Gary Schwartz described his major contemporary study of mediumship under controlled conditions in a 2002 book, The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death. His work, in fact, constitutes the most tightly controlled recent scientific investigations into mediumship yet achieved. Schwartz has an impressive background as a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona, director of its Human Energy Systems Laboratory, and publisher of more than 400 scientific papers.
He is keenly aware of what no doubt commonly occurs when people, longing for some evidence that their deceased loved ones in fact do survive, are OK, and are still thinking about them, go to a less than honest medium. The medium, with whatever attractive trappings appear convincing, proceeds to cleverly conduct what is known as a “cold reading.”
Such readings, Schwartz points out, typically begin with a very general query to the sitter.
“They’re (the spirits) telling me you know someone, living or dead, whose name is Charles. Do you know a Charles?” Almost everybody knows someone with this name. But if this doesn’t strike a responsive chord, the medium will continue with a stream of other information, along such lines as, “I’m seeing a gray-haired person having some trouble walking,” or” a woman dressed in white,” or “I’m getting a woman with an M in her name, an L or “There’s a younger person who’s crossed over, a son or a brother.”
Probably almost everyone will respond to one of these cues. The medium keeps going in this fashion while watching closely for a telltale reaction which could be quite subtle, such as a sudden blink, an intake of breath, or a tensing of the body. As soon as this occurs, the medium will begin following whatever she just said with statements related to that. If her comments don’t get a response, the medium will keep talking. Sooner or later the sitter will recognize in these remarks someone deceased who they apply to, and will offer more specific thoughts and feelings the medium can pick up on. At the end of the session, the sitter may well be in tears, convinced he or she has heard information the medium couldn’t possibly have known, certain of having been in contact a deceased loved one.
Schwartz notes that many people who call themselves mediums actually do cold readings, and it is what the skeptics assume is always going on. In his study of mediums he took very careful measures to rule out this sort of thing.
One investigation described in his book, filmed for presentation on HBO television and carried out at the University of Arizona’s Human Energy Systems Laboratory in 1999, involved several well known mediums – George Anderson, John Edward, Anne Gehman, Suzane Northrop, and Laurie Campbell. Two subjects or sitters were involved, one selected by Schwartz and his co-investigator Dr. Linda G. Russek, and known only to them, and one by the film production company and known only to them. The sitters had absolutely no contact with the mediums prior to the séances.
Shortly before the start of the experiment the two sitters completed detailed questionnaires involving the history and death of each person they hoped or expected might be contacted during the séances. No one involved – investigators, mediums, sitters, or film crew – had access to these documents which were sealed and safely stored. The five mediums were separated at all times from the two sitters except for the actual readings. Prior to the start of each session both the sitter and the medium were prepared in separate rooms with an electrode cap and arm electrodes, so electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms could be obtained to monitor for heartbeat-to-brain wave effects.
All sessions were videotaped following which stenographic transcripts were made which comprised around 200 pages. A procedure for scoring transcripts was followed that involved placing each piece of information provided by a medium into one of six categories: Initials, Names, Historical facts, Personal descriptions, Temperaments, and Opinions/Other, which was a catch-all category for anything that didn’t fit anywhere else. Statements such as “Your son wants me to tell you he doesn’t blame you for his death,” while often most meaningful to a sitter, obviously could not be validated and were thus least convincing to the investigators. The two sitters assigned a rating to each piece of information ranging from -3, a complete miss, to +3, a definite hit, with no rating if the sitter didn’t know. Sitters were asked to justify their responses and to state whether the information could be confirmed by living persons.
Results for one of the two sitter based on ratings of 600 items (a process that took some ten hours) indicated that the mediums ranged in accuracy from 77 percent to 95 percent accuracy. Their average for statements rated as completely accurate was 83 percent. Due to time constraints the second sitter had sessions with only two of the mediums. Ratings of the 200 plus items resulting yielded scores of 90 percent accuracy for one medium and 64 percent for the other.
Immediately after the HBO filmed investigations Schwartz and Russek developed another research design with even tighter controls, known as the Miraval Sessions. Ten sitters were involved carefully selected to vary in sex, age, profession, belief in the possibility of survival, geographical area, and history of departed loved ones. Four of the five mediums from the HBO study participated. Readings were divided into two parts. For the first ten minutes the sitters remained completely silent so that from hearing their voices mediums could not obtain a clue as to age, sex, or personality. During the second part sitters were allowed to give standard yes/no responses. The mediums never knew which sitter was the subject of a particular reading. Schwartz provides detailed analysis of two sessions (two mediums) with one sitter whose husband had recently died. During the silent period the two different mediums achieved an accuracy for items mentioned of 77 percent and an 85 percent accuracy in the yes/no questioning period.
