Chapter 22
The Research and a Christian Understanding
Marian came to my office on a Tuesday afternoon. She had been a widow for six months. Her husband Glen had died after a long bout with cancer, and Marian had nursed him through the last year with the kind of steady, unshowy love that pastors rarely get to see up close. She had buried him in a graveside service at the back of our church cemetery, and she had not missed a Sunday since.
Now she sat across from me with her purse in her lap and her eyes on the carpet. She had something to tell me, but she did not know how to begin. I waited.
"Pastor," she said finally, "something happened on Saturday night."
I waited some more.
"I was lying in bed, half asleep. And then I felt the bed go down, like someone had sat on the edge. And then I felt his hand on my shoulder. And he said my name. He said, 'Marian.' Just like he always did."
She looked up at me, and her eyes were full of tears and fear in equal measure.
"Pastor, please don't tell me that was the devil. Please don't tell me I'm losing my mind. But please don't lie to me either. I need to know what to do with what happened."
That conversation is more common than most pastors realize. And many widows like Marian have asked the same question, in the same hushed voice, and walked out feeling worse than when they came in.
This chapter is for them.
Chapter Thesis: After-death communications, what researchers call ADCs, are the experiences of bereaved people who report sensing, seeing, hearing, or otherwise being contacted by their deceased loved ones. They are widely reported across cultures and faith traditions, and they are far more common than most Christians realize. This chapter is not a license to seek the dead. It is, instead, a framework. We will look at the research with care, hold it up to Scripture, and offer the bereaved Christian a path that is neither paranoid nor credulous: receive what God may give; never seek what God forbids; and test every experience by the Word.
The phrase after-death communication — ADC for short — was coined by Bill and Judy Guggenheim in their landmark popular study, Hello From Heaven. After interviewing more than two thousand people and gathering over thirty-three hundred firsthand accounts, the Guggenheims grouped the experiences into a handful of recognizable categories.1
The most common kind of ADC is also the simplest: sensed presence, the bereaved person's quiet awareness that the deceased is somehow near. There is no image, no voice, just a knowing. We give that experience its own treatment in the next chapter, so I will not unpack it fully here.2 Beyond sensed presence, researchers describe several other kinds of experience:
Hearing the voice of the deceased — sometimes a single word, often the bereaved's own name, often a brief sentence of reassurance.3 Visual experiences — seeing the deceased in a room, at the foot of the bed, by a familiar chair. Tactile experiences — the sense of a hand on the shoulder, a brush against the cheek, an embrace. Dream visitations — vivid, structured experiences during sleep that experiencers insist were "more real than real" and unlike ordinary dreams. Symbolic signs — the meaningful timing of an object, a song on the radio, a butterfly, a scent associated with the deceased, an unaccountable behavior of an electric light.4 Unexpected knowledge — the rarer cases in which information is given that is later confirmed: the location of a missing object, the timing of an event the bereaved could not have known.5
The point is not to memorize the list. The point is to know that what Marian experienced — a sensed weight on the bed, a hand on the shoulder, her name spoken in her husband's voice — falls inside a pattern researchers have been documenting carefully for half a century. She is not strange. She is among a very large company.
A skeptical reader may wonder how often this kind of thing really happens. The honest answer is: a great deal more often than most pastors are told.
Jenny Streit-Horn, in her doctoral dissertation reviewing the field through 2010, gathered forty-nine research studies and sixteen related books on ADCs. She drew on surveys conducted by major institutions like Gallup International and the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Council, with participants in Tokyo, the United Kingdom, China, India, Norway, Iceland, Australia, Sweden, and many other countries — more than fifty thousand people in twenty-four nations.6
Her summary of the data is striking. Roughly thirty to thirty-five percent of people in the general population report at least one ADC at some point in life. Among the recently bereaved, the number rises to roughly eighty to eighty-five percent within the first year of loss.7 If those numbers are even close to right, billions of people across the globe believe they have, at some point, been contacted by someone who has died.
And yet — here is the pastoral tragedy — most of them never tell anyone. One older study found that fifty-four percent of those who had an ADC had never spoken of it to another soul before being asked by a researcher.8 Bereaved parents in the Continuing Bonds studies often kept their experiences hidden for years, afraid they would be thought crazy.9 Pastors hear far less of this than is happening in their congregations. Marian almost did not tell me. I am sure she is not the only one in any given congregation who has held something like that in silence for fear of what the pastor might say.
