Episode 281: Testing Mediums & True Ghost Stories of the Past

Join Sandra to explore more winning afterlife evidence from the Bigelow contest as well as discover how researchers are testing mediums in the lab today.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And you're here. Thanks for choosing the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Ghost Day and Paranormal Podcast Network. Your quest for
podcasts of the paranormal, supernatural, and the unexplained ends here.
They invite you to enjoy all our shows we have
on this network, and right now, let's start with Chase
of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast, AM employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do

(00:42):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on a journey to prove the existence of life after death.
On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know
that our loved ones have survived physical debt and so
will we Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. When we

(01:12):
talk about the afterlife, we talk about faith, we talk
about hope, We talk about the grief we have in
our hearts. When we lose someone we love. But today
I want to talk about logic, the things that can't
be explained by luck, by guessing, or even by reading
someone's mind. Today we're going to revisit our friends at
the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies who held that massive contest,

(01:37):
and we'll discuss two more of the prize winning essays.
As you remember, the challenge was to write an essay
that proves, using logic and evidence, that the human soul
survives death. The website Bigelowinstitute dot org has all of
the full essays available if you wish to do some
great reading. In the past, we shared the top three

(01:59):
prize winning episodes, but today I'm going to introduce you
to two of the runner ups, although I hate to
call them that because their work is really great, each
one fifty thousand for their research. One is doctor Julie Bishel,
a brilliant scientist who tests mediums using strict conditions. The
other is doctor Stephen Browdie, a philosopher and former president

(02:22):
of the Parapsychological Association. We'll start off with doctor Browdie's
work with some rather ghost like stories to start, but
they're incredibly fascinating. Here's a story about a dinner party
in Iceland, a board medium and a very rude, uninvited
guest named Runky. So imagine if you will. You are

(02:45):
in Reikiavik, Iceland, in the year nineteen thirty seven. It's
a dark, cold winter's night. A group of friends have
gathered at a house for a seance. Now these aren't
people who are grieving, and they're not crying over law
loved ones. They are just curious people. They have a
medium there named Hafstein Bijornsen. The seance begins and for

(03:08):
a while it's pretty standard. The medium goes into a trance.
The control spirit comes through. Everyone is polite, but suddenly
the energy in the room changes. The medium's voice changes.
It becomes rough, angry and confused. A new spirit has
pushed his way into the circle. He doesn't introduce himself nicely.

(03:29):
He demands to know where he is. He says his
leg hurts. He's shouting about being wet and cold. The
people in the room ask who are you? The spirit grumbles.
He says his name is Runolfer Runolfsen, but everyone calls
him Runky. Now the people in the room look at
each other. They whisper, do you know a Runky? No?

(03:52):
Do you Nobody knows this guy. They ask him more questions. Runky,
when did you die? He says in the year eighteen
seventy nine, that was nearly sixty years before this seance.
He says he was fifty two years old. He says
he died by drowning while he was walking home. He

(04:12):
says he had been drinking a little too much and
that he fell asleep on the beach and the tide
came in and took him. And then he says something
very specific. He says, I was a tall man, very tall.
So the seance ends, the medium wakes up. Everyone is confused,
who was this angry, wet fisherman. Now this is the

(04:33):
part where a skeptical mind jumps in and can say, oh,
the medium was just reading the mind and one of
the people in the room must be telepathy. Or they
say the medium just researched a local story to trick
the sitters. But doctor Browdie points out why this case
is so important because nobody knew who Runky was. The

(04:53):
sitters didn't know him, the medium didn't know him. The
people at the seance were so curious that they decided
to play detective. They went to the National Archives in Iceland.
They started digging through old parish records from the nineteenth
century and guess what they found. In the records for
the year eighteen seventy nine, there was a death certificate

(05:16):
for a man named Runolfer Runolfson. He was a laborer.
He was fifty two years old. He was known to
be a heavy drinker and the cause of death drowning.
His body was found on the sand where the tide
had come in. But there is one thing missing. Remember
how Runky bragged about being very tall. The records didn't

(05:38):
say anything about his height, so the researchers dug deeper.
They found his old bones. They actually located where he
was buried, and because it was an unmarked grave, they
had permission to measure the remains. They measured the femur,
the thigh bone, and based on the bone calculation, Runkie
stood well over six feet tall in Iceland in eighteen

(06:02):
seventy nine. That was a giant. So this man from
the seance was exactly who he said to be. Why
does doctor Browdie, a philosopher, a man of logic, love
this story so much because it destroys the super psi theory.
Supersigh is the idea that mediums are just super psychic

(06:23):
spies who steal information from living brains. But in the
case of Runky, there was no living brain to steal from.
The people in the room didn't know the guy. The
only person who knew the combination of Runky plus drowning
plus tall plus fifty two years old was Runky himself.
This is what is called a drop in communicator. It's

(06:47):
like somebody crashing a party. He didn't come because someone
called him. He came because he saw a bright light
like an open door, and he wanted someone to listen
about his wet leg. It's funny, isn't it, think of
the afterlife as angels and harps. But doctor Browdie reminds
us that if we survived death, we take ourselves with us.

