Skeptiko - Science at the Tipping Point

Guest: Marilynn Hughes, performs an out-of-body travel experiment for a mother grieving the loss of her daughter.

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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode we’re going to look at the psychic medium experiment that we’ve been doing. I haven’t spoken much about it in the last few episodes, but there’s been a lot going on, really for the last few months.

Let me take everyone back to the beginning, at least the Skeptiko beginning. Let’s start by maybe defining terms a little bit. I think everyone who’s listening to this show is probably familiar with psychic medium communication. If someone’s lost a loved one they go and talk to a psychic or a medium and they try and connect with that loved one through some anomalous means that we don’t fully understand.

Now keep in mind that the skeptical take on psychic medium communication, and this is certainly the position of mainstream science as well, is no way, no how. Never been proven. You get a lot of this hundred years of nothing stuff. So once again, and I really feel a need to point this out, we are faced with this absolutely insane disconnect between what science is investigating and what people care most deeply about. I mean, let’s face it. What happens to us after we die is something we all think about, and we all care deeply about.

In terms of this experiment, it really started about 18 months ago when I appeared on, “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” show with Dr. Steve Novella. I challenged those folks to do a public demonstration of psychic medium work to show that it really does happen. You may recall that we had a lot of communication about that, but it never really came to pass, at least for a year it didn’t. Then near the end of last year, in 2008, I decided to tackle this project on my own. Or at least to dig into it and that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve updated you several times on the progress that we’ve made, but this is going to be a little bit of a different update. The project has personally taken a couple turns for me that I couldn’t have expected, but have been wonderfully enlightening. I want to share a little bit of that with you.

First, this whole thing has been terrific. I mean, it’s been fascinating to speak with so many psychics, mediums, and out-of-body travelers. One thing you run into right away when you get into this is that you find that the labels we sometimes throw around don’t sit well with the folks doing the work. I want to respect that.
So that’s been amazing. It’s also been amazing to connect with so many folks who are dealing with the death of someone close to them. It hasn’t always been pleasant and fun, but it’s been rewarding on a different level.

In the last few months as I’ve been running these trials, I’ve learned a lot, I’ve certainly made a lot of mistakes, and then I’ve kind of come back and learned some more. Then a couple of months ago, I reached a little bit of a turning point. I had run about three trials on the medium experiment, and the way that I was doing it, I had achieved some mixed results.

Some of the experiments were showing extraordinary results – a million to one above chance levels. Others were not. Some of the readings were personally transformative for the people who were grieving, others were not. Now along the way, all along the way, I kept asking our mediums how we could improve the experiment, how we could make it better. The answer I got, and I got this a number of different ways, but ultimately the way I came to understand it is that I have to slow down and do these experiments, these trials, one at a time.

It’s funny, because I came to appreciate at a deeper level something that Julie Beischel said a while back. It’s something that I initially kind of bristled against. That’s that you have to serve everyone involved, the living and the dead. Now I know that sounds a little bit strange, but hang in there with me because that’s what this show is all about. It’s about one reading. One gifted person who’s somehow able to connect with people who have died. It’s also about one grieving mother. And it’s about one young adult who tragically decided to take her own life.

The story starts back in January of this year, ’09, when I was in the process of recruiting mediums for this experiment. I ran into Marilynn Hughes of the – get this, skeptics, you’re going to love this – the Out-of-Body Travel Foundation at outofbodytravel.org. Now if you’re wanting to snicker at the name, just wait until you dig into what Marilynn has to say. For many of us, even believers, the idea of God sending people on a journey through countless levels of spiritual realms in order to aid lost souls, all a little hard to take.

But two things that drove me forward with Marilynn were, one, I’m no longer put off by folks who believe in strange things that I don’t have any experience with. Heck, if Skeptiko has taught me anything, it’s that a lot of very down-to-earth people, like skeptics, believe in all sorts of things that they don’t have any experience with.

The second thing that drove me forward is that there was just something very engaging about Marilynn. I don’t know, I just really liked her, almost immediately. So I was really thrilled when Marilynn agreed to an interview. When we first started talking about the experiment and what we might be able to do together scientifically, I had some real doubts it was going to work out. I think you’ll see what I mean from this first clip.

Marilynn Hughes: Well, it’s an interesting question and I’ve been thinking about what I would say to you in terms of like how I think it could be done, and I think a thing that I would share is that from what I’ve experienced, this is where the challenge lies for science. When we leave our bodies and we go into different spiritual states, we enter worlds that have different laws than third dimensional reality. So in order to take science into that study, somehow we have to integrate and include those different laws of existence.

Alex Tsakiris: Different laws of existence? Isn’t this the kind of woo-woo stuff that just drives skeptics crazy? But you have to ask yourself one question. What if it’s real? And that’s the question I asked. So I pushed forward with Marilynn. I told her about the trials we’d already done. I told her about some of the other out-of-body experience research that had been published. So my dialogue with

Marilynn continued, and we started to kind of hone in on something that we might be able to do. Here’s Marilynn again.

Marilynn Hughes: You know the one thing that I think is more likely to be workable in terms in what my situation is, is utilizing out-of-body experiences for messages for people. I don’t know how far we can take it. I do receive — in out-of-body travel, I don’t have the mediumship thing like a John Edward or someone like that. I receive messages and people come visit me in out-of-body experiences. That sort of thing is actually fairly common, so common that I don’t even really document it. There are a few people that I could bring forward that could share some of the things I’ve told them that I can remember or that I still have contact with.

A lot of times it’s someone who randomly comes across my site and asks for help and I just tell them I’ll pray and If I get permission I’ll let them know what I hear. Then I’ll tell them what happened and they’re happy and they move on and I don’t keep track of them. But I could start keeping track of them and then you’re talking about probably doing it in a controlled environment. I think, ironically, one of the things that is much more powerful with these experiences is that personal contact. So if you’re doing it in a university setting or something, and you have a pool of people who have some kind of needs or whatever that I can actually face, talk to, touch, and just see them, it’s much more likely to happen that way. Does that make sense?