To exercise even greater control to prevent a medium from learning the identity of a sitter during a reading a third investigation was conducted, known as the Canyon Ranch Experiment. The research design called for the room where sessions were held to be divided by two sets of double wide sheets. Mediums sat with their back to the screen facing a video camera with the sitters on the other side eliminating any visual contact. The Miraval procedure was followed with the first ten minutes of a reading silent with the sitter never speaking. During the following portion an experimenter observed the sitters nodding yes/no responses and called that out to the medium on the other side of the screen. Five sitters and three mediums were involved. Of particular interest was the silent portion of the readings. Written transcripts of that portion of the 15 readings yielded over 4000 specific pieces of information. Each sitter and the three experimenters involved each individually rated all 15 readings. The three mediums individually ranged from 40 percent to 54 percent of +3 hits with an average of 40 percent.
The best controlled study described in The Afterlife Experiments was based on a new twist one of the mediums in the previous studies, Laurie Campbell, told Schwartz and Russek she had introduced in her readings. For 15 minutes before starting a reading she would meditate, and she had become aware that during that time she started receiving information such as such as names, relationships, causes of death, and personal descriptions. She wrote this down and conveyed it to the sitter before beginning the actual reading.
The investigators developed a research design calling for three sitters who remained at their homes in various locations. Their identity was only known to Schwartz and Russek. The medium, Laurie Campbell, stayed in the investigators’ home where she could be carefully observed to insure she did not learn the identity of the sitter or make contact with him or her. Half an hour before a sitting Campbell meditated in seclusion and silence and then wrote down impressions she received. The investigators then made telephone contact with the sitter. The phone was given to Campbell, but immediately placed on mute so the sitter couldn’t hear her speaking, and, for ten minutes, she gave a silent reading as in the prior research design. The phone was then taken off mute, and Campbell introduced herself, explained how she conducted her readings, and read the notes she had taken in her pre-reading meditation item-by-item, asking that the sitter confirm or contradict the information.
During her pre-reading meditation with one sitter, Campbell correctly received Dalzell, the sitter’s name, that of his best friend Michael, who had recently died, and the names of the other three deceased individuals present. She also mentioned candles burning, and Dalzell later confirmed he had lit a candle before beginning the experiment, something he rarely did. During the silent reading portion Campbell received a large amount of totally correct information, and during the actual reading with phone contact between medium and sitter she received even more.
One striking example involved the deceased Michael showing her where he had lived somewhere in Europe, including scenes of a big city and a journey through the countryside to his home. Along the road he showed her a river, an old stone monastery on the edge of the river, and centuries-old stonework. His parents, she noted, had a heavy accent. Dalzell had visited Michael at his parents’ home in Germany, and was aware they, in fact, did indeed speak English with a heavy accent. He was also able to confirm the parts about the big city, the countryside, the road to his home alongside a river, and their living in a village. He could not, however, recall anything about an old stone monastery along the river.
Campbell described an older Aunt A, that she had her great sense of humor (true), and that A was experiencing “compassion and sorrow” for her granddaughter (true). Campbell also correctly gave the exact name of the granddaughter, who she said was having difficulty, and was currently receiving “healing.” Dalzell was unaware of any such situation. In the three portions of the experiment combined, Campbell provided over 100 specific details with an accuracy between 90 percent and 100 percent per each deceased person.
Armed with the impressive results from these investigations Schwartz summarizes and refutes a number of the most common criticisms of what occurs in mediumship and the research involving it. Skeptics, Schwartz believes, tend to see all mediums as motivated to cheat, that is, to take money from grieving gullible people. They sometimes will participate in studies if they think they can manipulate the results so as to enhance their egos and attract higher fees. Yet the mediums who participated in this investigation put their careers and reputations on the line. If they had been caught cheating, Schwartz points out, they would have been exposed. However, no evidence of fraud or cheating was ever discovered among the highly select group of research mediums.
