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

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3:02Go to Sinesta.com to book your stay and unlock our best rates with Sinesta Travel Pass. Here today, Rome tomorrow. Join now at Sinesta.com, Terms and Conditions Apply. And you're here. Thanks for choosing the I-hard radio and coast-to-go-stay and paranormal podcast network. Your quest for podcasts of the paranormal, supernatural, and the unexplained ends here. We invite you to enjoy all our shows we have on this network and right now, let's start with Shades of the Afterlife for the Sandra Shandling. 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 I-hard media, I-hard radio, coast-to-coast-am, employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors and associates. We would like to encourage you to do your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.

4:04Hi, I'm Sandra Shandling. For over 25 years, I've been on a journey to prove the existence of life after death. On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know that our loved ones have survived physical death. And so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. When we talk about the afterlife, we talk about faith, we talk about hope, we talk about the grief we have in our hearts, when we lose someone we love, but today, I want to talk about logic, the things that can't be explained by luck, by guessing, or even by reading someone's mind. Today, we're going to revisit our friends at the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies who held that massive contest and will discuss two more of the prize-winning essays. As you remember, the challenge was to write an essay that proves using logic and evidence that the human soul survives death. The website, bigelowinstitute.org, has all of the full essays available.

5:08If you wish to do some great reading. In the past, we shared the top three prize-winning episodes. But today, I'm going to introduce you to two of the runner-ups, although I hate to call them that because their work is really great, each one 50,000 for their research. One is Dr. Julie Bischel, a brilliant scientist who tests mediums using strict conditions. The other is Dr. Stephen Browdy, a philosopher and former president of the Parapsychological Association. We'll start off with Dr. Browdy's work with some rather ghost-like stories to start, but they're incredibly fascinating. Here's a story about a dinner party in Iceland, a board medium, and a very rude, uninvited guest named Runky. So imagine, if you will, you are in Reykjavik, Iceland. In the year 1937, it's a dark, cold winter's night. A group of friends have gathered at a house for a seance.

6:09Now, these aren't people who are grieving, and they're not crying over lost loved ones. They're just curious people. They have a medium there named Halfstein Bjornsson. The seance begins, and for a while, it's pretty standard, the medium goes into a trance. The control spirit comes through. Everyone is polite, but suddenly the energy in the room changes. The medium's voice changes. It becomes rough, angry, and confused. A new spirit has pushed his way into the circle. He doesn't introduce himself nicely. He demands to know where he is. He says his leg hurts. He's shouting about being wet and cold. The people in the room ask, who are you? The spirit grumbles. He says his name is runoffer runoffson, but everyone calls him runky. Now, the people in the room look at each other. They whisper, do you know a runky? No, do you? Nobody knows this guy. They ask him more questions.

7:10Runky, when did you die? He says in the year 1879, that was nearly 60 years before this seance. He says he was 52 years old. He says he died by drowning while he was walking home. He says he had been drinking a little too much, and that he fell asleep on the beach, and the tide came in and took him. And then he says something very specific. He says, I was a tall man, very tall. So the seance ends, the medium wakes up, everyone is confused, who was this angry, wet, fishermen. Now, this is the part where a skeptical mind jumps in and can say, oh, the medium was just reading the mind, and one of the people in the room must be telepathy, or they say, the medium just researched a local story to trick the sitters. But Dr. Browdy points out why this case is so important, because nobody knew who runky was. The sitters didn't know him, the medium didn't know him. The people at the seance were so curious that they decided to play detective.

8:15They went to the National Archives in Iceland. They started digging through old parish records from the 19th century. And guess what they found? In the records for the year 1879, there was a death certificate for a man name, runoffer, runoffson. He was a laborer. He was 52 years old. He was known to be a heavy drinker, and the cause of death, drowning. His body was found on the sand where the tide had come in, but there is one thing missing. Remember how runky bragged about being a very tall? The records didn't say anything about his height. So the researchers dug deeper. They found his old bones. They actually located where he was buried. And because it was an unmarked grave, they had permission to measure the remains. They measured the femur, the thigh bone. And based on the bone calculation, runky stood well over six feet tall. In Iceland in 1879, that was a giant.

9:18So this man from the seance was exactly who he said to be. Why does Dr. Browdy, a philosopher, a man of logic love this story so much? Because it destroys the super sigh theory. Super sigh is the idea that mediums are just super psychic spies who steal information from living brains. But in the case of runky, there was no living brain to steal from. The people in the room didn't know the guy. The only person who knew the combination of runky, plus drowning, plus tall, plus 52 years old, was runky himself. This is what is called a drop in communicator. It's like somebody crashing a party. He didn't come because someone called him. He came because he saw a bright light like an open door. And he wanted someone to listen about his wet leg. It's funny, isn't it? We think of the afterlife as angels and harps. But Dr. Browdy reminds us that if we survive death, we take ourselves with us.