Alex Tsakiris: That’s awesome. So let me make sure I understand what you’re saying. You generally, because you attract so many people with your message and through other ways, people come to you and say, “Marilynn, can you please help me with connecting with so-and-so?”

Marilynn Hughes: Right.

Alex Tsakiris: Then in your experience a lot of times those messages are answered and then you pass those along to the folks.

Marilynn Hughes: Right. See, what happens is, is it’s not just that, though. And that’s one thing I’m not sure how far we can go with it. In a situation like that because it is God-directed rather than me-directed, it can happen in a number of ways. Somebody might want to have contact with a relative who’s passed on but yet it might be one of the guardian angels who comes to me and says, “Well, this is what they actually need to know. So we’re not sending Dad to see them today. I’m coming to tell you this.”

Then there are other times, too, when they have problems or issues that are going on in their life that will be shown to me in some way, shape or form and how they might best handle it. So it can be in a variety of ways that it would happen.

Alex Tsakiris: So at this point I was starting to get a pretty clear idea about we might run an experiment with Marilynn. I was really impressed with her openness and her willingness to do this. I’ve spoken with a number of mediums, and when you really get down to brass tacks about doing a public experiment, really putting them on the spot, they sometimes get reluctant. I understand that. It can be a real set-up to take something that is this extraordinary and try and put it under a spotlight and say, “Do it now.” It just doesn’t happen that way. But that wasn’t where Marilynn was coming from. She just wanted to push forward and find the best way to do it. So I started asking her how we might refine it. How we might find the best possible candidates.

Marilynn Hughes: I don’t know why I didn’t think of mentioning this before, but I work at the Catholic Church, and so of course we do two or three funerals a week on average. One of the things that seems to happen, and this can sometimes even happen while I’m awake, where the person will just all of a sudden be with me. All of a sudden they’re just talking, talking, talking. I’ll just be – sometimes I’ll do this without even letting the people know that I feel their presence because not everyone’s open to this. It still helps them when you tell them these things because the deceased person knows what those family member believed beforehand and they present it to me in a way that they know the family can hear and listen to.

So what I have found is that it’s the unresolved ones that are more likely to come through. That’s part of the reason I’ll pick these people up just driving down the street. If you drive by a car accident and there’s some souls that are still there and they have this unresolved stuff — there can be a lot of things, murder, suicide, accidental overdoses.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, this was a good little twist, a good little insight into Marilynn’s process. I wanted to follow through with that. So I took some of the other points that Marilynn had mentioned and we talked a little bit further. We nailed down the particulars and how we’re going to run this trial, and I set off on finding us a participant.

Now I’ve been running an ad in Craigslist looking for participants for the last several months, so I have a pretty good database of potential sitters to choose from. When I sorted these people by the criteria that Marilynn and I had talked about, I had four or five people that I thought would be pretty good. I wound up picking Michelle. I’m not going to reveal her last name because it’s really not necessary.

Michelle had lost a daughter to suicide at age 20 and she was looking to connect and had volunteered for the experiment. I e-mailed Michelle and then eventually wound up talking to her on the phone. I asked her if she wanted to not only participate in the medium experiment, but participate in this more in-depth public trial. She agreed. So here’s the protocol we set up.

I asked Michelle to send me an article of clothing that her daughter had worn. She did. She sent me a hat that was very special to her. I also asked her to send me some photographs. She did that, as well. I collected some general information about her daughter. First name, date of birth, date of passing. This is all information that Marilynn had said she would like to have during the reading. Now I was acting as the proxy. All information would be sent to me, and then I would send all that information along to Marilynn. Then I would receive the reading from Marilynn and I’d pass it along to Michelle.

Since all the readings came through in e-mail, this was an easy thing to do in terms of controlling exactly the amount of information that went through to Marilynn. So here’s what happened, and this is an amazing part of the story number one. While Michelle was in the process of sending me the hat and the photos, I passed along a little bit of information to Marilynn. I want you to put yourself in Marilynn’s position for a minute. Here’s the information that you received. You don’t know who I’ve selected. You have no idea. But here’s the information you receive.

First name, Megan. Then I’m going to give you the month and day, but not the year, that she was born. I’m going to give you the date that she passed, okay? So that’s all you have. You have that information.

Now I was going to send her the rest, I was going to send her the hat and I was going to send her the photographs, but I hadn’t done that yet. I had just passed along that information that I gave you. So next

I want to share with you the first e-mail reading I received from Marilynn based on that limited amount of information.

Marilynn starts out, “Megan is a soul who definitely wishes to make contact with her family and apparently has some level of permission from God to do so. I have some random things to share that she showed me. I don’t know what they mean. We’ll let the family see if they mean anything.“

Let me interject that even though she gives me this information and I pass it along to the family, I never give Marilynn any feedback on any of that information. I never tell her what’s a hit, what isn’t. So here are some of the things that she has to say.

“First, she showed me what appeared to be a college environment.” This is, in fact, correct. Megan was in college right before she committed suicide. She was about 20 years old when she died. Again, she had no way of knowing that. Back to her reading. “The next part was definitely not what I was expecting. I don’t know what this means, but I watched her begin on campus, and then somehow get lost. She ended up not being on campus, but I didn’t feel like she was that far away. She wandered off with a woman who was definitely very clearly lesbian. It seems that Megan wasn’t sure for a very, very short time of her identity, but she soon realized that she was not a lesbian and she refused to participate. My sense was that she was definitely showing me a time in the late teens, early 20s. I’ll find out when the pictures arrive if this is an appropriate age at which she died or not.”

Well, it did turn out to be an appropriate age. It was the exact time when she died, and the university angle does play into this as well, because Megan was raised in a major university town and this kind of interplay comes back and forth in the reading over and over again. So these couple of facts were really, really important and they became even more important after Marilynn received the photos and Megan’s hat and then continued with her second reading. Here I’ll share with you some of that.

