“In the late 1990s, I was a private investigator who–through a series of unusual events–came to investigate life after death. On the “About Bob Olson” page, Here’s a video where I tell the story about my work as a private eye and how I came to investigate evidence of the afterlife and test psychic mediums. You can hear my story by watching this video or read my story by clicking here.” ~ Bob Olson, Afterlife TV
If you’d like to watch this video, From Private Investigator To Afterlife Investigator – The True Story, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=314
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson’s other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob’s Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
JOIN BOB’S NEWSLETTER: Don’t miss Bob’s latest content about life lessons and life after death on his newsletter called, Bob Olson Connect.
Hi everybody. Bob Olson here from Afterlife TV. A lot of people ask about my story. They ask how I went from private investigator to afterlife investigator and then really became a psychic medium researcher. So, it’s an odd story. It’s a weird story. It’s something that I just fell into, and so I just figured I’d sort of give you a rundown on how that worked.
I went to school for criminology. I got my degree in criminal justice. I was going to, in my mind, work for the FBI or the ATF or the DEA. When I went and interviewed with those agencies, they told me: Bob, what you really need to do is get some experience. Go become a police officer, and then come back to us in maybe five years or so. Well, that wasn’t something that I wanted to do.
I immediately ended up becoming a private investigator. I got lucky enough to apprentice with one guy for a few years who was a very well-known PI in Massachusetts. After apprenticing with him I ended up taking over his agency, and that became my private investigation agency after he was done.
I investigated a lot of different types of cases that I went through before finally settling in on one particular specialty. But at first I did some fraud cases where I would go undercover and work for a company that thought maybe one of their employees was ripping them off. I would work as an employee and figure out who that was.
I worked what we call domestic cases where I would follow people who their spouses thought were cheating on them. In most cases they were. If you think your spouse is cheating on you to the point where you call a PI, chances are they probably are. In almost every case that was the result. It’s not a glamorous job. You follow people around in their car. You wait for hours. You eat lousy food. It’s not as exciting as they make it look on TV.
I eventually started doing criminal cases as my reputation grew. I worked for a lot of criminal attorneys. Since it’s the police who arrest people and then do the investigation to put people in jail, it would be the alleged criminal’s lawyers, defense attorneys, who would call me to investigate the case from that end and try to find the evidence to show that they were actually innocent. Believe it or not, most of them are not.
So what would happen was I learned that if I did a really good job I was really actually helping criminals go free. I did do a really good job, so I recognized that that wasn’t something I wanted to do anymore. I did several murder cases, and I realized I couldn’t live with myself anymore by helping those people out in that way.
I eventually settle in on personal injury cases where I would investigate accidents that took place. It might be what we call product liability, we’ll say, if a toy hurt a child or a crib hurt a child. Sometimes I did a lot of playground accidents, accidents that took place on escalators, for instance, or we had like car accidents or worker’s compensation accidents where people got hurt on the job.
I would investigate to see what happened, interview all the witnesses, take photographs of any products or evidence that needed to be photographed, look those things up if it was a product liability case. We’d do all kinds of research on the company that made it and manufactured it and make sure to get copies of those actual products in hand so we could test them on our own. So anyways, those are the kinds of things that I did.
In 1997, I had been a private investigator for many years, and my father died. It was like a shock to my system. First of all, he was 64. I was 35. He died fairly young. He had been ill for a while, so it’s not like it came as a big surprise; but it was still very devastating to me.
For the first time in my life I started to have questions about the afterlife, things that I never thought about. Where did my father go? Is there an afterlife? Is there a heaven? Is there a hell, all these things that I had learned over time. These are the questions that went through my mind. I decided that since I was a private investigator, I would use my skills as a PI to investigate the afterlife. Who better to find out, right?
Well, the first couple of years didn’t quite go so well. I had no idea really where to find the answers to these things, so I investigated psychics and tarot readers and astrologers and palm readers. I really had no idea where to go to get this information. I was on the right track with the psychics, but I was getting a lot of vague information from all these people for being the skeptic that I was.