(07:08):
If you were a grumpy fisherman in life, you might
be a grumpy fisherman in the afterlife, well at least
for a little while. But Ronkie was just a guest.
He dropped in and then he left. But what happens
when his spirit drops in and decides to move in?
I have another story for you from doctor Browdie's essay
One That's not just about facts, It's about obsession. It's

(07:31):
the story of a man named Frederick Thompson. Now, Frederick
Thompson was not a medium. He wasn't a psychic. He
was a goldsmith living in New York City in the
early nineteen hundreds. He was a practical man who worked
with his hands. He had no interest in painting. He
had no formal training in art, aside from a few

(07:51):
lessons as a schoolboy. But in the summer of nineteen
oh five, something strange began to happen to Frederick. He
started to feel a compulsion. It was like an itch
that he couldn't scratch. He suddenly felt an overwhelming urge
to paint pictures. And not just any pictures. He felt
driven to paint landscapes, misty, moody scenes of winds swept

(08:14):
trees and marshes. He tried to ignore it, but when
he did, the urge just got stronger. It started to
take over his life. He would neglect his work. He
would drift off into a dream like state and find
himself sketching for hours. He told his wife, I feel
like I am someone else. Specifically, he felt like he

(08:36):
was a man named Robert Swain Gifford. Now get this.
Robert Swain Gifford was an American landscape painter, but Frederick
didn't know him personally. So Frederick went to an art
exhibition in January nineteen oh six where he learned the truth.
Robert Swain Gifford had died exactly one year earlier, right

(08:59):
before Frederick's painting obsession began. Frederick stood in that gallery
staring at a painting by this dead artist, and suddenly
he heard a voice. It wasn't in his head, it
sounded like it was right next to his ear. The
voice said, you see what I have done? Can you
not take up and finish my work? Frederick was terrified.

(09:23):
He thought he was losing his mind. He went to
see a famous researcher named James Highslop. He said, help me,
I am being haunted by a painter. Highslop was a skeptic,
so he decided to test this. He took Frederick's sketches,
the ones he had drawn into trance, and showed them
to art critics who knew Gifford's work. The critics were stunned.

(09:45):
They said, this is most definitely Gifford's style. This is
his brushwork. This captures his misty atmosphere exactly. So remember,
Frederick was a goldsmith. He didn't know how to paint
like a master, but somehow he was channeling the specific
talent of a dead man. The story gets crazier. Frederick

(10:06):
kept having visions of a specific group of old, gnarled trees,
and he painted them over and over and over again.
He didn't know where they were, he just knew they
were real. Finally, following an urge, he traveled to the
coast of Massachusetts. He took a boat to a tiny
place called Nashon Island. He walked across the island like

(10:29):
he was being guided by an invisible GPS, and there,
standing on the hill were those exact trees, same ones
from his visions and the same ones that were in
his paintings. He sat down to sketch them, his hand shaking,
and while he was drawing, he heard the voice again.
The voice said, look on the far side of the trees.

(10:51):
Frederick stood up. He walked to the other side of
the old oaks. He looked closely at the bark, and there,
carved into the woods were the initials RSG. Robert Swain Gifford,
and underneath the initials the date nineteen o two. Frederick
Thompson had found the secret spot where the dead artist

(11:14):
used to stand and paint. There was no map, there
was no guidebook, there was no Internet. The only way
Frederick could have known about those initials was if the
spirit of Robert Swain Gifford was standing right there beside him,
whispering in his ear, finished my work. Doctor Browdie calls
this the Thompson Gifford case, and he considers it one

(11:35):
of the most powerful pieces of evidence we have. Why
because it combines everything. It has skill. Frederick painted with
a talent he didn't possess. It has knowledge, Frederick found
a hidden location he had never visited, and it has
the motive. The dead artist wasn't ready to put down
his brush. He still had more beauty to create, so

(11:57):
he borrowed a pair of living hands to do it.
As I wrap up this first segment with you, think
about Runky and Gifford. One was a simple fisherman who
wanted to complain about his leg. The other was a
brilliant artist who wanted to finish a masterpiece. They were
completely different people in life, but in death they proved
the same thing. We don't disappear. Our personality, our grumpiness,

