December 6, 2025 • 51 mins
Join Sandra and explore the strange and tangible afterlife proof of physical mediumship.
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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. Hi.
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on a journey to prove the existence of life after death.
Each episode will discuss the reasons we now know that
(01:04):
our loved ones have survived physical death and so will we.
Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. This episode will be
some true stories of life after death, stories that are
designed to give you hope, perhaps get your mind off grief,
even for just a little while most of the stories
come from a long, long time ago. You may have
(01:26):
heard of physical mediumship before, or seen the movie Ghostbusters
and heard terms like ectoplasm, and in your mind that
little red flag that skeptical mind and might be saying, Sandra,
this is crazy. But I'm asking you to be open
and realize our minds are designed to be skeptical. You
(01:47):
and I are hurling through an ever expanding universe on
a planet which is one of billions and billions. At night,
we look up at the stars that are thousands of
lifetimes away, and if you look at your own hand,
what is it really? Through the lens of quantum physics,
we know that if you could zoom in past the cells,
(02:09):
past the molecules, past the atoms, all you and I
are is invisible, vibrating energy. Why am I sharing this
because things that may seem too hard to believe, they're
part of reality. You and I are made of energy.
And what's the first rule of science That energy cannot
(02:31):
be created or destroyed. So if our minds can accept
that as reality, maybe we can open up just a
little bit to this weird and wonderful conversation we'll have today. First,
when we see a rainbow, when does it appear that's
right after a storm? And when we see a butterfly
that's beautiful and fragile, what did it have to go through?
(02:53):
And when through a total transformation in complete darkness, rearranging
all of its molecules to be comes something new. Our
lives are often like that. It's out of the darkest
times we can get our biggest growth. It was after
the death of my father that I went looking for
evidence the after life, evidence about grief and why it
(03:14):
hurts so bad. And out of that we have all
these episodes of shades of the afterlife are Sunday gathering
and so much more. The woman who created Mothers Against
Drunk Driving, you know how she started right with the
vehicle death of her child. When I first started my journey,
I was the biggest skeptic of all. In fact, that's
(03:36):
the subtitle of my book, We Don't Die, A Skeptics
Discovery of Life after Death. The only reason I changed
my mind is because of the evidence, the things I
experienced that cracked my skeptical mind right open back to
physical mediumship. Remember the movie Ghostbusters. There is truth behind
(03:57):
the story. Now, I don't mean the Green Slimy Stuf
and the Giant marshmallow Man. But the idea for the
movie came from a very real, very documented family history.
The man who wrote and starred in Ghostbusters, of course,
is Dan Ackroyd, and he comes from a very long
line of spiritualists. His great grandfather, his grandfather, and his
(04:19):
father all took this very seriously. Dan's father, Maurice, was
a Bell telephone engineer. He was so serious about this
that he actually asked his colleagues at Bell if they
thought it was possible to build a high vibration crystal
radio as a mechanical way to contact the spirit world.
(04:44):
Dan's father, Peter Ackroyd, wrote a fantastic book called A
History of Ghosts. In it, he tells the story about
his own grandfather, Samuel Ackroyd. Peter and his sister were
cleaning out the dark bay of the old family home.
In the back, they found an old blue metal trunk.
(05:06):
When they pried it open, there were eighty three journals
handwritten by his grandfather Samuel. These journals, written from nineteen
oh five to nineteen thirty one, were detailed accounts of
the seances and mediumship experiments he held in his farmhouse,
Peter Ackroyd remembers his own childhood. He writes about being
(05:30):
a little boy hiding in the cellar and watching one
of his grandfather's seances. He sets the scene all these
black cars pulling up to the farmhouse, the men in
their three piece suits, the women in their stylish hats.
He describes hiding on the damp cellar stairs, peeking through
a crack in the door. He watches his grandfather Samuel
(05:53):
tell everyone to be seated. The drapes are drawn, the
room is in faint light. The guests all hold hands
around the table. He watches as the medium, a young man,
closes his eyes and slips into a trance. Little Peter
Ackroyd is hiding there, trying to be perfectly still, when
(06:14):
he accidentally knocks over a broom. It falls with a
terrible clatter, and the whole house goes silent. The medium,
still in a deep trance, turns his head towards the
cellar door, and then a very amused voice called out
and eerily said, would the young man care to join
(06:35):
this circle? He was discovered, but he was invited in,
And Peter Ackroyd grew up reading those eighty three journals.
He passed that knowledge and those books to his son Dan,
and from that blue trunk full of seance journals, the
idea for Ghostbusters was born. So when the Acroids were
(06:56):
talking about seances, what did they mean? That word seance
sounds spooky, doesn't it, But it's just a French word
that means a meeting or a sitting. That's all, a
meeting of people in good fellowship and sincerity of purpose.
And you'll hear us talk about a cabinet. It's usually
a corner of a room with a curtain pulled across it.
(07:17):
The medium sits behind it, and it said that the
darkness helps to build up the energy, like a battery charging.
And the weirdest word of all is ectoplasm. In Ghostbusters,
it's that green slime, But in these real historical accounts
it's described as the life force, a creative substance or
a vapor like substance that comes from the medium's body
(07:42):
the spirit. People who are just energy can then step
into this substance and use it to become solid and
real again. They can use it to create a voice
box to speak, or even form a hand you can
touch now why does so much of this have to
happened in the dark. For skeptics, it feels like a
(08:02):
setup for a magic trick. But the great physical medium
Stuart Alexander used a beautiful analogy. He said, one might
as well argue that the dark room was unnecessary for
early photographic development. No one would question the fact that
the development of an embryo in the darkness of the
womb is essential for the creation of life itself. It's
(08:25):
not spooky darkness, it's creative darkness. It's the darkness of
the butterfly's chrysalis. It's the rich dark soil a seed
needs to sprout. And what's so amazing is that some
of these mediums in the past, the most powerful ones,
didn't even need the dark. This brings me to one
of the most wild, but most well documented, and sometimes
(08:48):
the most frustrating cases in history. His name was Carmine Mirabelli.
He was a Brazilian medium in the early nineteen hundreds,
and his story didn't start in a seance room. It
started in a shoe store where he worked. Eyewitnesses said
that when he was around, strange things would happen. Shoe
(09:08):
boxes would suddenly fly off, the shelves and reportedly chase
him out of the store and onto the street. People
were terrified, of course, they thought he was possessed. But
a research study in Brazil, the Caesar Lombroso Academy of
Psychical Studies, decided to study him. They reportedly held three
(09:29):
hundred and ninety two of these seances or sittings with him,
and what they claimed is mind blowing mirabelly. They said
could materialize spirits in broad daylight or in a room
with bright electric lights. Now we're talking about solid physical forms.
(09:49):
Doctors and scientists were present and they claimed they would
examine these materialized figures who were sometimes there for over
thirty minutes. They would check their pulse, listen to their heartbeat,
and they were warm like you and I. One of
the most famous stories is about a doctor Susa, his
(10:10):
deceased daughter allegedly materialized in broad daylight for thirty six minutes.
The report says she spoke to her father, she embraced him,
her pulse was tested, and they were even photographed together
before she de materialized and disappeared in front of everyone's eyes.
(10:32):
In another case, the spirit of a deceased Bishop Camargo
barras materialized in his full robes. Doctors examined him, felt
his teeth, his pulse, and listened to his heartbeat. Then
he reportedly dissolved away from the feet upwards in front
of the witnesses. Sounds amazing, right, However, Mirabelli was also
(10:57):
caught with a fake. Now, this photograph showed him levitating
several feet off the ground. It was published everywhere as
proof of his mediumship. But years later an investigator, doctor
Gordon Stein, found the original print of that photo, and
(11:18):
in that photo you could clearly see where the negative
had been tampered with. The chemical marks shown that Mirabelly
had been standing on a ladder, and the ladder had
been erased from the picture. This one picture made everyone
think that Mirabelly was a fraud. But was he really?
(11:39):
Were all of these sittings fraudulent? This is the central
mystery of physical mediumship. Was he just a fraud? If
he was, how did he fool five hundred and fifty
five witnesses over the years, including doctors and scientists in
broad daylight? How did he make a breathing, pulse, beating
(12:00):
person appeared in a sealed room? Or was he what
they call a mixed medium, someone who was genuinely gifted,
but when the power failed or he got impatient, he
decided to help it along with a little trick. We'll
never know for sure, but the case of Mirabelli teaches
us the most important lesson. Our skepticism is healthy. We
(12:23):
should be looking for ladders and tricks. It's why in
real physical mediumship, controls are important. Checking the room, strapping
the medium to a chair with thick plastic zip ties,
making sure everyone in the circle is holding hands. For me,
my journey from skeptic to where I am now with
(12:44):
physical mediumship, it wasn't a photograph. It was having my
own experience in a room with all those controls in place.
