Winter, spring, summer, or fall.
All you have to do is call.
And I’ll be there, yes I will.
You’ve got a friend.
—James Taylor
When I think of the late Susy Smith, author of some thirty books about parapsychology and life after death, I think of James Taylor’s song “You’ve Got a Friend.” As it turned out, she was a friend not only to me but to all those seeking verification of life after death and of Spirit’s willingness to help and guide us.
I have previously shared how I met Susy, and I have described in detail some of the research we’ve done together, before and after she died, in my previous books. In brief, when I first met Susy, she was eighty-five years old and preparing to die. She had even written her own obituary. Susy quickly became my first (and only) adopted grandmother; she used to playfully call me her illegitimate grandson. And as Susy was fond of saying, she couldn’t wait to die so she could prove to the world—including me—that she was still here.
However, I could never have foreseen, or even imagined, the creative and extraordinary proofs that Susy would subsequently provide from the other side about life after death and the active role that spirits can continue to play in our lives. As part of my personal quest to discover if Susy was still here and would continue to play a meaningful role in my life, she ended up revealing a new research protocol for exploring the apparent reality of Spirit and its possible benefits for all of us.
I continue to find it remarkable how what I do in my personal life—particularly related to Spirit—ends up seemingly informing and advancing my professional concerns. It could be because the mind or ego separates professional from personal as it does alive from deceased, while Spirit insists on one unified whole or continuum.
Curiously, my biological mother, Shirley, and my adopted grandmother, Susy, happened to share certain key qualities in common: a passion for life, an inherent goodness, a deep commitment to their respective causes, and a bigger-than-life personality that was independently and repeatedly detected by multiple mediums.
Like Shirley, Susy was tough. If Susy needed to assert herself, she would. And she was not about to let me misinterpret her beliefs, whether they were valid or not. Since this was her persona while physically alive, there was good reason to anticipate that, if her consciousness did survive death, she would continue to assert herself in this way.
Furthermore, if anyone was going to insist, after they died, that I not misinterpret genuine communication from the other side as being explained by telepathy, or that mediums didn’t always read dead information from the vacuum of space, it would be Susy.
This would especially be the case when the deceased in question was Susy and I happened to be the sitter! If Susy could find a way to prevent me from misinterpreting what was really occurring, she would do it. Her pragmatic approach is a model for everyone seeking the truth about afterlife contact and how not to fool one’s self.
Well aware that I was an orthodox agnostic, Susy knew it would take a lot of evidence—both in and out of the laboratory—for me to conclude that her consciousness survived and there is continued presence of Spirit in our lives. So Susy provided the evidence, in spades.
Surprise, Surprise, I’m Here
As I describe in some detail in The Truth about Medium, within twenty-four hours of Susy’s death—she was eighty-nine—on February 11, 2001, I began conducting blind readings to see if mediums could obtain evidence of Susy’s continued existence. These were not university investigations or experiments; they were private investigations conducted in my personal life, or self-science, as I call them.
Though these readings, on the whole, were remarkable for their accuracy and specificity, they did not in and of themselves prove that Susy’s living consciousness continued after her death.
Moreover, if the tables had been turned—if I had died and Susy were still here—she would not be convinced by similar information from mediums concerning my survival either!
However, within a month or so of Susy’s passing, I received a surprise email from a then-unknown purported medium. To honor and preserve her anonymity, I will call her Joan and say she lived in the Pacific Northwest. Joan claimed that she had been psychic since childhood, and because she was happily married with a young son, she strived to live a normal, nonpsychic life most of the time. However, deceased people still showed up unannounced in her house every now and again—sometimes she would know them and other times they would be strangers.
She then reported that a deceased older woman named Susy was hanging around her house, and that Susy had important messages for me. As I recall, Joan knew about Susy Smith, since I had described some of my research with Susy in my first book, The Living Energy Universe. Joan further claimed that she did not know if the information was valid, but she would like to learn what, if any of it, was correct.