As previously noted, criticisms raised by critics often relate to the tricks used in cold readings. Schwartz points out that in the Miraval and Canyon Ranch experiments, the mediums were deaf and blind to the sitters. Yet, in the absence of any verbal or visual cues, they were still able to provide a very large amount of data of which 40 percent to 80 percent was scored as absolutely accurate. In the HBO study one medium asked only five questions but reported more than 120 pieces of information that were rated over 80 percent accurate. In the Campbell experiment, the barriers between medium and sitters were even more strict, yet the medium’s accuracy was astonishing. In the research procedures employed, the sitters carefully scored the data for names, historical facts, personal descriptions, personality characteristics, and the like. The data turned out to be very specific for individual sitters.
Critics often assert that mediums combine vague and general information with lucky guesses that result from accidental hits or from fishing (cold reading) strategies. Schwartz points out that his experiments provided replication by having sitters read by as many as five mediums. The findings from precise scoring showed remarkable replication across mediums and sitters, and across experiments, as well. Statistical probability values extended from the millions to the trillions to one against chance. Guessing and chance simply could not account for the accuracy of the information being provided.
People receiving cold readings are likely to be convinced by what they are told because they only remember information they want to believe. Critics emphasize that this selective memory creates a self-fulfilling illusion that something is real that, in fact, is completely false. Schwartz contends selective memory was not a factor in his investigation. The scoring techniques he used did not rely on the sitters’ overall memories of the readings, but were scored from the transcripts of what the mediums actually said. The sitters in their scoring carefully considered every medium statement before assigning it to the hit or miss category. Data evaluated this way, and showing high rates of accuracy, simply cannot be explained by selective remembering.
If the maneuvers employed in cold readings can be ruled out, critics often fall back on the charge that mediums fraudulently produce apparent genuine communication by somehow getting information about the sitters ahead of time, through employing detectives or some other secret means. Schwartz concedes that in parts of his experiments it is conceivable that the mediums could have tapped the phones in the lab and the investigators’ homes, and thus obtained the names of all the sitters in advance. They could then have employed some means to get useful information about them, which they could have memorized and cleverly brought out in their séances. However, as unlikely as this would have been, such fraudulent efforts would not have been useful for the silent periods in the Miraval and Canyon Ranch experiments because the mediums were not able to see who was sitting behind them or on the other side of the screen.
Furthermore, the mediums did not know the order in which the sitters would be brought to them, as this was decided only at the last minute on the day of the testing. During the silent period of the procedure the sitter did not speak thus offering no clues as to age, sex, emotional state, or anything else that would have been revealed by seeing or hearing the sitter. In the Campbell experiment, the sitters were not even in the same location as the medium, and the most impressive data were offered even before any telephone contact was established.
In studies of mediumship where apparently genuine results are achieved, critics remind us that ruling out deceptive practices by mediums still leaves open the possibility that the behavior of the investigators themselves may be involved. Somehow they may unconsciously influence the results, perhaps by giving information to the mediums or encouraging the sitters to inflate their ratings. Perhaps they deliberate distort their findings. Schwartz points out that in spite of the tight experimental control exercised to prevent any possible experimenter influence, remarkably positive results were achieved. Yet as professional investigators he and his team “are still uneasy about concluding that the data are genuine, reflecting their own cautious approach and their own fears.”
In summarizing the outcome of his mediumship investigations Schwartz emphasizes that a group of top mediums consistently received messages, supposedly from the dead, that cannot be explained as cold reading or any kind of recognizable trickery. His team received help from professional magicians, oversight from other scientists, and videotaped scrutiny by professional documentarians. In the more carefully conducted later experiments, no one who witnessed the work or examined the data was able to point out any flaw in the procedures or offer a rational explanation as to how the mediums could conceivably be cheating. He makes clear, however, that the findings apply only to the mediums who have agreed to be the subjects in the controlled laboratory experiments, who he calls five “white crow” (per James) mediums. Yet, if there are five, there are probably many more.
In his 2011 book The Sacred Promise Schwartz describes his recent investigations into three broad issues, (a) the possibility that people’s consciousness survives physical death and that their consciousness is as alive and willful/intentional, (b) the possibility of spirit-assisted healing, and (c) the possible existence of a greater spiritual reality including angels and spirit guides.
These investigations, he readily acknowledges, were not conducted with the tight controls that characterize formal scientific research. Such formal research is typically defined as a systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge. However, there is less formal research that he calls self-science, personal explorations in our own lives, and exploratory investigations where laboratory scientists pretest themselves. This less formal research is very valuable as it can uncover essential proof-of-concept evidence that provides the foundation for formal research investigations.
