Mediumship & after-death communication evidence.
Reports of contact with the deceased. This hub collects the relevant claims, strongest and weakest evidence positions, source records, and map/library views for the cluster.
Related research reports
Evidence Against Common Spiritual Claims
A careful guide to spiritual claims that are popular but weakly supported, including astrology, reiki, auras, crystals, manifestation, numerology, and predictive tarot.
Best Evidence for an Afterlife
A comparative guide to the strongest survival-adjacent evidence: NDEs, terminal lucidity, deathbed visions, past-life memories, mediumship, and after-death communication.
Strongest claims in this topic
Cold reading explains mediumship
Stage mentalists reproduce 'mediumship' on demand. Cold and hot reading are well-documented techniques.
After-death communication
Around half of bereaved adults report sense-of-presence experiences. Common, meaningful, hard to verify.
Mediums can obtain anomalous information about the deceased
Most claimed mediumship is reproducible by cold reading. Some controlled lab studies (Beischel and others) report small but anomalous effects.
Ghosts are spirits of the deceased
Reports stretch back centuries and across every culture. Most well-investigated cases reduce to pareidolia, infrasound, expectation, or fraud; the broader 'soul of the dead' reading is essentially unverifiable.
Weakest or most speculative claims
Ghosts are spirits of the deceased
Reports stretch back centuries and across every culture. Most well-investigated cases reduce to pareidolia, infrasound, expectation, or fraud; the broader 'soul of the dead' reading is essentially unverifiable.
Mediums can obtain anomalous information about the deceased
Most claimed mediumship is reproducible by cold reading. Some controlled lab studies (Beischel and others) report small but anomalous effects.
After-death communication
Around half of bereaved adults report sense-of-presence experiences. Common, meaningful, hard to verify.
Cold reading explains mediumship
Stage mentalists reproduce 'mediumship' on demand. Cold and hot reading are well-documented techniques.
Key verified sources
Useful as a claimed replication/extension of the 2007 Windbridge-style protocol; still controversial, but much stronger than anecdotal stage mediumship.
A core positive mediumship paper because it explicitly targets cold reading, sitter cueing, experimenter cueing, and fraud as alternative explanations.
Major reference for the sceptical / cognitive-explanation side of psi-style claims.
Foundational source for the Barnum/Forer effect, a central ordinary-cognition explanation for astrology, tarot, numerology, and psychic readings feeling personally accurate.
Anomalous information reception by research mediums under blinded conditions II: Replication and extension
Useful as a claimed replication/extension of the 2007 Windbridge-style protocol; still controversial, but much stronger than anecdotal stage mediumship.
Anomalous information reception by research mediums demonstrated using a novel triple-blind protocol
A core positive mediumship paper because it explicitly targets cold reading, sitter cueing, experimenter cueing, and fraud as alternative explanations.
Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience
Major reference for the sceptical / cognitive-explanation side of psi-style claims.
The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility
Foundational source for the Barnum/Forer effect, a central ordinary-cognition explanation for astrology, tarot, numerology, and psychic readings feeling personally accurate.
Cold reading
Direct reference for the 'cold reading explains mediumship' skeptical hypothesis.
Barnum effect
The single most-cited cognitive mechanism behind subjectively-convincing astrology, tarot, cold-reading, and 'this happened for a reason' inferences.
Mediumship
Useful for both the phenomenon's claims and the well-developed sceptical literature.
After-death communication
Reasonable general reference for after-death communication language; the term itself is relatively recent in the academic literature.
Catch-all reference for the broad ghost claim; pair with apparitional-experience and parapsychology entries for the specific phenomenology and lab-history strands.
Apparitional experience
Covers both the anomalistic-psychology framing and the survival-research framing, making it useful context for separating experiences from spirit interpretations.