10:22If you were a grumpy fisherman in life, you might be a grumpy fisherman in the afterlife, well, at least for a little while. But runky was just a guest. He dropped in and then he left. What happens when a spirit drops in and decides to move in? I have another story for you from Dr. Browdy's essay, one that's not just about facts. It's about obsession. It's the story of a man named Frederick Thompson. Now, Frederick Thompson was not a medium. He wasn't a psychic. He was a goldsmith living in New York City in the early 1900s. He was a practical man who worked with his hands. He had no interest in painting, he had no formal training in art, aside from a few lessons as a schoolboy. But in the summer of 1905, something strange began to happen to Frederick. He started to feel a compulsion. It was like an itch that he couldn't scratch. He suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to paint pictures and not just any pictures.

11:23He felt driven to paint landscapes, misty moody scenes of wind swept trees and marshes. He tried to ignore it, but when he did, the urge just got stronger. It started to take over his life. He would neglect his work. He would drift off into a dreamlike state and find himself sketching for hours. He told his wife, I feel like I am someone else. Specifically, he felt like he was a man named Robert Swain Gifford. Now get this, Robert Swain Gifford was an American landscape painter, but Frederick didn't know him personally. So Frederick went to an art exhibition in January 1906, where he learned the truth. Robert Swain Gifford had died exactly one year earlier. Right before Frederick's painting obsession began, Frederick stood in that gallery, staring at a painting by this dead artist, and suddenly, he heard a voice.

12:24It wasn't in his head. It sounded like it was right next to his ear. The voice said, you see what I have done. Can you not take up and finish my work? Frederick was terrified. He thought he was losing his mind. He went to see a famous researcher named James Highslop. He said, help me, I am being haunted by a painter. Highslop was a skeptic, so he decided to test this. He took Frederick's sketches, the ones he had drawn into trance, and showed them to art critics who knew Gifford's work. The critics were stunned. They said, this is most definitely Gifford style. This is his brush work. This captures his misty atmosphere exactly. So remember, Frederick was a goldsmith. He didn't know how to paint like a master, but somehow he was channeling the specific talent of a dead man. The story gets crazier. Frederick kept having visions of a specific group of old, gnarled trees, and he painted them

13:25over and over and over again. He didn't know where they were. He just knew they were real. Finally, following an urge, he traveled to the coast of Massachusetts. He took a boat to a tiny place called Nashon Island. He walked across the island like he was being guided by an invisible GPS, and there standing on the hill were those exact trees, same ones from his visions, and the same ones that were in his paintings. He sat down to sketch them, his hands shaking, and while he was drawing, he heard the voice again. The voice said, look on the far side of the trees. Frederick stood up. He walked to the other side of the old oaks. He looked closely at the bark, and there carved into the wood where the initials are SG. Robert Swain Gifford, and underneath the initials, the date, 1902. Frederick Thompson had found the secret spot where the dead artist used to stand in paint.

14:29There was no map, there was no guidebook, there was no internet. The only way Frederick could have known about those initials was if the spirit of Robert Swain Gifford was standing right there beside him, whispering in his ear, finish my work. Dr. Browdy calls this the Thompson Gifford case, and he considers it one of the most powerful pieces of evidence we have. Why? Because it combines everything. It has skill. Frederick painted with a talent he didn't possess. It has knowledge. Frederick found a hidden location he had never visited, and it has the motive. The dead artist wasn't ready to put down his brush. He still had more beauty to create, so he borrowed a pair of living hands to do it. As I wrap up this first segment with you, think about Runky and Gifford. One was a simple fisherman who wanted to complain about his leg. The other was a brilliant artist who wanted to finish a masterpiece. They were completely different people in life, but in death, they proved the same thing.

15:32We don't disappear. Our personality, our grumpiness, our happiness, or our genius survives. And if the door is left open even a crack, we can still step in and say, I am still here. When we come back from the break, I'm going to share another one of Dr. Browdy's favorite cases. And you'll meet a man who died in 1950, but came back 30 years later to play a game of chess against a living grandmaster. And here's the thing. The medium didn't even know how to play chess. So we'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the I Heart Radio and Coast to Coast A.M. Hara Normal, Podcast Network. Alright, two truths in the law. Here we go. I went to college with college football coach Jim McElwain. I began my broadcasting career doing play by play for the Las Vegas stars. And I've been a Verizon customer for 15 years.

16:34Okay, I lied. All three are true. A Verizon isn't as expensive as you think. In fact, if you bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store, they'll give you a better deal. That's right. A better deal on the best network with the most ways to save on plans, streaming and phone deals. So take that AT&T or T-Mobile bill to your local Verizon store today, get a better deal and start saving. Based on root metrics, best overall mobile network performance, US second half, 2025. Alright, it's reserved. Must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal. All terms, conditions and restrictions apply. Crackin is built to make crypto simple. By Bitcoin, Ethereum and over 450 other assets in seconds. Fast account funding, fast withdrawals, and recurring buys if you want to stay on schedule. Simple, secure and trusted for over 14 years. Download Crackin on the App Store or Google Play. That's KRA KEN. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss and is offered to US customers excluding New York