(12:22):
our happiness, or our genius survives. And if the door
is left open, even a crack, we can still step
in and say I am still here. When we come
back from the break, I'm going to share another one
of doctor Browdie's favorite cases, and you'll meet a man
who died in nineteen fifty but came back thirty years
later to play a game of chess against a living

(12:45):
grand master. And here's the thing. The medium didn't even
know how to play chess. So we'll be right back.
You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeart
Radio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome

(13:19):
back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sanders Champlain. Doctor
Stephen Browdie, in his Bigelow Institute contest essay says, you
can't fake a skill. You cannot accidentally start speaking fluent
French if you didn't know the language, and you certainly
cannot accidentally play chess at the level of a grand master.

(13:41):
I want to tell you the next story. It's the
story of a chess game. But this wasn't just any game.
This was a match that lasted seven years, and it
was played across two countries, and one of the players
had been dead for thirty four years. The story began
with a man named doctor Wolfgang Eisenbeiss. He was a

(14:03):
Swiss researcher who wanted to test this exact question, can
a high level intellectual skill survive death. He didn't want
a ghost who could just tap the table once for
yes and twice for no. He wanted to know if
an afterlife friend could think, so he set up an experiment.

(14:25):
He found a medium named Robert Rawlins. Now this is important.
Robert Rollins did not play chess. He knew the basic moves,
but he had no strategy. He was a complete novice.
Then doctor Eisenbeiss needed an opponent. He managed to recruit
one of the greatest chess players alive at the time,

(14:46):
Victor Korchnoi. I don't follow chess, I have to be honest,
but if you do, you'll know that name. Korchnoi was
a legend. He was a Soviet defector, a brilliant strategist,
and he was ranked as one of the top players
in the world. He was a grand master, which is
the highest title a chess player can achieve. So doctor

(15:07):
Eisenbeiss had a medium who knew nothing about chess and
a living legend who knew everything. Now he needed a
participant from the afterlife. Through the medium, Doctor Eisenbeiss reached
out to the spirit world. He asked if there was
a deceased grand master who would be willing to play
a game against Victor Korchnoi. After a while, a spirit

(15:32):
came forward. He introduced himself as Gaza Marazzi. Gaza Marazzi
was a Hungarian grand master who had ranked the third
best player in the world back in the year nineteen
hundred and he had died in nineteen fifty one. So
the game began. The setup was simple. Victor Korchnoi, the

(15:54):
living player, would make a move on his board in Switzerland.
Doctor Eisenby would send that move to the medium. The medium,
Robert Rollins, would go into a trance. The spirit of
a Marazzi would communicate the counter move, usually through what's
called automatic writing, So the medium would write down something

(16:16):
like pawn to King four. Then that move would be
sent back to Korchnoi. Because of the difficulty of the mediumship.
Sometimes it took days, sometimes it took weeks to exchange
a single move. For seven years and eight months, this
ghost versus grand master battle raged on. Korchnoi told the

(16:36):
researchers that the opponent was not playing modern chess. You
see chess evolves. The strategies used in the nineteen nineties
are different from the strategies used in the eighteen nineties.
Kortchnoui said, this player is using the Marazzi bind. That
is a specific defensive strategy that Gaysa Marazzi invented in

(16:59):
the early n nineteen hundreds. It relies on slow, careful
maneuvering rather than aggressive attacks. Korchnoi said it felt like
playing a ghost from history. The style was old fashioned, elegant,
and incredibly strong. In fact, this ghost played so well
that he actually beat Korchnoi. In the early stages of

(17:20):
the game, the living legend was losing to a dead one. Eventually,
after forty seven moves, the game ended Victor Korchnoi won,
but just barely. He admitted that he had to play
his absolute and highest best to beat this spirit. When
asked about it, Korchnoi said I was playing against a

(17:41):
grand master. There is no doubt. Now let's bring this
back to doctor Stephen Browdie. Why does he include this
story in his fifty thousand dollars winning essay, Well, because
it destroys the skeptic's favorite argument, which is SUPERSI again
supersized the idea that the medium isn't talking to the dead,

(18:03):
but it's just using super telepathy to steal information from
living people. So let's apply that logic to the chess game.
If the medium Robert Rollins was faking this, how could
he do it. He didn't know chess. So to fake
a grand master level game, the medium would have to
one use telepathy to scan the entire world to find

(18:25):
a living chess expert, two telepathically show that expert the
current board position, three telepathically extract the best move from
that expert's brain. And if this all wasn't impossible enough,
he would have to make sure that he was playing
the exact outdated style of playing chess of a Hungarian