What the research has found. Researchers have gathered ADCs across more than fifty thousand respondents in two dozen countries. The experience is reported regardless of nationality, race, religious tradition, education, or physical health. Among the recently bereaved, ADCs are not rare; they are common — and most often hidden, not because the experiencer doubts them but because the experiencer doubts whether anyone will believe them.
The cross-cultural reach of the experience is itself important data. Christians report ADCs. So do Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. So do atheists.10 This wide reach should make us cautious in two opposite directions at once. On the one hand, it tells us that something real and human is going on; bereaved persons across the world report strikingly similar experiences. On the other hand, it tells us that the experience by itself is not a piece of theology. It cannot, on its own, decide which religion is true or what doctrine is correct. What people experience and what an experience means are two different questions. The experience itself is data. What it means must be tested against the Word of God.
The first place a bereaved Christian should look when wrestling with an ADC is Scripture. And here we must be careful, because Scripture is doing two different things at once.
On the one hand, the Bible firmly forbids one path. We are not to seek the dead. We are not to consult mediums, spiritists, or those who "call up the dead." This prohibition runs from Leviticus to the prophets:
"Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them: I am the LORD your God." (Leviticus 19:31, ESV)
"And when they say to you, 'Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,' should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?" (Isaiah 8:19, ESV)
Deuteronomy 18:10–12 is the best-known passage on this subject; we explore it more fully in Chapter 25. The biblical line is clear: the living are not to seek hidden knowledge from the dead, nor reach across the veil through forbidden means. That practice is named again and again as detestable, dangerous, and idolatrous, because it draws the seeker away from God toward forbidden powers.11
On the other hand — and this is what so many pastors miss — Scripture does not say that contact between the living and those beyond the veil is impossible. It says it is not for us to initiate. The Bible itself records moments when the veil thins from heaven's side, not from earth's. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah appear and converse with Jesus while three living disciples watch (Matthew 17:1–8). Long before Jesus' resurrection, Stephen, in the moment of his martyrdom, saw "the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56). The complicated story of Saul, the medium of Endor, and the appearance of Samuel (1 Samuel 28) is itself instructive in two directions at once: Saul's seeking is condemned, but the postmortem awareness of the prophet is taken for granted in the narrative.12
The pattern is consistent. When the veil parts in Scripture, it is God who parts it. The story is never of someone reaching across to summon the dead. It is of God allowing a glimpse, for His own reasons, in His own way. The living do not seek the dead; God may, in His mercy, let the bereaved feel, see, or hear something they did not seek.
That distinction — do not seek; receive with discernment if given — is the rule of thumb beneath this entire chapter.
A Note on Discernment: The Line We Cannot Cross. Scripture is firm: do not seek the dead through mediums, séances, Ouija boards, "channeling," or any practice meant to summon the departed (Leviticus 19:31; Deuteronomy 18:10–12; Isaiah 8:19). But unsought experiences — a sensed presence, a comforting dream, a brief moment of unmistakable peace — are not the same thing. We do not seek; if God permits, we receive humbly and weigh what we have received against the Word of Christ. Anything that pulls us toward the forbidden practices, or that contradicts the Christ revealed in Scripture, is to be set aside, however vivid it felt.
Once we are clear on what Scripture forbids and what it does not, the next pastoral question is this: when an unsought experience comes, how should the bereaved Christian think about it? What was that?
The honest answer is that the Bible does not give us a single neat box. There are at least four faithful ways to interpret an ADC, and they are not mutually exclusive — different experiences may belong in different categories, and one experience may have more than one explanation working at the same time.
(a) A real visitation, permitted by God. The Bible itself records moments of this kind (the Transfiguration; the appearance of Samuel, however we explain it). It is not absurd, in a Christian framework, that the Lord might grant a brief glimpse of a departed loved one as a particular gift to a grieving person. He is "Lord both of the dead and of the living" (Romans 14:9, ESV), and He is not bound by the limits we feel.13
(b) A vision given by God in familiar form. Sometimes the experience may not be the loved one as such, but a vision shaped by God to communicate comfort using the face and voice the bereaved would recognize. This is a long pattern in Scripture — God adapts His self-revelation to what the receiver can bear. The bereaved daughter who sees her father in a dream telling her "I'm okay; live well" may be receiving a real word from God in a form her heart can hold.