“Megan told me that her death was very, very hard on her mom, and that she really loved her mom and had a very close relationship with her. Now before you scoff at this, I have to tell you I’ve done a bunch of readings at this point and it’s certainly not a given that there’s a strong bond between a daughter and a mother. Sometimes there’s a lot of animosity there.” So this is also a hit. A minor hit, but it’s a hit.

Also, since I hadn’t revealed to Michelle that it was Megan’s mother who was trying to connect, or even the name of the person who was trying to connect with her, whether it was a male or female, it makes it even more interesting. Before you kind of dismiss some of these things and go, of course, of course, because you already know the end story, think back and remember the information that you had. You didn’t have any of that information.

Okay, next we have a couple of points that turn out to be very, very significant to the family in terms of understanding Megan’s death. The first is, Marilynn reports that “Megan experienced a returning home to her faith, like she had been somewhere else for a while.”

Marilynn’s reading says,”It was like she had been somewhere else for a while, maybe off to college or a different location, maybe she just went away from the church, and she came back. She was very happy to be back.” She goes on to say, ”It was kind of a calm before the storm.”

This is Marilynn again. “Yes, I’m hearing from her, underlined, a calm before the storm. She thought she had found her way back home, but something else was going to happen.” Then she said, “The woman told me a different story. Something she told me wasn’t true.” She emphasized this again and now writes this, ”Now I know all of that might sound a little bit cryptic, but it’s very important, very relevant to the story, because as it turns out, this is exactly the kind of spiritual crisis, if you will, that Megan was going through.”
It doesn’t matter what you think about a spiritual crisis, it’s her experience, and it’s what her mother recalls her going through. So she had somehow drifted away from her spiritual tradition, then she had found her way back. She was back reading the Bible and in a Christian group because that’s what was important to her. But then that was the calm before the storm and then the storm, of course, is her eventual suicide. I don’t think that’s really reading too much into it. That’s pretty much what the reading says. As you’ll soon hear, Megan’s mom confirms this is actually what happens.

So back to Marilynn’s reading. Marilynn writes that this case reminds her of another case she worked on where a family had come to her and said that they’d lost someone through an accident, but the police had never figured out if this had been an accident or a suicide or a murder, and it caused a lot of pain in the family. She goes on to say that, “Megan’s case sounds something like this to me. There’s something about Megan that the family does not fully know. But based on the way she’s presented this to me, I’m not sure that the family knows that there is something they don’t know yet.”
Now this part of the reading turns out to be very significant to Megan’s mom. In fact, it was the primary reason she contacted me.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I only knew it after I revealed this reading to her and she came back and said, “I have to tell you, Megan’s death has caused a major divide in our family. Her death was clearly a suicide, but there’s a part of my family that isn’t willing to accept that she really killed herself, and they think that there’s other reasons behind it. She was on medication, antidepressant medication. She had gone through some car accident and was on pain medication. And they want to believe that there are other reasons behind it, and it’s caused a real divide in our family.” So that is certainly a very, very unusual set of circumstances, and I have no way of explaining how Marilynn could possibly tune into that.
Marilynn provided three more e-mail readings for the family. Two of them were very brief, and one of them was pretty long. The amount of factual, verifiable data in them is relatively small, but they altogether had a very, very profound effect on the family. There is one other little verifiable fact that came through that I think is amazing in the way that so many of these readings are amazing. It’s a very, very small point, but it had great significance to the family.

It’s in the last reading that Marilynn provides, and she says, “I see Megan and she’s smiling, and there are these flowers all around her face. It’s a strange symbol.” Then she goes on to say, ”I think these flowers are peonies.” Now the only reason this point’s important, and the only person at this point that is important too, is Megan’s mom. Right around the time that she received this message, she had been talking to her husband about planting a garden specifically for Megan, to honor Megan. She was asking her husband what kind of flowers he thinks she should plant in there. Just about this time, she gets this message. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Who knows? Just another point to add to the whole story.

You’ll hear more about that a little later when we talk to Megan’s mom. First I want to go back to my second interview with Marilynn. This is a follow-up, the trial’s basically over, I’m ready to share the results with Marilynn, and I also want to talk about the process that she went through in arriving at this rather remarkable data.

Alex Tsakiris: So what was your process in terms of connecting with Megan?

Marilynn Hughes: Well, you know, with Megan it was almost instantaneous. You had given me, I think it was via e-mail – I don’t know if we spoke on the phone or I think you gave it to me by e-mail. Then I asked for the date of death, because sometimes it’s very important and helpful when you know how long someone has been crossed over. There are different stages in death, and so different types of timing you’re going to be more likely to reach them in different locations. But with Megan, as soon as I got her name and you gave me those dates, I could feel her. She was just all over me. And it was like, “Wow, this girl wants to talk to her family, you know what I mean?” [Laughs] Then it was that very night.
The process is really not something that I control. It’s a process where when I go to bed at night, I have these out-of-body experiences and then the person who is deceased will show me things. A lot of times they show you — and I believe I experienced based on what you just shared with me — her moment of death. In the last reading I think that’s when she probably died, because I had woken up bone-cold. I don’t know if you recall this – she was in a room, and I woke up bone-cold and that’s what felt like, oh, she must have died then.

So the process is going out-of-body, the person takes you on a visual where you almost experience it with them. It’s almost like you become them in the experience, where you’re experiencing part of their life as them so you can feel their emotions, their feelings. Everything that’s going through their mind. That’s part of the process that is very important for the remaining family members because a lot of times in a situation like this, the difference is exactly what was it that this person was confused about. Because the families always blame themselves, and it’s always helpful for them to know, if it’s possible, what was it that led to the moment of their death? What were they thinking? How did that come about? Who were the people that led them there?

What was the actual – and a lot of times, too, it’s about taking that personal responsibility which they always do after death. We all have to take the personal responsibility for our own decisions and stuff. There’s so many things involved in it, but it’s primarily something that is led by – I believe that it’s led by God, and he allows people to do this when it’s helpful for their spirit and for someone who might be left behind.