(18:49):
man from nineteen hundred. Doctor Browdie argues that this is
crippling complexity. It's like saying a child who has never
taken a piano life sat down and played a perfect
Mozart concerto. By telepathically borrowing the skills of a concert
pianist in the next town doesn't make sense, and it

(19:12):
doesn't happen. A skill like this requires a mind. It
requires active thinking. It requires looking at the chess board,
analyzing the trap, and planning five steps ahead. You cannot
fake thinking. The fact that forty seven moves were played
over seven years with a consistent, identifiable personality and style

(19:38):
proves the mind of Gaza Marazzi was still intact. He
was still thinking, he was still strategizing, and he was
still competitive. But the chess case isn't the only one.
Doctor Browdie shares one more story in his essay that
involves music. I want to introduce you to a woman

(19:59):
known in the research simply as Missus B. Missus B
was a simple woman living in the American Midwest. She
had an elementary school education. She had never traveled, She
had no interest in classical music. She preferred her church hymns,
and she certainly didn't speak any foreign languages. But one

(20:22):
day a researcher sent her a watch. He didn't tell
her who it belonged to. He just mailed it to
her and asked her what she picked up from it.
Missus B held the watch, went into a trance like state,
and suddenly her voice changed. She started speaking with a
heavy Scandinavian accent, and then she started speaking a language

(20:46):
that nobody in the room understood. They recorded it and
sent it to a linguist. It was finish, fluent, perfect finish.
Missus B claimed that she was channeling spirit of Junis
cocanan a famous Finnish composer who had recently died. Now remember,

(21:06):
missus B is a housewife in the Midwest. She doesn't
have a passport, she doesn't have a library card. But
for the next year she channeled this man. And it
wasn't just that she spoke his language. She possessed his
musical genius. In one session, the spirit of Cocanin said
he wanted to finish a piece of music that he

(21:27):
had been working on when he died, a piano quintet.
Missus B, who couldn't read music, grabbed a pen and
started scribbling musical notation. She wrote out the final bars
of the quintet that he had started. Then she told
the researchers to send it to a specific man in Finland,

(21:47):
a colleague of Cocanan's named ALUs Salinin. She said he
has the original score, tell him this is the ending.
The researchers tracked down this colleague. He did have the
unfinished score, and when he looked at what Missus B
had written, he was stunned. It matched the style, the key,

(22:09):
and the complexity of the dead composer perfectly. But the
spirit wasn't done. He wanted to gossip. He started talking
about his other musician friends. He critiqued their performances. In
one session, he talked about a specific recording of his
cello concerto. He debated which version was better, the one

(22:30):
on his record label or the Finlandia label. So to
fake this, Missus B would have needed to learn finish.
She would have needed to study advanced music theory. She
would have needed to memorize obscure record labels from a
country she had never visited. And she would have needed
to do all of this while pretending to be a

(22:52):
simple housewife. Doctor Browdie asks us, is it more likely
that Missus B was a secret genius, a linguist, and
a mass or spy who fooled everyone for years, or
was it more likely that Coconin was simply still Junis Coconin.
These two cases, the Chess game and the finished Composer,

(23:13):
are what we call ideal cases. Doctor Browdie says they
are the cases that make the skeptics go quiet, because
you can explain a feather or a flickering light, but
you cannot explain away a symphony, and you cannot explain
away a checkmate. Doctor Browdie uses these cases to show

(23:34):
us that survival isn't just about memories. It's about what
he calls agency. When we die, we don't just become
a recording of our past. We remain active agents. We
can still learn, we can still create, we can still play.
Think about what that means for your loved ones. If
your father was a carpenter, he still knows how to build.

(23:57):
If your daughter loved to dance, she's still dancing in heaven.
The machinery of the brain might be gone, but the operator,
the one who actually possesses the skill, is still right there.
The Maranci chess case and the Missus b case are
what doctor Browdie calls ideal cases. It's a case where
the unusual suspects things like fraud or hidden memory don't

(24:19):
just fit. The only explanation that makes sense is the
simplest one. The grand Master didn't die, he just moved
to a different table. The composer didn't die, he just
found a new instrument. So we've looked at the logical
side of the coin. We've heard the philosopher's argument, and
I'm sure you might be saying, Sandra, I love your stories,

(24:41):
but I want science. I want data. I want to
see what happens when mediums are put under a microscope.
Well you're in luck, my friend, because next we're going
to talk about the other fifty thousand dollars prize winner,
doctor Julie Bischel. She's the director of research at the
Windbridge Institute, and she doesn't deal and goes stories. She
deals in data. When we come back, I'm going to