Schwartz makes clear that neither the formal or informal experiments or investigations he describes in this book by themselves are definitive. In fact, he readily acknowledges, many of them are too exploratory as well as controversial to be published in mainstream scientific journals. Yet the findings have scientific validity and utility and raise important questions for future research and applications.
Science, Schwartz tells us, sometimes discovers that something is reliable and true, even though scientists don’t know precisely how or why it works, and he provides as an example, gravity. Obviously, it exists, and its effects have been extensively studied, yet there is no one universal theory explaining what gravity is. This is the case when it comes to spirit.
Schwartz holds a unique perspective on this work. He notes that people often ask him if he is trying to prove a concept such as the reality of life after death or the role of spirit in healing. His response is, “absolutely not.” What he is attempting to do is give the concept an opportunity to prove itself. In the case of a larger and more general idea of spirit and a greater spiritual reality, he is “using the scientific method to ideally optimize the possibility of spirit to establish its own existence.” “The proof of the pudding is in the tasting,” he says, which is a “precept that business people as well as scientists, and mothers, use every day.”
Schwartz argues that ongoing research in his laboratory points inexorably to an emerging conclusion that our consciousness, including our personalities and memories, survive physical death; that each of us have personal spirit guides; and that we can literally learn to call on spirit, which includes our deceased loved ones, higher spirit guides, and the sacred, for healing ourselves and reclaiming the planet as a whole.
In regard to the first of the three areas Schwartz investigated, the possibility that people’s consciousness survives physical death, he raises the question that has bedeviled psychical researchers from the outset. If I go to a medium to make contact with my deceased grandfather and she is an authentic, that is, she doesn’t do what’s called a “cold reading” or use a mental magician’s techniques, and I’m not giving the medium cues or information about my grandfather, and, furthermore, I haven’t told her that I’m trying to reach anyone related to me, what could my grandfather communicate through her that would prove that his consciousness has survived bodily death? Even if my grandfather were to provide verifiable information of his past history, this could be accounted for if the medium is psychic and reading my mind. Even if this is not the case, there might be other sources of information including what some scientists have speculated is a “zero point field.” According to this idea information encoded in starlight continues to exist in the vacuum of space long after the star has died. If the same way information and energy created while my grandfather was alive might continue to exist in the vacuum of space, and the medium might be registering it through some kind of super-psi process.
How could my grandfather demonstrate that he is actually conscious, alive, and evolving wherever he is? Schwartz asks us to imagine that we are our grandfather, from there trying to prove this to us here. Forgetting about the deceased issue for a moment, how would we do this if we as our grandfather were alive? The only consciousness we know for sure is our own. We each can only directly experience our own consciousness. If I tell you I am seeing a beautiful golden cup, you may see the cup and empathize with what I’m saying, but you can’t be sure what you see as golden is the same experience of golden that I’m having. I could program a computer to engage in a complex dialogue that sounds just like me. It might detect the vocal pattern comprising a question such as, “Who are you?” and respond giving my name. I could program the computer with tens of thousands of responses to even more sophisticated questions such as, “Are you conscious?” and the response, “Obviously, are you?” If this exchange were occurring over the telephone and the computer were programmed to mimic my grandfather’s voice, I might well think I was talking directly to him.
In fact, our living grandfather couldn’t prove definitively to us that he is conscious. The best we can do is infer he is conscious from his behaviors, as he would infer we are conscious from ours. If he’s deceased, the medium who functions as the link between us must infer that he is conscious. In principle this really isn’t a unique problem. Physicists are used to inferring processes they can’t measure directly, a case in point being gravity. It can’t be seen, heard, or detected with our primary senses. Gravity is inferred indirectly by its effects on matter or light. The same, Schwartz argues, goes for consciousness. So, what might our deceased grandfather do, what behaviors might he exhibit, that would convince us that he is not only conscious but very much alive as well. The answer, Schwartz tells us, is that he could assert himself creatively and convincingly.
Something of this nature occurred in his research. Although he was familiar with the research spanning more than a hundred years addressing the survival of consciousness hypothesis, he was unprepared when, unanticipated and unplanned, instances that were strongly suggestive of the survival of spirit started showing up in his formal laboratory experiments and his informal self-science investigations. These accumulating instances of apparent survival began to make it clear that the way for deceased people to prove that they were alive is simply for them to assert themselves. They could, Schwartz believed, “take charge of the situation and show that they had qualities of conscious intention—what we scientifically refer to as discarnate intention.”