I wondered: Was it really possible that the deceased Susy Smith had dropped in unannounced in a house in the Pacific Northwest and was actually badgering a gifted psychic housewife to make contact with me? I also wondered if the woman claiming to be psychic was crazy, or was she pulling my leg? At this point I didn’t know anything about her.
Did Joan have ulterior motives? Was she seeking fame, money, or something else? I even considered the possibility that Joan might be a spy for the infamous Amazing Randi, who has a reputation for trying to expose scientists and others investigating the paranormal. Having witnessed his antics and deceptions, I would have been imprudent to simply dismiss such a possibility out of hand.
So, you may ask, why pursue it at all? If Susy was in fact alive and well and wanted to communicate with me, having someone with her background cooperating in my research from the other side would be invaluable.
I wrote Joan, thanking her for contacting me, and suggested that she share whatever information the purported female spirit claiming to be Susy Smith wanted to communicate. I told Joan that the only way we could determine its accuracy was for me to carefully examine and score it.
Joan responded positively to my suggestion and sent detailed information she supposedly received from Susy. As I read the email, I determined that more than 80 percent of it was not only factually accurate but it sounded like Susy as well. As I studied the information carefully, I realized that the specific content related directly to me could be separated into two categories:
The first category I called “watching-over” information. This was about me in my present life, of the sort like, “Susy shows me that you recently experienced X.” Of course this was important to our overall exploration of whether Spirit can and will help and guide us.
The second type was what I termed “predictive” information. This pertained to me in the future, of the sort like, “Susy is showing me that in a few days Y will happen to you.” This is somewhat relevant to the above-mentioned consideration and proved to be critical in one instance.
Of course, I still had no idea at this point whether Joan was legitimate. I thought that if Susy was actually watching over me and even providing me with predictive information, this could be tested experimentally by spontaneous as well as intentionally planned behavior. In a follow-up email, I proposed to Joan that we conduct an informal investigation with me acting as a private person, who happened to approach his personal life as a scientist, and he wanted to know whether this was Susy or not.
I suggested that five mornings a week, Monday through Friday, Joan would agree to contact Susy and ask her two questions:
1. What had Susy witnessed as happening to me in the previous twenty-four hours—the watching-over information.
2. What did Susy foresee happening to me in the upcoming twenty-four hours—the predictive information.
Joan would then email the information she believed that she had received from Susy. Later in the day, I would score the information item by item. It would be relatively easy to remember much of what I had done in the previous twenty-four hours. Since most of the information turned out to be in the watching-over category, we focused our attention on it. I would email Joan my scoring each evening so she would know, on a daily basis, how she was doing.
We agreed that no readings would take place on the weekends to allow Joan to take a “Susy break.” Meanwhile, Susy presumably had to watch over me on Sundays, so she would be prepared to be interviewed by Joan the following Monday morning. This procedural detail will turn out to be important later.
Though Joan admitted she was nervous, she was eager to give it a try, and we decided to begin our informal personal experiment the following Monday.
Watching a Baseball Movie while Eating Chinese
Food with Chopsticks in Bed
As you might imagine, I too was also nervous, but for different reasons. If Susy were really watching over me, and if Joan were a genuine psychic, then I might soon have evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the deceased, or at least Susy, could choose to be with us on a fairly regular basis, whether we are aware of it or not.
I knew that it would not be evidential if Joan simply reported that Gary was brushing his teeth, taking a shower, or driving to work, etc. This kind of prototypic detail would fit most people, including me, and hence be scientifically useless—even if Susy happened to be witnessing me doing these daily activities.
But if I purposely did novel things and experienced rare events and Joan reported these activities supposedly via Susy, this kind of unique reporting could be meaningful. To give Joan and Susy the best opportunity to succeed, I decided to begin the watching-over experiment that Sunday night by watching a novel movie in a novel way.
I watched a VHS tape of the movie Field of Dreams, released in 1989, which I had not seen in a few years. This movie happens to be related to the question of life after death; it even includes scenes in which deceased baseball players play on a baseball field built on a farm in the Midwest.