(25:04):
tell you about the Windbridge Protocol, a scientific test so
rigorous and so controlled that it makes cheating absolutely impossible.
And in the middle of it all our spirit friends
still come through. You're going to hear exactly how they
did it and why it proves their survival of consciousness
will be right back. You're listening to shades of the

(25:26):
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm

(25:53):
Sandra Champlain. We've been taking a little time travel today,
visiting a sciance in Iceland in nineteen thirty seven and
a chess game in nineteen eighty five. And these stories
tell us the philosophy of survival, that our consciousness goes
on into the afterlife. But if you want something that
can be measured, this next part is for you. I'd

(26:15):
like to introduce you to the work of another runner
up of the Bigelow Institute contest. Her name is doctor
Julie Bischel, and she did not start out looking for
evidence of the afterlife. She started out as a materialist scientist.
She has a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology with a
minor in microbiology in immunology. In her words, her life

(26:41):
was about bugs and drugs. She studied bacteria, she studied chemicals.
She believed that when the brain dies, the person is gone.
Then something happened happens to so many of us. Her
mom died, and not only did she die, but her
death was tragic and common implicated it was a suicide. Now,

(27:03):
Julie was a scientist, but of course she was also
a grieving daughter. She was saturated with science, as she
puts it, but she needed comfort, so reluctantly she agreed
to sit with the medium. She walked into that room
expecting nothing. She expected a cold reading, she expected vague guesses. Instead,

(27:28):
she got her mother. She said it felt normal, it
felt like talking to mom. But doctor Bishaal didn't just
cry and go home. She's a scientist, and her brain
lit up. She thought, if this is real, if information
is actually coming from a dead person, we should be
able to test it. And that's exactly what she did.

(27:50):
She gave up a promising career in mainstream science to
found the Windbridge Research Center, and she created something that
is now the gold standard of afterlife research. It's called
the Windbridge Protocol. Now we know skeptics like to debunk mediums.
I was one of them myself, and to be fair,

(28:10):
they have some good points. They say, oh, the medium
could be just reading your body language. That's a cold reading.
Or they say the medium looked you up on Facebook
before you arrived, and that's called a hot reading. Or
they say the medium is just phishing. They say a
common name like John or a m name and you
say mom. Doctor Bishall knows all of these tricks, so

(28:34):
she designed an experiment that makes every single one of
them impossible. Let me take you inside the Windbridge Lab.
Imagine you are a medium who has agreed to be tested.
You want to prove you are real. So here's what
you have to go through. It's called a quintuple blind study.
It means that there are five levels of blindfolds preventing

(28:57):
any cheating. Level one the absent sitter and a normal reading.
You sit across from the client. You can see if
they are crying, you can see their wedding ring. In
the Windbridge Lab, the sitter, the client is not in
the room. They aren't even in the building. They might
be in New York while the medium is in Arizona,

(29:18):
so there's no body language to read. There's no facial
expression to see. Level two the blinded medium. The medium
is even told the name of the person they are
reading for. They are just told, we need you to
contact the deceased relative of subject number forty two. So
the medium cannot look them up on Facebook, they can't

(29:40):
google their name. They have absolutely no information. Starting out
level three the blinded interviewer. Now, the medium has to
talk to somebody, right, They need someone to say, okay,
what are you seeing? But doctor Bischel doesn't even let
the sitter be on the phone. Why because the sitter
might gasp, they might sigh, Their voice might give away

(30:03):
their age or their gender. So the medium talks to
a scientist. But the scientist doesn't know who the sitter
is either. So if the medium asks does this make sense,
the scientist of course has to say I don't know,
so there's no feedback. The medium is pretty much talking
to a blank wall. So level four is the blinded scoring.

(30:28):
Let's say the medium produces a transcript. They say, I
see a father. He loved fishing, he died of a
chest problem. He passed in October. Well, we have to
wait and see if that's accurate. No one can ask
the sitter does this fit? Because people have something called
confirmation bias. We humans, well, we tend to make things

(30:50):
fit because we want them to be true. So doctor
Bischel sends the sitter two transcripts. One is a reading
that has done for them. The other is a decoy
reading that was done for someone else. Entirely, the transcripts
are stripped of all names. They just say reading A
and reading B. The sitter has to read both and

(31:13):
score them item by item. They have to verify every fact.
Only after they return the scores does doctor Bischel reveal
which one was meant for them. Level five the statistical lockdown.
Doctor Bischelt doesn't just look for good hits. She uses
complex statistics to calculate the possibility. If a medium gets

(31:38):
the name Bob, it's not very impressive, is it, because
there are lots of Bobs. But if the medium gets
the name Archibald or Maurice and the specific cause of
death like it was a hang gliding accident, and the
specific shared memory, the statistics go through the roof. So
what happened when doctor Bischel ran this protoco well, she

