BILL GUGGENHEIM: “Our loved ones in spirit communicate with us in many ways, and Bill Guggenheim teaches us the 12 most common categories of after death communications (ADCs) in this video conversation. Bill is the co-author of Hello From Heaven with his former wife, Judy Guggenheim. Together they interviewed 2000 people and collected more than 3300 first-hand accounts of ADCs. In this conversation, Bill defines after death communications, shares his incredible story of how he was led to do this research, and teaches us how to recognize when our deceased loved ones are contacting us. Bill & Judy Guggenheim are the leaders in the field of after death communication.” ~ Bob Olson, Afterlife TV
Bill Guggenheim and his former wife, Judy Guggenheim, wrote Hello From Heaven: A new field of research – after-death communication – confirms that life and love are eternal. The book has been featured on 20/20 by ABC-TV and Coast To Coast with George Noory. First published in 1995, Hello From Heaven has become a classic on the subject of after-death communication (ADC), a term first coined by the authors.
Bill and Judy Guggenheim have been conducting after-death communication research since 1988. Bill serves on the Board of Advisors of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, is a member of the Association for Death Education & Counseling, and has presented workshops at conferences for The Compassionate Friends, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the Association for Death Education & Counseling, In Loving Memory, the International Association for Near-Death Studies, Bereaved Parents of the USA, Parents of Murdered Children, as well as other support groups for the bereaved, hospices, churches and similar institutions devoted to personal and spiritual growth.
WEBSITE: Bill Guggenheim’s website: http://www.After-Death.com
If you’d like to watch this video, Hello From Heaven: The 12 Types Of After Death Communication With Bill Guggenheim, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=2402
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.
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Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Hi everybody. Bob Olson here with Afterlife TV. You can find us at www.afterlifetv.com. This is where we search for evidence of life after death and ask the meaningful questions around that subject.
Today we have a guest I’m really excited about. I’ve been trying to get this guest on since Season One, and we finally made it happen. I want to welcome the coauthor of Hello From Heaven—I’m going to show this in a minute—Bill Guggenheim. Hey Bill, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it.
Bill Guggenheim: Good morning, Bob.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: This is great technology. This is the first time you’ve done a Skype interview, right?
Bill Guggenheim: Very much so. It’s only my second time of ever using it even.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s awesome. We did a couple other people, and it was the same situation that they had never done it before. So I love that this technology allows us to connect and do wonderful things like this in order to educate the public. So thanks; thanks for making that work out.
Today we’re going to talk about how after death communication provides strong evidence of life after death. Let me just say right off the bat, you were the one; you and your former wife Judy sort of coined the term after death communication. Is that true?
Bill Guggenheim: Yes, we did. We are the ones who actually came up with the terminology after death communication experience, or ADC. We also defined an ADC, what it is, and we did all the initial research. We interviewed 2,000 people.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: When did you start this research?
Bill Guggenheim: In 1988.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, I mean you guys were just way ahead of the curve here, way ahead of your time. I don’t want to jump too ahead. You did seven years of research, right?
Bill Guggenheim: Right.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Over 2,000 people interviewed, it says.
Bill Guggenheim: In all 50 states and all 10 Canadian provinces.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: A total of 3,300 firsthand accounts among those 2,000 people, right?
Bill Guggenheim: That’s right. If they weren’t firsthand, we would not accept their experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Fantastic. 353 of them are in this book. I have been recommending this book since at least the year 2000. My journey started in 1999. I came across this, blown away by it, and I just have not stopped recommending it. So let’s just show people Hello From Heaven. You can’t go to any one of my websites and not see me recommending this book. It’s a fantastic book. It is a classic. It is something that I think everybody who is interested in this field should read.
Thanks to you, Bill, and I appreciate this, I have three copies here. I’m going to give them away. Anybody who has signed up for our email list— the reason we did that, I was going to do it through Facebook or Twitter, decided to do I through our email list because it’s hard to get people’s addresses through Facebook. So we said, okay, sign up for our email list. We’re going to select three random numbers out of a total of how many people we have.
So let’s say we have 10,000 people on the email list. We’ll select three random numbers, and then we’ll just count down and we’ll pick those people. That’s how they’re going to win them. First time we’ve ever done that as well, so I thank you for donating those to these people. I know they’re going to be grateful for it.
You self-published this in 1997, right?
Bill Guggenheim: 1995.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: 1995, a couple years before, okay.
Bill Guggenheim: Yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Then what happened after that?
Bill Guggenheim: We sold probably 5,000 copies in October 1995. By Christmas that same December two months later we had a contract with Bantam Books.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: In two months.
Bill Guggenheim: With signed contract with Bantam Books. We had a literary agent who said, “We want you to go out and sell 10,000 copies, create some buzz,” as they call it. We did sell 1,000 copies in four weeks, the second thousand in 31 days and were well on our way.
Meanwhile, through a series of “coincidences,” or I call them coincidinks, various editors learned of our book through Gail Ross, our agent. For instance, she would have a copy in her backpack and it was sticking out. Someone said, “Oh, that looks interesting. Can I see it?” She gave it to three, and then she had to give it to a fourth one because she deals with all these people equally. There was a bidding war, and Bantam Books had the contract.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Amazing. I mean it’s an amazing story. I actually was reading a book years ago. It was written for writers. They had interviewed a bunch of authors about how they became successful. You guys were in there, and it told the story in much more detail. It’s a fascinating story. It’s really cool. Also, I love the fact that you told the publisher, “You can’t change a word,” right? Is that true? That’s what they said in there.
Bill Guggenheim: That’s true, because a number of publishers and people along the way, they wanted to change the title. It’s a warm and fuzzy book. It’s a very touchy-feely book because we’re dealing with people who are bereaved, who are grieving, and we wanted it to be that.
Incidentally, we began giving workshops in the second year of our research, so we had already been out giving dozens and dozens of workshops during those next six years. That’s where we found more and more people to interview as well. It was primarily for the Compassionate Friends, which is the largest self-help group for bereaved parents in the United States, or the world actually. So we were at national conferences and everything. It just evolved.
This is the language they could hear it in. So a couple publishers wanted to make it more scientific and objective, in other words arm’s length, and say, “People allegedly reported that,” this scientific psycho-babble.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s right. Right, exactly.
Bill Guggenheim: I said, “No, this is the way we wrote it, and whether you sell it or not, we’ll sell it,” and we did.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So what’s it been, 17 years roughly?
Bill Guggenheim: Sixteen years.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Sixteen years. I can’t go into a bookstore and not see several copies of it on the shelves, and they only do that when books are flying off the shelves. I mean a lot of times you have to order the book that you want. They always have copies of this. It has just been really successful as a result. What was your background? Tell us a little bit about your background, how you ended up conducting this seven years of research. That’s kind of cool.
Bill Guggenheim: My background is everything but what you’d expect. I used to be a stockbroker and a securities analyst for two different small firms on Wall Street in New York City. That was my home. I was raised in Long Island and grew up in New York and was in and around New York/New Jersey for the first half of my life. I didn’t believe in any of this. I was agnostic, maybe slightly atheistic. I’m not sure. I was still against all this.