Schwartz describes several “proof of concept” investigations that he believes demonstrate this. A key player in this effort was deceased parapsychological investigator, author, and friend, Susy Smith. She was 85 when he first met her and was fond of saying she couldn’t wait to die so she could prove to the world that she was still here. She died four years later, and Schwartz immediately began consulting mediums for private blind readings to see if they could obtain evidence of her continued existence. Although these readings, on the whole, were remarkable for their accuracy and specificity, Schwartz didn’t find them totally convincing that Susy’s living consciousness had continued after her death.
A month later he was contacted through email by an unknown woman who, although not currently practicing as a medium, said that deceased people sometimes showed up unannounced in her life. A deceased older woman named Susy had begun hanging around her house, and the woman said Susy had important messages for Schwartz. Immediately suspicious as to what the motives this woman he calls Joan might be, Schwartz invited her to share the information she claimed Susy wanted to give him. Joan sent detailed information that he carefully examined and scored. Not only did 80 percent of it turn out to be factually accurate, but it sounded like Susy as well.
The content of this material fell into two categories that Schwartz called “watching- over,” information that was about him in his present life, and ‘predictive” information that pertained to him in the future. He set up an agreement with Joan that five mornings a week she would contact Susy and ask her two questions, what she had witnessed happening to him in the previous twenty-four hours, and what did she foresee happening to him in the upcoming twenty-four hours. Joan was to email the information she believed that she had received from Susy each day, and later that day he would score it item by item. Schwartz would email Joan his scoring results that same day to let her know how she was doing. This was only to be done on weekdays although Susy presumably had to watch over him on Sundays also, so she would be prepared to be interviewed by Joan the following Monday morning.
Schwartz recognized that if he were to perform his normal daily activities, they would fit what most people did and be scientifically useless, even if Susy were actually witnessing them. So he purposely did novel things and experienced rare events. First he rented a VHS movie, ‘Field of Dreams,’ and watched it in bed while eating Chinese take-out food, three things he had never done together. The following morning Joan emailed him that Susy was showing her something about baseball and commented, “you were watching baseball last night.” She continued that Susy was showing her that he was eating” some kind of foreign food,” but he was not sitting at the kitchen table or the dining room table. She then said, “she shows me that you are eating while reclining. Does this make any sense?” The overall information from this first day turned out to be approximately 80 percent accurate.
Schwartz continued these investigations with Joan five days a week for more than two months. Sometimes, he notes, “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 he needed to check the tires on his car. He didn’t, and later that afternoon discovered his car had a flat tire. “I could not remember the last time I had had a flat.” One time Joan reported that Susy said a specific woman was about to cause him harm. Within three hours of the email, he learned from a third party that this person had indeed attempted to do so.
In summing up these investigations, Schwartz believes at least something psychic was going on. However, although the evidence seemed reliable and dramatic, it wasn’t sufficient to conclude that Susy was actually watching over him and sometimes giving him useful warnings. It was possible that Joan was relying on some kind of psychic ability, perhaps remote viewing as well as precognition.
However, something then occurred that Schwartz states “was beyond my wildest imagination” and ultimately “became a transformative discovery.” He was on the other side of the country traveling to visit with a grieving elderly couple whose adult daughter had recently died of brain cancer. While being driven to their home, the deceased daughter’s sister told Schwartz she 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. She wanted to let her parents to know that scientific research supported their hope that there is life beyond death, and their wish to someday be with their deceased daughter.
The next day he discovered a surprise email from Joan containing a seemingly incredible story. Joan did not know that he was meeting with this family or even that he had traveled to the East Coast. Joan wrote that something strange happened, even for her, that required that she write him at that time, even though it was the weekend. On Saturday morning, around the time that he was being driven to meet the elderly couple, (which she knew nothing about), she was driving in her new car. Suddenly, Susy and an unknown deceased person appeared in her car. Realizing that it might be distracting or dangerous to be driving a car with deceased people as passengers, Joan wisely pulled over. She communicated with Susy, and ultimately did a reading with the unknown woman. Joan reported that Susy instructed her to email the information from the reading to Schwartz immediately, insisting that he would know what to do with it.
Schwartz called the deceased’s sister, related what had occurred, and asked if she wanted the information from the reading and would be willing to score its accuracy. She did, and the accuracy of the reading was greater than 80 percent. Of particular significance 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.”