If you recall, in our first conversation I said the one factor that I have no control over is whether or not it’s allowed. A lot of times in a situation, because I don’t control it and I don’t just conjure it up and stuff, it comes to me or it doesn’t. Generally, in a situation where someone has some unfinished business after crossing over, there’s more likely a chance that they will be allowed to do this and to share this kind of experience and come back through someone who has a gift like this, than if there’s not any major unfinished business.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, it’s interesting and it’s also interesting that you’re talking about God and the religious mysticism aspect of it. It’s particularly interesting in this case, and it’s going to be very controversial and very challenging for a lot of folks. These are just the facts of this case. One of the things that you reported in your reading was this struggle that Megan was having and how she had gone and drifted away from her spiritual path and had run into some pretty bad people along the way. Then she had found her way back on her spiritual path and was, I don’t know if you said specifically that she was reading the Bible or not, but…

Marilynn Hughes: She was back in a church…

Alex Tsakiris: Back in a church, well…

Marilynn Hughes: …and was back in a group, a religious group of some kind. The way she presented to me it was the face of her youth.

Alex Tsakiris: This is exactly what happened in Megan’s case. So again, this is…

Marilynn Hughes: Wow, okay.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, while she was at the university she had befriended this woman who was really kind of a bad news person. This woman was somewhat of a psychic but was running a psychic scam and had kind of a bank of phones. This woman also had a Wicca background, whether that’s good or bad.

Marilynn Hughes: That explains a lot, explains a lot. Yes.

Alex Tsakiris: This relationship was quite troubling to Megan and to her family, but her mother reports that near the end, she had come back to her Christian faith and was trying to get back into that and was reading the Bible regularly and that.

So again, these are just the facts, and they match perfectly with the reading that you gave and there really isn’t a good or reasonable explanation for why you would connect any of that or why you would provide any of that information.

Marilynn and I went over a number of other points about her reading. I’m going to skip ahead a little bit in our conversation.

Alex Tsakiris: You’ve given a lot of information here. It’s not like talking on a phone. [Laughs]

Marilynn Hughes: Right. [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: I’m sure it isn’t for you, but it certainly isn’t in terms of the information you’re getting. Some of it is allegorical and has kind of other kinds of meaning that has to be kind of teased out of it. Some of it’s very specific…

Marilynn Hughes: Right, yes.

Alex Tsakiris: …so it’s kind of giving a summation. I’ll tell you one specific thing that you gave that had tremendous meaning for Megan’s mom was the flowers.

Marilynn Hughes: Really?

Alex Tsakiris: Yes.

Marilynn Hughes: She made a big deal about the flowers and I was almost hesitant to even write it because it was like, how could this mean something? [Laughs] I said, okay, I’ll just say it. That’s interesting. What meaning did that have?

Alex Tsakiris: Megan’s mom was in the process of building a flower bed specifically for Megan, to kind of celebrate Megan, and had been talking to her husband about, you know, I really want to start a little flower garden…

Marilynn Hughes: Wow, I’m getting slammed. [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: [Laughs]

Marilynn Hughes: Now I understand, because she had the flowers around her head. It was just kind of like it didn’t quite make sense, you know, but now it makes perfect sense that the flowers would be surrounding her. [Laughs] Wow.

Alex Tsakiris: And those specific flowers that you said, I can’t say, I can’t pronounce it.

Marilynn Hughes: Peonies? Were they peonies?

Alex Tsakiris: Oh, peonies, okay. I can’t remember but Megan’s mom was so moved by this that she went and researched these flowers and found that they were exactly the kind that you were looking for. They were indigenous to Texas. They met all the criteria that she had laid out in her mind in terms of how to construct this flower bed to honor her daughter. So I think this is…

Marilynn Hughes: Wow. That’s so exciting to hear that. One of the interesting things about doing an experiment like this is that most of the time when this sort of thing is happening, I know a little bit about the family. Sometimes I don’t know a whole lot, like in that particular instance that I mentioned where it reminded me of where they didn’t know if it was an accident, suicide, or murder, but I didn’t know that until the deceased person had come and told me, “Tell my brother it was an accident.” And then he said, “Wow. That’s really great because we didn’t know if it was an accident, a murder, or suicide. The police could never figure it out.”

So most of the time I know a little bit about the people or they’ve written to me and they have information, so I have a little bit to go on. And then they give me feedback. So this was actually very interesting for me to do, as well, because of the fact that there was the no feedback rule so it was kind of running blind and just hoping that you’re catching what she’s saying correctly and seeing things correctly and translating it correctly. You know what I mean? So that’s really exciting to hear of so many of the things that she had shared with me, that I got it right. And that it was helpful, you know what I mean?

Alex Tsakiris: And I think you can tell me if this is typical or not, and this is also going to be very, very challenging for a lot of folks who aren’t comfortable with this whole idea. Beyond the specific data that was evidential — and there was a lot of it — there were a lot of just uncanny coincidences that happened with Megan’s mom during this process, during this…

Marilynn Hughes: Really?

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, in terms of e-mails that she got, in terms of lights going on and off completely in a way that she had associated in the past with Megan’s presence being close to her. And in terms of her just knowing and feeling Megan’s presence and feeling resolution to these things. So I don’t know if that’s typical, but it sounds like, to me from talking to Megan’s mom, that this process that she went through in working with you without even knowing your name or knowing who you were…

Marilynn Hughes: [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: …but the process was very transformative for her.

Marilynn Hughes: A lot of times it does happen like that. Not necessarily always like lights going on and off, where there’s physical phenomenon, but a lot of times people will actually have – of course, this will happen more with people like may have been to my Web site and they know what I look like. They’ll see me in dreams and I’ll tell them things, or things like that. There will be kind of a mutual – where there’s information that’s kind of moving through both parties at the same time.