And since I've had dozens of those experiences, when we
get back, I'll share the first experienvariance I had and
what changed my hatred of Christmas into something truly magical.
(13:05):
We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Hairinormal
Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(13:35):
Sandra Champlain. Today we're talking a bit about physical mediumship
and what brought me to liking Christmas again. For almost
forty years of my life. To be honest, I hated Christmas.
I'd hear that First Christmas Carol and my stomach would
just turn upside down. The music, the decorations, all of it.
Maybe you're feeling the same way as.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
A little girl.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
My first thirty years of Christmas were magical. I'd wake
up at four in the morning, wake everybody up in
the house that Santa had come and there were presents
under the tree. But around fourteen or fifteen, my parents
got divorced and life just changed. Christmas was no longer
a happy one, but a time for me that other
(14:19):
families were happy, but mine was broken. That heartache and
that grief, it just seemed to build up a year
after year, and then in my twenties I had developed
a huge fear of dying. I was terrified when I'd
go to bed at night, not knowing what comes next.
And as awful as that fear was, I can look
back now and say I'm grateful it happened, because that
(14:42):
fear was the storm where my rainbow came into play.
It was the darkness I went through that forced me
to go on this journey to find truth, and it
gave me some amazing experiences, like my first medium class
back in two thousand and five, where I was a
total skeptic, but the medium promised that if we attend
(15:03):
her course, we would be someone who could accurately tell
the deceased people around others. The first partner I paired
up with, we were told we weren't really doing medium readings.
She was just walking us through how we would give
a reading when the time came. She just told us
to use our imagination. So I did. I sat knee
(15:26):
to knee with a woman I'd never seen before, closed
my eyes, used my imagination and invented a person standing
behind her. I thought I was making it up, but
I told her that her grandfather's name was Yon. He
was a fisherman in Denmark. He had blonde hair, blue eyes,
and he had a big gap between his two front teeth.
He had really bad skin, wind burned. I could see
(15:49):
him on a fishing boat. I heard him coughing and
saw him puffing a cigarette. And I told her, I
feel like he died from lung cancer and he wants
to tell your mom that he loves her. So I
thought I did a good job, and I opened my
eyes like, okay, it's your turn, and this lady was crying,
streams of tears coming down her face. In fact, every
(16:10):
detail that I thought I had invented was actually correct
evidence about her grandfather. His name was Jan was a
fisherman in Denmark. He fit the description perfectly in that
message that he loved his daughter well. He had never
told his daughter he loved her while living, but wanted
her to know that from the afterlife. My second great
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AHA moment came years later when I learned about electronic
voice phenomena also called EVP. It was pouring rain outside.
I believed in the afterlife at that point, but I
needed tangible or auditory evidence if I was going to
tell other people about it. I pressed record on my
digital recorder, recording the sound of the rain, and just
(16:54):
imagined deceased loved ones is at the foot of my bed,
and I said, if you guys are here and this
is real and I meant to help people, I need
you to talk very loud and then I'll say good night.
So I recorded the rain for about a minute and
then I said good night. When I plagued it back
the hairs on my arms just stood up. I had
(17:15):
to stop it, rewind it, play it again. There were
four different voices, two men, two women saying good night, Sandra,
good night, good night, good night. You'd think these moments
would have been enough to heal me, and they were amazing,
But did they bring my love of Christmas back? That
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part of my heart was still broken. The people that
taught me about EVP Tom and Lisa Butler, who wrote
the book Is No Death and There Are No Dead,
often spoke about physical mediumship. I did my research and
found physical medium Scott Milligan and an event being held
in England called Voices from the Past. Although my fear
(17:59):
was at an all time, I traveled three thousand miles
to a place with strangers where I would have to
sit in the dark to experience the weirdest of all.
As an afterlife researcher, I had to know is there
any truth to physical mediumship. The event was actually on
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Thanksgiving Day and they held what they called a Christmas
Tree seance. In the center of the room was about
a four foot artificial Christmas tree. We had all been
asked to bring wrapped gifts for the spirit children. All
of these presents were placed under the tree and on
the floor around it were some musical toys, a toy piano,
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a bell, a drum. The medium, Scott Milligan, went and
sat in his cabinet. He was strapped down to his
chair with heavy duty plastic zip ties. This wasn't a game.
Everyone was invited to check them, pull on them to
make sure. He absolutely could not get out. No way
(19:05):
anyone could get in or out. No hidden cabinets. We
could see everything. The lights went out. We were instructed
to hold hands with a rule. If anyone lets go,
you have to speak up. I felt safe, but I
was so nervous. The first thing we did was build
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the energy. How did we do this by singing? And
what did we sing? Oh, my gosh, we sang Christmas
Carol's jingle bells, the twelve Days of Christmas. And there
I was in the dark, holding hands with strangers and
thinking what am I doing here? This is crazy. We
sang our hearts out, and then a spirit person named
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Daniel spoke out of the thin air. His voice was
playful and kind. He had us laughing, and after a
few minutes he said, the children have arrived. What happened
next I will never forget. The room was suddenly filled
with the sound of ripping paper. It was the sound
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of maybe a dozen children in the room, all unwrapping
those Christmas presents at the exact same time. It was
that same sound of Christmas morning, with all the joy
and excitement. And then the children started playing. The bell
started ringing, the toy drums started banging, The toy piano
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was plinking away, all at once. There were hula hoops
in the room with glow in the Dark tape, and
suddenly they were floating through the air, zigzagging around the
room as if little hands were carrying them. A stuffed
animal was tossed and landed right in my lap. I
felt a little child touched my hand, and later a
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little glow in the dark plaque was presented to me
and I could see a little child's hands holding it.
I was crying, but they were happy tears, because there
were no children who entered the room with us. That
medium was tied to a chair. We were holding hands.
It was magic, real magic, and all of those toys
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were donated to a children's orphanage, infused with the love
from those spirit children. In that moment, everything changed for me,
Christmas became magical again. And I'm not the only one
who experienced this, not by a long shot. There are
some old recordings from the nineteen nineties from the archive
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of the Noah's Arks Society. It's a collection of elderly
spiritualists telling their stories of what they witnessed decades ago.
One of them described her own Christmas tree seance back
in the late nineteen forties or nineteen fifties. She said,
the room was bleak and cold, but they dressed a
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tree with trumpets and little packs of sweets and candies.
What happened next, she said, My goodness, was it interesting?
Was it noisy? She describes the exact same thing, spirit
children yelling, shouting, blowing the trumpets. It was a delight,
she said. And then, she says, a little spirit girl
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of about three years old sat herself on my lap.
I felt her there, and then this little girl pushed
into my mouth a packet of toffee. There's also another
story from a woman named Joan Honor who sat with
the physical medium William Olsen. She describes the exact same thing.
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They always placed the Christmas tree in the center of
the circle with wrapped little parcels underneath, and again she
said one could hear the bells being rung on the
tree and the sound of the parcels being unwrapped. But
her story has a beautiful evidential part. She had a
dolly which looked like a fairy for the top of
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the tree, and in her mind she secretly dedicated it
to her niece who was in spirit. Her name was Josephine,
and she didn't tell a single person about it. During
the seance, the trumpet came right to her, tapped her
three times, and a little voice said, you made me
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a dolly, didn't you. And then there's this story about
physicist Jan Vandersandy. He told me about his Christmas sitting.
His wife had bought a little black doll as a
gift for the spirit children, and she had wrapped it
up so no one knew what was inside the gift.
During the seance, a spirit guide named Brian came through
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and spoke to Jan's wife, Oh, hello, Marlene, thank you
for the nice present, And then he added, you're going
to have one of those next year, but it won't
be that color. Think about that. The lights were out,
the present was wrapped, and he was right. The following November,
Jan's wife had their daughter. After that, Jan said, the
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children had arrived, and what did he hear? The exact
same thing I did. He said, all of a sudden,
you hear this noise of all these presents being unwrapped.
At the same time he heard the little drums and
whistles being played. And he said, a little child came
and pulled on his pants, and a little hand held
(24:38):
his wife's hand. How do we explain that we don't
really you just feel it. There's no way our minds
can get around what we experience. That night in the
sands room, singing those carols, I finally understood the magic
I'd lost wasn't gone, and the love grieving wasn't gone.
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Throughout the seance, people's deceased loved ones returned, got to
speak through an ectoplasmic voice box, and gave evidential messages
to people in the circle. So how do I feel
now about Christmas? I get excited that I can create
my own reality knowing that my loved ones in spirit
(25:23):
are still around when we come back from the break.
I want to share some more stories of reunion that
have proved to me that this is all so real.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast, a paranormal
podcast network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(26:05):
Sandra Champlain. I know how this all sounds. A dozen
spirit children unwrapping Christmas presents, a little hand holding mine,
a floating glowing trumpet. It sounds like a one in
a million fairy tale. But it's not. My friend Scott Milligan,
his entire life's work is what he calls a result
of the ripple effect. It's a story about how one's
(26:28):
family's deepest grief led to one of the most incredible
stories ever documented. It starts with a man named John Austen.
