Surviving Death (2021) s01e05 Episode Script

1
[woman] At the moment of death
are we actually just dead
or is something else going on?
[man] Whatever this consciousness is
that we have in this life,
it was also there in another life before.
[woman 2] It's not,
"Do we believe in ghosts?"
but the fact that we continue
to report them and see them.
[man 2] There are things
that science can't test,
but it doesn't mean they don't happen.
[woman 3] How good would it be to know
there is life after death?
[siren wailing]
[horns and sirens blaring]
[PA] Stand clear
of the closing doors, please.
[woman] My name is Mariah.
I was always interested in the paranormal.
I like to be known
as a paranormal investigator.
I always believe in ghosts.
As a child and just growing up,
it was always my curiosity.
Like, "Well, what are they?"
And no one at the time, really,
could answer my question.
If our memories and who we are
are in our brain and our body,
what happens when we die?
And so that just fueled the curiosity.
I have a full-time job as a concierge,
and I go on the investigations
during the weekend.
I don't get paid for it,
but I felt that that was my calling,
that was my purpose.
And it was over time that I realized
this is what I'm meant to do.
I have a bunch of gear.
I never know what I'm gonna use
or what's gonna happen.
These are just little cat balls
that are just sensitive to movement.
This is really sensitive,
so anything gets close, this'll light up.
My favorite tools
are just digital recorders.
I always have two recording.
Sometimes, you'll capture a spirit
on one and not the other.
Then you really know that it's spirit.
This was the very first spirit voice
I captured.
[static crackles]
[Mariah] Do you wanna
use some of my energy?
-[static buzzing]
-[distant female voice] To talk more?
So what I hear is, "To talk more."
[Mariah] Do you wanna
use some of my energy?
-[static buzzing]
-[distant female voice] To talk more?
[Mariah] We're connecting with souls.
We're connecting with people
who lived hundreds of years ago.
This work needs to be revered.
It's sacred.
I have this passion,
now I'm able to travel
to haunted places throughout the country,
trying to make a connection
to the spirit world
and trying to interact with ghosts.
[Deborah Blum] As long as there have been
human civilizations
there's been reports of ghosts
and encounters with the other.
There's something about us
that loves a good spooky story.
You live this life full of energy
and purpose and love and hope and dreams,
and does all of that disappear?
[rustling]
Your body disappears,
but what about all that energy
that you brought to living?
Is there a kind of echo that we leave,
or a cosmic imprint of that?
To me, it's not
"Do we believe in ghosts?"
but the fact that we continue
to report them and see them.
You receive an image
or you feel a touch,
or you see someone unexpectedly.
You hear their voice.
Is this evidence that we can live on
and communicate with each other?
[whispering voices]
And would you ever wanna see a ghost?
[laughing] I wouldn't.
I really hope to never see a ghost, right?
[man] Culturally, the word "ghost"
has many meanings across the world.
The average person would take a ghost
to mean a spirit that has survived,
and it's gonna hang around after they die.
For example, deathbed apparitions,
the apparitions that are seen
by people in the process of dying.
[woman] About two, three in the mornin',
I woke up and I says,
"What do you think you're doin' here?"
My brother Ronnie.
My mother was so beautiful.
My father looked nice and slim.
It was heaven on earth.
They see their parents
or some other relative who is deceased,
who is there, as they say,
to help guide them to the next state.
[camera shutter clicks]
"Ghost," I know, in some cultures,
refers to a figure that's seen in a place
that simply repeats things
over and over again,
and we put that in the category
of a haunting, or place memory,
-or we might say a psychic recording.
-[shutter clicks]
I'm a parapsychologist.
Parapsychology is the science of study
of what we call psychic phenomena.
For me, the evidence that's there
surely indicates and supports a concept
that consciousness can somehow
survive the death of the body.
Millions of people
have had these experiences
over the-- the thousands of years
of human existence,
and to say we shouldn't
look into what this experience is
is unscientific and not human.
[cat yowls]
[whispering voices]
[Mariah] I try and come back every month
and investigate the Morris-Jumel house,
'cause it intrigues me.
I meet different spirits each time.
-How are you?
-Thanks. I'm well. How are you?