It is important to note that I rarely watch baseball. Though I appreciate the game aesthetically, the sport does not capture my interest or hold my attention. This fact will become important shortly.
I further decided to order in Chinese, something I had not done for two or three years prior to this watching-over experiment—I usually eat out at Chinese restaurants. In those days, I typically ordered in Italian food.
And finally, I watched the movie and ate my Chinese dinner in bed—three things I had never done together. As I learned that night, eating Chinese food with chopsticks while reclining in bed is neither easy nor advisable!
The following morning, with some trepidation, I turned on my computer and discovered an email from Joan: “Susy is showing me something about baseball; you were watching baseball last night.”
Joan continued, “Susy is showing me that you are eating some kind of foreign food.” She did not use the word Chinese. Although I had been eating foreign food the previous night, I could have been eating Italian instead, and the word foreign would have applied as well. Since I ate foreign foods at least two nights a week, I did not give this specific information much credence, although eating Chinese food at home was certainly a novelty. And eating with chopsticks was more foreign than using a fork.
However, what came next strongly captured my attention. Joan wrote, and I paraphrase, “I am trying to see where you are eating dinner. Susy is not showing you sitting at the kitchen table or the dining room table. I don’t understand this, but she shows me that you are eating while reclining. Does this make any sense?”
The key word here is reclining, for that was exactly what I had been doing. I had been reclining in bed, eating a foreign food with foreign utensils while watching a baseball movie. I could not recall the last time I had eaten dinner in bed watching a movie, and certainly not Chinese with chopsticks.
When I had scored all the information, the watching-over experiment for the first day turned out to be approximately 80 percent accurate.
Encouraged by the early success, we continued our personal exploration five days a week for more than two months. The information averaged around 80 percent accuracy. I carefully monitored my activities and found no evidence that I was being watched over by conventional means. I would not tell Joan when I would be traveling or where. If Susy were truly watching over me, I reasoned that she would be able to follow me wherever I went.
Sometimes the information provided by Joan was truly uncanny, especially when predictive information would show up in the form of warnings. One morning Joan wrote that Susy claimed that I needed to check the tires on my car. I did not act upon her purported request. Later that afternoon, I discovered in my laboratory’s parking lot that my car had a flat tire. I could not remember the last time I had had a flat. I decided to have all four tires replaced.
The skeptic would be correct in raising the possibility that Joan might have been cheating. It is conceivable that she secretly arranged for someone to watch my activities, or even let the air out of my tire. However, Joan also reported that a specific woman, whom I will call Martha, was about to cause me harm, and within three hours of the email, I learned from a third party that Martha had indeed attempted to do so. The event in question happened in the context of a legal matter, and it was highly improbable that Joan and Martha had collaborated.
All told, it seemed reasonable to conclude that at least something psychic was transpiring. However, as reliable and dramatic as this evidence was, it was not by itself sufficient evidence to conclude that Susy was actually watching over me and sometimes giving me useful warnings.
It was possible, as discussed previously, that Joan was merely being very psychic, engaged in remote viewing as well as precognition—the ability to foresee future events. The fact that Joan did not interpret it as remote viewing was not, in and of itself, justification to conclude it was anything more than this.
However, what happened next in this particular self-science venue was beyond my wildest imagination. In fact, it ultimately became a transformative discovery, provided by, of all people the deceased but spiritually alive Susy Smith, a spirit interloper par excellence.
Spirit’s Backseat Driver
It was the fall of 2001. I was on the East Coast for a combined business and pleasure trip. (To preserve the anonymity of the people involved, I will keep the location vague.) On Saturday, I was being driven from the city to a suburb to visit with a grieving elderly couple whose adult daughter had recently died of brain cancer. Both the husband and wife were Holocaust survivors. On the trip, the elder daughter, whom I will call Alice, shared with me some of her younger sister’s history.