Now we’re going to move ahead to 1977. Judy and I moved to Florida, and we were living in Jupiter, Florida, which is near the Palm Beach area. She said, “Come on in. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is going to be on the Donahue show.” It’s all Donahue, see.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, I remember.
Bill Guggenheim: A tall man with very white hair. I had heard her name, but I didn’t know who she was really. I went in, and she didn’t speak about death and dying, which was her specialty. She spoke about near-death experiences, which were very interesting to me. I’ve heard of them and read Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life, which was published in ’75 and whatnot. Watched the show for an hour and was moved by it. I went back to my office and back to the Dow Jones industrial averages.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: What a contrast.
Bill Guggenheim: Yes. Then this same show was run two weeks later on a cable channel. This time I watched it again because there was something about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She could speak directly at a camera without blinking, and she just drew people in. She was charismatic is an understatement. She was a very small woman. You’ll see that I met her later on. But it had her name and address at the bottom of the screen, so very magnanimously I wrote a check in support of her work, kind of the thing that you’d give to the Boy Scouts or the Heart Fund or something, $25. That was my attaboy, good boy, for the day. That was it. I figured that was all.
Then several weeks later I received two things in the mail. One was a set of audio cassette tapes from her called Lessons from a Dying Patient, which didn’t interest me frankly. I got a little bit squeamish physically. I didn’t want to hear about cancer and tumors and all the details of the terminally ill. The other was an invitation to attend a five-day workshop with her called Life, Death, and Transition.
Now, I was frankly elated to be invited by somebody who was very world famous already. She went on to receive a nomination for the Nobel Prize for peace. She didn’t get enough to win it, but she was at least nominated by several people. Anyway, so I felt really good about that at first, but it was a number of months away. The workshop was actually only two hours away at this point from where we were living.
I thought about going, but as the time grew near I realized if I went I’d probably be taking up the room of a doctor, a nurse, a social worker, a chaplain, somebody who works with the terminally ill. My thing’s Wall Street. What’s that got to do with anything? So I waited till the last day of registration, which was in September or October. She lived in Flossmoor, Illinois.
I called her office expecting to speak to a secretary. Well, it had been snowing that day. The woman who was her secretary, a Catholic nun who did that, couldn’t get to work. So Elisabeth answered her own phone. This is like calling somebody and getting Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise or whoever your movie star is, big name. What do I say now? “So I wanted to thank you very much for inviting me, Elisabeth. I really appreciate it, but please give my seat away to someone else who can truly benefit.”
So she listened politely, and she remembered me, by the way. She said in her German-Swiss accent, “Bill, I think you should be there.” I heard myself saying like a little boy, “Elisabeth, if you think so, I’ll come.” It’s like I get in my workshops. At least it proves one thing: I’m a pushover for dominant women. She was a very dominant woman; she’s deceased now, but at that time.
I went a few months later, and the workshop was in north Palm Beach. This was about life and living. It was 70 people sharing all the pain in their lives, not just the grief of some people who were terminally ill, but not just the grief of dying or the grief of loss of a child or a parent or a spouse dying or things like that. It was the grief of divorces. It was the pain of all kinds of losses in life: loss of money, loss of health, loss of you name it. As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said, you could lose your contact lens and go through the five stages of grief, denial, bargaining, anger, depression and finally acceptance when you find it again.
By the third day we all wanted to go off to an island to be together as one big family and send for the people we love, our families and whatnot, and go off in never-never land, which happens in a lot of workshops. During this workshop on Thursday evening it was a sharing time. The hard work was behind us, and now it was time to share some nice things.
So there was a mother there whose daughter had been hit and killed by a car a little over a year earlier. She went on to narrate how she had this most remarkable dream, but it was unlike any other dream she ever had, much more vivid and real and three-dimensional and absolutely clear in her mind, and how the daughter had been on a swing in a tree and how she was dressed and how healthy she looked and everything like this and how comforting this dream was. She gave a lot more detail than I just did. It’s in the book.
Because I was running analytical as soon as I heard the word dream, I was very happy for her that she had had this experience that I regarded as a dream. To me dreams weren’t real, so I dismissed it. Then she went on and told how her teenage son had seen his deceased sister. While he was doing his homework, he looked up and saw his sister standing there and could see what she was wearing and everything. Then he came running out of his bedroom into the living room where his parents were watching TV, saying, “Cathy’s there, Cathy’s there!” He was all very excited and whatever.
I’m thinking rationally. Let’s see. Fifteen-year-old boy sees dead sister. This was Peoria, Illinois. What are the odds of this? Oh, let’s see, marijuana.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right.
Bill Guggenheim: I went through my little trip of what kids can do back then. There weren’t as many things as there are now. I didn’t think he was doing LSD yet, but marijuana’s a good explanation so I dumped that one. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross went on with a story of how a patient of hers who had died 10 months earlier had come back to her, and that she told in great detail.
Elisabeth was about to quit her work. There was so much opposition to it from the establishment, meaning hospital officials and whatnot; because what she would do is go into a large hospital, had a lot of wards, whatnot, and said, “I want to interview some of the terminally ill patients.” Back then in the late ’50s, early ’60s, even ’70s, nobody was terminally ill. They were all going to get well and go home. It was all in denial, denial, denial.
Nurses would come in and plump up the pillows for people. They weighed 90 pounds and had tumors the size of basketballs, but they’re going to get well and go home. People didn’t talk about it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Interesting.
Bill Guggenheim: This is the old days, the dark before Elisabeth’s work, way before hospice. So they called her the vulture lady, the death and dying lady, but it was animosity. There was so much pressure she was almost going to resign, and she was going to type a letter that night. This woman met her at the elevator in the apartment on the opposite of her, and they walked from the elevator down to Elisabeth’s office.
Elisabeth recognizes the woman vaguely, not quite right away, but she’s not fully solid either. What is this? What’s going on? They get to the office, and in the office the woman says, “You must promise me not to submit a letter of resignation. Your work is too important for you to resign.” Elisabeth agrees to that.
Then she remembers this was a patient of hers who had had a number of near-death experiences and different things like that, and she’d had a minister who was very close to her who Elisabeth also knew. She said to Elisabeth, “Would you mind terribly? I’m writing a message to your minister.” So here’s this woman who’s died who takes a penciled message to her minister and then exacts the same promise from Elisabeth a second time to not quit her research and then smiles and walks toward the doorway.
Then Elisabeth stands there for a moment in pause and then rushes to the door and looks up and down the hallway at the whole office building, nobody in sight, gone. Now, anybody else I would’ve found some way to dismiss it, but Elisabeth had everything to lose, nothing to gain in telling a story like this. It’s 1977, long before there was anything on this on TV or anything else. In the book I say: If a pin had fallen on the ground, it would have sounded like a crowbar falling on a concrete floor. Stunned, I was totally stunned.
Then she did something else. Elisabeth flew Raymond Moody down from Virginia to Florida to talk to our group. He did. Raymond talked about near-death experiences, and two or three people in the group had had something like that or had one. So this is a wonderful evening, and that’s a Thursday night. Friday the workshop’s over. We all go home.