The people who think I'm wacky
or who are skeptics
doesn't faze me.
I'm not here
to convince you of the afterlife.
I'm here for the spirits.
I want to tell their story.
[man] The Morris-Jumel Mansion
dates back to 1765.
We've had all sorts of famous people
come through here.
Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton.
Aaron Burr lived here in the 19th century.
There are what
We have known deaths here in the house,
and our paranormal or haunted history
goes back to the early 1800s.
We actually have letters in our archives
about family members writing about things
happening to them here in the house
that they can't explain.
We've had neighbors who come to the door,
saying, "I'm seeing someone in the house
at two or three in the morning,"
when there's nobody here.
Lights going off and on
[footsteps]
footsteps
[whispering voices]
disembodied voices
things like that.
I want people to come in skeptical
and when they think
we're actually staging something
we're more than happy to show
that we're not, in any way that we can.
So
I just want a open space.
To the spirits of the mansion
which we may connect to tonight
we welcome you
to guide us
-teach us
-[whirring]
interact with us
help us connect
more deeply to your world.
Please allow the invisible to become
visible in any way and by any means.
We are grateful and honored to be here.
And now we call this investigation open.
[Mariah sighs]
-[white noise]
-Ready.
[Christopher] Mm.
[Mariah] I use noise machines.
So I experiment with different sounds.
[white noise]
With these,
they measure static electricity.
What they'll do is they'll light up
kind of in different spectrums.
We find that spirits know
how to manipulate these a lot.
So we're in the octagon room right now.
Who would like to speak with us tonight?
[white noise continues]
-[Mariah] That's not you.
-I'm over here.
And I'm not moving.
Can you do that again?
Can you make that light up, please?
[both] Thank you.
[white noise continues]
Hmm.
It's all quiet now.
There is no device that has--
anyone's been able to design
that definitively detects consciousness
in or out of the body.
-Put it in the hallway.
-Yeah.
And the motion-sensor lights
-They like those.
-I'll set up the sensors, then this.
This equipment that we use
is not used to detect ghosts.
It is used to look for changes
in the environment
when people are having
experiences of a ghost.
-This, we'll bring in the bathroom.
-Okay.
[Loyd] It's absolutely possible that
apparitions could conceivably affect them
and cause them to light up
and do all sorts of things.
Absolutely possible.
Good to go.
There's no way for us to know.
They don't directly give us
the kind of evidence you get in physics.
Okay.
-[Christopher] You've got your devices?
-[Mariah] Yeah.
[bleep]
Chris and I are sitting
in the bathroom now.
Who needs to speak with us now?
[Christopher] Three, two, one.
[Mariah] When I'm trying to capture
the spirit voice on digital recorders,
I find that using white noise, like water,
helps to enhance the sound.
A technique
that was pioneered decades ago
is electronic voice phenomena,
often called EVP.
The idea is that spirits are capable
of manipulating the recording device
to put their answers to questions,
put their voices, put sounds,
on the recording medium.
They're not acoustical sounds,
so the human ear can't hear them
when they're being produced.
They can only be heard on playback.
[water running]
[Christopher] Who's here with us?
What's your name?
[Mariah] Let's play it back.
[rustling and cracking sounds]
[Christopher] Who's here with us?
What's your name?
-[bleep]
-[faint background hum]
[whispering voice] Aaron Burr
-[bleep]
-[Mariah] Aaron Burr, somethin'-somethin'.
It went, "Aaron Burr, la, la, la."
-[bleep]
-[Christopher] What's your name?
[low whisper] Aaron Burr.
-[laughs] Yeah, there it is!
-[bleep]
I think we can safely say
Aaron Burr's in the house.
Do you want us to go to your room?
[faint rustling]
-[clicking sound]
-Okay.
[whirring]
[bleeping]
-[Mariah] Okay.
-[Christopher whispers]
-[Mariah] Yeah.
-[white noise]
Okay, we're in Aaron Burr's bedroom.
This is the last session of the night.
This is your chance to speak to us,
if there's anything you want us to know.
[Mariah] What do you need to tell us?
[white noise continues]
[bleep]
-[bleep]
-[rustling sounds]
[Mariah]
Okay, we're in Aaron Burr's bedroom.