17:34and Maine through payward interactive incorporate. Do you legal disclosures at Crackin.com slash legal slash disclosures terms and conditions apply? Three years ago, Wu-Tang Clan changed hip hop forever. Last year, they sold out arenas worldwide and now the final chamber comes back home. Wu-Tang Clan and on core, if you saw it last year, you know what this means. If you didn't, this is the moment. Get special guests, bone thugs in harmony, get tickets Friday at the Wu-Tang Clan.com. Wu-Tang forever, kill a beast, swarming on new locations. Are you trying to get weight loss support through telehealth, but it feels overwhelming and rushed? Check out orderlymeds.com now. Orderlymeds.com was built to be different. Here you connect with real doctors who take the time to understand your goals. Review your eligibility and guide you through a plan that's right for you. Orderlymeds provides access to proven GLP-1 medications, like somaglutide and terzepetide, including both name brand options and personalized compound versions when appropriate.

18:38So UF choices backed by clinical oversight. Not guess where. It's a simpler, more supportive telehealth experience, designer on people who want clarity, care, and confidence in their weight loss journey. And your medication is delivered directly to your home in discrete packaging. So your experience stays private from start to finish. We research, ask the right questions, then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer. Again, that's orderlymeds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary, not medical advice eligibility required, so you cite for details. Let's talk about modern home shopping. It's sort of become a fun side hobby, right? Scrolling listings at night, dreaming about kitchens you've never seen, or backyards you haven't even stepped foot in, all from the comforts of pretty much anywhere. Redfin knows a lot of people like you want to own, but are stuck in this browsing mode loop. That's where Redfin lips the script. With listings that update within minutes, and tours you can book right from the Redfin app, you can see your dream home the moment it appears.

19:41Now liking a listing is easy, but actually landing it, that's where Redfin comes in. Redfin has over 2200 agents with local expertise. And Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. That means they want to help you win, not just window shop. Redfin is built to help you go from just looking to wait. This could actually be home, so become the newest neighbor on the block. Visit redfin.com to start finding and start owning. That's redfin.com. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sanderson Plain, Dr. Steven Browdy in his Bigelow Institute Contest essay says you can't fake a skill. You cannot accidentally start speaking fluent French if you didn't know the language and you certainly cannot accidentally play chess at the level of a grand master.

20:45I want to tell you the next story. It's the story of a chess game. But this wasn't just any game. This was a match that lasted seven years. And it was played across two countries. And one of the players had been dead for 34 years. The story begins with a man named Dr. Wolfgang Eisenbeis. He was a Swiss researcher who wanted to test this exact question. Can a high level intellectual skill survive death? He didn't want a ghost who could just tap the table once for yes and twice for no. He wanted to know if an afterlife friend could think. So he set up an experiment. He found a medium named Robert Rollins. Now this is important. Robert Rollins did not play chess. He knew the basic moves, but he had no strategy. He was a complete novice. Then Dr. Eisenbeis needed an opponent. He managed to recruit one of the greatest chess players alive at the time.

21:50Victor Courtsnoy, I don't follow chess, I have to be honest. But if you do, you'll know that name. Courtsnoy was a legend. He was a Soviet defector, a brilliant strategist. And he was ranked as one of the top players in the world. He was a grand master, which is the highest title a chess player can achieve. So Dr. Eisenbeis had a medium who knew nothing about chess and a living legend who knew everything. Now he needed a participant from the afterlife. Through the medium, Dr. Eisenbeis reached out to the spirit world. He asked if there was a deceased grand master who would be willing to play a game against Victor Courtsnoy. After a while, a spirit came forward. He introduced himself as Giza Moratzi. Giza Moratzi was a Hungarian grand master who had ranked the third best player in the world back in the year 1900, and he had died in 1951.

22:54So the game began. The setup was simple. Victor Courtsnoy, the living player, would make a move on his board in Switzerland. Dr. Eisenbeis would send that move to the medium. The medium, Robert Rollins, would go into a trance. The spirit of a Moratzi would communicate the counter move usually through what's called automatic writing. So the medium would write down something like pawn to king four. Then that move would be sent back to Courtsnoy because of the difficulty of the mediumship. Sometimes it took days, sometimes it took weeks to exchange a single move for seven years and eight months. This ghost versus grandmaster battle raged on. Courtsnoy told the researchers that the opponent was not playing modern chess. You see, chess evolves. The strategies used in the 1990s are different from the strategies used in the 1890s.

23:54Courtsnoy said, this player is using the Moratzi bind. That is a specific defensive strategy that Giza Moratzi invented in the early 1900s. It relies on slow, careful, maneuvering rather than aggressive attacks. Courtsnoy said it felt like playing a ghost from history. The style was old-fashioned, elegant, and incredibly strong. In fact, this ghost played so well that he actually beat Courtsnoy in the early stages of the game. The living legend was losing to a dead one. Eventually, after 47 moves, the game ended. Victor Courtsnoy won, but just barely. He admitted that he had to play his absolute and highest best to beat this spirit. When asked about it, Courtsnoy said, I was playing against a grandmaster. There is no doubt. Now, let's bring this back to Dr. Stephen Browdy. Why does he include this story in his $50,000 winning essay?

