sound as "a Morse code cadence," and at first he dismissed it as an electrical problem. A few weeks later, driving their truck instead of the car, Phran heard the same sound. Then the Ginsbergs started hearing it in other places — on the telephone and on the TV, even when the TV was turned off, and once over the public address system when University of Arizona researcher Dr. Gary Schwartz was giving a lecture about afterlife research.
Earlier this year the Ginsbergs launched a Web site called thesignregistry.com. The rules: When you're still alive, think of the sign you'll want to send your loved ones after your death, then log onto the Web site to store your secret. The Forever Family Foundation notifies the designated loved ones that you've registered a sign but doesn't divulge what it is. After you die, if loved ones think they've received an after-death communication from you, they can log onto the site to check whether the sign they believe they've received can be verified.
"It's not 100 percent scientific," acknowledges Phran. In fact there's no way the Ginsbergs can totally eliminate fraud on the site, says researcher Schwartz, who is honorary president of the Forever Family Foundation. The sign registry, he says, is "more of a service" than a research tool. "But, having said that, it is possible that meaningful data will be collected. But it will be of the exploratory sort: Let's amass data and see if there's something there."
Start hunting around in the "survival" field and you'll soon stumble on Schwartz's work. A professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona, he is also director of the school's Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, where he does survival research. It's not your typical academic pursuit, especially since he is most known for his afterlife experiments using mediums who purport to receive information from the dead.
Contacted by the Ginsbergs after the Morse code episodes, Schwartz proposed an experiment. He told Phran to ask Bailey to contact one of his research mediums if, in fact, she was sending a code to her parents. "The next day," Bob reports, "I got an e-mail from Gary, which was the forward of an e-mail from the medium. It said, 'Somebody is sending me Morse code.' "
Bob and Phran are full of stories about the messages the dead leave. One day, Bob says, he visited a friend who is also his doctor. Bob hadn't seen him in a while, so he launched into an explanation about the Forever Family Foundation. At the end of the conversation, Bob remembers, "Finally he says, 'I've got to tell you something. Seven years ago my father died. He died at 2 in the morning, and later that day I called my answering service. They said, Your father called. They said he called at 4 that afternoon. They read me back the message and it said Frank, it's me. It's OK. Everything is better here.' " It was the first time the man had shared the story with anyone. "He hadn't even told his wife," Bob says.
The thing about "signs" is that there always appears to be another explanation: coincidence, randomness, wishful thinking; a story misinterpreted, details left out or embellished in the retelling. Scientists, by and large, have avoided studying phenomena such as afterlife communication, apparitions, death-bed visions, reincarnation, and, to a lesser extent, near-death experiences.
Response to his own afterlife research, says Schwartz, generally goes like this: 20 percent of scientists "feel it's profoundly important," 50 percent "are people who won't say anything in public, but behind closed doors, off the record, say 'I wouldn't be brave enough to do this kind of work but I think it's important,' " and 30 percent "think it's crazy and impossible and anyone who would entertain this hypothesis is either not a good scientist or is fooling himself. They're very, very, very negative about it." Of course, he adds, "there were scientists who said the Earth isn't round. When a fundamental belief is challenged, they view it as an attack."
Schwartz has written two books about his work with mediums, "The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death" and "The Truth About Medium." The latter reports on his research with the woman whose life is the basis for the TV show "Medium."
Schwartz says his work was inspired by a woman named Susy Smith, whom he met later in her life after she had written 30 books about her experiences as a medium and her lifelong attempt to prove that the soul survives bodily death. She claimed to have communicated with, among other people, the 19th century philosopher William James. According to Smith's final book, she also wrote a column called "Shopping With Susy" for both the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune during the early 1950s.
In 1973, long after she had left Utah, she established the nonprofit Survival Research Foundation in Tucson. As the end of her life neared, Smith devised an experiment to determine whether an encrypted sentence on her Web site (no longer functioning) could be broken by a secret phrase she hoped to communicate after she died. She offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who could crack her "afterlife code"— a reward which to date has not been claimed.
In his own books, Schwartz details his efforts to conduct his mediumship experiments scientifically — the medium does not know who the "sitter" is and cannot see or in some cases even talk to the sitter (to avoid picking up cues from facial expressions or a tone of voice). The results are sometimes general, vague revelations ("the person has white hair"), sometimes wrong, and sometimes eerily specific ("she was interested in quantum physics" or "she's telling me that (her) dog was named after a food.")
If scientists are reluctant to embrace mediums and other attempts to communicate with the dead, religions are just as uneasy, even though the reported results would seem to prove the very afterlife those religions espouse.
The Roman Catholic Church, for example, teaches that "all forms of divination are to be rejected," explains Susan Northway, director of the office of religious education for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City. To try to contact the dead through a medium, she says, is "contrary to the virtue of religion," which she describes as "letting God unfold whatever is ahead for us." No matter how much a person might want to see a loved one again, to attempt to do so "would be saying 'I know better than God,' " Northway says. As for signs from the dead, "Our church is very cautious in this area," she says. "We don't reject it, but we don't confirm it." Ditto for visits from the dead.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to "Mormon Doctrine" by Bruce McConkie, holds that mediums, no matter how sincere, "are in fact turning to an evil source." And people who seek signs to bolster their faith are "spiritually weak."
As for the signs that might appear without seeking, McConkie writes: "They may incidentally have the effect of strengthening the faith of those who are already spiritually inclined, but their chief purpose is not to convert people to the truth, but to reward and bless those already converted."
"Latter-day Saints believe that life continues beyond the grave and that a loving Father in Heaven hears and answers prayers. Occasionally, according to God's will, guidance has been given by sacred communication from those who have passed on," church spokesman Dale Bills said.
At The Sharing Place, a support center for children mourning the death of a loved one, outreach/education coordinator and grief specialist Chris Tucker says that the children and their parents sometimes report receiving a sign or something that feels like a visit from the person who has died. Sometimes it's the unexplained fragrance of the person's cologne, or just a feeling of the person's presence, or, once, a butterfly that landed on a child's books and stayed there as she walked to school.
"They know people will try to explain it away, just like the grief itself," Tucker says. "But for the child, it's life affirming."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com