Communications from the Dead?

(by Dan Peterson sic et non blog)

Other accounts speak of knowledge being conveyed that only the dead person could have known.  One of the Guggenheims’ informants, for instance, relates a story in which her deceased husband told her the location of some badly needed cash.[1]  The ancient Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (d. 43 B.C.) recounts an anecdote about a murder that was solved when the victim appeared during the dream of a friend and supplied the details of the crime.[2]  A very interesting subcategory of such narratives involves a deceased friend or family member warning of danger or of an unrecognized health threat.[3]  A friend at the university where I teach tells, for example, of her two-years-dead mother (whom I also knew) coming to her in a dream—the only time she has ever dreamed of her mother—and telling her “You have cancer.”  Although my friend had recently been tested and found to be fine, new tests confirmed the diagnosis, and early detection saved her life.[4]  A remarkable instance of much the same thing was related to Osis and Haraldsson.  According to the account given to them, a seven-year-old boy had been hospitalized in critical condition with a mastoid infection.  Unfortunately, he was rebellious.  He refused to take the necessary medications, and resisted the nurses at every turn.  Suddenly, though, he had an experience, as he believed, with his deceased uncle, who had worked as a physician on that very hospital floor and to whom he had been close.

The boy insisted that Uncle Charlie came, sat beside him, and told him to take his medicine.  He also told the boy that he would get well.  The boy was very sure that Uncle Charlie had sat in the chair and told him these things.  After this experience, the patient was cooperative.  He was not excited, and he took the deceased doctor’s “visit” as a matter of course.  The next morning, the boy was much better—a dramatic change had occurred in his condition.[5]
The phenomenon of “after-death communications” is surprisingly widespread, even among unbelievers and skeptics.[6]  

According to a survey conducted by the prominent priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley under the auspices of the National Opinion Research Center, 42% of American adults claim to have been in contact, in some way or another, with someone who has died.  The figures are even higher in certain subcategories of the population.  Studies suggest that somewhere between 50% and 74.4% of widows claim to have had some such experience.[7]  A lower but still significant figure has been found in surveys of the general European population, many of whom claim to have been fully awake during their encounter, unaffected by drugs, and, sometimes, not alone in their perception of the presence of a deceased person.[8]  Such results cannot simply be waved aside.

Still, despite their commonness, and despite the fact that many stories of after-death communication involve multiple witnesses, they remain anecdotal.[9] 

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https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2019/07/communications-from-the-dead.html