24:58Well, because it destroys the skeptics' favorite argument, which is Super-Sci. Again, Super-Sci is the idea that the medium isn't talking to the dead, but is just using Super-Telepathy to steal information from living people. So let's apply that logic to the chess game. If the medium Robert Rollins was faking this, how could he do it? He didn't know chess. So to fake a grandmaster level game, the medium would have to one. Use telepathy to scan the entire world to find a living chess expert. Two, telepathically show that expert the current board position. Three, telepathically extract the best move from that expert's brain. And if this all wasn't impossible enough, he would have to make sure that he was playing the exact outdated style of playing chess of a Hungarian man from 1900. Dr. Browdy argues that this is crippling complexity.

26:00It's like saying a child who has never taken a piano lesson, sat down and played a perfect Mozart concerto by telepathically borrowing the skills of a concert pianist in the next town. Doesn't make sense, and it doesn't happen. A skill like this requires a mind. It requires active thinking. It requires looking at the chess board, analyzing the trap, and planning five steps ahead. You cannot fake thinking. The fact that 47 moves were played over seven years with a consistent, identifiable personality and style proves the mind of Gaze Morazi was still intact. He was still thinking. He was still strategizing, and he was still competitive. But the chess case isn't the only one. Dr. Browdy shares one more story in his essay that involves music.

27:02I want to introduce you to a woman known in the research simply as Mrs. B. Mrs. B was a simple woman living in the American Midwest. She had an elementary school education. She had never traveled. She had no interest in classical music. She preferred her church hymns, and she certainly didn't speak any foreign languages. But one day, a researcher sent her a watch. He didn't tell her who it belonged to. He just mailed it to her and asked her what she picked up from it. Mrs. B held the watch, went into a trance-like state, and suddenly her voice changed. She started speaking with a heavy Scandinavian accent, and then she started speaking a language that nobody in the room understood. They recorded it and sent it to a linguist. It was Finnish, fluent, perfect Finnish. Mrs. B claimed that she was channeling

28:04the spirit of Jonas Kokenin, a famous Finnish composer who had recently died. Now remember, Mrs. B is a housewife in the Midwest. She doesn't have a passport. She doesn't have a library card, but for the next year, she channeled this man. And it wasn't just that she spoke his language. She possessed his musical genius. One session, the spirit of Kokenin, said he wanted to finish a piece of music that he had been working on when he died, a piano quintet. Mrs. B, who couldn't read music, grabbed a pen and started scribbling musical notation. She wrote out the final bars of the quintet that he had started. Then she told the researchers to send it to a specific man in Finland, a colleague of Kokenin's, named Alus Salonen. She said he has the original score. Tell him this is the ending. The researchers tracked down this colleague.

29:04He did have the unfinished score. And when he looked at what Mrs. B had written, he was stunned. It matched the style, the key, and the complexity of the dead composer perfectly. But the spirit wasn't done. He wanted to gossip. He started talking about his other musician friends. He critiqued their performances. In one session, he talked about a specific recording of his cello concerto. He debated which version was better. The one on his record label or the Finlandia label. So to fake this, Mrs. B would have needed to learn finish. She would have needed to study advanced music theory. She would have needed to memorize obscure record labels from a country she had never visited. And she would have needed to do all of this while pretending to be a simple housewife. Dr. Browdy asks us, is it more likely that Mrs. B was a secret genius, a linguist, and a master spy who fooled everyone for years?

30:07Or was it more likely that Junus, Kokenin, was simply still Junus, Kokenin, these two cases, the chess game and the finished composer, are what we call ideal cases. Dr. Browdy says, they are the cases that make the skeptics go quiet. Because you can explain a feather or a flickering light, but you cannot explain away a symphony. And you cannot explain away a checkmate. Dr. Browdy uses these cases to show us that survival isn't just about memories. It's about what he calls agency. When we die, we don't just become a recording of our past. We remain active agents. We can still learn, we can still create, we can still play. Think about what that means for your loved ones. If your father was a carpenter, he still knows how to build. If your daughter loved to dance, she's still dancing in heaven. The machinery of the brain might be gone,

31:08but the operator, the one who actually possesses the skill is still right there. The Marazi chess case and the Mrs. B case are what Dr. Browdy calls ideal cases. It's a case where the unusual suspects, things like fraud or hidden memory don't just fit. The only explanation that makes sense is the simplest one. The grandmaster didn't die. He just moved to a different table. The composer didn't die. He just found a new instrument. So we've looked at the logical side of the coin. We've heard the philosophers argument, and I'm sure you might be saying, Sandra, I love your stories, but I want science. I want data. I want to see what happens when mediums are put under a microscope. Well, you're in luck, my friend. Because next, we're going to talk about the other $50,000 prize winner, Dr. Julie Bichel. She's the director of research at the Windbridge Institute. And she doesn't deal in ghost stories. She deals in data. When we come back, I'm going to tell you