I was very skeptical, so I only saw the information they gave me as being a bunch of vague generalities, nothing concrete, nothing convincing enough to make me feel as though it was evidence of the afterlife in any way. Really it wasn’t, until finally about two years later in 1999 I had a reading with a medium, what’s known as a psychic medium, someone who communicates with spirits.
Of course, being very skeptical, I made the appointment. I said to my wife, “I should just cancel this appointment. I’m wasting my money. I might as well just give it to her and not even go.” But my wife convinced me, “Look, you’re doing this investigation. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get some evidence. This is what you’re looking for.” I went to the reading.
The reading went so well. It was a one-hour reading that I signed up for, but it went so well that the medium didn’t want it to stop either. I ended up getting a three-hour reading, a three-hour reading with a lot of concrete evidence that came through, really convincing evidence. Now, I had never met this medium before. She didn’t know me. We were strangers to one another. She knew nothing about me, and the information that came through was just amazing, things that she could not possibly know if not for communicating with my father in the afterlife, my grandmother, and several other loved ones in spirit who came through that particular day.
It was enough evidence to be convincing to me and crack my skepticism wide open, make me realize, boy, there’s a lot more to life and death than I ever realized. What this did was it set me off; it turned my investigation into overdrive. All of the sudden I decided that not only was I going to investigate it, but I was going to write a book about it. So I wanted to do some really detailed research about this information so that I could write about it and share it with other people.
Well, I started to test that particular medium and eventually met other mediums along the way. Within the first year I had met several very gifted people who allowed me to test them in all kinds of different ways to see what the boundaries were of their ability, what was possible. So I was learning about the ability of spirit communication along with information about the afterlife. As I was getting readings and I was watching other people get readings, I was learning information about the afterlife because that’s what you do when you get readings with people coming through in spirit.
I was taking all this information, carefully documenting it, writing about all the things. One of the things that I did was I wrote about my best readings, my favorite readings. I started to put those online. I created a site mainly for this reason called ofspirit.com. I think our original motto was: We are originally of spirit. So it’s ofspirit.com. That site, of course, grew like crazy.
We now have over 3,000 articles for the mind-body-spirit field on there. But my stuff was all on the psychics and mediums page, the articles that I was writing about my favorite readings. It was getting so much traffic, so much attention from the public, that I decided about two years later in 2001 that I would create bestpsychicmediums.com.
When I created bestpsychicmediums.com, I took all those articles, put them on that site, which really became my recommended list. Those were the most extraordinary readings I had. I wrote about them so that people like you could read about them, see what that reading was like, but also what the personality of that particular psychic or medium was like, what their reading structure was like, and see if it resonated with you, if that’s the kind of personality and style of reading that you liked so that you could have a reading yourself.
Well, this just continued with time, and I kept testing more and more mediums along the way to the point where I tested hundreds. I stopped counting at 300, and that was years ago. I started analyzing the best readings from the worst readings and trying to determine what made one really extraordinary, what made one mediocre, and figure out how this ability works, why it works better with some people than others, and just answer all those questions that you have about psychics and mediums, which I did, of course, over time.
A lot of people say to me, “Who appointed you the tester of psychic mediums?” That’s sort of the point is nobody did. I didn’t even appoint myself. This is not something I ever wanted to do. I never woke up saying, I want to be an afterlife investigator and I want to test psychic mediums. I never wanted to do that. I fell into it. It’s just something that I fell into.
I use the word “test” because there’s no better word to use. If I say I tested a psychic medium, you know what that means. I actually came up with a 15-point test that I follow when getting a reading so I can analyze it in comparison to the other readings. But at the same time it’s just easier to say I test a psychic medium than to say, well, I get readings from people and I analyze them. I compare them with all the other readings. You know what it means.
So I never appointed myself the tester. I just ended up testing people first for my own research, for my own benefit, to answer my own questions, and then because I started writing about them I ended up testing people so that I could share that information about who the best ones were with you, the public. That’s how I became known as the psychic medium researcher online.