[footsteps on recording]
[Christopher]
Those sound like heavy footsteps.
-This is your chance to speak to us
-[mouths]
if there's anything
you want us to know.
-[footsteps on recording]
-[Christopher] Nobody's moving.
-[Mariah] No one's moving.
-It sounds like hardwood floors, walking.
-[Mariah] Yeah.
-[footsteps on recording]
-There's someone walking.
-And it's not the windows.
-No.
-[Christopher] It's not the branches.
[background rustling on recording]
[footsteps on recording]
[Christopher laughs] That's a trip.
-[footstep]
-[bleep]
-Uh This was really interesting.
-That was I mean
God. And then the bathroom,
that was crazy.
Yeah.
[Mariah] I get emotional about this work,
because connecting with spirits
is a miracle happening.
The invisible become visible.
Thank you to all the spirits
who connected with us tonight.
It's been an honor to be here.
[Loyd] The belief in ghosts
and spirits of the dead
go back thousands of years.
We find evidence in Mesopotamian writings,
and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
I'd say that somewhere above 95%
of all ghost sightings
are people who are seeing their friends,
loved ones, relatives who have just died.
It really gives them assurances
that they still have an existence,
'cause any sort of communication
after death tends to be for the living,
not for the dead.
[hospital machine bleeping]
But mainstream science
says that this stuff is woo-woo,
and if you believe in this,
you're crazy or you're stupid.
Most people have no awareness whatsoever
that the father of modern
American psychology, William James,
was heavily involved
in psychical research.
[Deborah] William James
was a founder of the ASPR,
the Society for Psychical Research
in America.
Their aim was compiling evidence
to prove the physical manifestations
of our connection with the spirit world.
William James had lost a toddler child,
Herman,
and was grief-stricken.
So you saw people like James,
propelled by a personal tragedy,
and then continuing on because
they were fascinated by the questions.
How do we fit in this larger universe?
Is there more
than what I can see or touch?
Can science open those doors for me?
And the SPR believed,
"We will connect these dots.
We will show you why ghosts appear.
We will show you why you receive
what appear to be mysterious messages
from the dead."
[Chris Roe]
One challenge for psychical research
is that the evidence depends on
people's personal testimony, very often.
What might help with that is the existence
of permanent paranormal objects.
One kind of artifact
that was generated in these early studies
was spirit photography,
where people claimed
to be able to reproduce
the spirit forms
of their deceased relatives on camera.
So this is a report
on some developed photographs
that supposedly
have images of spirits on them.
Includes consideration
of fraudulent methods.
So, for example, taking
existing photographs from magazines.
These days, those phenomena
don't look terribly impressive,
given how we can replicate
all sorts of magical things.
But there are subclasses of phenomena
that go beyond that.
So, we have some cases that are witnessed
by more than one person,
and those people report
a shared experience.
When you're dealing
with such a controversial topic,
eyewitness testimony becomes key.
[man] I first came to this house
in the late '80s.
And the first time I was in it,
I just felt like there was an energy here
that was
different than what I experienced
in most places I've been to.
It just felt off.
And what I noticed was, um,
there's certain places in the house
when you feel something like sunburn,
or like your hair stand on end.
An, uh so, a prickly feeling.
You feel like there's something here,
but you don't know what it is.
We load it in.
Christmas '91,
I'd gotten a Polaroid camera from my dad
and I was sitting here
and the bathroom door opened.
[creaking]
And I was, like, watching it open and
I'm thinking "Okay, that's not right."
The interesting thing
about the bathroom door
is that you have to hold it
and lift it up,
because it would scrape the floor.
[laughs]
That's the pattern of the door opening.
So it's not like
it could just open by itself.
So I picked up the camera
and snapped a picture.
Then we got
some kind of, like, weird light stuff.
And then I thought
"Okay, my dad's a practical joker.
He gave me the camera. Okay.
That's what's going on here."
I took a couple more
and then my friend Rakowsky gets home
and I said, "Hey, John,
I gotta show you somethin'."
I pull out these pictures and he's like,
"Oh, wow! This is really cool.
How'd you do this?"
I said, "Well, it seems to be
something in the camera."
He goes, "Well, go over there.
Let me take a picture of you."