John was a very strict ex army man. His son
Howard was his pride of joy, of course, and an
Olympic hopeful. But in nineteen sixty seven, Howard was on
(26:49):
a train that crashed and he was killed along with
a friend. John fell into a deep, dark grief and
he didn't want to live anymore. John's wife, Geraldine, got
him to start investigating the afterlife. They started, like many
people did in that day, with table tipping just sitting
at a table, hands resting on it, asking for a sign.
(27:12):
For a long time, nothing happened. Then one day it moved.
John was just sitting with Geraldine, who was in a
wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. Their hands were on the table
when it started to move, and then it disappeared. John,
in a panic, turned on the light. He thought Geraldine
had somehow thrown it, but there she was, sitting in
(27:34):
her wheelchair, just as stunned as he was. He looked up.
The table was pinned to the ceiling. A moment later
it came crashing down and broke a leg. That was
the start. They went to see the famous medium, Doris
Fisher Stokes. They were late, and as they wheeled Geraldine
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to the front of the packed hall, Doras stopped the
entire demonstration, and she pointed right at John and gave
him thirty eight names of his family members who were
in spirit, and all of them were correct. And then
she said something that would change his life. One day,
the trumpets will lift and the dead will walk in
your front room. Now go away and work at it.
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John and Geraldine became obsessed with his prophecy. They got
a sitting with another famous medium, Leslie Flint. Leslie was
a direct voice medium, meaning voices would just come out
of the air around him. Skeptics, of course, said he
was a ventriloquist, so he would do his seances while
holding a mouthful of water or with his mouth taped shut,
(28:43):
and the voices they still came. John and Geraldine are
in this one sitting and the guide's voice comes and says, oh,
there's someone pushing their way forward. It was the voice
of their son, Howard. John told Scott what that moment
felt like. He said, imagine you're in the darkest and
most painful nightmare and then all of a sudden put
(29:06):
in a place of paradise. They started their own home circle,
just the two of them, and they'd record their sittings
on an old real to reel tape recorder. One night,
Geraldine asked, is that you boys, and the table tapped
one for yes, two for no, and it tapped yes.
But when they played the tape back, right after Geraldine's question,
(29:30):
a voice was on the tape and it was Howard's
and it said, yes, mom, we're here. Later in that
same recording, their cat walked into the room. You can
hear Geraldine say be careful of the cat. Howard's voice
comes on the tape and says, I won't hurt Blackie.
The prophecy wasn't yet fulfilled. The dead weren't walking in
(29:52):
their front room. Not yet. Years go by, John and
Geraldine are sitting, just the two of them, building the nest.
It's sary power. The spirit world tells them they need
to renovate their seance room and they need to buy
a red carpet. So John goes to a carpet shop.
A young salesman in his thirties comes to their house
(30:13):
to measure the room. As he's measuring John who would
say this to people just to see their reaction. You know,
we hold seances here. And the young man takes it
in stride and says, oh, I'm interested in that. I've
been to some meetings. John asks him if he wants
to try sitting at the table. The young carpet salesman
(30:34):
says yes, so they sit. The table, which always went
to John as he had the most power, this time
moved to the young man, Colin Fry, and then a
voice came from the spirit guide who said, I've been
waiting for you. John remembered the prophecy, this random carpet salesman.
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He was the medium they had been waiting for all
those years, and within just twenty one weeks of sitting
with them, Colin Fry, who went on to become one
of the UK's most famous mediums, was a full materialization medium.
John's wife, Geraldine, at this point, is very, very sick
(31:17):
with MS. She's bedbound. The circle stops one Sunday night.
It's clear she's not going to make it through the night.
John sits with her and she passes into the spirit world.
Of course, John is heartbroken all over again, but he
had made a promise to the spirit world, same time,
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same place, same people. So that Tuesday, the circle meets
Colin Fry. The medium is there, and John, grieving, wheels
his wife's empty wheelchair into the room and puts it
in its usual spot. They sit, they play the music,
they sing, They wait, and then a four builds. A
(32:01):
woman materializes. She steps out of the cabinet, not bound
in a chair, not having any illness, and she walks
right over to her husband John. She says, you can
get rid of that, and the empty wheelchair flew back
across the room and hit the door. Geraldine in spirit
(32:24):
said I'm fine, I'm well. John asked her who met you,
and she said Howard. Of course my mother was there too.
Oh John, heaven does exist. Scott told me what John
said about that moment. How can I be upset? This
woman was confined to a wheelchair and now is walking
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with my son. I'm just frustrated now because I'm here.
That is the power of this, my friends. It's the
ultimate proof of reunion. And these stories of physical proof
are everywhere. From the book on the Medium Alec Harris,
a story is told about a young soldier who materialized
for his grieving mother to prove it was him. He said, Mom,
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I want you to be quite sure that this is
really me. Look I've still got it, see, and he
took her hand and placed it on his chest. He
had a deformed breastbone, which his family had laughingly called
his chicken bone. He materialized his deformity to convince his mother.
Another incredible story from those old tapes of senior spiritualists
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comes from a woman named Ivy Northridge. She was in
a small seance with just a few people. The spirit
guide a little girl said to one of the men,
I've got something for you. Put your hand out and
open it wide. The man held his hand out. The
guide said close it, close it tight. He closed his fist.
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A moment later he said, it's getting awfully hot. Keep
it closed. She said, not ready yet. Finally she said,
now you can open it. He opened his hand and
in his palm was a miniature silver rowing boat, like
a tiny charm for a bracelet. Now here is the
interesting part. This man lived on a river, and that
(34:19):
very same day he had placed an ad in the
local newspaper asking to buy a rowing boat for his daughters,
and the spirit world had delivered one, but it was
a tiny one, right into his hand. A stunning account
comes again from the circle of al Carris. A very
well known medical man, Sir Alexander Cannon, was invited to
(34:43):
a sitting. During the seance, a form materialized. It was
Mahatma Gandhi, who had passed years earlier. He materialized exactly
how he had been on earth in his loincloth and spectacles,
and then he proceeded to convey at length with Sir
Alexander in Hindu, a language the medium Alec absolutely did
(35:07):
not know, but the doctor did. And if that wasn't
good enough. After Gandhi left, two Tibetan monks materialized. They
also spoke to the doctor in a little known Tibetan tongue,
which Sir Alexander also understood. He left highly satisfied. How
do you fake that? How do you fake someone speaking
(35:30):
fluent Hindu one moment and a rear Tibetan language the next,
all while fully materialized in a red lit room. We
also have the story from the Saturday night club, the
home circle of the medium Minnie Harrison. Her son Tom
kept detailed records. A highly respected surgeon, mister Britton Jones,
(35:52):
was a regular sitter. He wanted to test these spirits.
One night, Tom's aunt ag materialized in the red light.
The surgeon asked if he could take her pulse. She
held out her arm and mister Jones put his fingers
on her wrist, stood there for about half a minute,
and then he turned the entire circle and announced, thank you,
(36:16):
missus Hammond, you live and this isn't an isolated case.
Physicist doctor Jan Vandersandy told me his story. He sat
with the medium David Thompson. The guide William materialized and
he had a big, warm hand jam being a scientist,
asked William, do you have a pulse? The spirit grabbed
(36:38):
Jan's hand and he felt the pulse in his neck.
This all defies our logic, but the spirits, they seemed
to have a sense of humor about it. In the
same circle of Minnie Harrison, a spirit called Granny Lumsden materialized.
She'd always had cold feet in life. Tom asked her
if her feet were still cold. She replied, well, we
(37:00):
haven't got any guests tonight, so I haven't brought my feet.
She then lifted up the gown, pulled it waist high,
and there was nothing. Tom said he could see straight
through her to his father on the other side. Imagine
witnessing that these stories show proof of identity, proof of physicality.
They also show this isn't some scary event. It's filled
(37:24):
with love and laughter. Scott Milligan told me about a
woman in his circle whose husband materialized, but she wasn't
interested in talking to her husband. Why because he had
brought through the family parent, which had flown around in
the seance room. The wife was ignoring her husband in spirit,
just saying, oh, pretty boy, you're a pretty boy. These
(37:48):
stories from surgeons from physicists, from grieving parents, from me,
I'll tell us the same thing. Connection is real, it's physical,
and it's healing and filled with love. When we come
back from the break, we'll talk about how all of
this works and why it's an important message in the world.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the
(38:10):
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(38:37):
Sanders Champlain. If you like these stories and you want
to hear the original audios from their senior spiritualists, I've
put them together on a playlist. I have also started
a list of books on physical medium stories that I
know you'll like. Top of the list is definitely the
Alec Harris book. Just go to my website, we Don't
(38:59):
Die dot com. Go to the page Scott Milligan, scroll
to the bottom and you will find them there. These
stories absolutely give me goose films every time. But they
also bring up that nagging, big question, how is any
of this possible? And if it's real, why it doesn't
happen in the dark. I've had that question for years.
