Possibly:
But over the past few years mediumship has undergone a remarkable rehabilitation in academic circles. Scientists in prestigious universities in Britain and the US have begun investigating mediums and their results are shocking and perplexing in equal measure.
“We’ve proved it experimentally,” says Professor Gary Schwartz of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona. “Some mediums are real and they’re getting accurate information. We’ve convincingly ruled out every one of the conventional sceptical explanations.”
And Dr Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist at Kings College London, agrees: “It’s difficult to see another reason for the effect other than there is genuine communication with the deceased going on. This is the most logical interpretation.”
Anecdotal stories like Natalie’s, whilst compelling, have been the bane of researchers for decades. They are all too easily dismissed by sceptics as mere bunkum because they occurred outside the rigorously controlled conditions of a laboratory. To make matters worse, the reputation of mediumship is tarnished by the numerous high-profile charlatans and tricksters who claim to contact the dead.
Despite this, there has always been a significant number of mediums who consistently provide information that can only have come from the deceased. Few scientists have been willing to sift this psychic wheat from the chaff. A few years ago British researchers attempted to do just this – and they obtained some quite remarkable results.
Patricia Robertson and the astrophysicist Emeritus Professor Archie Roy, both of Glasgow University, carried out a series of experiments to find out whether mediums really do communicate with the dead. The experiments were based on the ‘double-blind’ trials used by doctors to measure the efficiency of new drugs. These are designed to rule out such human frailties as wishful thinking and fraud.
The mediums were asked to communicate with the dead whilst in secure rooms isolated from the audience. They were not told who they were giving a reading for. It was up to the spirit world to decide.
The mediums were told to provide specific robust facts rather than nebulous assertions. At the end of each reading the medium’s statement was given to the audience and each person was asked whether they thought it applied to them. Every single reading was then analysed line by line for accuracy.
“We were biased against the mediums,” says Robertson. “The statements had to be 100 percent accurate or we would regard it as wrong. If the medium said that your father died of a heart attack when in reality he died whilst having a heart operation then we would say that was incorrect. We were very hard on the mediums.”
And the results proved to be spectacular. Seventy percent of the facts obtained by the mediums proved to be true. Some mediums scored over 85 percent whilst the controls averaged only 30 percent. There was literally a million to one chance of the results being a fluke, which in statistical terms is proven way beyond reasonable doubt.
“There’s no doubt about it,” says Robertson. “Mediumship works. We are convinced that some mediums can impart to a sitter information about people who have died that they couldn’t possibly know in any normally accepted way. I’m not saying that it comes from the dead, but the most plausible explanation is that the information is coming from deceased personalities.”
With results like these, scientists around the world rushed to repeat the work and the fruits of this endeavour are now beginning to emerge.
Professor Gary Schwartz of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona, tweaked and repeated the experiments devised by the Glasgow team and obtained broadly the same remarkable results. The dead really do appear to talk to the living through mediums.
“Some mediums really are getting accurate information,” says Professor Schwartz. “Only people who do not know the research or ignore the evidence could come to any other conclusion.
“We’re moving away from the question of whether mediumship is real and instead asking how does it work. We want to know whether it is survival of consciousness after death or whether mediums somehow read the remnants of their memories that still exist.”
It’s an intriguing idea that Professor Schwartz is proposing. Either mediums tap into some form of cosmic ‘memory bank’ and retrieve the essence of a dead person’s character or they really do talk to the dead. Both possibilities would turn the world upside down and force us to completely re-evaluate our view of the universe. Out would go much conventional materialistic science and a more mystical outlook would take its place.
Sceptics, of course, do not believe either interpretation of the results.
“I don’t believe it,” says Professor Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor of Biology at University College London. “I don’t know how mediums do these tricks but it’s all nonsense. If they could get my telephone number or bank account details then that would impress me more.
“The truth is you don’t have a mind when you’re dead so mediums can’t tap into it. When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
Despite the scepticism of atheists like Professor Wolpert, there remain many who use mediums because they furnish useful information. Detectives are apt to use them for this reason, especially if they are stumped and unable to crack a crime using conventional means. One of the most intriguing examples concerns the case of Raonaid Murray and the Welsh medium Diane Lazarus.