(32:01):
tested twenty highly credentialed mediums. These mediums couldn't see here
or google anyone, and by all the laws of materialist science,
they should have failed. Their accuracy should have been fifty
to fifty if they were purely guessing. But that is
not what happened. Over and over again, the mediums chose

(32:24):
the correct reading. They produced specific accurate details about dead
people that they had never met. For living people, they
couldn't see. The odds of this happening by chance were
calculated to be less than one in a million. But
doctor Bischel didn't stop there. She wanted to know what
it felt like. You see, there is a theory called

(32:47):
somatic sigh, which we talked about earlier, the idea that
mediums aren't talking to the dead, but are reading the
minds of the living via telepathy. So doctor Bishell a
new experiment called UVO three. She had her mediums do
two types of readings. First, they did a psychic reading

(33:09):
for a living person. Then they did a mediumship reading
for a deceased person. The mediums were blinded. They didn't
know which was which. They were just given a first name.
Doctor Bishel measured their physiological and emotional responses and she
found something incredible. She reported that when the mediums were

(33:30):
reading for the dead, they reported significantly higher levels of love.
They didn't just know facts. They felt an overwhelming sense
of connection, warmth, and expansion. When they were reading for
the living, well, it felt colder, It felt like they
were just looking at a book. But when they read

(33:52):
for the dead. It felt like seeing a play. It
felt like a reunion. Doctor Bischel wrote a beautiful sentence
in her essay about this. She said, all the mediums
had was a first name, and dead people brought love
to the party. This is scientific proof of emotion. It
suggests that the signature of the afterlife isn't just information,

(34:17):
it is love, feeling emotion. Now you might be thinking
is this new? Now you might be thinking, is this
kind of investigating new? Actually? Doctor Bischel is standing on
the shoulders of giants. And this brings us back to
doctor Browdie's essay because he highlights the grandmother of all
scientific mediumship cases. Her name was Leonora Piper. Missus Piper

(34:42):
was a medium in Boston in the late eighteen hundreds,
and just like the Windbridge mediums, she was tested by
the absolute best scientists of the day. Specifically, she was
tested by doctor Richard Hodgson. Now, Richard Hodgson was not
a believer. He was known as a fraudbuster. He had
exposed fake mediums all over the world, and he came

(35:05):
to Boston specifically to expose Missus Piper. Doctor Browdie tells
us that Hodgson had detectives follow Missus Piper and her
husband for weeks. He wanted to see if they were
digging through people's trash, or looking at obituaries or talking
to servants. The detectives came back with nothing. Missus Piper

(35:28):
was just a simple housewife. She didn't research anyone. But
Hodgson wasn't satisfied. He thought, maybe she has a network
of spies in Boston. So he took her out of
her element. He put her on a boat and shipped
her all the way to England. She arrived in a
country where she knew no one. She stayed in a

(35:48):
stranger's house. Her luggage was searched, her mail was read.
And then Hodgson brought in strangers off the street, people
she had never met, whose names she wasn't told. And
guess what happened. Missus Piper went into a trance, and
she started telling these strangers their deepest secrets. She told

(36:11):
them the names of their deceased children. She told them
about items in their pockets. She told them nicknames that
only their dead spouses knew. One of the most famous
scientists of all time, William James, the father of American psychology,
sat with her. He was a skeptic too, but after

(36:31):
watching Missus Piper work, he made a famous statement. He said,
if you wish to upset the law that all crows
are black, it is enough if you prove one single
crow to be white. Missus Piper was his white crow.
She was the one exception that proved the rule was broken.

(36:53):
So whether it is Missus Piper in eighteen ninety or
the Windbridge mediums in twenty twenty, the results are the same.
The controls are tight, the detectives are watching, the numbers
are crunched, and the answer is always the same. Our
loved ones are still here. So we've covered the logic,
We've covered the data, we have covered the love. There's

(37:16):
one final piece of the puzzle for today. We have
talked about spirit's visiting, but what happens when a spirit
moves in? When we come back for our final segment together,
I'm going to share a story that doctor Stephen Browdie
calls the perfect case for survival. It's the story of
a thirteen year old girl named Rancy Venom. One morning

(37:40):
she woke up, but Rancy wasn't there anymore. Instead, a
girl named Mary Roth, who had been dead for twelve years,
opened her eyes, and what she did next convinced an
entire town that death is not the end. So don't
go anywhere. We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades
of the Afterlife on the iHeart Radio and Coast to

(38:01):
Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of

(38:24):
the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain. Doctor Stephen Brownie calls this
next story the Watsika Wonder and even though it happened
back in eighteen seventy eight, it remains one of the
most perfect untouchable cases in history. It takes place in
a small town called Watseka, Illinois. They lived a family