He got a picture of me
standing in the doorway
with this lighted stuff in front of me.
Got another roll of film
and we thought, "Let's just try it again,"
assuming that nothing would happen.
I think that's when we got this one.
Very first images I got, it was
kinda scary, but kinda funny too,
because it was almost
like we were being mocked.
Like, "Ooh, scary ghost."
You know what I mean? It's like
It was the right amount of scary
to be to make it still funny,
but not so funny
that you didn't get a little scared.
[Loyd] There are many issues that can
happen photographically or shooting video
that can be misinterpreted
when you're reviewing things.
Uh, this looks to be some form
of either a light anomaly or smoke.
This is part of the problem.
Without knowing the conditions
when these were taken,
it's really difficult
to know what's actually happening.
A lot of people actually want
objective evidence of ghosts.
They want the smoking gun.
They want the physical picture.
The reality is single pictures, or even
multiple pictures from the same location,
are not highly evidential in themselves.
There are some that are credibly shot,
but we really don't know if they're
showing what we think they're showing,
unless there are multiple witnesses,
more than one witness.
[John] After the initial images I got,
it took a couple of weeks
of, like, settling in with it.
So then we thought, "You know, we really
need to share this with somebody."
So we invited over three friends
and we showed them these pictures.
They were like, "That's really cool.
How'd you do that?"
We were like, "We don't know.
We think it's the camera."
A couple of 'em were kinda skeptical.
Someone said, "Are you here now?"
Someone said, "Let's find out."
They got the camera
and took a picture.
It took a while
before it dawned on us
that it actually said something.
And I I remember that was quite, like,
frightening and
Like, "What? How can it answer?"
It's not supposed to answer.
It's supposed to show ectoplasmic clouds
and pretty billowy things.
Instead
it said, "Yes."
And then, in my memory,
someone said, "What is your name?"
And the Polaroid said, "Wright."
The name was Wright.
And somebody said,
"Are you a good ghost or a bad ghost?"
Sort of half-kidding, half-serious.
And then it said, "Friend."
And at that point,
it's like, "This thing is talking to us.
It's answering our questions."
Once the talking started
that changed everything.
[camera whirring]
Then it became hugely significant,
'cause it's not just an imprint
on the ground anymore.
If it is,
it's a conscious imprint on the ground
that has thought and has awareness,
not only of itself,
but it's aware of us.
We went to the Hall of Records to see
if we could find anybody named Wright
associated with the property.
We did find
four different people named Wright
that were remotely associated
with the property,
none died here
that we're aware of.
There were no suspicious deaths.
So none of them were
distinctly the Wright we were looking for.
[camera whirring]
[murmur of conversation]
We need more chairs.
[John] The reason we,
early on, hosted parties
is that people would bring Polaroid film
and see if they experienced something.
-[man 1] Oh!
-[man 2] See?
-See, look. Look here.
-[man 1] Yeah.
This is incredible.
-[man 3] There's a face.
-A face!
And here's somethin'
that never completely formed.
[John] Sometimes, they'd bring
their own Spectra cameras.
Interestingly, the only time
we'd get pictures, though
was on a Spectra camera,
with Polaroid Spectra film.
All the others,
nobody would ever get it.
I'd say we've taken
probably 11 or 12,000 pictures.
Then they stopped making
Polaroid Spectra film.
I believe it was something
in the chemical makeup
of that specific type of film
that allowed the spirit images
to come through.
But we just stopped taking pictures,
because we couldn't get the film anymore.
I don't try to convince skeptics.
They believe or not.
I mean, everyone will have a different
take on this thing. This could be a ghost.
This could be a guardian angel,
if you believe that.
It could be, as some theorists
have said, it's our minds doing it.
I've heard it described that ghosts
were simply imprints in the earth.
Like a recording
that plays over and over again.
But I think what's going on here
is different than that.
I think it has a level of awareness
that a ghost isn't gonna have.
A ghost is gonna be a pattern.
Someone famous used to say this saying.
"For the believer, proof is not necessary.
And for the skeptic,
no proof is possible."
And I think that's true.
[Deborah] That underlying belief that we,
as humans, don't want to let go of,
that there is something more
really helps define who we are.
I don't think that makes us stupid.