Raonaid was murdered in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, in 1999. Diane was drafted into the case by Detective Inspector Eamon O’Reilly to help catch the killer.
Diane was taken to Raonaid’s bedroom where she asked the parents what had happened to the poetry the girl had written on the wall. It turned out that Raonaid’s distraught parents had wallpapered over it. DI O’Reilly maintains that she could not have known about Raonaid’s poetry by any conventional means.
The officers then took Diane to the murder scene. Once there, Raonaid’s spirit re-played the whole gruesome murder inside the medium’s mind.
“When I visited the murder scene I felt the knife go into the left hand side of my body,” says Diane. “That knife is now in someone’s kitchen drawer.”
According to Diane, Raonaid was stabbed to death shortly after midnight on September 4th 1999. She was rushing home from work when a man approached her with a knife. He was a regular in the pub where she worked and had spent the entire evening watching her every move.
“He was a stalker,” says Diane. “He was waiting for her in the lane. He approached her and started trying to grab her bags but I think he was out to kill her. He slashed her arms as she struggled to break free. Then he stabbed her. She fought to the last.”
Diane’s description of the injuries closely matches those discovered in the post-mortem. DI O’Reilly maintains that this information was a closely guarded secret. Again, Diane cannot have known about them through any normal means. Diane’s grim evidence is proving useful to the police. She told them the initials of the murderer – and they match those of the prime suspect. Diane also gave them a detailed description of the murderer. Again, it matches that of the prime suspect. Eamon O’Reilly is convinced he knows the identity of the killer but the suspect has a seemingly robust alibi.
“One thing’s for sure,” says Diane. “Raonaid’s really furious about being murdered. I would not like to be her killer.”
And if all that wasn’t strange enough, the medium Christine Holohan helped the Metropolitan Police solve an equally brutal murder and put the killer behind bars.
Jacqui Poole was killed in London in 1983 and her case remained unsolved for nearly 20 years. Shortly after her murder, the medium Christine Holohan began receiving visitations from Jacqui who told her the name of the man who killed her. Her amazing story is told in the book A Voice from the Grave.
Christine went to the police but initially received a cool reception. But after she began describing the murder scene and the manner of Jacqui’s death the police suddenly took an interest.
“I had been the first officer on the scene,” says Detective Constable Tony Batters, a member of the squad investigating the case. “I remained there for many hours. Christine could not have seen it but she managed to described it just as I found it, including the victim’s position, clothing and injuries. She gave us extraordinarily accurate details about the murder scene.
Christine successfully described the killer in great detail, his age and month of birth, his height, skin and hair colour, his tattoos, the type of work he did, and mentioned his criminal history. In total, of the 130 verifiable facts revealed by Christine, 120 proved to be entirely accurate. She also revealed the most important detail of all: that the killer’s name was ‘Pokie’ - the nick name of Anthony Ruark, a local petty criminal.
"It was absolutely spine-chilling,” says DC Batters. “We'd already interviewed Ruark but at that moment I knew we'd got our man."
But it was not to be - Pokie had a cast-iron alibi. Try as they might, the police could not pick holes in it. At least, thought the officers, Christine’s testimony had allowed them to move much faster and more thoroughly than would normally have been the case. As a result, they had gathered crucial evidence that might prove useful when forensic technology caught up with Christine’s psychic abilities.
And eighteen years later Ruark’s alibi did finally fall apart. By then scientists had developed a new way of fingerprinting DNA from the tiniest traces of blood, skin and semen. The evidence gathered as a result of Christine’s guidance could finally be put to the test and it proved to be decisive. Ruark was convicted of murdering Jacqui Poole in August 2001.
If cases like these prove anything, it’s that the blind faith of sceptics and atheists can be safely ignored for the time being at least. Natalie Well’s brother would seem to be living on in some form and the spirits of murder victims really can haunt their killers.