(38:44):
called the Venoms. They had a daughter named Rancy now
Rancey was just thirteen years old. She was a normal,
healthy girl until one day she started slipping into trances.
She would faint, she would wake up claiming that she
was someone else. Her parents were terrified, as you can imagine,
They thought she was going insane. They were actually preparing

(39:07):
to send her to an asylum. But mediumship was big
back in those days, and a neighbor told them, wait
before you lock her up, take her to a spirit medium.
So they brought in a man. He sat with Rancy.
He realized she wasn't crazy, she was just open to spirit.
He told Rancy, or the spirit inside her, that she

(39:29):
needed a guide. She needed a good spirit to take
control and stabilize her. The voice coming out of Rancy said,
her name is Mary Roff. Now, the Venom family didn't
know the Roff family very well. They lived on the
other side of the town, but everyone knew of them
because twelve years earlier, the Roths had lost their daughter, Mary,

(39:53):
Mary Roff had died at the age of eighteen. When
Mary died, Rancy Venom was just a one year old baby.
They had never met, and Rancy knew nothing about her.
But the next morning, the thirteen year old girl woke up.
She looked around the room and she said, where am I?
I want to go home. Her parents said, you are home, Rancy.

(40:14):
She said, I am not Rancy. My name is Mary Roff. Finally,
the Rof family heard about this. Mary's mother and sister
decided to visit the Venom house to see this impostor.
As they walked up the path, Rancey, who was inside
looking out the window, started jumping up and down. She

(40:35):
screamed Here comes my Ma and my sister Nervi. Nervy
was the secret family nickname for Mary's sister Minerva. When
they came inside, the girl ran into their arms. She cried,
she hugged them. It wasn't the awkward hug of a stranger.
It was the desperate, familiar hug of a daughter who
had been gone for twelve years. The Roths were definitely skeptical. Well,

(41:00):
they agreed to let this girl come and stay with
them for a while. As they walked to the Roth house,
the girl didn't need directions. She knew exactly where they
were going. When they got inside, she knew where everything was.
She asked about an old velvet hat she used to wear.
The mother said, we don't have that anymore. The girl said, yes,

(41:21):
you do. It's in the attic, in a specific box.
They went to the attic, they opened the box and
there was the hat. So for the next three months,
this girl lived as Mary Roth. She didn't just know facts.
She knew people. Neighbors would walk by and she would
wave and call them by their names. She would ask
about their kids. She would say things like, remember that

(41:45):
time we went on the sleigh ride. These were memories
from twenty years ago, long before Rancy Venom was even born.
This girl loved the Roths. She treated them as her
true parents. She had zero interest in the Venom family
for biological parents. When the Venoms came to visit, she
was polite but distant. She treated them like they were strangers.

(42:07):
Doctor Browdie says the only explanation that fits the data
is that Mary Roffs came back. She borrowed a body
so she could spend three more months with her parents
that she missed. Eventually, the time came for Mary to leave.
She told her parents the Roths that Rancy was healed
and ready to return. The goodbye was heartbreaking. She hugged them,

(42:31):
she promised them that death was not the end, and
then she closed her eyes. When she opened them again,
she was Rancy. Of course, she didn't know where she was.
She didn't know the Roths. She asked for her mother.
The Watsika wonder it was over, but the proof remained.
With these old stories, it's easy for us to say, well,

(42:54):
that sounds good, Sandra, but it happened in the eighteen hundreds.
What about today? Can we prove that mediums are actually
feeling a spirit, not just imagining it. So let's bring
doctor bischelback in the Windbridge Institute. One of the most
interesting parts of her essay is when she talks about
the sensation of the correction. Again, she doesn't just test

(43:17):
for accuracy. She interviewed her mediums about what it feels
like to talk to the dead versus what it feels
like just to be psychic, and she wanted to know
if it feels different bringing in a deceased loved one,
and the answer was a definite yes. One of her
Windbridge certified research mediums described the difference perfectly. She said

(43:41):
there is a heaviness around the sensation of living people,
like air compared to helium. She explained that reading a
living person feels dense or static, it feels grounded, but
when she connects to a deceased person, it feels like helium.
It's a floating sensation. It feels lighter, faster, and higher

(44:04):
in vibration. Another medium described it as a physical supercharge.
She told doctor Bischel, physically, mediumship charges me up. It's
like I've had eight cups of cappuccino. The physiology changes,
the energy changes, and the emotion changes. Doctor Bischel found
that mediums consistently report feeling deep love when talking to