I don't think it makes us credulous.
I think that makes us
people who really do want the world
to make sense,
to have possibility,
to be more than what we can touch and see.
And I think that helps define who we are.
And that may make us very vulnerable,
uh, to being duped.
But it also makes us more interesting.
[whispering voices]
[Leslie Kean] Apparitions are certainly
one of the harder aspects
of all this to study,
but the scientists from the SPR have been
studying them for hundreds of years.
It's a mysterious, complicated,
kind of convoluted universe to be into,
and there are always gonna be
a lot of unanswered questions
about how it works and what goes on.
Crisis apparitions. Those are among
the more interesting cases of apparitions.
[Deborah] A crisis apparition
is the sort of final blast of energy
from someone who's dying,
whether this was an energy
at the moment of death
or whether it was something that came
from just over the other side, right,
which is a little creepier.
The SPR looked
at thousands of these cases.
[cheering]
There was a story of a man who was
at the theater with a friend in Canada,
looks down into the pit,
he was up in the balcony,
sees the face of his brother.
Says to his friend,
"My brother is down there.
This is so strange."
His friend looks down and doesn't see
the brother and he goes down,
can't find the brother, goes back up.
Eventually, of course
this is 19th century, he gets a letter,
and on the day that he's searching around
the theater for his brother
was the day his brother had died in China.
Writing about ghost hunters
taught me to shed
some of the hubris and arrogance
that can come
with believing that we know everything,
and it allows me to remind myself
that we haven't found all the answers.
The story that I have
which kind of fits into this
is a story from my husband's family.
My father-in-law was a very grounded
very grounded
Norwegian-American small businessman.
[cicadas chirping]
One night, he sat up in bed,
and he sat up so abruptly
-that he woke up my mother-in-law.
-[owl hooting]
And he said, "My cousin Bob is calling me.
He's out in the yard."
[wind whistling]
And they both sat there and listened
and didn't hear anything.
She said, "Oh, it's just a dream."
They go back to bed.
And about ten minutes later or so
he's up and goes, "No, he's out
in the yard, calling my name.
-I'm gonna go get him."
-[footsteps]
And he goes outside.
Looks around the yard.
It's just dark and nothing.
And gets back in bed.
He's still feeling just puzzled by it.
[birdsong]
And that morning,
his cousin's son called him,
and almost literally at the moment
he was out in the yard
looking for his cousin,
his cousin had shot himself to death.
-[gunshot echoes]
-[crows cawing]
That is a very classic crisis apparition,
because you have this confirmation
of someone else who you woke up,
who knew you went through the experience,
and you you could date the time.
The family talked about it,
and everyone agreed
they had no idea what that was,
which I think is where we often end up.
The process of dying has been sanitized
and has actually distanced people
from that process,
so people find death more fearful now
than perhaps ever before.
In fact, ghostly kinds of experiences
happen to normal, healthy people.
If you're sitting
with somebody who's dying,
don't be surprised if, in that process,
they start talking
to people who don't seem to be there.
That's quite a common part
of that process.
[Leslie] Apparitions,
or seeing somebody who's dead,
can also be something that occurs
at the end of life.
People close to death will often see
a deceased loved one of theirs
come into the room.
And they'll they'll reach out to them
or they'll talk to them.
And you can see that person
actually communicating
or responding to that person.
[whispering voices]
And as far as they're experiencing it,
there is an apparition in the room.
That person is there, visiting with them.
I've heard so many stories
of-- of a dying person
expressing that recognition that their
loved one from the other side is there
helping them cross over.
[man] End-of-life experiences
have been described
across cultures and throughout time.
Anybody who's been
an observer of humanity
and questions the idea of mortality
has been drawn to this.
When I was a resident
we'd routinely say the worst thing
you could say to somebody,
which is,
"There's nothing more for us to do."
And we abandoned the patient.
We would actually
take them off of our list,
because there was
nothing for us to "do for them."
-[knocking]
-[woman] Hi.
-How are you?
-[dog barking]
I'm Chris Kerr.
It was just a very limited view
of what total medicine is,
and I was guilty as anybody.
-[Chris] Hi.
-How are you doing?
-[Chris] Very nice to meet you.
-Same here.
[Chris] You got company.