So when I got home I began looking for other accounts of people who’d been contacted by somebody who had died. Now, keep in mind there’s no internet in 1977.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right. That’s right.
Bill Guggenheim: If there was, I sure didn’t know about it. There were bulletin boards maybe. But that’s like saying you want to be a cosmonaut and walk on the moon. No. So I went to the public libraries and began to look for books and journals and anything I could find, and I did. I found one story here, two or three stories there. On one occasion I found a whole chapter in a book. But nobody had given them a name, yet there was a consistency to these stories.
Now, because I’m a stockbroker/securities analyst, I’m not a medical doctor. I’m not a PhD. I don’t have master’s degree, nothing. So I’m thinking, well, I’d like to follow this up, but if I wrote a book, who’s going to publish it? Who’s going to read it? You have to have credentials in our society.
So I went to Raymond Moody, who I got to know through a mutual friend over the years. I said, “Raymond, how about I’ll find people for you to interview.” He had another friend who was into parapsychology. “We’ll find the people. You interview them.” Raymond never said yes, but he never said no. He just said, “Well, I’m working on this now. I’m working on that.” He kept putting me off.
So 11 years later in 1988, I hear a voice in my head say, “Bill, do your own research. Write your own book. It’s your spiritual work to do.” I heard this voice before because it helped me save or prevent the drowning of my child, who was less than two years old. I believe it was my father, who had died 33 years earlier.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Really?
Bill Guggenheim: That voice, this was in 1980 when our son was 22 months old. Do you want to hear that story?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, yes. Because really, I mean that’s the beginning of all this, right? I mean in a way it’s what taught you what other people are doing, but if it saves your child’s life, that teaches you to trust that voice.
Bill Guggenheim: Sunday afternoon Judy and I had been in the front of the house. We had a conversation. We were living in Longwood, Florida, which is where I live now, a suburb of Orlando. We finished the conversation. We’re starting to go different directions, and I heard a voice in my head say telepathically, “Go outside and check the swimming pool.” That’s all it said. There was no sense of emergency, no sense of urgency. Just do it.
For some reason, I go. Why not? I had nothing else to do. So I walked to the back of the house, to the rear. We had sliding glass doors. We had a screened-in swimming pool, which is very common in Central Florida, Disney area and all. I noticed that about 15 feet away we had a wrought iron fence. It had a gate in it, and the gate was ajar. We had three boys, two older boys who used that as a shortcut, and a younger boy who was less than two.
The gate being ajar was not safe, so I went out to close it. When I did I looked at the deep end of the pool and saw our youngest son, Jonathon, who was 22 months old, was floating in the deep end not moving, not near the edge. He was several feet from the edge. There was no way I could’ve heard a splash or anything from where I was. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive.
One of those moments, I went running down the side of the pool. I screeched like an owl, screeched Judy’s name. For some reason I had been a volunteer fireman for three and a half years, and I heard, “Take your shoes off before you go in the water.” So I’m pulling my shoes off and I’m looking at Jonathon. His eyes are wide open. He has a small smile. He’s akimbo, just arms and legs floating, and he’s about an inch under the water.
I don’t know. All you can do is dive into the water, come up under him, push him to the side. Judy heard my scream, came out, grabbed him by the wrist, pulled him out. About 20 seconds later he spit up some water. Everything was fine. No CPR, nothing. We, by the way, figured out he had come out from a bathroom which was at the other end of the pool, and we had those rubber safety knobs over the doorknobs. A lot of adults have trouble turning the doorknobs. But how he got out we don’t know. Maybe this was set up for me to do all this, but that gave me a lot of belief in that voice. In this case it saved his life and saved us from being bereaved parents.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s right. Just to see the coincidinks as you talk, you see that thing on TV. Out of the goodness of your heart you send her a donation. She’s sending you something. You have resistance. I mean even the integrity: I don’t want to take up a seat of someone who could really use this. It’s just amazing to me all these little things. She talks you into going. I mean you call. You get her, not somebody else. She talks you into going. You go.
Not only do you meet someone who just changed this field to be what it is today—she’s just amazing; if anybody hasn’t read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, they need to—but you also meet Raymond Moody.
Bill Guggenheim: Yes, yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: In the same week. You try to get him to do the research. It never happens. You hear this voice. You had learned to trust this voice because of this experience that you just told us about. It’s amazing the things that took place in order to get you to write this book and do the research.
Bill Guggenheim: Yes. Even there, now Judy and I have been divorced for four years. This is 1988 now. She was the one who knew the most about this field. I invited her to come over. Now to be honest, we had gone through the usual stuff. We were married 17 years. We had three sons. When you’re divorced, it’s not easy the first few years. There’s dithering about whose car was out of the drive in the morning, typical nitpicking stuff that people do.
She had already said, “Let’s put down our sword and our shield and stop battling each other and make it good for the boys. Let’s do our best for them.” So we were on a good footing relatively. It was very new, fragile, but we had put down the fighting gear and we were becoming not friends yet, but at least good parents for the boys. We have a lifetime relationship to them and through them to each other.
So I invited Judy to come over, but my biggest concern was if we found these experiences, and yes, I had mine with saving my son, are there any other ones that are “evidential” in some way? While we’re sitting there, a woman calls who I hardly knew and tells me about a friend of hers, a relative, living in Tallahassee, which is a few hours away in Florida, and how the friend had a friend in turn who died and came to her and said goodbye. It was before she knew the terminally ill friend had died. She had her experience before she was informed, and that seemed very interesting.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, in so many levels, right? Because first of all, we’ll talk about this in a moment, but it’s not like grief imagining things, right? She doesn’t even know her friend has passed yet. Then she has this after death communication and finds out later that it’s true. But it’s also an exclamation mark on your work because just as you’re talking with Judy about doing this work—
Bill Guggenheim: Judy’s only there for an hour, and I get this phone call. It’s not like I get them every hour on the hour. It’s just the first and last one.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, okay.
Bill Guggenheim: One more green light.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wow, it’s just fascinating. You’re just like being pushed. You’re being shoved into this work. So you and Judy decide to do this research together.
Bill Guggenheim: Yeah. Actually, I began with another woman being the researcher herself, and we tried to conduct all our interviews in person. But frankly, that’s very, very time consuming because you’re driving all over several counties, and many people weren’t kind enough if they cancelled to even call. So this woman would often have to drive 45 minutes to get there, and they’re not even home. So I did the first 200 interviews, but with an interviewer in person. Then we switched to telephone interviews. Everything was recorded on audio cassette tapes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s amazing. I mean, again, to remind people, internet wasn’t around at that time.
Bill Guggenheim: Nothing, nothing. 1988. We didn’t know if I’d find 10 people or 50 people in the entire year. How would I find them? Wherever I would go I would try to find one or two people. I’d sit through a whole workshop someplace or a support group meeting or anything just to talk for two to three minutes at the end of it. My goal was to find 10 people a week, and I did. We interviewed 500 people the first year.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That right there, I mean what it takes to go out and do these little three-minute talks in order to get these people to come forward.
