Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Spoken with the dead lately?

Spoken with the dead lately? No, not the Australian Democrats, 
but people who are actually physically dead, deceased, kaput.

Well, neither have I, but according to the Sunday Telegraph 
on November 7, "it's not uncommon to be in touch with the 
spirit world". Apparently everybody's doing it.

That is, according to the Sunday Tele's aptly-named Body & 
Soul supplement. The November 7 issue had four main feature 
articles: three of them predictably enough on such topics as 
eating less, natural skin care and reducing the size of your bum.

The fourth, however, the two-page lead article in the supplement, 
was a piece of pseudo-scientific nonsense about communicating 
with the dead. Specious, irresponsible, absurd and dishonest it 
was tabloid journalism at its worst.

Its first paragraph started off seriously enough, reminding us 
that people have been probing the "tantalising" question of 
whether there is life after death "for as long as man has 
inhabited the Earth".

Then in the fourth sentence it lurched into the wilds of fantasy: 
"Serious exploration remained uncharted, however, until in the 
1840s ...." Whoa! Serious exploration? Of the afterlife?

This is not serious writing, it's a TV script. Some variant of 
Stargate or Sliders. Or possibly Dr Who.

Can't you see the intrepid explorers setting out to cross the 
River Styx in their inflatable rubber dinghies, under orders to 
capture one of the inhabitants of "the other side" and return at 
once?

But what, I hear you ask, was the "serious exploration" that took 
place in the 1840s? Why, that was when "the Fox sisters of 
Hydesville, New York, revealed their unique gift of communicating 
with the dead through siances.

"The search for clues to the spirit world was popularised, as 
even sceptics couldn't disprove their claims."

Right here, at the beginning of the article, the Sunday Tele 
has made its position clear: "communicating with the dead" is 
to be accepted at face value, as fact. Far from requiring 
spiritualists to prove that they are communicating with the dead, 
it is up to sceptics to "disprove their claims".

Most of the article is made up of anecdotal "evidence", 
recounting what people claim to have seen or heard. Some of these 
hardly come close to qualifying as communications with the dead.

One young woman from the Sydney suburb of Sutherland, reported 
that while "going through a particularly stressful period", she 
had a vision of her dead grandfather. This apparently gave her a 
sense of calm and gave her life "the redirection it needed".

As an "after death communication", however, it is tenuous, to say 
the least. Incidentally, the spirit world cognoscenti call these 
communications by their initials, "ADCs". There's nothing like 
jargon to make something seem real.

The ADC I like best is however one from a woman in Wollongong, 
whose husband reportedly died last Christmas eve. She has, 
according to the article, "found some respite through incidents 
that she feels are a sign that John [her dead husband] is near".

One of these is then detailed: "On a weekend away, a white 
feather mysteriously found its way to [her] bedside table, 
disappeared suddenly, then two months later was found in a tiny, 
hard to get to compartment of her travel bag."

Why on Earth would that make anyone think that their dead husband 
was trying to communicate with them? He had a thing for feathers?

The most quoted authority in the article is an English author, 
Emma Heathcote-James, who spent five years at Birmingham 
University researching "contemporary testimonies of angel 
visitations" (you can get away with anything at English 
universities).

Obviously adept at self-promotion, Heathcote-James' research 
produced "numerous media releases", followed by a BBC TV 
documentary and then a book, Seeing Angels. Basically a 
record of people's accounts of their supposed encounters with 
angels, the book generated so many letters containing accounts of 
further "uncanny experiences" that she was able to put them 
together as a second book, After Death Communication.

Her latest book is called They Walk Among Us (don't laugh, 
this woman is serious). According to the Sunday Tele, her 
new book "explores the science behind many ADCs".

Unfortunately, Ms Heathcote-James tends to talk with her foot in 
her mouth, as witness her explanation of the "scientifically 
measurable" way to examine after death communications:

"Summon a spirit through someone who is a highly skilled medium, 
using them as a portal for the deceased to return to our world, 
as in a siance-type setting.

"The information can be witnessed — scientists can record and 
research the outcomes, using subatomic physics and maths."

That sounds eminently technical, until we remember that watching 
an apple fall off a tree, as Newton did, is also "subatomic 
physics".

The only real scientist quoted in the article is Salih Ozgul, 
Manager of the Psychology Clinic at the ANU in Canberra. One 
sentence only is quoted from what was obviously a very carefully 
worded statement from Ozgul concerning the use of the idea of an 
afterlife as a way of easing grief after bereavement.

"Believing in the existence of an afterlife and that a person may 
become reunified with deceased loved one on their own death, may 
for some people, provide solace."

Torn from its context and dropped into the middle of the article 
with no qualifying comment, Ozgul's quote serves to give the 
appearance of local scientific support to the rest of the pseudo 
science and mumbo jumbo in it.

Finally, in a mish mash of non-science and nonsense, the 
Telegraph quotes Heathcote-James saying that "many enlightening 
works" on near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences 
remain unpublished because what she calls the "scientific elite" 
prefer apparently "to stick to Einstein's big bang theory of 
'when you're dead, you're dead'".

Say what?