-Yeah, right.
-[laughs]
-Who are these?
-[David] Rags and Wags.
-[Chris] Rags and Wags?
-[David Yeah.
[Chris laughs]
[Chris] I started working with
hospice patients when I was a resident.
Hospice is comfort-centered care
for those who are no longer
in a curative phase of illness,
who usually have a prognosis
of six months or less to live.
Tell me, have you had some experiences
where you've had some intense dreams?
I saw my wife.
She passed away,
like I said, eight years ago.
And I run up the--
She's standing by a tent.
I run up to give her a hug
and she just disappeared before me.
-And--
-How did that feel?
It felt real good to see her.
That's great. I really appreciate
you lettin' me talk to you.
-[David] Bye.
-[Chris laughs]
When I started at a hospice,
I had seen a young man,
he was dying of complications of HIV.
And, uh,
I went back to the nurse's station
and announced that, you know,
he's got more time,
if we did things,
these following things to him.
And she doesn't even look up.
She keeps writing.
She says, "No, he's dying." I say, "Why?"
She said,
"Because he's seen his deceased mom."
[chuckling] And, uh, I said,
"I I forgot that class
from medical school,"
and she said shut the hell up,
and pay attention to something
other than my own reference point.
That was kind of my first notion
that dying people
were being flooded by other experiences,
seeing somebody they loved,
and it brought them peace.
[woman] I waited in a room,
and there were these curtains
and they were, like, billowing.
And in came my husband, Gene,
and our daughter Cassie.
She was deceased this past year.
And they were smiling and just so happy.
And they turned around and went back
through these flowing flowing curtains,
and they were together and that was
Oh! It was just a beautiful scene.
-You're not asleep when this happens?
-No.
Some of 'em are so real, like they--
Like I was sitting here with you.
It's been remarkable to me
that you've had all the essential elements
of your life
-return to you.
-Yeah. Yeah.
It's-- it's remarkable.
-I can't thank you enough for sharing it.
-Thank you.
-It's been a privilege.
-You're welcome.
[Chris] Before coming to a hospice
I was as death averse as anybody else.
More so, having lost a parent as a child.
I was 12 when my father died,
and at that age, I had no way to cope
with seeing the devastation
of everybody I loved around me.
I think I gravitated
to working with hospice patients
because I-- I knew,
when it came to talking to families
I knew other people
weren't necessarily doing it well.
I went to start seeing patients at home.
You listen to them in their own words.
And they wanted their voices to be heard.
[knocking softly]
Come on in. [chuckles]
-Oh, hi.
-Hello.
-Nice to meet you. Chris Kerr.
-Nice to meet you, too.
-Where would you like me to sit?
-Right here?
-Okay. On this side?
-Yeah.
-So you've been in hospice for a while.
-Mm-hm.
-You're failing to comply with hospice.
-I know!
-I keep telling them to kick me out!
-[Chris laughs]
-That's a good thing.
-[laughs] Yes, it is.
So you really haven't changed a lot
since you came into program.
No, I haven't,
and I said something to Dr. Banas.
And she says, "Well, your type is gonna go
like this and then all of a sudden dive."
Yeah, that's maybe the case, yeah.
One thing I wanted to talk to you about
-Yes?
-is I hear that you've been having,
um, some pretty intense visions.
-Yes.
-Which are really common.
Um The notable one was when my dad
said that he was proud of me.
-So you were 22 when he passed away?
-Right.
Okay. When was your dream
that you had about him?
You wanna describe it for me?
I think we were walking.
[birdsong]
And, um, I said something about
somethin' was goin' on in my life.
[Chris] Did he look healthy?
-[Colette] He did.
-[Chris] That's nice.
-[Colette] He did.
-[Chris] It felt real?
[Colette] Yeah.
And he came over and gave me a hug
and said, "I'm proud of you."
-He was a very, very strict man.
-[Chris] Hmm.
I was afraid of him.
So he-- he comes back to you
and he tells you he's proud.
That must have felt wonderful.
-It did. It did.
-Yeah.
-Yeah.
-Here we go.
[Chris] These people,
they're seeing actual people who existed.
They go back
to these core, elemental relationships,
and they go back to childhood.