In checking this out with the family, the deceased sister indeed had a passion for eagles, collecting paintings and statues of them, as if they were like a totem animal to her. After she died and was cremated, the family placed her ashes in a carved glass statue of an eagle. They had the song” Fly Like an Eagle” played at her memorial service. To verify all this, the family later sent Schwartz a videotape of the service.
This amazing incident suggested to Schwartz a potential new proof-of-concept research paradigm. Perhaps one deceased person could intentionally bring a second deceased person to a medium. The first could serve as an afterlife, or spirit, experimenter. This would offer a real breakthrough in afterlife research.
With this new paradigm it became possible to go beyond conventional double-blind experiments because success required “active collaboration from the other side” This allowed the possibility of the medium reading the mind of the sitter or experimenter to be ruled out. Furthermore, the possibility he or she is reading dead information in space could also be eliminated as 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.” Schwartz conducted several self-science investigations to determine whether this double-deceased paradigm could be replicated, all of which proved to be successful.
One involved a well-known medium, Mary Occhino, with whom he had previously worked, and the granddaughter of a deceased medium. As a preliminary experiment, Schwartz met with the granddaughter and explained his proposed procedure. He then emailed Mary asking her to contact the deceased Susy Smith and invite her to bring along a second unknown deceased person. Mary was to then read this person and provide the information through a return email.
The morning of the reading Schwartz called Mary who informed him that, as they were speaking, an elderly woman showed up who Mary described. Mary wanted to know if this was the woman Susy was to bring, but Schwartz didn’t confirm or deny this. However, privately he was unsure. He briefly described what had happened to a female friend who was present. The friend said the woman Mary had described sounded like her own grandmother. Schwartz called Mary back and asked if she would do two readings, one with the deceased woman who had spontaneously appeared and the other with the woman Susy was supposedly going to bring. Mary performed both readings. It’s important, Schwartz reminds us, that Mary did not know the identities of either the two deceased grandmothers or their granddaughters, and he knew little about the deceased medium and nothing about the other grandmother.
That same day he got the two granddaughters together and asked them each to rate both sets of readings. They correctly identified which reading belonged to which grandmother, and each scored the reading for their own grandmother as approximately 80 percent accurate, while scoring that for other grandmother as only 40 percent accurate. The patterns of specific information obtained through Mary, Schwartz notes, was so dramatic that blind judging would have produced exactly the same results.
Based on these informal investigations Schwartz designed a formal proof-of-concept test extending the double-deceased paradigm. Two physical experimenters were involved, himself and another scientist, Dr. Ortega (pseudonym), who was curious as to whether mediums could provide evidence of the continuing survival of his deceased daughter, Elizabeth. Dr. Ortega was on the East Coast while Schwartz remained in Tucson. Two mediums performed readings, Joan and Mary, with five sitters located in different parts of the country receiving those readings. Two deceased spirit experimenters, Susy Smith and Dr. Ortega’s deceased daughter played key roles. Joan served as the medium for Susy and Mary for Elizabeth.
In the first phase of the investigation each of these deceased individuals, Susy and Elizabeth, watched over one of the sitters on a given day and were then contacted by their medium who did a reading with them. The mediums emailed their readings to a third experimenter, who coded the readings, and then sent them to each of the five sitters for blind scoring. During a five day period each sitter was watched over twice, once by Susi and once by Elizabeth. Each day Schwartz randomly chose a sitter and through Joan asked Susi to visit him or her. Dr. Ortega did the same with Joan and Elizabeth. Schwartz and Dr. Ortega were each blind as to the precise order of the visits that were made by his spirit experimenters. The sitters were blind to which days they were actually being watched over by which deceased spirit, and did not know which two of the ten readings were theirs, versus the eight readings that belonged to the other four sitters.
For the second phase of the investigation Schwartz incorporated the double-deceased paradigm. The spirit experimenters, Susy and Elizabeth, each were asked to bring a deceased person related to a given sitter, again randomly selected, to their medium, Joan or Mary. Readings were again blind scored. For both phases of the investigation, watching over and double deceased, statistically significant effects were obtained for the two female sitters. Results for two of the three male sitters were similarly positive. One male sitter was poorly read by both mediums. As it turned out he was the only sitter of the five who no longer felt an emotional need to connect with his loved ones as they were long deceased.
In summing up these occurrences and investigations Schwartz notes that they demonstrate the possibility, once and for all, for establishing, that survival of 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.”