(c) The Spirit's comfort, perceived in personal terms. Sometimes what the bereaved experiences is the Holy Spirit's nearness, deeply colored by their love for the one they lost. The presence is real; the Comforter is real; the form the comfort takes in their perception is shaped by grief. This is something like the way a parent's love can seem to "fill" a room where they have been remembered, only deeper, and from a different source.
(d) Memory and grief producing felt experiences. Sometimes the human heart, in the rawness of bereavement, will produce vivid sensations that are not from beyond the veil at all. They are not lies, and they are not pathology — they are part of the way God made grieving creatures process love that has been torn loose by death. Naming this category honestly is not cynical. It is simply careful. Not every experience is a visitation. Some are the work of love and memory in a soul made for both.
The pastor who insists on choosing one of these and only one is overconfident. The bereaved Christian who is told in advance which category their experience belongs in is being ill-served. Humility before the data is the right posture. Different experiences, different sources. Test each one. Hold them gently.
When researchers stand back from thousands of cases, certain patterns emerge — and they are pastorally important.
First, most ADCs reported to bereaved Christians produce comfort, not fear. The widow feels peace, not dread. The bereaved parent feels love, not torment. Streit-Horn's review describes ADCs in language like "pleasant, positive, mystical, serene, elating, helpful, comforting, healing, spiritual." Most experiencers report afterward that they feel reassured the deceased "continues to exist — and in a state of wellbeing."14 The pattern of effect is gentle, not jarring.
Second, the messages, where there are messages, are remarkably modest. They typically affirm three things and only three things: I am okay. I love you. Live well. They do not deliver doctrine. They do not tell the recipient whom to marry, what to invest in, or what new spiritual practice to try. The Guggenheims, after sifting more than three thousand cases, summarized the takeaway from the entire body of evidence as essentially this: love God, love people.15 That is not a new revelation. That is the great commandment.
Third, ADCs are typically followed by lasting good fruit in the experiencer's life. They report an increased sense of God's reality, a softening of the fear of death, a renewed energy for love and service. Where the fruit is sour — fear, secrecy, doctrinal confusion, isolation from the body of Christ — that is exactly where discernment must press hardest.16 "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God" (1 John 4:1, ESV).
Fourth, ADCs tend not to feel like a doorway that the experiencer can re-open at will. They come once, perhaps twice, and then quietly recede. They behave less like a "channel" and more like a single, surprising kindness. That fits with a Christian reading of the data: God gives what He chooses to give. He is not summoned.
Hold what fits Scripture. Test what does not. And expect that, in most cases, the experience will not require you to add anything to your theology — only to give thanks for a moment of mercy along a hard road.
Back to the woman in my office.
When Marian finished telling me what she had felt on Saturday night, I did not roll my eyes. I did not correct her. I did not begin a lecture on demonic deception. I told her what I have come to believe over many years of pastoral ministry, and what I will tell you now, if you have walked into this chapter with a story like hers held tight in your hands.
I believe you. What you experienced may very well have been a real gift from God — a brief moment in which the love that bound you and your husband for forty-three years was permitted, by the Lord of the living and the dead, to brush against you again.17 You did not summon it. You did not seek it. You did not earn it. It came, if it came, as grace.
Receive it with thankfulness and humility. Do not try to make it happen again. Do not build new doctrines on it. Do not stop reading the Bible, going to church, or trusting Christ — those are the rails that keep grief from running off the road. But do not be afraid of what God in His kindness may have allowed you to feel. The God who carried Glen home is the same God who has been carrying you. Walk in peace.18
Sit gently with these questions. There is no rush, and there are no wrong answers.
1. Have you ever had an experience like Marian's — sensing, hearing, seeing, or being touched by someone who has died? If so, what did you feel afterward: comfort, confusion, fear, or all three at once?
2. If you have not told anyone about your experience, what has held you back? What would it take for you to share it with one safe Christian friend?
3. Where on the spectrum from "almost certainly a real visitation" to "memory and grief shaping perception" does your experience seem to fall — and is it possible to hold it without insisting on a single answer?
4. How does Scripture's distinction between seeking the dead and receiving an unsought moment from God help you frame what you have experienced?
5. What fruit has the experience left in your life over the days, weeks, or months that have followed — peace and love, or fear and confusion?
6. Is there anything in what happened that contradicts the Christ revealed in Scripture? If so, how will you weigh that part?
7. Who is one safe Christian friend or pastor with whom you could share this, asking them simply to listen, pray, and help you hold it well?