And they're reached in ways
they couldn't be reached otherwise.
-A pleasure. Thank you very much, sweetie.
-Thank you.
[Chris] Doctors are comfortable
with questions of the brain,
but not of the mind.
You're talking about something
that's so out there.
These end-of-life experiences
are not gonna be taken seriously
by a majority of people.
So I wanted to create a study
with evidence-based methodology
to learn about visions at the end of life.
We ask the patients directly
about their end-of-life experiences,
and we use quantifiable methods.
You know, surveys, daily.
We ruled out confusion.
We looked at their medications.
It was important that the study
was published in peer-reviewed journals,
that it was, essentially,
legitimized medically.
My name is Jeanne LaRue Faber.
I'm 74 years old.
For about four days last week,
three or four days,
someone was present here.
Something.
I lost my wife eight years ago
and, a couple of times, she gave me
the little beauty pageant wave.
It was real.
We were sitting there,
as much as we're sitting here.
It was like we were all together.
[Chris] We've cataloged well over
a thousand of these sorts of experiences,
and what we found was over 80% of them
had at least one experience
where their deceased loved one
is actually present or seen to them.
My wife was there. We were dancing.
Well, she, uh she could dance.
We were havin' a good time.
It was it was fun.
And I didn't want it to end.
I see my old dog, Shadow,
that has passed away,
and I see him
and he's in a good place,
and he's runnin' and he's havin' fun,
but then again he runs away
and I never see him again.
[Chris]
Children are different than adults,
in that they often haven't known somebody
who's passed before them.
But they usually have known an animal.
One night, I happened to see,
like, a long, black thing.
-[Chris] Yeah.
-And that was him by my bed.
[Chris] He doesn't say anything to you?
No, like Dogs don't talk.
[Chris] When we graded the realism,
it's off the charts. It's ten out of ten.
They'll go out of their way to say, "No,
no, no, this actually happened to me."
It's an absolute.
I have seen my mother.
Recently, more.
I can't say that my mother and I got along
all those years,
-but we made up for it.
-[laughs]
[woman] My mom started having visions
about six months before she passed.
I was laying in bed,
and people were walking very slowly by me.
Everybody I knew that was dead was there.
I felt good.
-Wonderful.
-I come from a science background,
and I'm used to
uh, observing things and having
an explanation or a product at the end.
Going through this experience
with my mother
is very different.
It's very experiential.
There are no answers, necessarily.
I was happy. It left me with
a good feeling, that somebody was there.
She felt
that her parents were letting her know
that she was on her way
and it was gonna be okay.
[Jeanne] I remember seeing
every piece of their face.
Well, my husband wasn't there
and my dog wasn't there,
so I figured it wasn't my time,
'cause they'll be there!
[laughs]
[Chris] So we see a dramatic increase
in the frequency of dreaming
as people approach dying.
They start to see
ever more of the deceased.
When we measure comfort to content,
the highest level of comfort
is associated with seeing the deceased.
One of the problems I think I have with it
is calling them dreams.
50% of people say they're not asleep.
I think these should be called
end-of-life experiences,
because they're more dissimilar
than similar to dreams as we know them.
[soft rainfall]
-twice 20
-Yeah.
Oh, gosh, yeah.
Thought she had more, right?
[Chris] I was talking to my partner,
John Tangeman,
who's a a brilliant internist,
and he had had an experience
with his mother, Gerd.
Your-- your mom's experiences
are interesting.
Well, yeah,
she was a pretty damaged person
from a series of life tragedies
[John] I had a unique experience,
because my mother spent
the last several weeks of her life
at hospice, where I work every day,
and I spent a lot of time with her.
My mother was born in Norway in 1925,
and as near as I can tell,
had a pretty good childhood.
And then, when she was, um,
in high school, the Nazis showed up.
So she gets through the war and
she leaves her family behind,
start a new life, moves to America
meets my father.
My brother's born in 1959.
His name was Thomas.
And at age three, he was diagnosed
with acute childhood leukemia
which was basically a death sentence.
And when she's 52, my dad dies suddenly.
Around that time was when she really
became much more bitter and angry.
She spent a lot of time blaming Hitler
for all of her problems.
She was back in the war.