32:09about the Windbridge Protocol, a scientific test so rigorous and so controlled that it makes cheating absolutely impossible. And in the middle of it all, our spirit friends still come through. You're going to hear exactly how they did it and why it proves their survival of consciousness. We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the I Heart Radio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. All right, two truths in the lie. Here we go. I went to college with college football coach Jim McElwain. I began my broadcasting career doing play-by-play for the Las Vegas stars. And I've been a Verizon customer for 15 years. OK, I lied, all three are true. A Verizon isn't as expensive as you think. In fact, if you bring in your 18-in-tier T-mobile bill to a Verizon store, they'll give you a better deal. That's right, a better deal on the best network

33:09with the most waste, save on plans, streaming, and phone deals. So take that 18-in-tier T-mobile bill to your local Verizon store today. Get a better deal and start saving. Based on route metrics, best overall mobile network performance, US second half, 2025. All rights reserved must provide recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. Kraken is built to make crypto simple. By Bitcoin, Ethereum, and over 450 other assets in seconds, fast account funding, fast with draws, and recurring buys if you want to stay on schedule, simple, secure, and trusted for over 14 years. Download Kraken on the App Store or Google Play. That's K-R-A-K-E-N. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss and is offered to US customers excluding New York and Maine through Payward Interactive Incorporate. View legal disclosures at Kraken.com slash legal slash disclosures, terms and conditions apply. Wootain clan, the final chamber, comes back home and on core, kilobies, swarming on new locations.

34:11With special guests, bone thugs and harmony, get tickets this Friday at WootainClan.com. Last support through telehealth, but it feels overwhelming and rushed? Check out orderlymeds.com now. Orderlymeds.com was built to be different. Here you connect with real doctors who take the time to understand your goals, review your eligibility, and guide you through a plan that's right for you. Orderlymeds provides access to proven GLP-1 medications like somaglutide and terzepatide, including both name brand options and personalized compound versions when appropriate. So you have choices back by clinical oversight. Not guess where. It's a simpler, more supportive telehealth experience, designer on people who want clarity, care, and confidence in their weight loss journey. And your medication is delivered directly to your home and discrete packaging. So your experience stays private from start to finish. Do your research, ask the right questions. Then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer. Again, that's orderlymeds.com slash podcast.

35:13Individual results may vary, not medical advice eligibility required, so you site for details. Let's talk about modern home shopping. It's sort of become a fun side hobby, right? Scrolling listings at night, dreaming about kitchens, you've never seen, or back yards, you haven't even stepped foot in, all from the comforts of pretty much anywhere. Redfin knows a lot of people like you want to own, but are stuck in this browsing mode loop. That's where Redfin flips the script. With listings that update within minutes and tours you can book right from the Redfin app, you can see your dream home the moment it appears. Now liking a listing is easy, but actually landing it, that's where Redfin comes in. Redfin has over 2200 agents with local expertise. And Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. That means they want to help you win, not just window shop. Redfin is built to help you go from just looking to wait, this could actually be home, so become the newest neighbor on the block.

36:15Visit redfin.com to start finding and start owning. That's redfin.com. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife, I'm Sandra Champlain. We've been taking a little time travel today, visiting a Samson Iceland in 1937, and a chess game in 1985. And these stories tell us the philosophy of survival that our consciousness goes on into the afterlife, but if you want something that can be measured, this next part is for you. I'd like to introduce you to the work of another runner up of the Bigelow Institute contest. Her name is Dr. Julie Baishel, and she did not start out looking for evidence of the afterlife. She started out as a materialist scientist. She has a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology

37:15with a minor in microbiology and immunology. In her words, her life was about bugs and drugs. She studied bacteria, she studied chemicals. She believed that when the brain dies, the person is gone. Then something happened, like happens to so many of us. Her mom died and not only did she die, but her death was tragic and complicated. It was a suicide. Now, Julie was a scientist, but of course, she was also a grieving daughter. She was saturated with science as she puts it, but she needed comfort. So reluctantly, she agreed to sit with the medium. She walked into that room, expecting nothing. She expected a cold reading. She expected vague guesses. Instead, she got her mother. She said, it felt normal. It felt like talking to mom. But Dr. Baishal didn't just cry and go home.

38:17She's a scientist and her brain lit up. She thought, if this is real, if information is actually coming from a dead person, we should be able to test it. And that's exactly what she did. She gave up a promising career in mainstream science to found the Windbridge Research Center. And she created something that is now the gold standard of afterlife research. It's called the Windbridge Protocol. Now, we know skeptics like two debunk mediums. I was one of them myself. And to be fair, they have some good points. They say, oh, the medium could be just reading your body language. That's a cold reading. Or they say, the medium looked you up on Facebook before you arrived. And that's called a hot reading. Or they say, the medium is just fishing. They say a common name like John or a M name. And you say, mom, Dr. Baishal knows all of these tricks. So she designed an experiment that makes every single one

39:18of them impossible. Let me take you inside the Windbridge Lab. Imagine you are a medium who has agreed to be tested. You want to prove you are real. So here's what you have to go through. It's called a quintuple blind study. It means that there are five levels of blindfolds preventing any cheating. Level one, the absent sitter. And a normal reading you sit across from the client. You can see if they are crying. You can see their wedding ring. In the Windbridge Lab, the sitter, the client, is not in the room. They aren't even in the building. They might be in New York while the medium is in Arizona. So there's no body language to read. There's no facial expression to see. Level two, the blinded medium. The medium isn't even told the name of the person they are reading for. They are just told, we need you to contact the deceased relative of subject number 42. So the medium cannot look them up on Facebook.