Of course, I think in Megan’s case, she obviously – it was so strong, and it’s interesting because just yesterday I was meeting with somebody who really wants to make contact with a daughter who had died about 16 years ago. I didn’t feel a thing. It might be something where it comes up in a week or two, because I mentioned to you in our first conversation, sometimes it happens immediately, sometimes it takes three months, sometimes it takes six months, and sometimes it never happens. It’s all up to the will of God, not me. It was very interesting with Megan because she was just immediate. She really wanted to communicate with her mother. She made a lot of effort to do so.

It was almost difficult to keep up with her because there were so many interesting twists in her story, and knowing nothing about the story it was like, okay, well, I think I might have mentioned this in my first e-mail. This is either really right on or just really crazy stuff. [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: [Laughs]

Marilynn Hughes: Because I had no idea about all these interesting twists and turns, but that’s what kind of ironically makes doing an experiment like this very interesting, too. Because she had a case where it would be highly difficult to guess that all the circumstances around it. When she was showing them to me, it was a little bit, well, this is kind of a little far out.

This is probably – it was kind of difficult just receiving it and saying well – and you know even with the issue of questioning her sexuality and the woman who was a lesbian, you don’t want to make things worse with the family if this is something they don’t know about. Or, if it’s not correct. [Laughs] So this was actually probably a very interesting case to utilize because it had so many interesting facets to it.

Alex Tsakiris: I think we stayed very true to our original goal of keeping it blinded in a scientific…

Marilynn Hughes: Totally blind, yes.

Alex Tsakiris: And I think it’s also – it’s been a learning process for me, too, in terms of how to do these experiments. I think so many things came out of this process for me. One of the big things that came out is just how important this work is for the people involved. I want to make sure that going forward, I really honor that and I really respect that and do that work from that. You do this experiment, which is important, the scientific part of it is important, but going forward I really want to make sure that we do this from that place. From that place of honor and respect, because there is some kind of higher meaning to all this. That’s that we have to honor that while we discover it.

Marilynn Hughes: It’s really important that people know that — a lot of people hear about the people who will just say they connect with the dead for random purposes. It’s really important for people to know that when this kind of contact is actually allowed, it’s for what I would call an eternal purpose. You’re absolutely right. It has to be respected and honored because the purpose of it has to do with that family and that soul who have something they need to communicate to one another.

It’s very important that that be the primary target, so to speak, which is one of the things – part of my process as you asked earlier was every night as I was getting ready to go to bed and prepare to have out-of-body experiences and stuff, I would ask Megan and say, “Okay, Megan, what does your mother need to hear from you? What do you need to say to her, for her to be okay, and for you to be okay? You need to be real specific with me here so that we can get right to what she needs from you. And what you need from her.” I would try to focus her in also, and say, “Okay, now this going to be real hard for me to keep track of all these details right before your life because it’s very complicated, but we need to make sure that we get what she needs to know.” You know what I mean?

Sometimes, like in that one instance, it was simple. It was, it was an accident, not suicide or murder. In this case, it was a lot more complicated.

Alex Tsakiris: It was very complicated.

Marilynn Hughes: And that kind of made it interesting. [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: You know, that’s — even that is evidential, right?

Marilynn Hughes: Yes.

Alex Tsakiris: Because this is a very, very complicated situation. I’m just giving you kind of a thumbnail sketch of everything that went on, but it was very complicated. Well, Marilynn, I am going to be in touch with you and I’m hoping we can collaborate and do some other things in the future. I think your work is wonderful and I encourage everyone to check out, even though you may have those initial reservations and doubts whether it’s okay to go to something called The Out-of-Body Travel Foundation.org. Please do so and stretch your mind a little bit. You never know what you might discover.

Marilynn Hughes: The Web address is actually outofbodytravel.org, but it’s called The Out-of-Body Travel Foundation.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay. I’m sorry. I tell you what, you have quite a presence on the Web. If someone Googles “out-of-body travel,” they’re going to find you. I have no doubt about that.

Marilynn Hughes: That’s true. It’s number one on all the search engines, so they should be able to find it. If you just look up out-of-body travel, you’ll find it. The Out-of-Body Travel Foundation Web site and there’s all sort of resources on it, including there’s a special video section called, Science and Research, that has a lot of video footage of a lot of the science that’s being done around out-of-body travel, near-death experiences, and reincarnation. So there’s a lot of resources, even for those who want to look into the science of it.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, thanks so much for joining me today and we’ll be in touch.

Marilynn Hughes: Thank you, Alex, it’s been a great experience.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, the last interview I want to share with you is with Megan’s mom, Michelle. Here are some clips from that interview.
Michelle: Another of the most profound facets of the information that Marilynn sent was immediately where she conveyed that Megan was conveying to her that she had been seeking and searching spiritually before her death, and that she had been confused. She had been misled and she had been confused and now that she was communicating through Marilynn that she’s on the right track now. That was profound to me, because Megan was spiritually seeking and she had stumbled into some wrong paths.

Right before she died, she was reading the Bible every day and praying and she just – she felt like she had – that was where she needed to be. That’s where she was finding her answers, and I thought that was so profound that Marilynn was able to interpret that through Megan. And she knew nothing about that. I don’t feel like it was just irony, you know, I think that Megan was saying, “Ahh, this is the real answer, Mom, this is what I was seeking and this is the truth.” So I thought that was really amazing that Megan felt it important to even communicate that part.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, I thought it was pretty remarkable, too. It’s kind of hard objectively to pick out that kind of information, say that that’s some general information that someone would give. Again, through the whole process, suicide was never mentioned to Marilynn. She never knew until half an hour ago when I spoke to her on the phone that…

Michelle: Really?

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. She never knew that. That was never disclosed to her, so she never knew the exact conflict that was surrounding the issue of Megan’s passing until I just told it to her. She was like, wow, that really makes a lot of sense in terms of what she was getting from Megan. So it’s been a very interesting experience. And a great experience.

And an opening experience for me, too. I mentioned to Marilynn this has helped me understand how I need to go forward in doing this work in the future and how we do need to really, really respect the work that’s being done from the other side and the work that’s being done with the people who are still here and all that. I really appreciate your openness, Michelle, and your willingness to share this story and to participate in this. It’s been really great.