(39:20):
In those old archives I found a beautiful answer from
the medium Stuart Alexander. He said, think about it like this.
One might as well argue that the dark room was
unnecessary for early photographic development, and no one would question
the fact that the development of an embryo in complete
darkness of the womb is essential for the creation of
(39:43):
life itself. It's not spooky darkness, though, it's creative darkness.
It's the darkness of the butterflies chrysalis. It's the rich
dark soil a seed needs to sprout. And it's not
just an analogy that darkness is a vital physical for
the medium. In those same archives, the respected medium Ivy
(40:05):
Northridge told a story about her friend, the famous medium
Helen Duncan. She said that one night after a seance,
Helen pulled her aside and said, look what the people
did to me last night. Helen lifted her skirt and
her whole abdomen was black and blue because someone had
switched on a light and this ectoplasm had whipped back
(40:28):
into her solar plexus. Another witness, Jeane Woods, told a
similar story of a medium named Chris A sitter unknowingly
lit a cigarette lighter, the ectoplasm flew back and the
medium suffered severe burns on his abdomen. A couple of
years ago, our friend Scott Milligan, same thing happened. Someone
(40:50):
accidentally turned on a light. Although they all got to
see the ectoplasm coming from him and holding up a
trumpet in midair, it shot back to him like a
rubber band and he was left with black and blue
marks around his eyes and burn marks on his belly.
This is why the controls are so strict. This is
(41:10):
why we hold hands, this is why we sit in
the dark. It really is to protect the medium. David
Fontana a British psychologist and a former president of the
Society for Psychical Research, which is a very skeptical group.
He said, any professional conjuror is welcome to try and
fake these things if they follow these same rules. No
(41:33):
unsupervised access to the room beforehand. They have to submit
to bodily searches. They must be securely bound by fool
proof restraints. There must be no money involved. In fact,
Stuart Alexander's own method was a brilliant way to deal
with skepticism. He did not use a cabinet. He sat
(41:55):
in the group with everyone else, and he had glowing
the dark tape on his so you knew exactly where
he was at all times. And in that sitting, a
small red light was on and Stuart strapped to his
chair as an ectoplasmic hand formed on the table in
the middle of the room. People in the front were
(42:16):
invited to touch it. They said it was warm. Not
all mediumship even uses ectoplasm. I once interviewed Robin Foy,
who started the world famous Home Circle in the nineteen
nineties called the Skull Experiment. They did things differently. Their
spirit team said they didn't need ectoplasm, but instead a
(42:37):
blend of three energies, the energy of spirit, the spiritual
energy of the sitters, and the natural energy of the earth.
And the things they produced were pretty mind blowing. They
received over one hundred and fifty apports. Physical objects appeared
out of thin air. The most incredible story I've heard
(42:59):
is they got a war time time newspaper from nineteen
forty four and it looked brand new. It had scientifically
been tested by a print research association who verified it
was genuine wartime newsprint. The spirit team at school wasn't
just doing it for proof, they were doing it for healing.
They would see little spirit lights in the room, and
(43:21):
these lights would heal people. He told me about a
woman who came to the circle who had such bad
arthritis in her knees that she could hardly walk in
the dark. The whole group watched as one of these
little spirit lights went into her knee and stayed there
for five minutes. When she got home, all the pain
(43:42):
in that knee was gone. So she came back the
next week and the light went into her other knee.
Robin said that twenty years later she was still pain free. This,
my friends, is the why. Ivy Northridge told one last
story about a sitting with the Great Alec Harris. She
saw him sitting in his cabinet in the red light,
(44:05):
and a little bearded guide named David materialized. He came
over to her and she shook his hand. As she did,
a thought popped into her head. This is the hand
of a child of five. It was tiny. She hadn't
said a word, but like a flash, the guide answered
her thought. He said, they don't want to see our hands,
(44:26):
so we don't waste our time on them. It's our
faces they want to see and hear what we've got
to say. That's the why which brings me to this
important story. It defines our friend Scott Milligan's life purpose.
After Scott's mediumship developed, he became famous for what he
(44:46):
called circus trick phenomena. He would do all the wow stuff.
He told me about demonstrations at the Arthur Finley College
where with the lights on, ectoplasm poured from the nostrils,
from the mouth, and from the belly down to the floor.
He said it rolled and creeped and formed a hand
that walked across the floor. His ego, he admits, was
(45:10):
getting very big. Then after one of these demonstrations, a
woman came up to him and she said, Scott, I've
seen you a few times now, brilliant. I love it.
But then she said, but it's not bringing my son back.
Scott said, it hit him like a knife, stabbing me
in the stomach. He felt her pain. He went back
(45:32):
to his circle and the spirit world gave him a choice.
They said, you can continue down this path and we
will show you the phenomena. But if you want loved ones,
which is going to take up most of the power,
we need to go a different course. And Scott and
his circle decided quite quickly for the voices of loved ones.
(45:54):
Why because, as he says, that's what gets a mom
up in the morning. That's the why. It's not about
trumpets and tables and floating lights. The why is the reunion.
It's the healing. It's the proof that love doesn't die.
And that brings us to the how how do we
get this back in the world. The answer from every
(46:17):
great medium is the same, the home circle. It all
starts with what Douglas Lowe's spirit guide, John King said.
He was asked what a circle needs, and he said,
give me a bunch of purely ordinary folk who have
no psychic ability whatsoever, sitting in good fellowship and in
sincerity of purpose, we can do everything. So you don't
(46:39):
need to be psychic. You just need fellowship, love, tolerance, understanding, dedication,
and patience. Patience being the biggest part. In Stuart Alexander's case,
his circle sat fourteen years with no results, nothing For
fourteen years. They just met in the dark with love,
(47:01):
had tea, cakes and coffee. Afterward, he said that was
the highlight. And only after fourteen years of that dedication
did the first voice come through Another circle. The Hodges
sat for twelve years before anything happened. This is the
ultimate lesson of the spirit world. They don't work on
our time. They work on the time of love and trust,
(47:25):
and when that trust is built, miracles happen. I want
to leave you with one last story from one of
those old recordings. Elsie sat in the home of a
medium named Frank Havard. For years, she would receive the
same apport, which was a set of rosary beads. They
would drop in her lap or come out of the trumpet,
(47:46):
but at the end of every seance she had to
give them back. She asked the spirit guide why, and
the guide told her they belonged to a lady who
has not seen the outside world for fifty two years,
so we can only loan them to you. We've got
to get them back to her before she misses them.
Elsie figured it was a nun in a closed order,
(48:08):
and then the guide said, but one day, Elsie, we
promise you there'll be yours to keep. This went on
for years. Then one friday, Frank the medium moved his
circle to a church to test the blackout for another medium.
There were more people there. The guide's voice came and
asked Elsie to cup her hands in the center of
(48:29):
the circle. The trumpet swished over her head and out
of it dropped the rosary beads. At the end of
the night, Elsie, as usual, went to give them back,
and the Guide said, no, Elsie, they are now yours
to keep. The Guide then took Elsie's hand in the
hand of Frank's wife, Lena, and put them together. He said,
(48:51):
this is true friendship, which must never be broken, because
you are going to need each other in the not
too distant future. After Elsie got her rosary beads, they
sat and the spirit of the nun Maria came through
to thank Elsie for the healing she had sent through
those rosary beads. And the week after that, the medium
(49:14):
Frank passed into the spirit world. Think about that. The
spirit world knew they kept their promise. They made sure
Elsie had her gift, and they gave her and the
medium's wife a warning of the comfort they would need,
all just three weeks before Frank passed. My friends, this
is real. It's rare to witness, but it is very real.
(49:37):
You know, my goal is never to convince you. I
just share these things that have made a difference in
my life. As Ivy Northridge said, I'm not here to
convince you. I can only tell you I know before
I was blind and now I can see. I hope
this has given you a bit of comfort and awe
and wonder. Whether it's the holiday season or another time,
(50:00):
love is all around. As a reminder, come visit me
sometime on my free Sunday gathering on Zoom two pm
New York time, every single Sunday. There's a lot to
explore on my website, we Don't Die dot com. Go
to the Scottmilligan page if you're interested in this. We
even created a guide to home Circles, which explain not
(50:22):
just home circles, but how to start your development to
have a closer connection with spirit. Remember, as my friend
Scott Milligan says, they haven't lost their life, They've just
lost their voice. I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you for listening
to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast
(50:43):
to Coast am Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
Day and Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out
all our show is on the iHeartRadio app or by
going to iHeartRadio dot com, MHM
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. Hi.
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on a journey to prove the existence of life after death.