40:20They can't Google their name. They have absolutely no information starting out. Level three, the blinded interviewer. Now, the medium has to talk to somebody, right? They need someone to say, okay, what are you seeing? A doctor by shell doesn't even let the sitter be on the phone. Why? Because the sitter might gasp. They might sigh. Their voice might give away their age or their gender. So the medium talks to a scientist. But the scientist doesn't know who the sitter is either. So if the medium asks, does this make sense? The scientist, of course, has to say, I don't know. So there's no feedback. The medium is pretty much talking to a blank wall. So level four is the blinded scoring. Let's say the medium produces a transcript. They say, I see a father. He loved fishing. He died of a chest problem. He passed in October. Well, we have to wait and see if that's accurate.

41:22No one can ask the sitter, does this fit? Because people have something called confirmation bias. We humans, well, we tend to make things fit because we want them to be true. So Dr. Byshel sends the sitter to transcripts. One is a reading that is done, especially for them. The other is a decoy reading that was done for someone else entirely. The transcripts are stripped of all names. They just say reading A and reading B. The sitter has to read both and score them, item by item. They have to verify every fact. Only after they return the scores, does Dr. Byshel reveal which one was meant for them. Level five, the statistical lockdown. Dr. Byshel doesn't just look for good hits. She uses complex statistics to calculate the possibility. If a medium gets the name Bob, it's not very impressive, is it? Because there are lots of Bob's.

42:23But if the medium gets the name Archibald or Maurice and the specific cause of death, like it was a hang gliding accident and the specific shared memory, the statistics go through the roof. So what happened when Dr. Byshel ran this protocol? Well, she tested 20 highly credentialed mediums. These mediums couldn't see here or Google anyone. And by all the laws of materialist science, they should have failed. Their accuracy should have been 50-50, if they were purely guessing. But that is not what happened. Over and over again, the mediums chose the correct reading. They produced specific, accurate details about dead people that they had never met. For living people, they couldn't see. The odds of this happening by chance were calculated to be less than one in a million. But Dr. Byshel didn't stop there. She wanted to know what it felt like.

43:26You see, there is a theory called somatic sigh, which we talked about earlier. The idea that mediums aren't talking to the dead, but are reading the minds of the living via telepathy. So Dr. Byshel ran a new experiment called UV03. She had her mediums do two types of readings. First, they did a psychic reading for a living person. Then they did a mediumship reading for a deceased person. The mediums were blinded. They didn't know which was which. They were just given a first name. Dr. Byshel measured their physiological and emotional responses. And she found something incredible. She reported that when the mediums were reading for the dead, they reported significantly higher levels of love. They didn't just know facts. They felt an overwhelming sense of connection, warmth, and expansion. When they were reading for the living,

44:27well, it felt colder. It felt like they were just looking at a book. But when they read for the dead, it felt like seeing a play. It felt like a reunion. Dr. Byshel wrote a beautiful sentence in her essay about this. She said, all the mediums had was a first name. And dead people brought love to the party. This is scientific proof of emotion. It suggests that the signature of the afterlife isn't just information. It is love, feeling, emotion. Now you might be thinking, is this new? Now you might be thinking, is this kind of investigating new? Actually, Dr. Byshel is standing on the shoulders of giants. And this brings us back to Dr. Browdy's essay because he highlights the grandmother of all scientific mediumship cases. Her name was Leonora Piper. Mrs. Piper was a medium in Boston in the late 1800s. And just like the wind bridge mediums,

45:27she was tested by the absolute best scientists of the day. Specifically, she was tested by Dr. Richard Hodgson. Now Richard Hodgson was not a believer. He was known as a fraud buster. He had exposed fake mediums all over the world. And he came to Boston specifically to expose Mrs. Piper. Dr. Browdy tells us that Hodgson had detectives follow Mrs. Piper and her husband for weeks. He wanted to see if they were digging through people's trash or looking at obituaries or talking to servants. The detectives came back with nothing. Mrs. Piper was just a simple housewife. She didn't research anyone, but Hodgson wasn't satisfied. He thought, maybe she has a network of spies in Boston. So he took her out of her element. He put her on a boat and shipped her all the way to England. She arrived in a country where she knew no one.

46:28She stayed in a stranger's house. Her luggage was searched. Her mail was read. And then Hodgson brought in strangers off the street. People she had never met, whose names she wasn't told. And guess what happened? Mrs. Piper went into a trance. And she started telling these strangers their deepest secrets. She told them the names of their deceased children. She told them about items in their pockets. She told them nicknames that only their dead spouses knew. One of the most famous scientists of all time, William James, the father of American psychology, sat with her. He was a skeptic too. But after watching Mrs. Piper work, he made a famous statement. He said, if you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough. If you prove one single crow to be white, Mrs. Piper was his white crow.