Michelle: Well, I’ve been so grateful and I can tell you, Alex, that there has been a huge healing component in all of this. There really has. As sad and as traumatic and all of that that it’s been, if there can be good, there has been. There has been good from it, you know? This has been huge and it just was just a reminder that we really are just spiritual beings having a human experience. I know that she’s still here with me. Like you did mention that the lights went on and off, and yeah, that has been a very, very real phenomenon ever since she died.

More so in the beginning but it did happen the other day when I was specifically communicating over the phone to my husband. I was in tears, and I just received this e-mail, this answer that I’d been looking for for all this time. I was very emotional and my husband said – he had read the e-mail from Marilynn – and he said, “Marilynn said that Megan said that she’s going through this process of healing and understanding where she is, which is different from where you are, but it’s still a process. And she’s going through it just like you are, trying to understand and she’s seeking for answers.” And when he said that, and I started crying, the electricity in the whole entire house went out.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, right.

Michelle: I’ve lived here two years and that has never happened. When she died in the apartment that I had for the two years after she died, that happened all the time. I mean, just amazing, amazing miraculous ways. But it had not happened here. For it to happen at that moment, that was confirmation that Megan was listening in on that conversation. Megan knew exactly what we were talking about, and that was her way of communicating, “Right on. That’s exactly right.” You know?

Alex Tsakiris: So what do you think? Are we to believe everything that Marilynn Hughes has to say about the spiritual realm? Just because she gave some pretty accurate information on this reading? I don’t know, but I can tell you this. You know, a couple months ago, Dr. Julie Beischel from the Windbridge Institute, one of the foremost researchers in this area, she was out here in San Diego and gave a very excellent public presentation. She also, with the help of a very hard-working volunteer named David Jespersen, was able to set up some very interesting meetings with hospice workers on one hand and grief counselors on the other.

As Julie was recounting what had transpired during her trip and what she learned, it became clear to me just how outrageously out of balance our intellectual perspective is on this topic. I mean, consider for a minute. Whether you believe everything that Marilynn Hughes has to say or not, just consider for a minute that we’re training thousands of grief counselors across the United States, and we’re sending them out in the field and we’re not exposing them to any of this information. The reason we’re not is because we don’t know if it’s real. The reason we don’t know if it’s real is because we haven’t bothered to look.

I mean, if I can sit here, and in a couple months put together a demonstration like this, a demonstration that is highly suggestive of some kind of anomalous communication, and is at the very least highly suggestive that the process can be very beneficial to the grieving. How can we ignore it? And if you’re a skeptic, how can you possibly justify standing in the way of this research going forward? I’m not talking about taking sides. I’m not talking about converting you to believing.

I’m talking about why would you want to be an impediment to finding out whether this works? Whether it works in terms of communicating with the dead, or whether it works with comforting the grieving? Yet that’s the exact situation we’re in. We’ve allowed our “mainstream scientists” and the skeptical community to create a huge barrier. A barrier that’s been impossible for most researchers to overcome. Hence, this research just doesn’t get done.

Now in the months to come, I’m hoping to in a small way, change that. I’m hoping to fund a couple of research projects, perhaps at a couple of universities, and see if we can get some kindling going, and maybe get a little fire under a couple people to start this research. It’s desperately needed. And of course, if you have any ideas or suggestions about how we might do that or how we might do that most effectively, please let me know.

Well, this show has been running on pretty long here. A lot of interviews to get in. But before I leave, I want to give a special thanks to Marilynn Hughes for all the time that she devoted to this project. She did it on a volunteer basis, and with an open heart and a very open spirit of exploration. I also want to thank Megan’s mom, Michelle, for the time, energy, and openness that she showed towards this project.

If you’d like more information about this episode, or any of our previous episodes, please check out our Web site at skeptiko.com. You’ll also find a link to our forum, an e-mail link for me, and you’ll find a new Web site look there. I hope it didn’t give you too much trouble in turning over the feed to I-Tunes, but I think we have that straightened out. We have many, many more interesting interviews coming up in the near future. So stay with us for all of that. Until next time, take care, and bye for now.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode we’re going to look at the psychic medium experiment that we’ve been doing. I haven’t spoken much about it in the last few episodes, but there’s been a lot going on, really for the last few months.
Let me take everyone back to the beginning, at least the Skeptiko beginning. Let’s start by maybe defining terms a little bit. I think everyone who’s listening to this show is probably familiar with psychic medium communication. If someone’s lost a loved one they go and talk to a psychic or a medium and they try and connect with that loved one through some anomalous means that we don’t fully understand.
Now keep in mind that the skeptical take on psychic medium communication, and this is certainly the position of mainstream science as well, is no way, no how. Never been proven. You get a lot of this hundred years of nothing stuff. So once again, and I really feel a need to point this out, we are faced with this absolutely insane disconnect between what science is investigating and what people care most deeply about. I mean, let’s face it. What happens to us after we die is something we all think about, and we all care deeply about.
In terms of this experiment, it really started about 18 months ago when I appeared on, “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” show with Dr. Steve Novella. I challenged those folks to do a public demonstration of psychic medium work to show that it really does happen. You may recall that we had a lot of communication about that, but it never really came to pass, at least for a year it didn’t. Then near the end of last year, in 2008, I decided to tackle this project on my own. Or at least to dig into it and that’s what I’ve been doing.
I’ve updated you several times on the progress that we’ve made, but this is going to be a little bit of a different update. The project has personally taken a couple turns for me that I couldn’t have expected, but have been wonderfully enlightening. I want to share a little bit of that with you. First, this whole thing has been terrific. I mean, it’s been fascinating to speak with so many psychics, mediums, and out-of-body travelers. One thing you run into right away when you get into this is that you find that the labels we sometimes throw around don’t sit well with the folks doing the work. I want to respect that.
So that’s been amazing. It’s also been amazing to connect with so many folks who are dealing with the death of someone close to them. It hasn’t always been pleasant and fun, but it’s been rewarding on a different level.
In the last few months as I’ve been running these trials, I’ve learned a lot, I’ve certainly made a lot of mistakes, and then I’ve kind of come back and learned some more. Then a couple of months ago, I reached a little bit of a turning point. I had run about three trials on the medium experiment, and the way that I was doing it, I had achieved some mixed results.