If you are a pastor, you will hear something like Marian's story far more often than you have so far. The reason is not that ADCs are spreading; it is that the stories are already there, and most have never been told. A whole population of bereaved Christians has been sitting on these moments for decades, waiting for one safe person to hear them.
Be that safe person. When someone in your congregation begins, in a hushed voice, to describe a sensed presence, a dream visitation, or a felt moment of contact, your first words matter more than almost anything else you will say in the conversation. Lead with two simple sentences: Thank you for telling me. Tell me what happened. Then listen. Do not interpret too quickly. Do not categorize too quickly. Just receive the story.
What to say. "I'm glad you told me. That can't have been easy to bring up." "Many faithful, believing Christians have had experiences like this. You are not alone, and you are not crazy." "Let's pray and ask the Lord to help us hold this rightly — to receive what is from Him and to test it carefully against His Word."
What NOT to say. "That was probably the devil." Said as a reflex, this is pastoral malpractice. It is also unbiblical: Scripture nowhere says that every unsought encounter is demonic. We are commanded to test the spirits, not to curse them in advance.19 "You're imagining it because you miss him." Even if some experiences fit category (d) above, the pastor who reduces every ADC to projection has stopped being a pastor and started being an amateur Freudian. "Don't tell anyone." This deepens shame and silence. Better to direct the bereaved toward discernment than back into a closet.
Two pastoral landmines. First, watch for the bereaved person who, after one ADC, begins seeking another — through psychics, mediums, Ouija boards, or the new wave of online "channeling" practices. That is no longer reception; it is seeking, and the biblical prohibition applies (Deut. 18:10–12; see Chapter 25). The pastor's job here is gentle, firm redirection. The Father gives good gifts to His children (Matthew 7:11); we do not bypass Him to seek hidden things from forbidden sources.
Second, watch for the bereaved person who will not speak, even after months. If you sense in a pastoral visit that something is being held back, give them an opening: Sometimes after a loss, people have unusual experiences. They feel they can't tell anyone. If anything like that has happened to you, I'd be honored to hear about it. You may not get the story that day. But you have given them permission, and that may be the gift they needed most.
Next steps. When a bereaved Christian shares an ADC, the conversation is rarely finished in one visit. The first conversation is for receiving the story. The second is for placing it gently within Scripture and the discernment markers we explore in Chapter 25. The third — weeks or months later — is for asking how the experience is shaping their life now. Good fruit, or sour? Peace, or fear? Drawing them deeper into Christ and the church, or pulling them away?20 Most often, you will find that the experience has been a quiet kindness, simply received and quietly carried — and your role has been to bless it, not to explain it.
Bill Guggenheim and Judy Guggenheim, Hello From Heaven (Bantam, 1995). The foundational popular collection of more than three hundred ADC accounts; not written from a Christian perspective, but indispensable as a map of what is being reported.
Louis LaGrand, Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved (Berkley, 2006). A grief counselor's careful pastoral treatment of ADCs as a part of healthy bereavement.
J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 (Wisdom Creek, 2023). Christian scholarly engagement with the ADC research; especially helpful on the strength of the evidence and on faith-friendly interpretation.
J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Wisdom Creek, 2022). Engages the question of whether biblical Christianity should welcome or fear this whole body of research.
Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman, eds., Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Taylor & Francis, 1996). The grief-research classic that overturned the older "letting go" model and quietly documented how often the bereaved sense their dead.