Alice wished she could have a convincing conversation with a research-validated medium to assure her that her younger sister’s essence was alive and well. Alice wanted her parents to know that contemporary scientific research was supportive of their hope that there was life beyond death and their wish that they would someday be with their deceased daughter.
As I listened to Alice, I realized that I had been having a truly unique personal scientific experience with Joan. I had been receiving the kind of information that, while it would not convince a skeptical scientist, would provide profound comfort to a layperson seeking evidence that their deceased loved one was well.
The truth is, I began to feel guilty. I deeply wished that Alice and her family could have the same comforting experience I was having about the possibility of life after death.
The next day, Sunday, I was back in the city and checked my email and could not believe what I was reading. There was a surprise email from Joan containing a seemingly incredible story.
Joan began by saying that she knew this was the weekend, however, something strange happened, even for her, which required that she write me at this time. She claimed that on Saturday morning, around the time that I was being driven to meet the elderly couple—of course, I had not told Joan my travel plans or what I was doing there—she was driving in her new car. Suddenly, Susy and an unknown deceased person appeared in her car.
I presumed that it must be distracting, if not dangerous, to be driving a car with deceased people as passengers. Joan wisely pulled over, communicated with Susy, and ultimately did a reading with the unknown woman. She further claimed that Susy instructed her to email the information from the reading to me immediately, supposedly insisting that I would know what to do with it.
I wondered: What if while I was feeling guilty in the car on Saturday and thinking about Susy and our watching-over experiment, Susy heard me and wanted to help this family?
What if Alice’s deceased sister had been in the car when Alice was talking about her, and Susy had met the deceased woman?
And what if upon hearing Alice’s as well as my private thoughts and wishes, Susy had realized she could barge in on Joan and ask her to do an impromptu reading with the sister for this family?
Three clearly speculative what-ifs.
As I looked over the information provided by Joan in the email, I could not tell if any of it was accurate except for a few details.
Remember that this was Sunday morning. I had a novel dilemma—should I call Alice, tell her what transpired, and then determine whether the information fit her deceased sister? Would Alice think that I was crazy? Or would she relish the opportunity to receive this unanticipated reading?
I ultimately decided that the only way to answer the questions, as well as to honor the apparent wishes of Susy, Joan, and the purported deceased sister, was to muster my courage and call Alice. I placed the call Sunday afternoon. I explained that something unusual if not downright weird had happened, and explained the circumstances. I asked Alice if she would be interested in hearing the email and scoring each item in a careful fashion. She said yes, and we spent an hour reviewing the information.
To my astonishment, Alice’s scoring of the information indicated that the accuracy was greater than 80 percent.
However, as mentioned earlier, survival is in the details. One unique piece of information was the tipping point for this work.
Midway through the communication, Joan claimed that the deceased was saying that eagles were important to her. That I needed to tell the family about the eagles, and that they would understand what this meant.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the phone, Alice was sobbing. Remember, Joan did not know that I was meeting with Alice and her family or even that I had traveled to the East Coast. It turned out that the deceased sister indeed had had a passion for eagles. She collected statues and paintings of them. The eagle was like a totem animal to her.
Apparently, after she died and was cremated, instead of her ashes being placed on the front table at the service, the family set out a carved glass statue of an eagle. The song “Fly Like an Eagle” played at her memorial service. And to verify all this, the family later sent me a videotape of the service!
While Alice was explaining this to me on the phone, the thought crossed my mind that Susy had revealed a potential new proof-of-concept research paradigm. This surprise experiment conducted by the other side was suggesting that one deceased person could intentionally bring a second deceased person to a medium. In other words, the first deceased person could be, so to speak, serving as an afterlife, or spirit, experimenter!
Notice that using this new paradigm, it becomes possible to go beyond conventional double-blind experiments, and the success in the study requires active collaboration from the other side. Not only does this paradigm rule out the medium reading the mind of the sitter or experimenter, but it also implies that the medium is not simply reading dead information in space, since the accuracy of the information requires the intentional cooperation of a spirit co-investigator. This would offer further proof of discarnate intention—spirits acting with the same willfulness as the living—which helps establish spirits’ presence and at least their ability to offer advice and guidance.