Each episode will discuss the reasons we now know that
(01:04):
our loved ones have survived physical death and so will we.
Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. This episode will be
some true stories of life after death, stories that are
designed to give you hope, perhaps get your mind off grief,
even for just a little while most of the stories
come from a long, long time ago. You may have
(01:26):
heard of physical mediumship before, or seen the movie Ghostbusters
and heard terms like ectoplasm, and in your mind that
little red flag that skeptical mind and might be saying, Sandra,
this is crazy. But I'm asking you to be open
and realize our minds are designed to be skeptical. You
(01:47):
and I are hurling through an ever expanding universe on
a planet which is one of billions and billions. At night,
we look up at the stars that are thousands of
lifetimes away, and if you look at your own hand,
what is it really? Through the lens of quantum physics,
we know that if you could zoom in past the cells,
(02:09):
past the molecules, past the atoms, all you and I
are is invisible, vibrating energy. Why am I sharing this
because things that may seem too hard to believe, they're
part of reality. You and I are made of energy.
And what's the first rule of science That energy cannot
(02:31):
be created or destroyed. So if our minds can accept
that as reality, maybe we can open up just a
little bit to this weird and wonderful conversation we'll have today. First,
when we see a rainbow, when does it appear that's
right after a storm? And when we see a butterfly
that's beautiful and fragile, what did it have to go through?
(02:53):
And when through a total transformation in complete darkness, rearranging
all of its molecules to be comes something new. Our
lives are often like that. It's out of the darkest
times we can get our biggest growth. It was after
the death of my father that I went looking for
evidence the after life, evidence about grief and why it
(03:14):
hurts so bad. And out of that we have all
these episodes of shades of the afterlife are Sunday gathering
and so much more. The woman who created Mothers Against
Drunk Driving, you know how she started right with the
vehicle death of her child. When I first started my journey,
I was the biggest skeptic of all. In fact, that's
(03:36):
the subtitle of my book, We Don't Die, A Skeptics
Discovery of Life after Death. The only reason I changed
my mind is because of the evidence, the things I
experienced that cracked my skeptical mind right open back to
physical mediumship. Remember the movie Ghostbusters. There is truth behind
(03:57):
the story. Now, I don't mean the Green Slimy Stuf
and the Giant marshmallow Man. But the idea for the
movie came from a very real, very documented family history.
The man who wrote and starred in Ghostbusters, of course,
is Dan Ackroyd, and he comes from a very long
line of spiritualists. His great grandfather, his grandfather, and his
(04:19):
father all took this very seriously. Dan's father, Maurice, was
a Bell telephone engineer. He was so serious about this
that he actually asked his colleagues at Bell if they
thought it was possible to build a high vibration crystal
radio as a mechanical way to contact the spirit world.
(04:44):
Dan's father, Peter Ackroyd, wrote a fantastic book called A
History of Ghosts. In it, he tells the story about
his own grandfather, Samuel Ackroyd. Peter and his sister were
cleaning out the dark bay of the old family home.
In the back, they found an old blue metal trunk.
(05:06):
When they pried it open, there were eighty three journals
handwritten by his grandfather Samuel. These journals, written from nineteen
oh five to nineteen thirty one, were detailed accounts of
the seances and mediumship experiments he held in his farmhouse,
Peter Ackroyd remembers his own childhood. He writes about being
(05:30):
a little boy hiding in the cellar and watching one
of his grandfather's seances. He sets the scene all these
black cars pulling up to the farmhouse, the men in
their three piece suits, the women in their stylish hats.
He describes hiding on the damp cellar stairs, peeking through
a crack in the door. He watches his grandfather Samuel
(05:53):
tell everyone to be seated. The drapes are drawn, the
room is in faint light. The guests all hold hands
around the table. He watches as the medium, a young man,
closes his eyes and slips into a trance. Little Peter
Ackroyd is hiding there, trying to be perfectly still, when
(06:14):
he accidentally knocks over a broom. It falls with a
terrible clatter, and the whole house goes silent. The medium,
still in a deep trance, turns his head towards the
cellar door, and then a very amused voice called out
and eerily said, would the young man care to join
(06:35):
this circle? He was discovered, but he was invited in,
And Peter Ackroyd grew up reading those eighty three journals.
He passed that knowledge and those books to his son Dan,
and from that blue trunk full of seance journals, the
idea for Ghostbusters was born. So when the Acroids were
(06:56):
talking about seances, what did they mean? That word seance
sounds spooky, doesn't it, But it's just a French word
that means a meeting or a sitting. That's all, a
meeting of people in good fellowship and sincerity of purpose.
And you'll hear us talk about a cabinet. It's usually
a corner of a room with a curtain pulled across it.
(07:17):
The medium sits behind it, and it said that the
darkness helps to build up the energy, like a battery charging.
And the weirdest word of all is ectoplasm. In Ghostbusters,
it's that green slime, But in these real historical accounts
it's described as the life force, a creative substance or
a vapor like substance that comes from the medium's body
(07:42):
the spirit. People who are just energy can then step
into this substance and use it to become solid and
real again. They can use it to create a voice
box to speak, or even form a hand you can
touch now why does so much of this have to
happened in the dark. For skeptics, it feels like a
(08:02):
setup for a magic trick. But the great physical medium
Stuart Alexander used a beautiful analogy. He said, one might
as well argue that the dark room was unnecessary for
early photographic development. No one would question the fact that
the development of an embryo in the darkness of the
womb is essential for the creation of life itself. It's
(08:25):
not spooky darkness, it's creative darkness. It's the darkness of
the butterfly's chrysalis. It's the rich dark soil a seed
needs to sprout. And what's so amazing is that some
of these mediums in the past, the most powerful ones,
didn't even need the dark. This brings me to one
of the most wild, but most well documented, and sometimes
(08:48):
the most frustrating cases in history. His name was Carmine Mirabelli.
He was a Brazilian medium in the early nineteen hundreds,
and his story didn't start in a seance room. It
started in a shoe store where he worked. Eyewitnesses said
that when he was around, strange things would happen. Shoe
(09:08):
boxes would suddenly fly off, the shelves and reportedly chase
him out of the store and onto the street. People
were terrified, of course, they thought he was possessed. But
a research study in Brazil, the Caesar Lombroso Academy of
Psychical Studies, decided to study him. They reportedly held three
(09:29):
hundred and ninety two of these seances or sittings with him,
and what they claimed is mind blowing mirabelly. They said
could materialize spirits in broad daylight or in a room
with bright electric lights. Now we're talking about solid physical forms.
(09:49):
Doctors and scientists were present and they claimed they would
examine these materialized figures who were sometimes there for over
thirty minutes. They would check their pulse, listen to their heartbeat,
and they were warm like you and I. One of
the most famous stories is about a doctor Susa, his
(10:10):
deceased daughter allegedly materialized in broad daylight for thirty six minutes.
The report says she spoke to her father, she embraced him,
her pulse was tested, and they were even photographed together
before she de materialized and disappeared in front of everyone's eyes.
(10:32):
In another case, the spirit of a deceased Bishop Camargo
barras materialized in his full robes. Doctors examined him, felt
his teeth, his pulse, and listened to his heartbeat. Then
he reportedly dissolved away from the feet upwards in front
of the witnesses. Sounds amazing, right, However, Mirabelli was also
(10:57):
caught with a fake. Now, this photograph showed him levitating
several feet off the ground. It was published everywhere as
proof of his mediumship. But years later an investigator, doctor
Gordon Stein, found the original print of that photo, and
(11:18):
in that photo you could clearly see where the negative
had been tampered with. The chemical marks shown that Mirabelly
had been standing on a ladder, and the ladder had
been erased from the picture. This one picture made everyone
think that Mirabelly was a fraud. But was he really?
(11:39):
Were all of these sittings fraudulent? This is the central
mystery of physical mediumship. Was he just a fraud? If
he was, how did he fool five hundred and fifty
five witnesses over the years, including doctors and scientists in
broad daylight? How did he make a breathing, pulse, beating
(12:00):
person appeared in a sealed room? Or was he what
they call a mixed medium, someone who was genuinely gifted,
but when the power failed or he got impatient, he
decided to help it along with a little trick. We'll
never know for sure, but the case of Mirabelli teaches
us the most important lesson. Our skepticism is healthy. We
(12:23):
should be looking for ladders and tricks. It's why in
real physical mediumship, controls are important. Checking the room, strapping
the medium to a chair with thick plastic zip ties,
making sure everyone in the circle is holding hands. For me,
my journey from skeptic to where I am now with
(12:44):
physical mediumship, it wasn't a photograph. It was having my
own experience in a room with all those controls in place.
And since I've had dozens of those experiences, when we
get back, I'll share the first experienvariance I had and
what changed my hatred of Christmas into something truly magical.
(13:05):
We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Hairinormal
Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(13:35):
Sandra Champlain. Today we're talking a bit about physical mediumship
and what brought me to liking Christmas again. For almost
forty years of my life. To be honest, I hated Christmas.