Bill Guggenheim: You’ve got to be kind of nuts.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: No, no.
Bill Guggenheim: You’ve got to be a collector of people and stories.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It’s an amazing commitment, if people can even imagine what that must have been like to put yourself out there in that way. Were you still working as a stockbroker at this time?
Bill Guggenheim: No, I wasn’t. I was frankly handling my own investments for myself. I was no longer in it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, good. How about with friends and family, are you worried about your reputation or what?
Bill Guggenheim: Not really because I was always a little bit different anyway, not seriously ill or anything and not a druggie or an alcoholic or anything like that. I had unusual beliefs in their view to some degree. Being grounded in Wall Street, I was okay. That was something people understood.
I was a very good amateur photographer. I took a lot of pictures of my children and things like that. I was divorced at this point and I had two daughters by my first marriage. I spent a lot of time with them. I was middle of the road, I guess, but people didn’t really know me. We moved to Florida, and we didn’t know that many people.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, so it allowed you to take that leap. Why don’t we just get into some of the details because I don’t want to run out of time and I definitely want to get through the different types of experiences that there are. I know in the book you separate it between like how many Americans versus how many people worldwide—why don’t you tell us that—have experienced an after death communication, or an ADC.
Bill Guggenheim: May I first give a definition of it. I think that’s the easiest place to start.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Let’s do that. I mean I think a lot of our audience knows, but let’s do it for those who don’t.
Bill Guggenheim: By our definition, an after death communication, or ADC experience, is a spiritual experience that occurs when someone is contacted directly and spontaneously by a family member or friend who has died. Directly means there’s no third party. There are no psychics, no mediums, no devices, no therapist, no hypnotist, no rituals, no Ouija boards or crystal balls, nothing.
Spontaneously means that our deceased loved ones chose when, where, and how to contact us. So it’s a very clear thing, but this does not include mediumship. This does not include electronic voice phenomena, looking for ghosts and all that. This is a family member or friend, not a stranger, not a nonphysical being, not channeled writings and all that, but somebody you’re related to or have known.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So as far as you’re concerned, anything outside of that is not considered an ADC?
Bill Guggenheim: By our definition, simply because there are a gazillion books already written on mediumship. There’s nothing new there, but this had never been written on. That’s the whole point. So we wanted something new. From there it was just a question of interviewing people, finding them to interview them. That said, they were in all these different states of America. We wanted as much geographic and economic and social diversification as possible.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So after you’ve done this research, you’ve spent seven years, you got a sense of what percentage of the population actually has this kind of experience.
Bill Guggenheim: We conservatively estimate that 20% of the population. We wrote our book 16 years ago. Population then was about 250 million. Now it’s 300 million. So we say 60 million Americans have had one or more after death communication experiences.
Now, there was a poll put out back then by a Catholic priest, Father Andrew Greeley, where his numbers were double ours. He was saying it was actually about 43% of the population have had an after death communication experience. Last night on the internet I happened to visit a friend of mine; on YouTube I saw her. She’s saying 60% of all people who are bereaved, in other words grieving the death of a loved one, 60% of them have an ADC.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Sure. The numbers can range, no question about it. But also, you were doing your research back in a time where, first of all, we didn’t have the internet. This kind of information wasn’t as prominent, and it was a little bit more risky for people to come forward and admit the experiences that they had, right?
Bill Guggenheim: When they were interviewed, many people said, I’ve already told the story to a few of my closest family members or friends. A lot of people thought I was nuts. I didn’t go any further. Or in a few cases, you’re the first person I’ve ever told. This happened 20 years ago. This was like near-death experiences were before Raymond Moody wrote Life After Life. If people had a fantastic near-death experience in the hospital and they tried to share it with the nurses or anybody the next day, where’d they wind up? In the psychiatric ward.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right.
Bill Guggenheim: Some of them were given antipsychotic drugs and all kinds of things. That still happens, a lot of misdiagnosis of spiritual experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s sad. So I would imagine that’s the discrepancy between the numbers.
Bill Guggenheim: So we say 60 million Americans have had one, which is one out of five people, 20%.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Conservatively.
Bill Guggenheim: As you said, conservatively. I’d rather be conservative. I’m not trying to hype something.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well, not only that, but I mean you have a very specific definition for what an ADC is. Some of these other people might’ve stretched that a little bit more.
Bill Guggenheim: Unfortunately, a number of books by researchers were not as organized as we were, but they would just accept whatever they could get their hands on, whatever people sent them in a letter or a phone call or a chat, wherever they met each other. They weren’t even ADCs. They were something like maybe an encounter with an angel or an encounter with an unknown being and all kinds of things, and they were selling their books.
It’s hard for me to read a number of those because they’re not discriminant in what they published. I’m not saying they’re sloppy. It’s just that they weren’t trained investigators or trained researchers in this field.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Exactly, exactly.
Bill Guggenheim: Well-intended people, yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You noticed that there were a certain number of experiences that just seemed to fit into these categories. How many categories or types?
Bill Guggenheim: Twelve major categories.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Twelve major categories.
Bill Guggenheim: It’s not because we analyzed them and said so. It’s just the language I saw or I heard or I smelled; it was the language that they used that put them in the categories. It wasn’t us analyzing it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well, I think it’s very exciting, and you are the man to be able to describe these to people because, first of all, I highly recommend that people get the book so that they can read about them and they can really categorize their own experiences obviously; nothing more important than that.
For right now, why don’t we briefly go through the 12 experiences. I’ll name them off, because you have them listed for me and you had sent me something in the mail. You have them listed. You can maybe just tell us what it’s like, so maybe people can go, oh, I’ve had one of those. You know what I mean? They’ll know what category it fits in.
So number one is sensing a presence, otherwise called sentient ADCs.
Bill Guggenheim: That’s where you just sort of feel that the person is near you. Many people can say he or she is off to my left or right, in front or the rear. There’s a definite sense that they’re nearby. They can often say when they came and also when they left. Although we didn’t mention it, sometimes there’s a slight change of temperature in the room even. The temperature seemingly goes up or goes down.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay.
Bill Guggenheim: These typically occur very quickly after someone has died, although they can occur many years later. That doesn’t really matter because I think they’re just trying to get through to us and let us know they’re there. But just when you feel their presence, that’s nice; it’s comforting usually.
But what we encourage people to do if they can, and obviously not when they’re driving a car, but to sit down, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, relax, sort of get into a meditative state and ask to receive a message. Because they’re not there just to hang around, they’re there to try to communicate if we’re open to it. As pretty as one of these may be to know that they’re there, there’s still more, I believe.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Is this the same idea like say I’m studying hard in a library and someone sneaks up behind me and they’re sort of looking over my shoulder? I might not have known they’re there in any other way than I can feel them. All of us have done this at one time or another. We look, and, sure enough, there’s somebody there. Is that sort of the idea?
Bill Guggenheim: I think so, yeah. Some people would describe it perhaps a little bit more concretely than that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Really?
Bill Guggenheim: I have not had that myself, so I can’t speak of all these. I’ve had some of these.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah.