Possible future experimental designs rapidly flashed through my mind. Of course, I could not share these burgeoning plans with Alice; she was immersed in the emotional pain and comfort of discovering that the information fit her beloved sister, and it implied that her sister had cooperated with another deceased person to convince an unsuspecting medium to perform an unplanned reading to convince her family that she was alive on the other side.
After Alice and I hung up, I was both inspired and perplexed. I was inspired because what I had just witnessed went far beyond predictions from remote viewing or even superpsi. What I had witnessed was potentially revolutionary, proof-of-concept evidence of spirit-directed research, conceived and implemented by someone on the other side.
I was well aware that before I would propose formal university-based research using a double-deceased paradigm, which would indicate my belief that what I had experienced was a legitimate protocol, I would need to see it privately replicated many times. As it would turn out, what I had witnessed was metaphorically like the early-morning hint of yellow light beginning to rise above eastern mountains. In time, this streak would get bigger, brighter, and ultimately round out. The light would become so intense that you could only look at the glowing yellow ball through a pair of strongly filtered lenses.
Exploring the Double-Deceased Paradigm
Over the course of the next six months, I seized upon every opportunity that occurred spontaneously in my personal life to determine whether Susy’s double-deceased paradigm would replicate. All of the self-science investigations proved to be successful. I will briefly share one of them here.
I decided to test the double-deceased paradigm with Mary Occhino. Mary is an extraordinary medium who hosts the highly successful daily satellite radio show Angels on Call. I’ve known Mary since 2003 and have been able to verify the accuracy of her mediumship on several occasions. She is featured in part IV of this book addressing the question of whether angels are real and play a protective role in our lives.
At first we tested the paradigm informally. This personal test with Mary involved the middle-aged granddaughter of a deceased medium. It is important that I keep all their identities anonymous. I shared with the granddaughter the emerging double-deceased paradigm research. It turned out that when Susy and the medium in question were both alive, they had known each other.
I suggested to the granddaughter that I would email Mary, inviting her to participate in the informal private experiment. I would ask her to contact Susy, and would explain to Mary that Susy was to bring along a second unknown deceased person, and I would request that Mary read the second person and provide the information in an email.
The morning of the reading, I called Mary to make sure she had received my email. She told me that while we were speaking, an elderly woman showed up, and Mary insisted upon describing her. She asked me if this sounded like the woman Susy would bring along, and I told her I was not at liberty to confirm or disconfirm this possibility.
However, after we hung up, I questioned whether this was the deceased medium, and I briefly mentioned what had happened to the lady I was dating at the time. She said that the woman Mary had described sounded like her beloved deceased grandmother! She was about the same age as the granddaughter of the medium whom Susy was supposed to bring to Mary.
The question popped into my mind: was I being gifted with two deceased grandmothers for the price of one?
I called Mary back and asked if she would do two readings. One with the deceased woman who had spontaneously shown up and the other with the woman Susy was supposedly going to bring. Mary gracefully complied. She completed the two readings by the early afternoon. Recall that Mary did these readings without knowing the identities of either of the granddaughters or their deceased grandmothers. And recall that while I knew a little about the deceased medium, I knew nothing about the other grandmother.
Later that afternoon, I brought the two granddaughters together and asked them each to rate both sets of readings. The granddaughters identified correctly which reading belonged to which grandmother. Keeping in mind her mother’s unique traits, each granddaughter’s scorecard for her grandmother was approximately 80 percent accurate while the other grandmother’s reading was only 40 percent the same.
Though I am not at liberty to disclose details about these readings, the patterns of specific information obtained through Mary were so dramatic that blind judging would have produced exactly the same results.
This surprising, informal, private test of the double-deceased paradigm was unique because one of the deceased had seemingly shown up spontaneously and I had known nothing about her.
