# Do loved ones contact us after death? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 28, 2013, 6:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596 "2013-01-28T06:57:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Kaio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c68b51/32.png) [@Kaio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kaio)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/61 "2013-02-01T18:28:48Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > But lots of people have died over the history of the human race. More dead than alive by a very large margin. Why would it be that you only sense the ones in the cemetery next door? What about all the other ones that are crowding the ether? The people in those graves didn’t die in those graves. They died somewhere else. Why are they hanging around their mortal remains? Well, you seem to be misinterpreting what I said. Of course, I see elderly people downtown nowhere near the retirement home, too – there’s not like some rule that dictates the elderly only appear in proximity to a retirement home, nor is there a rule that the dead only appear in proximity to a cemetery. I’ve had experiences when I’ve lived in another neighborhood with no cemetery nearby. I’ve had experiences waiting for the bus, also nowhere near a cemetery. I’ve just had experiences _more often_ since moving to this place. (My apartment building is the second from the cemetery wall, where my street dead-ends, so it’s maybe 100 feet away.) Not all of the dead remain as ghosts, either. Some move on when they die, some stick around for a bit before moving on, some hang around for a really long time. It seems probable that there are some I’ll never notice even if they are still around. As for why they hang around their mortal remains, there are probably as many answers to that as there are ghosts. They’re still people, with their own motivations (and sometimes emotional imbalances). The most recent one, as near as I can figure, was near her mortal remains because she had only recently passed away and was terribly upset and confused about why she was still here. This is a total guess on my part, but she may have just been following her body around trying to figure out WTF was going on. I can only WAG, though. They usually don’t tell me why they’re here. A lot of them don’t talk to me at all. I basically just “pass them on the street” so to speak. > [@](#): > > My questions are largely rhetorical in nature. I’m not sure you can give me satisfying answers. Though I may be wrong so I’ll stand corrected if you have a reasonable explanation. More importantly, as others have repeatedly said up-thread and whenever this topic is brought up elsewhere… None of these claims you make have been substantiated. None are repeatable. None are testable with positive findings. So what is the rational for continuing to claim something that can’t be substantiated by independently verified evidence? I know it’s hard to admit that your mind plays tricks on you… but with an overwhelming lack of proof, isn’t it worth considering what you may be experiencing is just a trick of the mind? I understand where you’re coming from. I hope you can understand where I’m coming from. I haven’t _personally experienced_ an overwhelming lack of proof. There’s the old expression “I’ll believe it when I see it.” The point here is, I _do_ see it. I also feel it in the tactile sense, feel in an emotional/empathetic sense, and hear it, depending on particular circumstances – it could be just one of those, or all four. I’ve even had spirits move things around the house, or break things. The more I practice opening up my perceptions, the more I notice, the more I have actively worked against basic phenomena like [change blindness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness). Ten years ago, I sucked at this and basically never had experiences like this. Now… well, I’m still pretty bad at it (at least relative to several people I know, who have many of their own stories which also provides me with reason to believe it), but I experience it more often, because I’ve had ten-plus years of practice. And… our science is still in its infancy. 40,000 years ago we understood that willow bark tea helped with pain relief, but we didn’t understand how, and didn’t find out about aspirin until thousands of years later. Right now, we understand that quantum entanglement exists, but we don’t understand how, and it will probably be a while before we do. This is the _normal_ progression of human knowledge – we know that something IS well before we know HOW IT IS, and we may never discover why for a lot of things. I’m okay with acknowledging that we have limits to our knowledge. We’ll learn more in time, even if that time is thousands or millions of years. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/62 "2013-02-01T19:12:37Z")
I believe you when you say that you experience something. The trouble I have is that what you experience can’t be reliably repeated or recorded or independently confirmed. So to use your analogy about the willow bark’s effect on pain relief, while we may not both agree on how or why it works, we can certainly agree on the fact that it does have a predictable and repeatable effect. Belief or lack of understand about how or why a thing works has no bearing on the observable data. What is our commonly observable data with respect to ghosts? ---
**Author:** ![Anaamika](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/63 "2013-02-01T19:28:49Z")
No, of course they don’t. How could they? I had many dreams of my mother and while everyone told me she was contacting me, I knew I had been thinking about her a lot and that’s all they were - dreams. ---