Bill Guggenheim: It’s an inner knowing. That is what we say. But on the other hand people say, well, I’m just imagining this.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well, that’s what I was going to just say because it seems like this would be the easiest to write off.
Bill Guggenheim: It’s the least substantial, yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Interesting, all right. Number two, hearing a voice, auditory ADCs. Tell us about that.
Bill Guggenheim: Okay. Some people claim they hear a voice through their ears like you and your viewers are hearing me now, the primary way we communicate with each other. But the majority of communication is by telepathy. You don’t hear anything with your ears. It’s mind to mind contact, thought transference.
You would hear a voice in your head, very specific words, and some people, not many, but some actually are able to have two-way conversations this way, especially people who have been married many, many years and are now widowed. But they go on and have conversations.
I met one woman. I was walking into a store and just began chatting with her. She and her husband used to run a business. He died fairly young, and she talks to him every night. He gives her information on how to continue running the business. That’s not typical, but that’s a form of how it can be two way.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that is really neat, and I’ve heard of people doing that. They said the biggest challenge for them was just trusting because they were just hearing that voice in their head.
Bill Guggenheim: Now this I want to stress: At the same time, they know who it is. This is not just some voice telling them to pick up a weapon and hurt somebody or end your life and go get a gun. I mean it’s not demonic. I don’t even like that word. It’s not an unknown entity that’s threatening in any way.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right. In many cases that would more be along the lines of mental illness.
Bill Guggenheim: I don’t even want to go there. I’m not certified or qualified.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That would be the difference too.
Bill Guggenheim: It’s somebody they definitely know and trust, and they recognize the tonality of the voice. Even though it’s not a voice, everybody has a certain cadence. Many people have certain phrases they use and things of this nature and whatnot, and that’s what they hear by telepathy.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s how you tell the difference though. When you’re researching and doing your research, as long as those criteria are there; not like you said, I’m just hearing a voice, don’t know who it is, but they’re telling me to do something. That doesn’t count.
Bill Guggenheim: We didn’t even interview those. They always must know who it is.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well, I think that’s important because I think there are a lot of people out there, certainly the skeptics, who would be thinking that these are part of the 2,000 people that you interviewed. Those people didn’t even make it into the pool.
Bill Guggenheim: See, I did all the screening. I probably spoke to 4,000-5,000 people. Only the ones that I felt had some voracity to them did I turn over to the interviewers. I had 10 different interviewers, not all at the same time but over a period of seven years, and Judy was one of them. So there were many people who you would think they are in our book and they weren’t even interviewed.
We did a very good pre-interview, a prescreening, and in some cases it didn’t fit our criteria. I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feeling and just say, no, it’s not for you. I just let the phone call go on, and they thought that was the interview, me doing it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s right.
Bill Guggenheim: In other cases we had too many of the same thing. After a while when we got 1,500 or more we had a lot of this, and we didn’t need more. Each interview frankly, each person, cost me about $100 by the time it was all done.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s amazing.
Bill Guggenheim: This was a lot of money that was invested. I’m not trying to impress anybody with the money, but over seven years it was about $50,000 a year because phone calls in those days were 15 cents a minute. Many of these were 45 minutes to an hour and a half interviews, plus paying the interviewer, plus transcriber, plus mailing things back and forth, consent forms and stuff like this, on and on and on. There were many, many costs involved.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s amazing. Number three, feeling or touch, tactile ADCs. Tell us about that.
Bill Guggenheim: Now that’s a small category because not that many people would recognize a particular touch. So it’s something that’s very familiar to them like a pat, a caress. Some people as they go by they brush their hair or they snap their finger, just little mannerisms that people have. You know who that is. Even with your eyes shut you would know on earth. You would know who it is. It’s that kind of thing.
It’s hard to describe, but these are again all affection, nurturing, warmth, assurance. People know who it is. Some feel like an arm around the shoulder or around the waist or even a hug, a one or two-armed hug. The important thing is we use their language. Every account, 353 accounts in the book, are in their language. We didn’t modify it. We had to edit them because the experience may be told in a linear way or it may be all over the map. We put it in a linear story, and it’s their language, not ours.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. Now, were there people who felt the touch but didn’t know who it was, so again, they were discarded?
Bill Guggenheim: If that’s the way, then we didn’t use them.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay. So only those who knew who it was.
Bill Guggenheim: Yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Interesting, okay. Can I just ask you—if you don’t know, if this isn’t what you get into, then it isn’t what you get into; but some people might feel this touch, I can only imagine, feel this touch, might even think they know who it is, but they’re scared by it. So therefore the fear doesn’t even allow them to really recognize it.
Bill Guggenheim: Yes, we cover that. We have a subchapter. We call them fearful ADCs.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay.
Bill Guggenheim: Mostly it’s because it’s the unknown. They’ve never heard of this happening to anybody else. They think they’re going crazy. They’re in a room by themselves, maybe a bedroom or whatever. This is just booga, booga, booga; it’s scary. They will move themselves out of that receptive state, maybe turn on a light or get up and move or whatever. They’re frightened by it, especially if somebody starts to appear. We have firsthand cases. They’re all, again, in Hello From Heaven.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. I’m guessing, but I would imagine ghost stories over the years, some of the TV shows that exist, the movies are to blame for some of that.
Bill Guggenheim: Nightmare on Elm Street didn’t help our cause.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right, that’s right. Let’s see. When something like this happens, it doesn’t have to happen at nighttime. It’s nighttime, daytime, right?
Bill Guggenheim: Anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay.
Bill Guggenheim: Some of these occur in a car. I never understood how could you be driving a car and your deceased loved one, you see him or her. We haven’t gotten that far. You see them sitting next to you or in the backseat. Now, I think I would be off the road, spinning over down in the ditch. Nobody did that, and they’ll explain why.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay. Before we get to that one, we’ll do number four, smelling a fragrance, olfactory ADCs. What’s that one?
Bill Guggenheim: Now, this is where you smell a scent, which could be a cologne, a perfume, aftershave lotion, some people say tobacco smoke. Now, some of these accounts involve pipes, which people don’t use much anymore, and different pipe tobaccos had much different aromas than cigarettes do. But even cigarette smoke can vary. It can be a favorite food, bath products of all kinds, sachets in a drawer, anything that has a fragrance to it.
But what makes these interesting is that let’s say you’re in an office in the middle of Wisconsin in the middle of the winter and you’re in a cubicle of a corporation. All of the sudden you begin smelling lilacs. Now, there are no lilacs growing. There are no lilacs in a bowl or anything because it’s the wrong time of year, middle of winter.
You don’t say anything, and somebody else comes down the corridor, sniffs the air, and says, oh, where are the lilacs? Maybe a third person comes along and doesn’t even hear what the second person said and sniffs, oh, that’s a beautiful scent. Who’s wearing lilac perfume? Well, nobody.
What I’m getting at is that smelling a fragrance often has witnesses to it, so two or more. In one case up to 12 people all smelled a certain fragrance at the same time and same place.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s great confirmation.