That’s how bestpsychicmediums.com became so popular and then later Best Psychic Directory. Because a lot of people were asking about psychics and mediums who I had not yet tested, I said, hey, I’m going to create a directory where the public can write reviews about their best readings the same way I do. They’re shorter reviews. They’re brief, but you will get the gist of it.
It allows you to go to bestpsychicdirectory.com, click on any psychic or medium’s listing, and read the reviews that people have written about them. That way, if someone has no reviews and another person has 70 reviews, it makes it easy for you to choose between the two because you’ve got 70 people who are raving about their reading with somebody and the other one doesn’t have anybody raving about them.
This is sort of how it happened. I created these websites along the way just to share this information. First it was Ofspirit.com Magazine. Then it was bestpsychicmediums.com, then bestpsychicdirectory.com. Now I’ve got afterlifetv.com just to sort of present this information to you in video form.
Along the way though, in probably the year 2000, I started to expand my investigation beyond just psychics and mediums. I started to expand it in other ways by having experiences with other practitioners or researching and interviewing people who have had experiences, like people who have had near-death experiences, people who have died for a few seconds or a few minutes and then come back to life. Maybe they were revived in the surgery room or something, the emergency room.
These people had these experiences where they were floating above their body and saw their body below them, saw the doctors and nurses trying to revive them, saw a spiritual being come and greet them and maybe bring them to the spirit world, where they were then told it wasn’t their time yet and they had to go back. Near-death experiences I started to research.
I started to investigate past-life regressions and actually have my own past-life regressions. Again, I was skeptical about past-life regressions. I really didn’t know what to believe until I had my own experience. It brought it from, well, I wasn’t even a believer, but it would’ve brought it from a belief to a knowing. I went from skepticism to knowing right past belief because once you’ve had an experience like that on your own, all of the sudden you know it’s true.
It’s true for you. It doesn’t have to be true for anybody else, but you know on a cellular, on a soul level, that you actually had another lifetime. You experience it in multiple ways. I felt things. I smelled things. I saw things. I knew what it was like to be in the body of that first guy. His name was George, big, burly guy with lots of hair from 1642 in some Celtic land. I had that experience. It will live with me forever. It’s just one of those vivid experiences that never leave you. I ended up then later having other past-life experiences as well, other regressions.
I investigated channelers, people who communicate not just with loved ones in spirit but more with ascended masters, higher level spirits, maybe even group entities who speak as one through what’s called a channeler. They’re really channeling wisdom from these higher level spirits instead of really messages from our loved ones. That was fascinating. I learned a lot from that.
I investigated what’s called ADCs, after-death communications. Great book called Hello from Heaven by Bill and Judith Guggenheim. I highly recommend it. These are the signs and the signals that people send to us from the spirit world to let us know they still exist, to let us know they’re there, to let us know they’re watching over us and that they’re with us, after-death communications.
I also had life between lives regressions. A guy named Michael Newton said, “What if we do a past-life regression and then on the day of that person’s death we just keep going? What happens then?” Well, he did that, and I did that. I had that experience. It’s like a four or five-hour experience. You go to day of the death of whatever that lifetime was that you experienced. After that, where do you go? You go into the spirit world. That’s our true home. That’s the place that we go between lives, so it’s called a life between lives regression. It’s an amazing experience.
So I had lots and lots of experience with all sorts of different practitioners in the spiritual field and learned a little bit about the afterlife from each and every one of them. You can read about a lot of the articles that I’ve written on ofspirit.com, on bestpsychicdirectory.com, bestpsychcimediums.com, and now you get to learn about them on video here on afterlifetv.com. So that’s my story. I hope you found it interesting. Anyways, it probably answers some questions that you had about me and how I got into this, and it helps you get to know me a little bit better, I hope. Thanks.
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson’s other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob’s Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
JOIN BOB’S NEWSLETTER: Don’t miss Bob’s latest content about life lessons and life after death on his newsletter called, Bob Olson Connect.