47:30She was the one exception that proved the rule was broken. So whether it is Mrs. Piper in 1890 or the wind bridge mediums in 2026, the results are the same. The controls are tight. The detectives are watching. The numbers are crunched. And the answer is always the same. Our loved ones are still here. So we've covered the logic. We've covered the data. We have covered the love. There's one final piece of the puzzle for today. We have talked about spirits visiting. But what happens when a spirit moves in? When we come back for our final segment together, I'm going to share a story that Dr. Stephen Browdy calls the perfect case for survival. It's the story of a 13-year-old girl named Rancy Venom. One morning, she woke up, but Rancy wasn't there anymore. Instead, a girl named Mary Roth would have been dead for 12 years, opened her eyes. And what she did next convinced an entire town

48:32that death is not the end. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the I Heart radio and Coast to Coast A.M. Heronormal Podcast Network. All right, two truths in the lie. Here we go. I went to college with college football coach Jim McElwain. I began my broadcasting career doing play-by-play for the Las Vegas stars. And I've been a Verizon customer for 15 years. Okay, I lied. All three are true. A Verizon isn't as expensive as you think. In fact, if you bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store, they'll give you a better deal. That's right, a better deal on the best network with the most ways to save on plans, streaming and phone deals. So take that AT&T or T-Mobile bill that you're local Verizon stores today. Get a better deal and start saving. Based on root metrics, best overall mobile network performance, US second half, 2025.

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52:41I'm Sandra Champlain. Dr. Stephen Browdy calls this next story, the Watseka Wonder. And even though it happened back in 1878, it remains one of the most perfect, untouchable cases in history. It takes place in a small town called Watseka Illinois. They lived a family called the Venoms. They had a daughter named Rancy. Now Rancy was just 13 years old. She was a normal, healthy girl. Until one day, she started slipping into trances. She would faint. She would wake up claiming that she was someone else. Her parents were terrified, as you can imagine. They thought she was going insane. They were actually preparing to send her to an asylum. But mediumship was big back in those days, and the neighbor told them, wait, before you lock her up, take her to a spirit medium. So they brought in a man he sat with Rancy. He realized she wasn't crazy. She was just open to spirit.

53:42He told Rancy, or the spirit inside her, that she needed a guide. She needed a good spirit to take control and stabilize her. The voice coming out of Rancy said, her name is Mary Roth. Now, the Venom family didn't know. The Roth family very well. They lived on the other side of the town, but everyone knew of them. Because 12 years earlier, the Roths had lost their daughter, Mary. Mary Roth had died at the age of 18. When Mary died, Rancy Venom was just a one-year-old baby. They had never met, and Rancy knew nothing about her. But the next morning, the 13-year-old girl woke up. She looked around the room and she said, where am I? I want to go home. Her parents said, you are home, Rancy. She said, I am not Rancy. My name is Mary Roth. Finally, the Roth family heard about this. Mary's mother and sister decided to visit the Venom house to see this imposter.

54:44As they walked up the path, Rancy, who is inside looking out the window, started jumping up and down. She screamed, here comes my mom and my sister, Nervy. Nervy was the secret family nickname for Mary's sister, Manurva. When they came inside, the girl ran into their arms. She cried, she hugged them. It wasn't the awkward hug of a stranger. It was the desperate, familiar hug of a daughter who had been gone for 12 years. The Roths were definitely skeptical. They agreed to let this girl come and stay with them for a while. As they walked to the Roth house, the girl didn't need directions. She knew exactly where they were going. When they got inside, she knew where everything was. She asked about an old velvet hat she used to wear. The mother said, we don't have that anymore. The girl said, yes, you do. It's in the attic in a specific box. They went to the attic. They opened the box and there was the hat.

55:45So for the next three months, this girl lived as Mary Roth. She didn't just know facts, she knew people. Neighbors would walk by and she would wave and call them by their names. She would ask about their kids. She would say things like, remember that time we went on the sleigh ride? These were memories from 20 years ago, long before Rancy Venom was even born. This girl loved the Roths. She treated them as her true parents. She had zero interest in the Venom family, her biological parents. When the Venoms came to visit, she was polite, but distant, she treated them like they were strangers. Dr. Browdy says the only explanation that fits the data is that Mary Roth came back. She borrowed a body so she could spend three more months with her parents that she missed. Eventually, the time came for Mary to leave. She told her parents, the Roths, that Rancy was healed and ready to return. The goodbye was heartbreaking.

56:46She hugged them. She promised them that death was not the end. And then she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was Rancy. Of course, she didn't know where she was. She didn't know the Roths. She asked for her mother. The Watsika wonder was over, but the proof remained. With these old stories, it's easy for us to say, well, that sounds good, Sandra, but it happened in the 1800s. What about today? Can we prove that mediums are actually feeling a spirit? Not just imagining it. So let's bring Dr. Bischelback and the Windbridge Institute. One of the most interesting parts of her essay is when she talks about the sensation of the correction. Again, she doesn't just test for accuracy. She interviewed her mediums about what it feels like to talk to the dead versus what it feels like just to be psychic. And she wanted to know if it feels different bringing in a deceased loved one.