Bill Guggenheim: There’s nothing there. It’s a beautiful little story, and I tell it briefly. There was a little girl who tragically died, and it was a single mom. They had a funeral, I guess, in the church cemetery kind of thing. They came back. These are all women. When the mother came in the house first, she smelled the scent of roses, but there were no roses there. Eleven or 12 other people all came in, and all but one smelled the roses as well, but there were no roses. The only one who didn’t had never known the little girl when she was alive.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh my goodness. Wow, that plays with your mind.
Bill Guggenheim: In so many different ways here with every story like that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Right, wow, okay. Of course, that’s not always the case, but for some reason it was in that incident.
Bill Guggenheim: Yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wow, that’s cool. That’s cool. So the next one we’re getting into the appearances. I imagine there are two here. I think they’re both part of the number five, which is partial and full appearances, visual ADCs.
Bill Guggenheim: The only difference is that when we say partial you can see the outline of the body. It’s a faint outline. It can be just like a transparent mist or something, or you might just see their head and shoulders or from the waist up or the knees up, that kind of thing, or it’s less than fully solid. You don’t see the entire body. It’s not fully solid.
So this is just to write two chapters. One is partial visual. The other is full visual, where you see the entire person and they look as lifelike as though they were right in the room with you and were in good health like they were fully alive. By the way, some appear just as a ball of colored light. I don’t know how much you’ve gotten into orbs. I don’t know if that’s what the people mean, but we have three experiences under partial experiences where they just saw colored lights. They didn’t see a person, but they knew who it was and what it was about.
So obviously, this is very exciting when you see the person, but the important thing I always stress is when you see their face they’re almost always smiling. They’re letting you know that they are healed and whole and they also have radiant health. They’re glowing. They’re assuring you that regardless of their former death, which could be a horrible fire, automobile accident, battlefield—I don’t have to go through all the list. But they come back in one piece, so to speak, healed and whole, in radiant health.
Whether there’s communication or not, often there is, at least by their smile and everything they’re letting you know they continue to exist. They’re fine. They’re okay. These are so healing to have these.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I don’t know. I mean I know a lot of people are visual, and for some I think it would be one of the most confirming to actually see either a partial or a full. This is what you were talking about with the car. People look over and they actually see their loved one there. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about this. I’ve heard a woman tell me a story about her husband walked up the stairs. She heard it first, so this is a combination of types here. Then she actually saw him.
Bill Guggenheim: I want to stress these do often occur in combination.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Do they?
Bill Guggenheim: So with a full appearance where they not only see them but they touch them, there’s actual physical touch. There’s verbal communication usually by telepathy, and they can smell a cologne or an aftershave or something as well. The only thing that’s not involved is taste, although one person claimed it was taste, but I’m not so sure.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, okay. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the story that you told where she had that whole vision of someone who actually wrote something down, what happens at that point? Did Elisabeth actually say what the woman wrote down, she could see later?
Bill Guggenheim: She gave it to a minister named Renee Gaines, who she describes. I never followed that up myself. I had other things to do and she certainly had other things to do, but she gave it to him.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Did you ever run into anything like that where people claimed—?
Bill Guggenheim: No.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: No, okay. That’s an extreme case there.
Bill Guggenheim: Keep in mind, no matter if we wrote a book with 5,000 accounts in it, there’d still be 5,001. In other words, there’d be another variation. This is just an indication of what can occur.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Right, yeah.
Bill Guggenheim: There is no finite number for human circumstances. They’re too large for that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: These are just the most common categories that you’ve found.
Bill Guggenheim: Yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: All right. Number six, a glimpse beyond, ADC visions.
Bill Guggenheim: This is very hard to describe, but it’s literally seeing a vision. I’ve seen one, but not in this context. It’s like seeing a 35mm slide suspended in space. It could be in black and white but also in color. It could be small, could be large. It can happen with your eyes open—that’s what I’m describing now—or with your eyes shut.
Let’s say you’re meditating or praying. You typically have your eyes shut. You see a picture in your head. Let me turn sideways. Sort of what they call the third eye above the eyebrows right in here you have like a viewing screen and you see them there. You’re seeing them, we believe, in their dimension. It’s like watching a movie. You can have one or two-way communication as well.
So every one of these is a full chapter of at least 15 experiences in the book. It’s not just one or two. It’s a whole bunch of them. They all fit. We go from the least complex to the more complex in the chapter.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I see that. Now, are you familiar with shared death experiences?
Bill Guggenheim: Yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Would those fit within this category?
Bill Guggenheim: Now, those are shared with near-death experiences. We have something we didn’t publish, but I hope to write a sequel now. We call them bedside experiences. It’s very well-known. It’s called deathbed visions or departing visions or whatnot. A person is dying, in the last three days of their life. They’ll look up. They’ll start talking to somebody. It could be a brother, sister, mother, father, wife. Nobody knows. All the sudden their health will improve. They’re animated. They’re glowing. They’re talking, and it’s like a two-way conversation.
A bystander would say they’re hallucinating. There’s nobody there. They’re imagining things. If they’re a nurse, they’ll say this person’s either having too much drugs or too little drugs, change the medications. We have a whole bunch of firsthand accounts where a third person, a third party, stood there and watched and saw the one who came back. Not just one person, maybe the whole room is filled with people. All those bedside experiences, we have not published those yet.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well, that was my understanding of shared death experiences that it is related to these deathbed visions as well. They were able to see that. Sometimes they were able to even follow their loved ones after they passed, all kinds of different variations of that. But what did you call it, because I really liked the name of that?
Bill Guggenheim: We call that bedside experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, very cool.
Bill Guggenheim: Then another one that we have, we have a lot of these. Again, we can only do so much in one book.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right.
Bill Guggenheim: We call it the soul leaving the body. We have many people seeing literally the soul leave from the middle of the chest or the top of the head like a little wisp of smoke or something like that. Then it forms into the likeness of the body of the person who died. It’s their spirit, their soul, their atman, whatever you want to call it. The being of light, that’s who we are. Then they have sometimes one or two-way communication. Then it’s sort of like Superman, up through the roof or out through the window, gone.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Really.
Bill Guggenheim: Then a third category is escort to the light, which we don’t have that many of. It’s a really unusual one. These are hospice kind of experiences where you have to be with somebody at the time of their death or around that time to be there. But some people will be in a meditative state or whatever and will literally escort someone who has died to the light. So it reads like a near-death experience. You’re overhead, trees and valleys and on up to the light. Then it’s thanks very much for escorting their loved ones to the light, saying, you may return now. It’s not your time. Go back home.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Geez.
Bill Guggenheim: But there’s a lot of that stuff, and I’m sure there’s more that we don’t know about. We’re not experts. Nobody is.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wow, man, mind-blowing stuff.
Bill Guggenheim: A year later I’m sure somebody would cover some of this and they haven’t.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. Well, isn’t that part of it? Isn’t that what a lot of us are doing anyways? We’re like, oh, someone surely must have covered this by now.
Bill Guggenheim: Well, we have them. They’re in our files, so many experiences.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Number seven, encounters at the alpha, twilight experiences, right?