But in the last, probably,
year of her life,
she spent a great deal of time talking to
a portrait she had made of my brother,
after he had passed,
blowing kisses to it, talking to it,
and it provided her
a great deal of comfort.
And, uh, in the end,
she made it very clear to me
that he was talking back.
She forgot a lot of the bad memories
that had defined her life,
and became a different person.
[Chris] Among the-- the skeptics,
they'll say this is a dying brain,
a deoxygenated brain,
this is somebody on medication.
-[machines bleeping]
-[laughter]
But that's very different from
what is happening to these patients
who are seeing their deceased loved ones.
[laughter and chatter]
Because a dysfunctioning brain,
for example,
in delirium or a confusional state
is very different.
Thoughts are tangential.
They're fear-based.
They're unsettling. They're disconnected.
These people are cognitively intact.
These people aren't confused.
[Chris] What month are we in?
-June.
-Yeah. You got it.
-Okay.
-All right. Nice to meet you.
Thank you.
[Chris] These people actually are having
experiences that give them insight.
[birdsong]
It became really clear,
from a research perspective,
how powerful these experiences were
for the patient.
But what was the implications
for the bereaved?
How did it help them reinterpret loss?
Did it actually help them
with the grief process?
[birdsong]
This is Ginny's bear box, she called it.
It's got all her hospital bracelets
in here.
Ginny was a very strong-headed girl.
She was born pretty healthy.
But on January 7th, 2015
she was diagnosed with,
uh brain cancer.
She was 14 and a half.
She fought and she gave it
all her effort she could,
and she just never believed
she was gonna die.
Until
she talked to my aunt in heaven.
My Aunt Miriam came down
to bring me up to heaven.
And she was playing with me with Barbies,
and fell asleep together with her dog.
[Chris]
And when you see your aunt, where are you?
In a castle.
-[Michele] Oh.
-[Chris] Really?
[Ginny] There's a window
that you can see the sun through it.
[Chris] What do you think the castle is?
What does it mean?
Safe place.
[Chris] A safe place, yeah.
[Michele] Just a few days
before Ginny passed,
I could hear her talking in her room,
but I--
I couldn't hear what she was saying.
So I went in to check on her
and said, you know,
"Who are you talking to?"
And she said, "God."
And I said, "Huh. Okay."
it was comforting
but scary,
'cause I knew why she was seeing God.
At that point, I mean, I knew.
What it makes me feel is
I feel better about my daughter dying.
I feel like I know my daughter's
not alone, and now when
when a friend or a family member
passes away
I try to tell them Ginny's story
to help
help them feel better, like
get through their grieving processes.
And then I saw Aunt Mimi.
In a castle!
[Chris] Really?
There's a window that you can see the sun.
-[Chris] So that's a pretty special place.
-[sobs]
[Ginny] And then there's a piano.
[Chris] Mm-hm.
[Michele] Ginny's castle was
her safe place. She felt safe there.
Which is why I can get through my days
now that she's not here anymore.
'Cause I think she's in a castle.
And I'm hoping
that I'll get to go there someday.
[Chris] We've done studies of hundreds
of bereaved people, and it's very clear.
What's good for the patient
is good for their loved ones.
And it absolutely
soothes them in grief.
[woman] Do you get asked whether or not
you believe that there's life after death?
[laughing] Oh, shit. This is the question
I hate the most. And you know what?
I keep getting asked that question,
and I don't have a prepared answer.
My natural
uh bias is to avoid
any questions of spirituality.
I don't even like horoscopes.
I don't like anything.
I would never see a medium
or have my palm read or anything.
[horse neighing]
But I think you'd be a fool
to have seen what I've seen
for 20-some years,
and heard what I've heard,
and not think there's more to the story.
It's remarkably short-sighted
to hang onto this notion
that we only can believe what we can see.
[horse neighing]
[woman] When I was a child,
I grew up in a very religious home.
My grandfather and uncle
are both ministers,
and we went to church probably once
or twice a week growing up, my whole life.
My mom and dad said,
"If you believe in God,
you would not believe in reincarnation."
But the very first time
my son Atlas spoke about a past life
was one day, when he just said,
out of nowhere
"My name was Jaylen Robinson."
And then he said,
"When I was this child
someone killed me."