Some of the experiments were showing extraordinary results – a million to one above chance levels. Others were not. Some of the readings were personally transformative for the people who were grieving, others were not. Now along the way, all along the way, I kept asking our mediums how we could improve the experiment, how we could make it better. The answer I got, and I got this a number of different ways, but ultimately the way I came to understand it is that I have to slow down and do these experiments, these trials, one at a time.
It’s funny, because I came to appreciate at a deeper level something that Julie Beischel said a while back. It’s something that I initially kind of bristled against. That’s that you have to serve everyone involved, the living and the dead. Now I know that sounds a little bit strange, but hang in there with me because that’s what this show is all about. It’s about one reading. One gifted person who’s somehow able to connect with people who have died. It’s also about one grieving mother. And it’s about one young adult who tragically decided to take her own life.
The story starts back in January of this year, ’09, when I was in the process of recruiting mediums for this experiment. I ran into Marilynn Hughes of the – get this, skeptics, you’re going to love this – the Out-of-Body Travel Foundation at outofbodytravel.org. Now if you’re wanting to snicker at the name, just wait until you dig into what Marilynn has to say. For many of us, even believers, the idea of God sending people on a journey through countless levels of spiritual realms in order to aid lost souls, all a little hard to take.
But two things that drove me forward with Marilynn were, one, I’m no longer put off by folks who believe in strange things that I don’t have any experience with. Heck, if Skeptiko has taught me anything, it’s that a lot of very down-to-earth people, like skeptics, believe in all sorts of things that they don’t have any experience with.
The second thing that drove me forward is that there was just something very engaging about Marilynn. I don’t know, I just really liked her, almost immediately. So I was really thrilled when Marilynn agreed to an interview. When we first started talking about the experiment and what we might be able to do together scientifically, I had some real doubts it was going to work out. I think you’ll see what I mean from this first clip.
Marilynn Hughes: Well, it’s an interesting question and I’ve been thinking about what I would say to you in terms of like how I think it could be done, and I think a thing that I would share is that from what I’ve experienced, this is where the challenge lies for science. When we leave our bodies and we go into different spiritual states, we enter worlds that have different laws than third dimensional reality. So in order to take science into that study, somehow we have to integrate and include those different laws of existence.
Alex Tsakiris: Different laws of existence? Isn’t this the kind of woo-woo stuff that just drives skeptics crazy? But you have to ask yourself one question. What if it’s real? And that’s the question I asked. So I pushed forward with Marilynn. I told her about the trials we’d already done. I told her about some of the other out-of-body experience research that had been published. So my dialogue with Marilynn continued, and we started to kind of hone in on something that we might be able to do. Here’s Marilynn again.
Marilynn Hughes: You know the one thing that I think is more likely to be workable in terms in what my situation is, is utilizing out-of-body experiences for messages for people. I don’t know how far we can take it. I do receive — in out-of-body travel, I don’t have the mediumship thing like a John Edward or someone like that. I receive messages and people come visit me in out-of-body experiences. That sort of thing is actually fairly common, so common that I don’t even really document it. There are a few people that I could bring forward that could share some of the things I’ve told them that I can remember or that I still have contact with.
A lot of times it’s someone who randomly comes across my site and asks for help and I just tell them I’ll pray and If I get permission I’ll let them know what I hear. Then I’ll tell them what happened and they’re happy and they move on and I don’t keep track of them. But I could start keeping track of them and then you’re talking about probably doing it in a controlled environment. I think, ironically, one of the things that is much more powerful with these experiences is that personal contact. So if you’re doing it in a university setting or something, and you have a pool of people who have some kind of needs or whatever that I can actually face, talk to, touch, and just see them, it’s much more likely to happen that way. Does that make sense?
Alex Tsakiris: That’s awesome. So let me make sure I understand what you’re saying. You generally, because you attract so many people with your message and through other ways, people come to you and say, “Marilynn, can you please help me with connecting with so-and-so?”
Marilynn Hughes: Right.
Alex Tsakiris: Then in your experience a lot of times those messages are answered and then you pass those along to the folks.
Marilynn Hughes: Right. See, what happens is, is it’s not just that, though. And that’s one thing I’m not sure how far we can go with it. In a situation like that because it is God-directed rather than me-directed, it can happen in a number of ways. Somebody might want to have contact with a relative who’s passed on but yet it might be one of the guardian angels who comes to me and says, “Well, this is what they actually need to know. So we’re not sending Dad to see them today. I’m coming to tell you this.”
Then there are other times, too, when they have problems or issues that are going on in their life that will be shown to me in some way, shape or form and how they might best handle it. So it can be in a variety of ways that it would happen.
Alex Tsakiris: So at this point I was starting to get a pretty clear idea about we might run an experiment with Marilynn. I was really impressed with her openness and her willingness to do this. I’ve spoken with a number of mediums, and when you really get down to brass tacks about doing a public experiment, really putting them on the spot, they sometimes get reluctant. I understand that. It can be a real set-up to take something that is this extraordinary and try and put it under a spotlight and say, “Do it now.” It just doesn’t happen that way. But that wasn’t where Marilynn was coming from. She just wanted to push forward and find the best way to do it. So I started asking her how we might refine it. How we might find the best possible candidates.
Marilynn Hughes: I don’t know why I didn’t think of mentioning this before, but I work at the Catholic Church, and so of course we do two or three funerals a week on average. One of the things that seems to happen, and this can sometimes even happen while I’m awake, where the person will just all of a sudden be with me. All of a sudden they’re just talking, talking, talking. I’ll just be – sometimes I’ll do this without even letting the people know that I feel their presence because not everyone’s open to this. It still helps them when you tell them these things because the deceased person knows what those family member believed beforehand and they present it to me in a way that they know the family can hear and listen to.
So what I have found is that it’s the unresolved ones that are more likely to come through. That’s part of the reason I’ll pick these people up just driving down the street. If you drive by a car accident and there’s some souls that are still there and they have this unresolved stuff — there can be a lot of things, murder, suicide, accidental overdoses.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, this was a good little twist, a good little insight into Marilynn’s process. I wanted to follow through with that. So I took some of the other points that Marilynn had mentioned and we talked a little bit further. We nailed down the particulars and how we’re going to run this trial, and I set off on finding us a participant.
Now I’ve been running an ad in Craigslist looking for participants for the last several months, so I have a pretty good database of potential sitters to choose from. When I sorted these people by the criteria that Marilynn and I had talked about, I had four or five people that I thought would be pretty good. I wound up picking Michelle. I’m not going to reveal her last name because it’s really not necessary. Michelle had lost a daughter to suicide at age 20 and she was looking to connect and had volunteered for the experiment. I e-mailed Michelle and then eventually wound up talking to her on the phone. I asked her if she wanted to not only participate in the medium experiment, but participate in this more in-depth public trial. She agreed. So here’s the protocol we set up.
I asked Michelle to send me an article of clothing that her daughter had worn. She did. She sent me a hat that was very special to her. I also asked her to send me some photographs. She did that, as well. I collected some general information about her daughter. First name, date of birth, date of passing. This is all information that Marilynn had said she would like to have during the reading. Now I was acting as the proxy. All information would be sent to me, and then I would send all that information along to Marilynn. Then I would receive the reading from Marilynn and I’d pass it along to Michelle.