I'd hear that First Christmas Carol and my stomach would
just turn upside down. The music, the decorations, all of it.
Maybe you're feeling the same way as.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
A little girl.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
My first thirty years of Christmas were magical. I'd wake
up at four in the morning, wake everybody up in
the house that Santa had come and there were presents
under the tree. But around fourteen or fifteen, my parents
got divorced and life just changed. Christmas was no longer
a happy one, but a time for me that other
(14:19):
families were happy, but mine was broken. That heartache and
that grief, it just seemed to build up a year
after year, and then in my twenties I had developed
a huge fear of dying. I was terrified when I'd
go to bed at night, not knowing what comes next.
And as awful as that fear was, I can look
back now and say I'm grateful it happened, because that
(14:42):
fear was the storm where my rainbow came into play.
It was the darkness I went through that forced me
to go on this journey to find truth, and it
gave me some amazing experiences, like my first medium class
back in two thousand and five, where I was a
total skeptic, but the medium promised that if we attend
(15:03):
her course, we would be someone who could accurately tell
the deceased people around others. The first partner I paired
up with, we were told we weren't really doing medium readings.
She was just walking us through how we would give
a reading when the time came. She just told us
to use our imagination. So I did. I sat knee
(15:26):
to knee with a woman I'd never seen before, closed
my eyes, used my imagination and invented a person standing
behind her. I thought I was making it up, but
I told her that her grandfather's name was Yon. He
was a fisherman in Denmark. He had blonde hair, blue eyes,
and he had a big gap between his two front teeth.
He had really bad skin, wind burned. I could see
(15:49):
him on a fishing boat. I heard him coughing and
saw him puffing a cigarette. And I told her, I
feel like he died from lung cancer and he wants
to tell your mom that he loves her. So I
thought I did a good job, and I opened my
eyes like, okay, it's your turn, and this lady was crying,
streams of tears coming down her face. In fact, every
(16:10):
detail that I thought I had invented was actually correct
evidence about her grandfather. His name was Jan was a
fisherman in Denmark. He fit the description perfectly in that
message that he loved his daughter well. He had never
told his daughter he loved her while living, but wanted
her to know that from the afterlife. My second great
(16:32):
AHA moment came years later when I learned about electronic
voice phenomena also called EVP. It was pouring rain outside.
I believed in the afterlife at that point, but I
needed tangible or auditory evidence if I was going to
tell other people about it. I pressed record on my
digital recorder, recording the sound of the rain, and just
(16:54):
imagined deceased loved ones is at the foot of my bed,
and I said, if you guys are here and this
is real and I meant to help people, I need
you to talk very loud and then I'll say good night.
So I recorded the rain for about a minute and
then I said good night. When I plagued it back
the hairs on my arms just stood up. I had
(17:15):
to stop it, rewind it, play it again. There were
four different voices, two men, two women saying good night, Sandra,
good night, good night, good night. You'd think these moments
would have been enough to heal me, and they were amazing,
But did they bring my love of Christmas back? That
(17:36):
part of my heart was still broken. The people that
taught me about EVP Tom and Lisa Butler, who wrote
the book Is No Death and There Are No Dead,
often spoke about physical mediumship. I did my research and
found physical medium Scott Milligan and an event being held
in England called Voices from the Past. Although my fear
(17:59):
was at an all time, I traveled three thousand miles
to a place with strangers where I would have to
sit in the dark to experience the weirdest of all.
As an afterlife researcher, I had to know is there
any truth to physical mediumship. The event was actually on
(18:21):
Thanksgiving Day and they held what they called a Christmas
Tree seance. In the center of the room was about
a four foot artificial Christmas tree. We had all been
asked to bring wrapped gifts for the spirit children. All
of these presents were placed under the tree and on
the floor around it were some musical toys, a toy piano,
(18:42):
a bell, a drum. The medium, Scott Milligan, went and
sat in his cabinet. He was strapped down to his
chair with heavy duty plastic zip ties. This wasn't a game.
Everyone was invited to check them, pull on them to
make sure. He absolutely could not get out. No way
(19:05):
anyone could get in or out. No hidden cabinets. We
could see everything. The lights went out. We were instructed
to hold hands with a rule. If anyone lets go,
you have to speak up. I felt safe, but I
was so nervous. The first thing we did was build
(19:26):
the energy. How did we do this by singing? And
what did we sing? Oh, my gosh, we sang Christmas
Carol's jingle bells, the twelve Days of Christmas. And there
I was in the dark, holding hands with strangers and
thinking what am I doing here? This is crazy. We
sang our hearts out, and then a spirit person named
(19:48):
Daniel spoke out of the thin air. His voice was
playful and kind. He had us laughing, and after a
few minutes he said, the children have arrived. What happened
next I will never forget. The room was suddenly filled
with the sound of ripping paper. It was the sound
(20:11):
of maybe a dozen children in the room, all unwrapping
those Christmas presents at the exact same time. It was
that same sound of Christmas morning, with all the joy
and excitement. And then the children started playing. The bell
started ringing, the toy drums started banging, The toy piano
(20:31):
was plinking away, all at once. There were hula hoops
in the room with glow in the Dark tape, and
suddenly they were floating through the air, zigzagging around the
room as if little hands were carrying them. A stuffed
animal was tossed and landed right in my lap. I
felt a little child touched my hand, and later a
(20:53):
little glow in the dark plaque was presented to me
and I could see a little child's hands holding it.
I was crying, but they were happy tears, because there
were no children who entered the room with us. That
medium was tied to a chair. We were holding hands.
It was magic, real magic, and all of those toys
(21:17):
were donated to a children's orphanage, infused with the love
from those spirit children. In that moment, everything changed for me,
Christmas became magical again. And I'm not the only one
who experienced this, not by a long shot. There are
some old recordings from the nineteen nineties from the archive
(21:40):
of the Noah's Arks Society. It's a collection of elderly
spiritualists telling their stories of what they witnessed decades ago.
One of them described her own Christmas tree seance back
in the late nineteen forties or nineteen fifties. She said,
the room was bleak and cold, but they dressed a
(22:01):
tree with trumpets and little packs of sweets and candies.
What happened next, she said, My goodness, was it interesting?
Was it noisy? She describes the exact same thing, spirit
children yelling, shouting, blowing the trumpets. It was a delight,
she said. And then, she says, a little spirit girl
(22:24):
of about three years old sat herself on my lap.
I felt her there, and then this little girl pushed
into my mouth a packet of toffee. There's also another
story from a woman named Joan Honor who sat with
the physical medium William Olsen. She describes the exact same thing.
(22:45):
They always placed the Christmas tree in the center of
the circle with wrapped little parcels underneath, and again she
said one could hear the bells being rung on the
tree and the sound of the parcels being unwrapped. But
her story has a beautiful evidential part. She had a
dolly which looked like a fairy for the top of
(23:07):
the tree, and in her mind she secretly dedicated it
to her niece who was in spirit. Her name was Josephine,
and she didn't tell a single person about it. During
the seance, the trumpet came right to her, tapped her
three times, and a little voice said, you made me
(23:27):
a dolly, didn't you. And then there's this story about
physicist Jan Vandersandy. He told me about his Christmas sitting.
His wife had bought a little black doll as a
gift for the spirit children, and she had wrapped it
up so no one knew what was inside the gift.
During the seance, a spirit guide named Brian came through
(23:51):
and spoke to Jan's wife, Oh, hello, Marlene, thank you
for the nice present, And then he added, you're going
to have one of those next year, but it won't
be that color. Think about that. The lights were out,
the present was wrapped, and he was right. The following November,
Jan's wife had their daughter. After that, Jan said, the
(24:15):
children had arrived, and what did he hear? The exact
same thing I did. He said, all of a sudden,
you hear this noise of all these presents being unwrapped.
At the same time he heard the little drums and
whistles being played. And he said, a little child came
and pulled on his pants, and a little hand held
(24:38):
his wife's hand. How do we explain that we don't
really you just feel it. There's no way our minds
can get around what we experience. That night in the
sands room, singing those carols, I finally understood the magic
I'd lost wasn't gone, and the love grieving wasn't gone.
(25:02):
Throughout the seance, people's deceased loved ones returned, got to
speak through an ectoplasmic voice box, and gave evidential messages
to people in the circle. So how do I feel
now about Christmas? I get excited that I can create
my own reality knowing that my loved ones in spirit
(25:23):
are still around when we come back from the break.
I want to share some more stories of reunion that
have proved to me that this is all so real.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast, a paranormal
podcast network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(26:05):
Sandra Champlain. I know how this all sounds. A dozen
spirit children unwrapping Christmas presents, a little hand holding mine,
a floating glowing trumpet. It sounds like a one in
a million fairy tale. But it's not. My friend Scott Milligan,
his entire life's work is what he calls a result
of the ripple effect. It's a story about how one's
(26:28):
family's deepest grief led to one of the most incredible
stories ever documented. It starts with a man named John Austen.