**Author:** ![Kaio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c68b51/32.png) [@Kaio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kaio)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/64 "2013-02-01T19:56:42Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > I believe you when you say that you experience something. The trouble I have is that what you experience can’t be reliably repeated or recorded or independently confirmed. > > So to use your analogy about the willow bark’s effect on pain relief, while we may not both agree on how or why it works, we can certainly agree on the fact that it does have a predictable and repeatable effect. Belief or lack of understand about how or why a thing works has no bearing on the observable data. > > What is our commonly observable data with respect to ghosts? Well, to turn it back on you, suppose Grog kept pointing out to the clan that willow bark tea worked inconsistently, and that some people got very little pain relief from it, and even sometimes the same people got varying results? Grog says willow bark is just a placebo! The shaman could have thrown out the use of willow bark entirely, but if he had we wouldn’t have eventually discovered that different people have different reactions to medications, and that this is normal. Or that inconsistencies in brewing the tea (time, temperature), and natural variation in the willow trees themselves resulted in medicine of varying concentrations. Ironically I did think about including this in my last post, but figured it was long enough as it was. 🙂 Anyway, I imagine you could be trained in the perception of this sort of phenomena, in which case we’d have observations in common, at least as reliable as witnesses at a crime scene (i.e. even when people see the exact same thing, their perceptions of it differ, often radically). On the other hand, we discovered the Higgs Boson just within the last year. Why couldn’t we “see” it a hundred years ago, or even ten? We hadn’t invented and built the proper equipment yet. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/65 "2013-02-01T20:15:58Z")
> [@Kaio](#): > > Anyway, I imagine you could be trained in the perception of this sort of phenomena, in which case we’d have observations in common, at least as reliable as witnesses at a crime scene (i.e. even when people see the exact same thing, their perceptions of it differ, often radically). On the other hand, we discovered the Higgs Boson just within the last year. Why couldn’t we “see” it a hundred years ago, or even ten? We hadn’t invented and built the proper equipment yet. Scientist doing the research had reason to believe there was a Higgs Boson particle. There was observable, repeatable evidence to suggest there was a Higgs Boson particle. Once it was observed, nobody claimed others would only be able to see it if they were properly trained to see the Higgs Boson particle. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![DrFidelius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drfidelius/32/3447_2.png) [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/66 "2013-02-01T20:17:59Z")
I don’t believe in ghosts. It only encourages them. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/67 "2013-02-01T20:26:33Z")
> [@Kaio](#): > > The shaman could have thrown out the use of willow bark entirely, but if he had we wouldn’t have eventually discovered that different people have different reactions to medications, and that this is normal. Or that inconsistencies in brewing the tea (time, temperature), and natural variation in the willow trees themselves resulted in medicine of varying concentrations. Yet there was a preponderence of evidence to pursue the ‘willow bark = big medicine’ solution. Had there not been, I’m sure that would have been the last we’d heard of it. Where is the preponderence of evidence for ghosts? ---
**Author:** ![Kaio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c68b51/32.png) [@Kaio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kaio)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/68 "2013-02-01T20:50:35Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > Scientist doing the research had reason to believe there was a Higgs Boson particle. There was observable, repeatable evidence to suggest there was a Higgs Boson particle. Once it was observed, nobody claimed others would only be able to see it if they were properly trained to see the Higgs Boson particle. 🙂 Of course. Now try stepping into your time machine any going back say, 100 or 200 years. Explain the Higgs Boson to the contemporary scientists. Tell them there’s observable evidence of it. Now watch them look at you like you have two heads. My point is, we’re not there yet. We might be, someday; in fact I do think we will be eventually. But just like the Higgs Boson, there’s a body of knowledge we have to build _first_ before we can get to the point you’d like us to be at now. Hey, I’d love to jump ahead 500 years and see how this quantum physics stuff works out. Quantum mechanics, at least by all appearances, is the engine that makes the universe work the way it does – and it’s pretty freaky, utterly counter-intuitive stuff – even though we were completely unaware of the existence of quarks, or even of evidence of the existence of quarks, 100 years ago (and most definitely unaware of them 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago). At one point, we didn’t know how to look for quarks. We didn’t even know that we _should._ At this point we don’t even fully understand consciousness and [perception](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness) – we’re learning new stuff all the time, a great deal of it fairly recently. I’ll have to accept that it’s highly likely that the coolest stuff we discover will be long after I’m dead. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/69 "2013-02-01T21:37:23Z")
If I did attempt to explain current scientific knowledge to someone from the 18th century, I would certainly expect them to be at the very least skeptical until I was able to present compelling evidence. So I’m asking you for the compelling evidence to support the claims you’re making about the supernatural and I am willing to give you all the time you need to provide that verifiable evidence. Though I suspect I do not have as much time as you may need in order to produce it, and until you do, I will remain a skeptic. ---
**Author:** ![Kaio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c68b51/32.png) [@Kaio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kaio)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2013, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/70 "2013-02-01T21:45:58Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > If I did attempt to explain current scientific knowledge to someone from the 18th century, I would certainly expect them to be at the very least skeptical until I was able to present compelling evidence. > > So I’m asking you for the compelling evidence to support the claims you’re making about the supernatural and I am willing to give you all the time you need to provide that verifiable evidence. Though I suspect I do not have as much time as you may need in order to produce it, and until you do, I will remain a skeptic. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting you to wait 500 years. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Zebra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/c0e974/32.png) [@Zebra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zebra)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2013, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/71 "2013-02-02T18:48:09Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > Scientist doing the research had reason to believe there was a Higgs Boson particle. There was observable, repeatable evidence to suggest there was a Higgs Boson particle. Once it was observed, nobody claimed others would only be able to see it if they were properly trained to see the Higgs Boson particle. 🙂 Have you _seen_ a Higgs Boson particle? :dubious: As to the OP, I’ll say I don’t know. But I doubt it. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2013, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/72 "2013-02-03T02:42:24Z")
When members of my family die they stay politely dead. No ghostly shades, no table rapping, no nothing. Wife tells me that her family is not so gracious and that it was probably her father who pushed on the door I was holding on New Years Day, encouraging me to leave his house but knocking me a bit off balance. Asshole. He was a jerk when he was alive and death has not improved him. FTR, I believe it was Wife herself pushing on the door. She was standing right there putting on her coat and she’s a bit clumsy these days, but she denies it. And at home we used to have a bigger problem with elementals than dead folk, anyway, but they seem to have moved out. Suits me, but I have to find a can to pour burger grease into since the friendly, tentacled monster that lived in the pantry is not around to slurp it up as soon as my back is turned. He liked grease. ---
**Author:** ![kambuckta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/53a042/32.png) [@kambuckta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kambuckta)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2013, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596/73 "2013-02-03T06:36:36Z")
> [@thenonepercent](#): > > Oh yeah, like scientists in 2213 aren’t going to be all "LOOK AT THESE DUMB 21st CENTURY MORONS. LOOK AT THE DUMB SHIT THEY BELIEVE. THIS SHIT IS AS RETARDED AS ETHER OR HUMOURS OR NEWTONIAN PHYSICS. GET A LOAD OF THESE PAST-LIVING MOTHERFUCKERS AND HOW THEY THOUGHT THEY KNEW ABOUT SHIT WHEN THEY COULDN’T EVEN EXPLAIN GRAVITY OR MAGNETISM OR STRONG AND WEAK NUCLEAR ATTRACTIONS WITHOUT GOING “SHIT I DUNNO JUST CALL THEM FUNDEMENTAL”. > > Also in the future they have no lower case letters. That is a technology that is lost with time, like greek fire. Trust me, TimeWinder, our science is as much bullshit as every iteration that came before, and we’re only starting to realize that none of it actually works on the smallest levels. > > Everything you think you know is bullshit and you’re too wrapped up in the contemporary mindset to know it. Anyone who sincerely believes that we just HAPPEN to be living in the time where humanity has finally got shit figured out is as dumb as the guys who advocated the crystal sphere theory of astronomy. Since you don’t get science let me explain it: Mushrooms, right? 😛 > [@](#): > > Science is the process of disproving what we believe to be true. Eternally. Sort of. Science is what happens when we subject **everything** we believe to be true to rigorous examination that sometimes results in disproving our belief/s. At this point in our scientific and medical/biological evolution, we can say with a degree of certainty (read: ABSOLUTELY) that dead people, cats or whatever cannot send messages after their physical death. To believe otherwise is just fucking stupid. 😃 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-loved-ones-contact-us-after-death/648596.md?page=3)