WICHITA, Kansas – A Kansas professor has conducted a scientific study about communicating beyond the grave.
In 1993, the disappearance of Pittsburg State student Stephanie Schmidt sent the entire campus into a panic.
“I would be talking with several friends on a regular basis because they were pretty upset,” said Dr. Julie Allison, a professor at Pittsburg State University.
Schmitt was a promising psychology major. Dr. Julie Allison was her professor and advisor and she was a natural fit to provide needed counseling. But she never imagined where that role would take her.
"One of her friends came into my office and had a look of relief,” Allison said.
Schmidt was missing for nearly a month. But a week before her body was discovered, one of her close friends said she had seen her.
"Stephanie had communicated with her that she was okay, but she was dead and to tell her parents that she loved them,” Allison said. “And that she loved her and that she was going to be okay."
The event prompted Dr. Allison to launch a research project on after-death communication. Using students as participants, she surveyed her subjects, asking if they had such an experience and how. The published results revealed 54 percent of those studied say they believed they had been visited by a dead loved one.
"I was very much surprised,” Allison said.
And rightly so, as the study also revealed a majority of people don’t talk about their experiences.
"Didn't know he was dead, I found out later,” said Pastor K.O. NooNoo
NooNoo never discussed what he saw when he was a teenager in Guyana, Africa, until the ADC study came up in a conversation.
He shared his story with Dr. Allison.
"He was walking across the field, he was wearing a blue suit, and didn't say anything to me just walked on by,” NooNoo said.
That teacher, NooNoo would later learn, was dead.
"I had to check and double check because I just saw him,” he said.
NooNoo says he still doesn’t know why he saw what he did. But Dr. Allison says for most of the people she studied, a perceived after-death communication is a form of comfort.
"I think that's significant from a psychological point of view,” she said. “Finding some sense of comfort in the loss of a loved one and whether it's real or not, it is comforting.”
The after-death communication in Allison’s study ranged from perceived sounds and smells of a loved one to actual transparent visions.
She even talks of her own encounter after the research was complete. It came three weeks after her father died.
"My father was laughing and talking with me and said, ‘don't you worry, your baby will be just fine,’ and at the time I didn't know I was pregnant,” she said. “And low and behold my husband and I were expecting our first child."
Still, Allison’s research found that the most common experience was during sleep. That has skeptics arguing that such experiences are likely vivid dreams; our minds playing tricks to help us cope with a trauma.
And Dr. Allison agrees that’s a possibility.
"We know that people can create memories for which people can not discern whether they're accurate or not the brain is able to do that,” she said.
Pastor NooNoo says he’s wondered a lot about what he saw.
"I think it was him, I think it was him,” he said.
But through his studies of the Bible, he believes it can happen.
"It's not the person, per say coming back, but perhaps we are receiving some kind of help,” he said. “And the help has to take a form that we can recognize. And maybe that's what we see; maybe that's what we experience.”
Scientifically, however, there’s no proof one way or the other, meaning for now the answers will have to come from the other side of the grave.
According to Dr. Allison's study, a majority of those reporting ADC’s believed they should be discussed and that their experience had been positive.
Dr. Allison stresses the importance of believing someone who shares an ADC and using that as a tool to help them come to an acceptance of the loss of a loved one.