Think about this: if the double-deceased paradigm is legitimate, then the information should more accurately match the deceased person that the Spirit experimenter is allegedly bringing to the reading for the targeted sitter, the one expecting her specified loved one. This is in comparison with other deceased people who might show up, on their own, looking for their own relative.
The Double-Blind Test of the Double-Deceased Paradigm
Based on informal personal tests inspired by Susy Smith, I designed a formal proof-of-concept test extending the double-deceased paradigm to two experimenters and spirits. We would also have two physical experimenters like me and several sitters (those receiving the readings), all under double-blind scoring conditions—the mediums and sitters were not in contact. I did this as a private investigation with the collaboration of a scientist who was also privately exploring whether mediums could bring through survival evidence of his deceased daughter.
The two mediums who participated in the investigation were Joan and Mary. There were two physical experimenters: me in Tucson and the other scientist who was on the East Coast and whom I will call Dr. Ortega. The two deceased spirit experimenters were Susy Smith and Elizabeth Ortega—the name I will use for Dr. Ortega’s beloved deceased child.
There were five professional sitters, located in different parts of the United States. All were professional and personal friends. Two were women: a physician and a grief counselor; three were men: a physician, a social worker, and the president of a small foundation. Susy was read by Medium Joan; Elizabeth was read by Medium Mary.
In the first phase of the investigation, Susy and Elizabeth each watched over one of the sitters on a given day. Joan would contact Susy for a reading, and Mary would contact Elizabeth for a reading. They would send their readings by email to a third experimenter, who coded the readings and then sent them to each of the five sitters for blind scoring to see if any of the information was related to them. Over the course of five days, each sitter would be watched over twice, once by Elizabeth and once by Susy. Using five envelopes in random order, I would open a given envelope on a particular day and ask Susy to visit the sitter named.
Dr. Ortega had a set of matching envelopes whose order was also randomized. He would open a given envelope on a particular day and ask Elizabeth to visit the sitter named in that envelope. Dr. Ortega kept me blind to the precise order of visits established by his envelopes, and I kept Dr. Ortega blind to the precise order of visits established by mine. Since the sitters were blind to which days they were actually being watched over by which deceased spirit experimenters, they did not know which two of the ten readings happened to be theirs versus the eight readings that belonged to the other four sitters.
The second phase of the investigation expressly involved the double-deceased paradigm. Spirit experimenters Susy and Elizabeth were instructed to each bring a deceased person related to a given sitter, which was again selected by randomized envelopes, to Joan or Mary.
The blind scoring of the readings showed that the spirit-assisted double-deceased paradigm was feasible as an experimental protocol. Statistically significant effects were obtained for the female sitters across both phases of the investigation—watching over and double-deceased—and for both spirit experimenters and mediums. The results for the male sitters were in the predicted direction, but they did not reach statistical significance because one of the male sitters happened to be read poorly by both mediums. In other words, his inability to be read was independently replicated by Joan and Mary. Interestingly, he was the one sitter of the five whose loved ones were long deceased, and he no longer felt an emotional need to connect with them. Minus his poor scores, the scores for the other two male sitters were similarly positive to their female counterparts.
This chapter reveals the possibility for establishing, once and for all, that survival of consciousness (such as intentional, living consciousness) is real and that our deceased loved ones can continue to be with us—and even educate, help, and guide us—if we are willing to listen. In other words, this can scientifically prove that the Sacred Promise is indeed a solemn covenant between Spirit and us.
As profound as the double-deceased paradigm is, it is just one bright star in a night sky filled with many sparkling stars waiting to be revealed.
We are about to consider another spirit-assisted experimental paradigm, revealed again by Susy Smith. The discovery of this paradigm included a celebrity, the late Princess Diana. It appears that well-known stars like Princess Diana are at least as persistent in being heard as are unknown stars like Susy, Shirley, Marcia, and Elizabeth. Some of them apparently intend to assist in future research and even help heal the world—and we can use all the help we can get.