Bill Guggenheim: Only because twilight experiences, that was the language when they were saying, just as I was falling asleep. You go from the beta awareness to the alpha and delta. Alpha is where you’re relaxed. It’s where you generally enter the meditative state, that kind of thing. Or people would say, just as I was waking up. Then if they are waking up, often the person they were thinking they were dreaming about is there. They open their eyes and he or she is standing right next to them.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s interesting.
Bill Guggenheim: It’s a smaller category, but it was their language so that’s why we included it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I think I had a mini one once. I was in that state, but I don’t know who it was so I wouldn’t have fit into your categories here. But I saw this face in front of me and it just said, Bob! It woke me up.
Bill Guggenheim: Yeah. It got your attention.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, it got my attention. Number eight, more than a dream, so sleep state ADCs.
Bill Guggenheim: Well, this is a huge category. Now, there are ordinary dreams that people who are bereaved have, or you don’t even have to be bereaved. You’ll have a dream of someone who’s died. A typical dream is kind of symbolic and jumbled. It kind of swims in time and unless you write it down it kind of drifts away pretty quickly. We’ve all had that.
But with these, sleep state communication, these have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. They feel like an actual visit together because they are. People remember these in exquisite clarity 10, 20, 30 years later, and they say so. They’ll say I had a dream, but it was unlike any other dream I had before. They don’t have the language. How many people know sleep state ADC, but they say I had a dream; but it wasn’t like the typical dream.
My husband, my child, whoever, was there, wherever there was. It could be a familiar place. It could be a very unfamiliar place. The possibilities are endless. If they’re in a large group of people, sometimes they’re the only one who sees the one who died. There are a lot of variations to sleep state ADCs. Basically, it’s because they can come to us while we’re the most relaxed, while we are meditating or sleeping.
I say when I give a workshop how hard it is to get through to us in ordinary waking consciousness. I call you on the phone, I get an answering machine. I leave a message. Maybe you return the call. I send emails. Maybe it gets deleted. Maybe it gets answered. Faxes, same thing.
It’s so hard. We’re so busy, busy, busy, to get through to each other it’s very difficult for physical people, important people, where money and contracts depend upon it, and parents and child, and from dates, dating, and relationships and all that stuff. So imagine how hard it is to come through to us for those not in physical form.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well, that’s interesting. The people that I run into that have had those, that’s one of the things that they always say is what you mentioned earlier: just the most vivid dream they’ve had, and it could have been 20, 30 years ago and it feels like it was like last night.
Bill Guggenheim: Yes. What I started to say earlier about these experiences that there’s something about them, and that’s why it can be in a car and not freak you out. You feel a sense of incredible peace when these occur, a peace that passes all understanding. I’m wondering about a woman; their child was killed, say, in a car crash, a teenage boy going to prom and all this usual stuff. It’s horrible and everybody’s upset. Several children are killed. Some are injured in the hospital.
Then the son comes to this woman a few weeks, few months later, whatever, and when she sees him in a dark room at night, how does she see him? Because his body gives off light; it’s radiant light, radiates light, whoever it is, he/she. You can see all the details of their face.
Whether they speak or not, these are so comforting that rather than what I would’ve thought they would do is they’d get on the phone and call every relative and friend and say, my son is here, my son is here. It’s the first night they’ve had where they’ve been so relaxed in their grief that they can go to sleep. They fall into very deep, comforting sleep afterwards. Then they share it, if they should share it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: If they do, yeah, if they do. Very interesting.
Bill Guggenheim: They produce tremendous comfort, so you don’t have to freak out when they occur.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s right. I like that. I just love the idea of actually being able to get a good night’s sleep with that kind of comfort for the first time in who knows how long.
Number nine is homeward bound, out-of-body ADCs.
Bill Guggenheim: This is my favorite one to talk about because now I can be a little bit philosophical. I was raised as an Episcopalian, and I was a Catholic convert in my late teens because there was a girl I wanted to marry but didn’t. I attended a Unitarian church in my late 20s, and if I go now it’s to a Unity church.
I’m a Christian, yes, but very liberal. But I was raised to believe that some part of us when we die called our soul or our spirit, whatever that is, wherever it is, will leave the body. If we’re a good boy or girl, it goes up, and if we’re not so good, if you’re Catholic it’s limbo and purgatory. But if we’re really bad there’s another place we can go, etcetera, etcetera. That’s pretty standard Christian belief.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right.
Bill Guggenheim: I’m not going to go outside of Christianity because I’m not that familiar with any of them.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Sure.
Bill Guggenheim: However, what we have come to believe, what I have come to believe is this. This is what I say. In each of us, you, I, every listener you have, we are a spirit or a soul or a being of light right here, right now, wearing a physical body. This is our earth suit. We have to have an earth suit for me to pick up the book that you can see, for you to see me via our communications via Skype. To communicate, I need a body; you need a body.
To do all the things we do in this lifetime, we need a physical body. Therefore, the only thing that really dies is our physical body. We leave it. It’s no longer relevant, or as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross used to say: A physical body is like a winter overcoat that’s worn out that you no longer need in the springtime. You take it off and discard it, same thing. So each of is that spirit or soul right here, right now. If we get that and that we’re all united, we’re all one, and all the other philosophical kind of stuff, it’s really all about love.
But just within this some people are literally able spontaneously to leave their physical body for a short time, generally while they’re meditating or in soul sleep, and they encounter a deceased loved one nearby, meaning in their house, a short distance away, down the street or a few miles away. Others will travel several hundred miles. Others move out into the galaxy, for want of better language, and a few literally go to, we call it heaven.
The title came to me. I didn’t create it. I woke up with it one morning. So heaven means afterlife. You encounter them in heaven, afterlife, nirvana, paradise, happy hunting grounds, spirit realm, whatever you want to call it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s funny.
Bill Guggenheim: You see them in that dimension, and it’s so incredibly beautiful. The bushes, the flowers, the trees, the grass, the colors are heavenly. You see your deceased loved one there. Or in fact, we have five cases where somebody literally goes through a tunnel. It reads like a near-death experience. They go through a tunnel to the light, and there their deceased loved one is standing in the light.
Now there’s usually communication, two-way communication, and they’re told: It’s not your time. Now you must return and go back through the tunnel back into their physical body. If I put this in a book, a near-death experience would read just like it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, yeah.
Bill Guggenheim: So you don’t have to be near to death. By the way, all the people we interviewed we ascertained had you been drinking or using any “recreational” drugs. If they said yes to that, we did not use those experiences.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: They’re not in the book.
Bill Guggenheim: Unless otherwise specified, everybody was in a normal state of health, perfect. In some cases, they were not in a good state, but we indicated that in our book.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay.
Bill Guggenheim: So these people are not on drugs or alcohol or anything.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Sure.
Bill Guggenheim: So a lot of people have out-of-body experiences.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s cool. Yeah, we did a video interview a few weeks ago on someone who’s just had a whole bunch of them since he was 12 years old, really cool. Love the idea. I’d love to have one myself, working on that.
Number 10 is person to person. You call them telephone ADCs. What’s that?
