A widow unmistakably senses her husband's presence at night. A son, weeks after the funeral, hears his mother's voice – two sentences, calm and clear. Such spontaneous after-death communications are among the most common exceptional experiences of all, and since 2025 there is, for the first time, a major analysis with German data: published in the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik we recently portrayed, by the field's leading international research team. Its core question is as simple as it is astonishing: what do the deceased actually convey – and in what state do they appear?
What after-death communications are
The technical term is After-Death Communication (ADC): the spontaneous, direct impression of contact with a deceased person – without a medium, without a séance, without any technique, usually entirely unexpected. The forms range from distinctly sensing a presence to heard voices, felt touches and characteristic scents, to visual impressions and extraordinarily real dreams. How widespread this is we know for Germany from the Psi Report: apparitions of the deceased are among the classic experiences affecting a substantial part of the population – and hardly anyone talks about them. Important for the distinction: this is the opposite of the mediated contacts through mediums studied, for instance, by the EREAMS study – nobody sought these experiences, they simply happen.
The project: the systematic survey
Since February 2018 the international research project on the phenomenology of spontaneous after-death communications has been under way – carried by the Swiss ADC researcher Evelyn Elsaesser together with the psychologists Chris A. Roe and Callum E. Cooper (University of Northampton) and David Lorimer (Scientific and Medical Network), funded among others by the Bial Foundation and the Society for Psychical Research. Detailed questionnaires have meanwhile been completed by more than 1,300 experiencers in six languages; Elsaesser's book "Spontaneous Contacts with the Deceased" (2023) summarises the findings and won the Scientific and Medical Network book prize. Her German-language account appears under the title "Wenn das Ende nicht das Ende ist".
The German results (2025)
The paper in the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik – "What the Deceased Communicate, What we Learn About Their State of Mind, and how this Impacts Grief" (Elsaesser, Roe, Cooper, Morrison & Lorimer, volume 25, no. 2) – analyses the project's 235 German-language questionnaires. Three findings stand out:
- The state of the deceased: they are perceived predominantly in a positive emotional state – well, peaceful, released; negative impressions are the rare exception.
- The content of the contacts: at the centre stands support and help for the bereaved – reassurance, encouragement, the signal "I am well, you can let go".
- The effect: the contacts influence grief palpably for the better – they comfort, relieve and help with living on.
Anyone who knows our articles on deathbed visions and Christopher Kerr's hospice research recognises the pattern at once: it is the same message from the other side of the threshold. The dying are received by deceased loved ones who appear well and reassure them – and the bereaved are visited by the same deceased, appearing well and reassuring. Two independently researched phenomena, one consistent picture.
The honest counter-side
Of course there is the obvious psychological reading: after-death communications as a coping achievement of grief – the psyche producing what the pain needs. In its favour speaks the comforting function; against it speak several peculiarities of the material documented by the project: the contacts often come unexpectedly and in sober moments, they also come to people without corresponding beliefs, and the project literature moreover describes cases in which recipients received information they, by their own account, could not have known. A survey can – here as with the Psi Report – document experiences, not their cause. But the blanket explanation "wishful thinking of the bereaved" has to grapple with an awkward detail: wishful thinking would have to deliver what the wish dictates – yet the reported contacts strikingly often follow an agenda of their own.
Context
For the bereaved themselves the practical yield of the study can hardly be overstated: whoever has such a contact is neither alone nor ill – they share an experience with millions, now cleanly documented for the German-speaking world as well. Precisely this normalisation is one of the project's stated aims, and it is the same service that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross rendered to the dying. And for the larger question of this site, the study adds one more stone to the mosaic: deathbed visions, hospice dreams, terminal lucidity, after-death communications – all independently researched phenomena that keep telling the same story. At some point the most parsimonious explanation is no longer the one that invents a different mechanism for every phenomenon.
Sources: Evelyn Elsaesser, Chris A. Roe, Callum E. Cooper, Sophie Morrison, David Lorimer: "What the Deceased Communicate, What we Learn About Their State of Mind, and how this Impacts Grief", Zeitschrift für Anomalistik 25 (2025), no. 2, pp. 242–281 (issue overview); the international ADC research project (since 2018, University of Northampton / Scientific and Medical Network, funded among others by the Bial Foundation and the SPR), adcrp.org; Evelyn Elsaesser, Spontaneous Contacts with the Deceased (2023), in German Wenn das Ende nicht das Ende ist, evelyn-elsaesser.com; supplemented by our articles on deathbed visions, Christopher Kerr and the Psi Report Germany.
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