57:48And the answer was a definite yes. One of her Windbridge certified research mediums described the difference perfectly. She said, there's a heaviness around the sensation of living people. Like air compared to helium. She explained that reading a living person feels dense or static. It feels grounded. But when she connects to a deceased person, it feels like helium. It's a floating sensation. It feels lighter, faster, and higher in vibration. Another medium described it as a physical supercharged. She told Dr. Bischel, physically, mediumship charges me up. It's like I've had eight cups of cappuccino. The physiology changes, the energy changes, and the emotion changes. Dr. Bischel found that mediums consistently report feeling deep love when talking to the dead. A love so strong, it sometimes makes them feel like they lose themselves.

58:50One medium said, I feel like I don't know who I am anymore. I'm at one with a spirit person. I'm part of their energy. So whether it's Rancy Venom hugging her mother in 1878 or a modern medium, feeling that loving helium buzz in 2026, the evidence is consistent. There is always a presence, and that presence brings love. So we have these incredible stories. We have the science. We have the sensations. But does it count as proof? In her essay, Dr. Bischel moves away from the science lab and steps into the courtroom. She asks a very powerful question, what constitutes proof? In a criminal trial, you don't need 100% absolute certainty. You can't travel back in time to see the crime happen. What you need is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the standard we use to make life and death decisions. Dr. Bischel actually interviewed one of her

59:53wind bridge certified research mediums, a woman named Tracy, who used to work in law enforcement. She knew the legal system inside and out. Dr. Bischel asked her, based on the evidence, the quintuple blind studies, the accuracy rates, and the impossibility of cheating. If this were a trial, how would you vote? Tracy didn't hesitate, she said, where I presented this question in a courtroom, I would vote along with beyond a reasonable doubt. In court, you look at the facts. You look at the reliability of the witnesses. You look at the impossibility of the alternative explanations. In the case of the afterlife, the alternative explanations involve things like super telepathy that someone could read someone's mind and steal chess strategies from a living brain. Or mass hallucinations that allow blind people to see. Dr. Bischel argues that these alternative explanations have become unreasonable.

1:00:54It is unreasonable to believe that a housewife in the Midwest learned and spoke fluent finish just to trick a researcher. It is unreasonable to believe that a 13 year old girl faked being someone else for three months without slipping up once. And it is unreasonable to believe that 20 mediums in a lab all guessed the exact same details by chance when the odds are one and a million. When the doubt becomes unreasonable, the verdict must be guilty. Or in this case, alive. Yes, the dead are alive. We just can't see them. Dr. Bischel concludes her essay with a powerful statement. She says that the scientific evidence she has collected meets if not surpasses what is required in a court of law. The most logical explanation, the only explanation that fits all the facts is that human consciousness survives death.

1:01:55So my friend, the jury is in. The verdict has been read, but here's the problem. The court of public opinion hasn't heard the evidence yet. Most people in the world still think all this afterlife talk is just wishful thinking. They don't know about the Wind Bridge Protocol. They don't know about the Watsika wonder. They don't know that we're approaching almost 300 episodes of Shades of the Afterlife with so many stories from professional and incredible people. It's one of the reasons we have a new film out called Evidence of the Afterlife, saving evidential mediumship. It's my way, along with filmmaker Robert Lyon and mediums, Carrie McLeod and Phil Dykes, of taking this courtroom verdict and putting it on the big screen. In the film, we take you inside the laboratory. We show you the history. We show you the science that Dr. Bischel and others have fought so hard to uncover. We show you why mediumship is under attack

1:02:56and why skeptics are trying so hard to bury it. Of course, we humans grieve and I'm gonna continue to give you every bit of information so that you know that the afterlife is real. Your loved ones are still alive and you will see them again. So if you enjoyed this episode today, why not check out our film. There's a link to it on my main page at wedon'tdie.com. Just scroll to the bottom. And while you're there, if you don't yet have a copy of my book and you'd like a free PDF copy of Wedon't Die, a skeptics discovery of life after death, just enter your name and your email address. There's some other free goodies there as well. I invite you to join our free Sunday gathering on Zoom. Starts two o'clock New York time and we have hundreds of people from all over the world join us. There's a medium demonstration included in every single service and they are empowering, inspirational and fun. I wanna thank Dr. Steven Browdy and Dr. Julie Byshel

1:03:58for their incredible research. They are true pioneers and we get to benefit from their work. So my friend, the verdict is in, the logic holds up, check, the science holds up, check, and the love holds up, check. You are not a body that has a soul. You are a soul that has a body that we really are as a divine eternal being. And we're all here to learn, to grow, and to love and to forgive and be kind and help others. And when this life is over, the game isn't finished. It's just time to move to a different board. I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the I Heart Radio and Coast to Coast A.M. Paranormal Podcast Network. Thanks for listening to the I Heart Radio and Coast to Coast A.M. Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out all our shows

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