Bill Guggenheim: It’s a small category. Actually, one man wrote a whole book on this, Scott Rogo, who was a parapsychological researcher. He called it Phone Calls from the Dead. That was his bestselling book, and then his publisher dropped it. I don’t get it. Anyway, let’s make it you’re asleep. For some reason a full appearance or anything, one of these when you’re awake would be too much, but you can handle a phone call ringing in your sleep. You take it. You hear the voice of the one who’s died, have a one or two-way conversation, and then it’s over.
What about you’re in your home, you’re in the kitchen doing whatever, cooking something or any other part of the house. The actual telephone rings, the real telephone, not cellphone for the moment, just the ordinary phone, home phone. Boy, the technology you’ve got to keep up with.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, right.
Bill Guggenheim: You pick it up and you hear the voice and have a one or two-way conversation. Then generally the voice fades away. There may be some static at the end. But always, it’s as though the line is cut, sort of severed. You never hear a dial tone or a disconnect or a hang up. It just ends. It’s a small category, 5% at the most.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Short conversations, brief, I’d imagine.
Bill Guggenheim: Relatively.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Relatively. That would be really nice just to hear their voice again. I remember finding an old cassette tape that went with one of my answering machines years after my father had passed and hearing it. Just the sound of his voice just brought back all kinds of warm, fuzzy feelings.
Bill Guggenheim: So we did our research. Remember, our book was published in 1996. People are recording more and more that they’re receiving messages on their telephone answering machines or voicemail after a message is there from somebody who’s died, and also on computers that there are messages. There’s not an email from somebody. I mean they can’t account for it. Nobody’s playing a trick on them and things like that, so through these electronic communication devices.
My former wife Judy figured out electricity, there’s something about it that’s relatively easy to manipulate, and teenage boys are especially good at it. They can make the garage doors go up and down and all kinds of wacky stuff. We’ll get into that in a minute.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Material matters, so ADCs of physical phenomena, would that fall into that category?
Bill Guggenheim: Lights? No. Of course, almost anywhere lights can go off. A light bulb burns out, big deal. I’m not impressed by that. I want to know why lights go on. There used to be something called a touch lamp. You could touch it, it would go on. Touch it, it would go off. We have one like that where somebody’s saying, make the light blink once for yes or two for no. But yeah, that’s the answer if it blinks once or twice.
But others, maybe the lights in their bedroom go on, and then down throughout the house, the hallway, the living room, dining room, kitchen, microwave, television, everything starts blaring at once. Or maybe just a stereo or radio go on, or a TV, and it’s to a station they’d never listened to and it’s playing the song you associate with the one who died. It could be something like “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton, something like that, or whatever their song was. I don’t want to say it’s any particular song.
It’s some kind of physical phenomena that occurs you can’t account for. A woman was saying last night, which is true, we have it in here, a music box starting to play a year later often on an anniversary date or the wedding anniversary, the anniversary of the birth or death of the one who died, or you, the experiencer. Toys begin operating. Things that are even missing pieces or battery operated and there are no batteries in them.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, gee.
Bill Guggenheim: You can’t account for it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You can’t account for it.
Bill Guggenheim: After, I can just report. I’m a reporter. I don’t have to explain it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s it, yeah, no, exactly. Well, that was number 11, so the 12th category, butterflies and rainbows. You call them symbolic ADCs.
Bill Guggenheim: This is very common. There’s something about human beings, regardless of what they believe. They say whoever goes first, will you give me a sign? Give me a sign. The most common ones involve butterflies and rainbows. But it could be birds or other animals. It could be almost anything.
But here’s what I mean by butterflies. Maybe a butterfly will come and land on their casket throughout the entire service or land when a daughter talks about one on his finger or on their shoulder. Or you go outside and you see a whole flock of butterflies, ones you’re not even familiar with that you don’t see in that area. They’re there for a few seconds and then disperse. Or you may be out walking let’s say in a park or something and a butterfly kind of like leads you somewhere. You follow it and you find a little glen or a seat and you feel especially good.
So it’s not just a butterfly; it’s a behavior. Same for birds, birds come to a house, maybe peck on a window or come sit down next to you. Wild birds, not parrots or parakeets but chickadees or hawks or cardinals or you name it. I think that we have, if I had kept a list, probably about 20 to 25 different species of birds that have been reported as having behavior that they took as a sign. It’s not me saying it’s a sign; it’s for them to say.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That is pretty cool. I mean that’s amazing. Well, what I love about Hello From Heaven, it’s just like story after story after story. So you could pick any one of these categories that maybe you’ve had one or you think you had one, and in that just one chapter you can just read example after example after example of other people’s stories.
First of all, as I was reading I just couldn’t stop. It’s like you read one. They’re only like one and a half to two pages long. Then you just want to read the next one. It’s a little bit addicting because they’re neat. But if you’ve lost a loved one, they’re also comforting. You know what I mean? They just make you want to read more because they comfort your soul in some way. I loved it that way. I love that you have so many of them in there. We have a lot of books that just have one, two, or three anecdotes per chapter. You’ve got lots of them.
We’re running out of time, so I’ll ask a couple things. First of all, let’s just ask, what is your website?
Bill Guggenheim: It’s www.after-death.com. Mainly, we have a message board that people can communicate with each other on. That’s our most important feature.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That is nice. Lots of resources on there, I know.
Bill Guggenheim: We link to support groups for bereaved people. It’s a bereavement site, frankly.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s it.
Bill Guggenheim: That’s where our heart is.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: But to have that board where people can sort of communicate, that’s invaluable. Are you doing any upcoming events, Bill?
Bill Guggenheim: No, frankly, I’m 73 now and I’m turning down lectures because I don’t want to get on airplanes anymore. I have a project of working on the sequel to this, and I want to do that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Great.
Bill Guggenheim: So I’m willing to drive to anything, yes, in Florida, but I don’t want to get on another plane, go through security, and all the rest.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, and you don’t need to. We have Skype now. We have Skype.
Bill Guggenheim: I’ve got a point for years. I don’t need to keep doing it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: We want to read their sequel. We want to read the sequel, so that’s great. Any final words, Bill, that you want to just say to our listeners, our viewers, about this subject?
Bill Guggenheim: Well, basically, we regard after death communications as a natural and normal part of life, and we want people to treat it like that. It’s not other than, it’s not weird, it’s not eerie, strange, different. It’s just maybe something they haven’t heard of before.
Read the book. You’ll know more about it or as much about it as we do, because we also have six chapters of why are these real and not hallucinations, brief induced hallucinations or imagination, wishful thinking or grief. Each of those has 15 different categories. I mean it’s got 15 different experiences. Our basic message is that everything we’ve learned convinces us that life and love are eternal.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I love that. Bill, I can’t thank you enough. I appreciate it. When you come out with that other book, let’s do it again, okay?
Bill Guggenheim: Very much so. I really enjoyed this, Bob.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Thank you.
Bill Guggenheim: Thank you for making it so easy and fun.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: My pleasure. All right, we’ll see you. Bye, Bill.
Bill Guggenheim: Bye for now.
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.
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