John was a very strict ex army man. His son
Howard was his pride of joy, of course, and an
Olympic hopeful. But in nineteen sixty seven, Howard was on
(26:49):
a train that crashed and he was killed along with
a friend. John fell into a deep, dark grief and
he didn't want to live anymore. John's wife, Geraldine, got
him to start investigating the afterlife. They started, like many
people did in that day, with table tipping just sitting
at a table, hands resting on it, asking for a sign.
(27:12):
For a long time, nothing happened. Then one day it moved.
John was just sitting with Geraldine, who was in a
wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. Their hands were on the table
when it started to move, and then it disappeared. John,
in a panic, turned on the light. He thought Geraldine
had somehow thrown it, but there she was, sitting in
(27:34):
her wheelchair, just as stunned as he was. He looked up.
The table was pinned to the ceiling. A moment later
it came crashing down and broke a leg. That was
the start. They went to see the famous medium, Doris
Fisher Stokes. They were late, and as they wheeled Geraldine
(27:55):
to the front of the packed hall, Doras stopped the
entire demonstration, and she pointed right at John and gave
him thirty eight names of his family members who were
in spirit, and all of them were correct. And then
she said something that would change his life. One day,
the trumpets will lift and the dead will walk in
your front room. Now go away and work at it.
(28:19):
John and Geraldine became obsessed with his prophecy. They got
a sitting with another famous medium, Leslie Flint. Leslie was
a direct voice medium, meaning voices would just come out
of the air around him. Skeptics, of course, said he
was a ventriloquist, so he would do his seances while
holding a mouthful of water or with his mouth taped shut,
(28:43):
and the voices they still came. John and Geraldine are
in this one sitting and the guide's voice comes and says, oh,
there's someone pushing their way forward. It was the voice
of their son, Howard. John told Scott what that moment
felt like. He said, imagine you're in the darkest and
most painful nightmare and then all of a sudden put
(29:06):
in a place of paradise. They started their own home circle,
just the two of them, and they'd record their sittings
on an old real to reel tape recorder. One night,
Geraldine asked, is that you boys, and the table tapped
one for yes, two for no, and it tapped yes.
But when they played the tape back, right after Geraldine's question,
(29:30):
a voice was on the tape and it was Howard's
and it said, yes, mom, we're here. Later in that
same recording, their cat walked into the room. You can
hear Geraldine say be careful of the cat. Howard's voice
comes on the tape and says, I won't hurt Blackie.
The prophecy wasn't yet fulfilled. The dead weren't walking in
(29:52):
their front room. Not yet. Years go by, John and
Geraldine are sitting, just the two of them, building the nest.
It's sary power. The spirit world tells them they need
to renovate their seance room and they need to buy
a red carpet. So John goes to a carpet shop.
A young salesman in his thirties comes to their house
(30:13):
to measure the room. As he's measuring John who would
say this to people just to see their reaction. You know,
we hold seances here. And the young man takes it
in stride and says, oh, I'm interested in that. I've
been to some meetings. John asks him if he wants
to try sitting at the table. The young carpet salesman
(30:34):
says yes, so they sit. The table, which always went
to John as he had the most power, this time
moved to the young man, Colin Fry, and then a
voice came from the spirit guide who said, I've been
waiting for you. John remembered the prophecy, this random carpet salesman.
(30:56):
He was the medium they had been waiting for all
those years, and within just twenty one weeks of sitting
with them, Colin Fry, who went on to become one
of the UK's most famous mediums, was a full materialization medium.
John's wife, Geraldine, at this point, is very, very sick
(31:17):
with MS. She's bedbound. The circle stops one Sunday night.
It's clear she's not going to make it through the night.
John sits with her and she passes into the spirit world.
Of course, John is heartbroken all over again, but he
had made a promise to the spirit world, same time,
(31:38):
same place, same people. So that Tuesday, the circle meets
Colin Fry. The medium is there, and John, grieving, wheels
his wife's empty wheelchair into the room and puts it
in its usual spot. They sit, they play the music,
they sing, They wait, and then a four builds. A
(32:01):
woman materializes. She steps out of the cabinet, not bound
in a chair, not having any illness, and she walks
right over to her husband John. She says, you can
get rid of that, and the empty wheelchair flew back
across the room and hit the door. Geraldine in spirit
(32:24):
said I'm fine, I'm well. John asked her who met you,
and she said Howard. Of course my mother was there too.
Oh John, heaven does exist. Scott told me what John
said about that moment. How can I be upset? This
woman was confined to a wheelchair and now is walking
(32:47):
with my son. I'm just frustrated now because I'm here.
That is the power of this, my friends. It's the
ultimate proof of reunion. And these stories of physical proof
are everywhere. From the book on the Medium Alec Harris,
a story is told about a young soldier who materialized
for his grieving mother to prove it was him. He said, Mom,
(33:11):
I want you to be quite sure that this is
really me. Look I've still got it, see, and he
took her hand and placed it on his chest. He
had a deformed breastbone, which his family had laughingly called
his chicken bone. He materialized his deformity to convince his mother.
Another incredible story from those old tapes of senior spiritualists
(33:36):
comes from a woman named Ivy Northridge. She was in
a small seance with just a few people. The spirit
guide a little girl said to one of the men,
I've got something for you. Put your hand out and
open it wide. The man held his hand out. The
guide said close it, close it tight. He closed his fist.
(33:58):
A moment later he said, it's getting awfully hot. Keep
it closed. She said, not ready yet. Finally she said,
now you can open it. He opened his hand and
in his palm was a miniature silver rowing boat, like
a tiny charm for a bracelet. Now here is the
interesting part. This man lived on a river, and that
(34:19):
very same day he had placed an ad in the
local newspaper asking to buy a rowing boat for his daughters,
and the spirit world had delivered one, but it was
a tiny one, right into his hand. A stunning account
comes again from the circle of al Carris. A very
well known medical man, Sir Alexander Cannon, was invited to
(34:43):
a sitting. During the seance, a form materialized. It was
Mahatma Gandhi, who had passed years earlier. He materialized exactly
how he had been on earth in his loincloth and spectacles,
and then he proceeded to convey at length with Sir
Alexander in Hindu, a language the medium Alec absolutely did
(35:07):
not know, but the doctor did. And if that wasn't
good enough. After Gandhi left, two Tibetan monks materialized. They
also spoke to the doctor in a little known Tibetan tongue,
which Sir Alexander also understood. He left highly satisfied. How
do you fake that? How do you fake someone speaking
(35:30):
fluent Hindu one moment and a rear Tibetan language the next,
all while fully materialized in a red lit room. We
also have the story from the Saturday night club, the
home circle of the medium Minnie Harrison. Her son Tom
kept detailed records. A highly respected surgeon, mister Britton Jones,
(35:52):
was a regular sitter. He wanted to test these spirits.
One night, Tom's aunt ag materialized in the red light.
The surgeon asked if he could take her pulse. She
held out her arm and mister Jones put his fingers
on her wrist, stood there for about half a minute,
and then he turned the entire circle and announced, thank you,
(36:16):
missus Hammond, you live and this isn't an isolated case.
Physicist doctor Jan Vandersandy told me his story. He sat
with the medium David Thompson. The guide William materialized and
he had a big, warm hand jam being a scientist,
asked William, do you have a pulse? The spirit grabbed
(36:38):
Jan's hand and he felt the pulse in his neck.
This all defies our logic, but the spirits, they seemed
to have a sense of humor about it. In the
same circle of Minnie Harrison, a spirit called Granny Lumsden materialized.
She'd always had cold feet in life. Tom asked her
if her feet were still cold. She replied, well, we
(37:00):
haven't got any guests tonight, so I haven't brought my feet.
She then lifted up the gown, pulled it waist high,
and there was nothing. Tom said he could see straight
through her to his father on the other side. Imagine
witnessing that these stories show proof of identity, proof of physicality.
They also show this isn't some scary event. It's filled
(37:24):
with love and laughter. Scott Milligan told me about a
woman in his circle whose husband materialized, but she wasn't
interested in talking to her husband. Why because he had
brought through the family parent, which had flown around in
the seance room. The wife was ignoring her husband in spirit,
just saying, oh, pretty boy, you're a pretty boy. These
(37:48):
stories from surgeons from physicists, from grieving parents, from me,
I'll tell us the same thing. Connection is real, it's physical,
and it's healing and filled with love. When we come
back from the break, we'll talk about how all of
this works and why it's an important message in the world.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the
(38:10):
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(38:37):
Sanders Champlain. If you like these stories and you want
to hear the original audios from their senior spiritualists, I've
put them together on a playlist. I have also started
a list of books on physical medium stories that I
know you'll like. Top of the list is definitely the
Alec Harris book. Just go to my website, we Don't
(38:59):
Die dot com. Go to the page Scott Milligan, scroll
to the bottom and you will find them there. These
stories absolutely give me goose films every time. But they
also bring up that nagging, big question, how is any
of this possible? And if it's real, why it doesn't
happen in the dark. I've had that question for years.