(44:28):
the dead, a love so strong it sometimes makes them
feel like they lose themselves. One medium said, I feel
like I don't know who I am anymore. I'm at
one with a spirit person. I'm part of their energy. So,
whether it's Rancy Venom hugging her mother in eighteen seventy
eight or a modern medium feeling that loving helium buzz

(44:51):
in twenty twenty six, the evidence is consistent. There is
always a presence, and that presence brings love. We have
these incredible stories, we have the science, we have the sensations,
but does it count as proof? In her essay, doctor
Bischel moves away from the science lab and steps into
the courtroom. She asks a very powerful question, what constitutes

(45:16):
proof in a criminal trial. You don't need one hundred
percent absolute certainty. You can't travel back in time to
see the crime happen. What you need is proof beyond
a reasonable doubt. That is the standard we use to
make life and death decisions. Doctor Bischel actually interviewed one

(45:36):
of her Winbridge certified research mediums, a woman named Tracy,
who used to work in law enforcement. She knew the
legal system in sign and out. Doctor Bischell asked her,
based on the evidence the quintuple blind studies, the accuracy rates,
and the impossibility of cheating, if this were a trial,

(45:57):
how would you vote. Tracy didn't hesitate, She said, where
I presented this question in a courtroom, I would vote
along with beyond a reasonable doubt. In court, you look
at the facts, You look at the reliability of the witnesses,
you look at the impossibility of the alternative explanations. In
the case of the afterlife, the alternative explanations involve things

(46:20):
like super telepathy that someone could read someone's mind and
steal chess strategies from a living brain, or mass hallucinations
that allow blind people to see. Doctor Bischel argues that
these alternative explanations have become unreasonable. It is unreasonable to
believe that a housewife in the Midwest learned and spoke

(46:43):
fluent Finish just to trick a researcher. It is unreasonable
to believe that a thirteen year old girl faked being
someone else for three months without slipping up once. And
it is unreasonable to believe that twenty mediums in a
lab all guests the exact same details by chance. When
the odds are one in a million. When the doubt

(47:05):
becomes unreasonable, the verdict must be guilty or in this case, alive. Yes,
the dead are alive, we just can't see them. Doctor
Bischel concludes her essay with a powerful statement. She says
that the scientific evidence she has collected meets, if not surpasses,

(47:26):
what is required in a court of law. The most
logical explanation, the only explanation that fits all the facts,
is that human consciousness survives death. So, my friend, the
jury is in. The verdict has been read. But here's
the problem. The court of public opinion hasn't heard the
evidence yet. Most people in the world still think all

(47:49):
this afterlife talk is just wishful thinking. They don't know
about the Windbridge Protocol, they don't know about the Watsiko Wonder.
They don't know that we're approaching almost three hundred episodes
of Shades of the Afterlife, with so many stories from
professional and incredible people. It's one of the reasons we

(48:10):
have a new film out called Evidence of the Afterlife,
Saving Evidential Mediumship. It's My Way, along with filmmaker Robert
Lyon and Mediums Carrie McLoud and Phil Dykes of taking
this courtroom verdict and putting it on the big screen.
In the film, we take you inside the laboratory. We
show you the history. We show you the science that

(48:33):
doctor Bischel and others have fought so hard to uncover.
We show you why Mediumship is under attack and why
skeptics are trying so hard to bury it. Of course,
we humans grieve, and I'm going to continue to give
you every bit of information so that you know that
the afterlife is real. Your loved ones are still alive
and you will see them again. So if you enjoyed

(48:55):
this episode today, why not check out our film. There's
a link to it on my main page at We
Don'tdie dot com. Just scroll to the bottom and while
you're there, if you don't yet have a copy of
my book and need like a free PDF copy of
We Don't Die, a Skeptics Discovery of Life after Death,
just enter your name and your email address. There's some

(49:16):
other free goodies there as well. I invite you to
join our free Sunday gathering on zoom. Starts two o'clock
New York time, and we have hundreds of people from
all over the world join us. There's a medium demonstration
included in every single service, and they are empowering, inspirational
and fun. I want to thank doctor Stephen Browdie and

(49:40):
doctor Julie Bischel for their incredible research. They are true
pioneers and we get to benefit from their work. So,
my friend, the verdict is in. The logic holds up check,
the science holds up check, and the love holds up check.
You are not a body that has a soul. You
are a soul that has a body. We really are

(50:00):
as a divine, eternal being and we're all here to
learn to grow and to love and to forgive and
be kind and help others. And when this life is over,
the game isn't finished. It's just time to move to
a different board. I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you from the
bottom of my heart for listening to Shades of the

(50:22):
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Paranormal
Podcast Network.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost
Ay and Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out
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