1 Bill Guggenheim and Judy Guggenheim, Hello From Heaven: A New Field of Research — After-Death Communication — Confirms That Life and Love Are Eternal (New York: Bantam, 1995), 16–18. The Guggenheims gathered approximately 3,300 firsthand accounts and identified twelve major categories of ADC. Their work is not theologically Christian, and discerning use is required, but their typology has become standard in the field. ↩
2 Sensed presence is given full treatment in Chapter 23 of this book. For the research grounding, see J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic, Evaluating Death-Related Visions, Terminal Lucidity and After Death Communications (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), in the chapter on after-death communications, drawing on the Harvard Bereavement Study. ↩
3 Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1, in the chapter on ADCs, summarizing reports from the Guggenheim collection and the Streit-Horn review of the field. ↩
4 Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1, in the chapter on ADCs, summarizing Jenny Streit-Horn's typology of ADCs as "visual, auditory, tactile, sense of presence, olfactory, dream, symbolic (song on radio, butterfly), deathbed vision (nearing-death awareness), and telephone." Sleep-state ADCs are widely reported as "more real than typical dreams." ↩
5 Guggenheim and Guggenheim, Hello From Heaven, chaps. 18 ("Validations: Evidential ADCs") and 19 ("Special Delivery: ADCs for Protection"). Cited in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1, in the chapter on ADCs, where Miller reports a personal correspondence with Bill Guggenheim noting that, of more than 3,300 cases collected, none included demonstrably incorrect information from the deceased. ↩
6 Jenny Streit-Horn, "A Systematic Review of Research on After-Death Communication (ADC)" (PhD diss., University of North Texas, 2011), 17–27. Streit-Horn surveys forty-nine research studies on ADCs and sixteen related books, drawing on responses from "50,682 research participants and representation from 24 countries." Cited in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1, in the chapter on ADCs. ↩
7 Streit-Horn, "Systematic Review," 56–63, summarized in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1, in the chapter on ADCs. The 30–35 percent lifetime figure for the general population, and the 80–85 percent figure for those within the first year of bereavement, are Streit-Horn's headline findings. ↩
8 P. R. Olson, J. A. Suddeth, and C. Egelhoff, "Hallucinations and Widowhood," Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 33, no. 8 (1985): 543–47, summarized in Streit-Horn, "Systematic Review," 63, and discussed in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1, in the chapter on ADCs. ↩
9 Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, eds., Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1996), 206–12. ↩
10 Streit-Horn, "Systematic Review," 56–58, finding that ADC reports occur "regardless of nationality, race, religious affiliation, physical health, or educational level," and that the majority of studies reviewed found no significant difference in ADC frequency tied to religious practice or affiliation. ↩
11 The biblical prohibition on consulting the dead is treated more fully in Chapter 25 of this book; the central passages include Leviticus 19:31; 20:6, 27; Deuteronomy 18:9–14; and Isaiah 8:19–20. For a careful Old Testament treatment of the necromancy texts in their cultural setting, see John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), in the chapter on Old Testament views of the afterlife (under the discussion of necromancy and Saul at Endor). ↩
12 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, in the chapter on Old Testament views of the afterlife (under the discussion of Saul, the medium of Endor, and the Transfiguration). On the Transfiguration as a window into the conscious intermediate state, see also J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2022), in the chapter on biblical accounts of the heavenly realm, in the section addressing Stephen, Paul, and the Transfiguration. ↩
13 Romans 14:9 is given fuller treatment in Chapter 13 of this book, where its bearing on postmortem opportunity is developed. ↩
14 Streit-Horn, "Systematic Review," 73–74, cited in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1, in the chapter on ADCs. ↩
15 Guggenheim and Guggenheim, Hello From Heaven, 383, summarized in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1, in the chapter on ADCs. ↩
16 On the discernment of fruit as the proper test of any spiritual experience, see John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), in the chapter on testing such experiences against Scripture. The biblical principle is Matthew 7:16 and 1 John 4:1–3. ↩
17 The author affirms the conscious intermediate state — that the souls of believers, at death, depart immediately into the conscious presence of Christ. For the foundational biblical case, see Chapter 2; for the philosophical and theological case for substance dualism, see Chapter 3. ↩
18 Louis LaGrand, Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved (New York: Berkley, 2006), develops at length the pastoral observation that ADCs, gently received, tend to support healthy mourning rather than impede it. ↩
19 The discipline of "testing the spirits" (1 John 4:1–3) is given full treatment in Chapter 25. The key markers there: Christ-honoring content, fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23), consistency with Scripture, and integration into the body of Christ rather than isolation from it. ↩
20 Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? in the chapter on the surprising compatibility of these experiences with historic Christian teaching, develops the argument that the Christian church has nothing to fear and much to learn from careful, discerning engagement with this body of research. ↩
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
Guggenheim, Bill, and Judy Guggenheim. Hello From Heaven: A New Field of Research — After-Death Communication — Confirms That Life and Love Are Eternal. New York: Bantam, 1995.
Klass, Dennis, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, eds. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1996.
LaGrand, Louis E. Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved. New York: Berkley, 2006.
Miller, J. Steve. Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic, Evaluating Death-Related Visions, Terminal Lucidity and After Death Communications. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2022.
Olson, P. R., J. A. Suddeth, and C. Egelhoff. "Hallucinations and Widowhood." Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 33, no. 8 (1985): 543–47.
Streit-Horn, Jenny. "A Systematic Review of Research on After-Death Communication (ADC)." PhD diss., University of North Texas, 2011.