(39:20):
In those old archives I found a beautiful answer from
the medium Stuart Alexander. He said, think about it like this.
One might as well argue that the dark room was
unnecessary for early photographic development, and no one would question
the fact that the development of an embryo in complete
darkness of the womb is essential for the creation of
(39:43):
life itself. It's not spooky darkness, though, it's creative darkness.
It's the darkness of the butterflies chrysalis. It's the rich
dark soil a seed needs to sprout. And it's not
just an analogy that darkness is a vital physical for
the medium. In those same archives, the respected medium Ivy
(40:05):
Northridge told a story about her friend, the famous medium
Helen Duncan. She said that one night after a seance,
Helen pulled her aside and said, look what the people
did to me last night. Helen lifted her skirt and
her whole abdomen was black and blue because someone had
switched on a light and this ectoplasm had whipped back
(40:28):
into her solar plexus. Another witness, Jeane Woods, told a
similar story of a medium named Chris A sitter unknowingly
lit a cigarette lighter, the ectoplasm flew back and the
medium suffered severe burns on his abdomen. A couple of
years ago, our friend Scott Milligan, same thing happened. Someone
(40:50):
accidentally turned on a light. Although they all got to
see the ectoplasm coming from him and holding up a
trumpet in midair, it shot back to him like a
rubber band and he was left with black and blue
marks around his eyes and burn marks on his belly.
This is why the controls are so strict. This is
(41:10):
why we hold hands, this is why we sit in
the dark. It really is to protect the medium. David
Fontana a British psychologist and a former president of the
Society for Psychical Research, which is a very skeptical group.
He said, any professional conjuror is welcome to try and
fake these things if they follow these same rules. No
(41:33):
unsupervised access to the room beforehand. They have to submit
to bodily searches. They must be securely bound by fool
proof restraints. There must be no money involved. In fact,
Stuart Alexander's own method was a brilliant way to deal
with skepticism. He did not use a cabinet. He sat
(41:55):
in the group with everyone else, and he had glowing
the dark tape on his so you knew exactly where
he was at all times. And in that sitting, a
small red light was on and Stuart strapped to his
chair as an ectoplasmic hand formed on the table in
the middle of the room. People in the front were
(42:16):
invited to touch it. They said it was warm. Not
all mediumship even uses ectoplasm. I once interviewed Robin Foy,
who started the world famous Home Circle in the nineteen
nineties called the Skull Experiment. They did things differently. Their
spirit team said they didn't need ectoplasm, but instead a
(42:37):
blend of three energies, the energy of spirit, the spiritual
energy of the sitters, and the natural energy of the earth.
And the things they produced were pretty mind blowing. They
received over one hundred and fifty apports. Physical objects appeared
out of thin air. The most incredible story I've heard
(42:59):
is they got a war time time newspaper from nineteen
forty four and it looked brand new. It had scientifically
been tested by a print research association who verified it
was genuine wartime newsprint. The spirit team at school wasn't
just doing it for proof, they were doing it for healing.
They would see little spirit lights in the room, and
(43:21):
these lights would heal people. He told me about a
woman who came to the circle who had such bad
arthritis in her knees that she could hardly walk in
the dark. The whole group watched as one of these
little spirit lights went into her knee and stayed there
for five minutes. When she got home, all the pain
(43:42):
in that knee was gone. So she came back the
next week and the light went into her other knee.
Robin said that twenty years later she was still pain free. This,
my friends, is the why. Ivy Northridge told one last
story about a sitting with the Great Alec Harris. She
saw him sitting in his cabinet in the red light,
(44:05):
and a little bearded guide named David materialized. He came
over to her and she shook his hand. As she did,
a thought popped into her head. This is the hand
of a child of five. It was tiny. She hadn't
said a word, but like a flash, the guide answered
her thought. He said, they don't want to see our hands,
(44:26):
so we don't waste our time on them. It's our
faces they want to see and hear what we've got
to say. That's the why which brings me to this
important story. It defines our friend Scott Milligan's life purpose.
After Scott's mediumship developed, he became famous for what he
(44:46):
called circus trick phenomena. He would do all the wow stuff.
He told me about demonstrations at the Arthur Finley College
where with the lights on, ectoplasm poured from the nostrils,
from the mouth, and from the belly down to the floor.
He said it rolled and creeped and formed a hand
that walked across the floor. His ego, he admits, was
(45:10):
getting very big. Then after one of these demonstrations, a
woman came up to him and she said, Scott, I've
seen you a few times now, brilliant. I love it.
But then she said, but it's not bringing my son back.
Scott said, it hit him like a knife, stabbing me
in the stomach. He felt her pain. He went back
(45:32):
to his circle and the spirit world gave him a choice.
They said, you can continue down this path and we
will show you the phenomena. But if you want loved ones,
which is going to take up most of the power,
we need to go a different course. And Scott and
his circle decided quite quickly for the voices of loved ones.
(45:54):
Why because, as he says, that's what gets a mom
up in the morning. That's the why. It's not about
trumpets and tables and floating lights. The why is the reunion.
It's the healing. It's the proof that love doesn't die.
And that brings us to the how how do we
get this back in the world. The answer from every
(46:17):
great medium is the same, the home circle. It all
starts with what Douglas Lowe's spirit guide, John King said.
He was asked what a circle needs, and he said,
give me a bunch of purely ordinary folk who have
no psychic ability whatsoever, sitting in good fellowship and in
sincerity of purpose, we can do everything. So you don't
(46:39):
need to be psychic. You just need fellowship, love, tolerance, understanding, dedication,
and patience. Patience being the biggest part. In Stuart Alexander's case,
his circle sat fourteen years with no results, nothing For
fourteen years. They just met in the dark with love,
(47:01):
had tea, cakes and coffee. Afterward, he said that was
the highlight. And only after fourteen years of that dedication
did the first voice come through Another circle. The Hodges
sat for twelve years before anything happened. This is the
ultimate lesson of the spirit world. They don't work on
our time. They work on the time of love and trust,
(47:25):
and when that trust is built, miracles happen. I want
to leave you with one last story from one of
those old recordings. Elsie sat in the home of a
medium named Frank Havard. For years, she would receive the
same apport, which was a set of rosary beads. They
would drop in her lap or come out of the trumpet,
(47:46):
but at the end of every seance she had to
give them back. She asked the spirit guide why, and
the guide told her they belonged to a lady who
has not seen the outside world for fifty two years,
so we can only loan them to you. We've got
to get them back to her before she misses them.
Elsie figured it was a nun in a closed order,
(48:08):
and then the guide said, but one day, Elsie, we
promise you there'll be yours to keep. This went on
for years. Then one friday, Frank the medium moved his
circle to a church to test the blackout for another medium.
There were more people there. The guide's voice came and
asked Elsie to cup her hands in the center of
(48:29):
the circle. The trumpet swished over her head and out
of it dropped the rosary beads. At the end of
the night, Elsie, as usual, went to give them back,
and the Guide said, no, Elsie, they are now yours
to keep. The Guide then took Elsie's hand in the
hand of Frank's wife, Lena, and put them together. He said,
(48:51):
this is true friendship, which must never be broken, because
you are going to need each other in the not
too distant future. After Elsie got her rosary beads, they
sat and the spirit of the nun Maria came through
to thank Elsie for the healing she had sent through
those rosary beads. And the week after that, the medium
(49:14):
Frank passed into the spirit world. Think about that. The
spirit world knew they kept their promise. They made sure
Elsie had her gift, and they gave her and the
medium's wife a warning of the comfort they would need,
all just three weeks before Frank passed. My friends, this
is real. It's rare to witness, but it is very real.
(49:37):
You know, my goal is never to convince you. I
just share these things that have made a difference in
my life. As Ivy Northridge said, I'm not here to
convince you. I can only tell you I know before
I was blind and now I can see. I hope
this has given you a bit of comfort and awe
and wonder. Whether it's the holiday season or another time,
(50:00):
love is all around. As a reminder, come visit me
sometime on my free Sunday gathering on Zoom two pm
New York time, every single Sunday. There's a lot to
explore on my website, we Don't Die dot com. Go
to the Scottmilligan page if you're interested in this. We
even created a guide to home Circles, which explain not
(50:22):
just home circles, but how to start your development to
have a closer connection with spirit. Remember, as my friend
Scott Milligan says, they haven't lost their life, They've just
lost their voice. I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you for listening
to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast
(50:43):
to Coast am Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
Day and Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out
all our show is on the iHeartRadio app or by
going to iHeartRadio dot com, MHM
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