Deanna,

  The kind of evidence you point to is, I find, some of the strongest evidence for our continuing existence beyond death.  Once fraud and collusion are ruled out there are very few possible alternative explanations for how someone can gather specific, accurate information from or about a deceased person.  Your experience sounds like a very good example of pretty solid evidence that your grandad still exists.  This kind of evidence, that comes through our own direct experience appears to be the only kind that can convince us.  Other people may come up all sorts of possible alternatives to try to explain such evidence away, but when it's your own experience you can be the best judge of the truth.

At the last workshop I gave in Poland everyone did the exercise where they were to visit with a previously unknown (to them) deceased person.  The deceased person's name was randomly drawn from a basket full of slips of paper provided by other participants, about 120 people. 

After the exercise one participant came up to me exclaming, this is not possible!  I thought I was just making it all up, but all the detailed information I got from the dead person was verified!  Many of the information details she gathered were on a par with your grandad's peg-legged chicken.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Bruce

I love this story, Deanna. A chicken with a wooden leg?

Tell me that anyone here in this world has heard it all yet. Always something new under the sun.

Love your proof...
blink

How Brilliant Deanna!!

I once had a good reading from a Medium who didn't charge me a penny and the things she told me were only known to me and my mother. That was the proof I needed after years of *hoping * there was an afterlife...I don't think there is an afterlife now,I KNOW there is!!

Blessings to you! xx

Deanna,

Thanks for sharing your spiritualist experience.  I hope it means what your understandable wishful thinking suggests.   But the use of words like "proof" (Deanna) and "solid evidence" (Bruce Moen) is sadly misguided because the ESP interpretation seems at least as plausible if not more so.  Why?  Over the years, I've occasionally reported one of the most devastating counter-examples descrediting channeled contacts with deceased loved ones and no one here has been honest enough to acknowledge its force.   So I will repeat it again.

Dr. Sam Soal visited a famous British medium, Blanche Cooper, in the hope of contacting his recently deceased brother.   During the sitting, Gordon Davis, an unexpected drop-in communicator, interrupted the seance.  Davis was a schoolmate of Soal's who had recently died--or so Soal had been told.   Davis lamented, "I'm only concerned about my wife and kiddie now."  He gave detailed verifications that he was genuine by describing the interior of his house, by recalling incidents in their school life together, and by using jargon that typified his speech (e.g. "old chap" and "confab" instead of "meeting").  

A while later, Soal discovered that Davis was in fact still alive and knew nothing about the channeled impostor.   If one asks why mediumship is not discredited in this way more often, one need only ask: How often are you wrongly told that a friend has died?  Apparently Soal's belief in Davis's death either enabled Cooper to reconstruct his personal via ESP or was seized by a spirit impostor as an opportunity for deception.  Such examples shift the burden of proof to those who claim that the best of channeling is evidence of postmortem survival.

Remember two additional facts.  (1) Many mediums also display ESP.  (2) Prior to the 19th century, channeling was generally attributed to a god or a demon rather than to a discarnate human.  Who is to say that modern mediumistic contacts with the dead are more than culturally conditioned wishful thinking?

Deanna, what your example does do is eliminate the claim that the most impressive channeled claims can be dismissed as either fraudulent or lucky guesses.   Instead, the 3 most likely options are ESP, spirit impersonators, or genuine contact--in that order of plausibility IMHO. That said, there are a few examples of mediumship that I suspect really are genuine contacts with the dead and I have previously posted one such case on this site.  But please, people, let's inject a little integrity into our assessment of the evidence.

Don    

Kathy,

Well said! I agree with you.   But many alleged cases of paranormal contact with the dead involve information that only the dead would know: e.g. Swedenborg's contact with the recently deceased Dutch ambassador about the location of a lost receipt for jewelry.  Only the dead ambassador could have known about the secret compartment in the upstairs bureau where the receipt was hidden.

Personally, my most convincing spiritual experiences are totally deficient in verifiable details.  So I don't usually share them in an effort to convince the skeptic.   Instead, I share less influential experiences with more evidential value.  Deanna's experience may well be a genuine contact.  I merely object to terms like "proof" or "solid case" and want true believers to at least acknowledge the contrary evidence.

Don  

Don's point is well taken, while the experience may be "pretty solid evidence that your grandad still exists" we probably can't call if "proof" in a scientific sense. 

It wasn't that many years ago that science dismissed ESP as either fraud or fantasy, only to reverse itself in recent years as scientists found satisfactory testing methods (for itself) that "scientifically" proved ESP's existence.  I find it amusing that science now claims communication with the deceased is just ESP.

Scientifically acceptable proof, by its nature, is always behind the curve in proving that something previously unknown to itself, like ESP or communication with deceased, exists. 

First, someone has to claim such a thing exists, and present some kind of evidence.  Curious, open-minded scientists must then formulate theories and testable hypothesis that could explain the phenomenon.  Then science must design suitable testing methods to eliminate all previously known alternative explanations, leaving only the possibility that ESP or communication with the deceased exists.  Then, these experimental results must be replicated by other scientists enough that they can be said to be proven, "scientifically."

None of this means that ESP or communication with the deceased don't exist before they are scientifically proven to exist.  ESP existed long before science found a way to prove its existence to itself.  It just means that curious, open-minded scientists must find ways to prove it to themselves.  And in the case of communication with the deceased, there is so much resistance against the idea (as there was against ESP) that scientists risk condemnation by their peers, and sometimes  their careers to undertake research in the area.

I'm certain that someday science will find a way to prove the existence of communication with the deceased to itself.  Meanwhile, I've seen too much evidence within my own experience and in the experience of others to harbor a single doubt.

The most convincing evidence comes when the information provided by the deceased person is know only to that deceased person, and then verified within physical reality.  Seeing just one of these kind of white crows would prove that not all crows are black, and I've seen many white crows.

So, Deanna, don't worry.  Someday science will catch up with what many of us already know to be true.

Bruce

the medium didnt just tell me about grandads chicken he also said about  lollipops ,well my grandad used to suck on a lollipop every day in his last years so that was more proof that it was my grandad ,when i was a little girl i found a pidgeon on the side of the road and i took him home to my dad he had a broken wing and my dad looked after him and got him better now  no medium could have known about this cause i was a child when this happened but lo and behold a medium came through to me a coulpe of months ago and said he had got my dad with him and to ask me about the pidgeon now how do u explain that away love deanna