Since all the readings came through in e-mail, this was an easy thing to do in terms of controlling exactly the amount of information that went through to Marilynn. So here’s what happened, and this is an amazing part of the story number one. While Michelle was in the process of sending me the hat and the photos, I passed along a little bit of information to Marilynn. I want you to put yourself in Marilynn’s position for a minute. Here’s the information that you received. You don’t know who I’ve selected. You have no idea. But here’s the information you receive.
First name, Megan. Then I’m going to give you the month and day, but not the year, that she was born. I’m going to give you the date that she passed, okay? So that’s all you have. You have that information. Now I was going to send her the rest, I was going to send her the hat and I was going to send her the photographs, but I hadn’t done that yet. I had just passed along that information that I gave you. So next I want to share with you the first e-mail reading I received from Marilynn based on that limited amount of information.
Marilynn starts out, “Megan is a soul who definitely wishes to make contact with her family and apparently has some level of permission from God to do so. I have some random things to share that she showed me. I don’t know what they mean. We’ll let the family see if they mean anything.“
Let me interject that even though she gives me this information and I pass it along to the family, I never give Marilynn any feedback on any of that information. I never tell her what’s a hit, what isn’t. So here are some of the things that she has to say.
“First, she showed me what appeared to be a college environment.” This is, in fact, correct. Megan was in college right before she committed suicide. She was about 20 years old when she died. Again, she had no way of knowing that. Back to her reading. “The next part was definitely not what I was expecting. I don’t know what this means, but I watched her begin on campus, and then somehow get lost. She ended up not being on campus, but I didn’t feel like she was that far away. She wandered off with a woman who was definitely very clearly lesbian. It seems that Megan wasn’t sure for a very, very short time of her identity, but she soon realized that she was not a lesbian and she refused to participate. My sense was that she was definitely showing me a time in the late teens, early 20s. I’ll find out when the pictures arrive if this is an appropriate age at which she died or not.”
Well, it did turn out to be an appropriate age. It was the exact time when she died, and the university angle does play into this as well, because Megan was raised in a major university town and this kind of interplay comes back and forth in the reading over and over again. So these couple of facts were really, really important and they became even more important after Marilynn received the photos and Megan’s hat and then continued with her second reading. Here I’ll share with you some of that.
“Megan told me that her death was very, very hard on her mom, and that she really loved her mom and had a very close relationship with her. Now before you scoff at this, I have to tell you I’ve done a bunch of readings at this point and it’s certainly not a given that there’s a strong bond between a daughter and a mother. Sometimes there’s a lot of animosity there.” So this is also a hit. A minor hit, but it’s a hit.
Also, since I hadn’t revealed to Michelle that it was Megan’s mother who was trying to connect, or even the name of the person who was trying to connect with her, whether it was a male or female, it makes it even more interesting. Before you kind of dismiss some of these things and go, of course, of course, because you already know the end story, think back and remember the information that you had. You didn’t have any of that information.
Okay, next we have a couple of points that turn out to be very, very significant to the family in terms of understanding Megan’s death. The first is, Marilynn reports that “Megan experienced a returning home to her faith, like she had been somewhere else for a while.” Marilynn’s reading says,”It was like she had been somewhere else for a while, maybe off to college or a different location, maybe she just went away from the church, and she came back. She was very happy to be back.” She goes on to say, ”It was kind of a calm before the storm.”
This is Marilynn again. “Yes, I’m hearing from her, underlined, a calm before the storm. She thought she had found her way back home, but something else was going to happen.” Then she said, “The woman told me a different story. Something she told me wasn’t true.” She emphasized this again and now writes this, ”Now I know all of that might sound a little bit cryptic, but it’s very important, very relevant to the story, because as it turns out, this is exactly the kind of spiritual crisis, if you will, that Megan was going through.”
It doesn’t matter what you think about a spiritual crisis, it’s her experience, and it’s what her mother recalls her going through. So she had somehow drifted away from her spiritual tradition, then she had found her way back. She was back reading the Bible and in a Christian group because that’s what was important to her. But then that was the calm before the storm and then the storm, of course, is her eventual suicide. I don’t think that’s really reading too much into it. That’s pretty much what the reading says. As you’ll soon hear, Megan’s mom confirms this is actually what happens.
So back to Marilynn’s reading. Marilynn writes that this case reminds her of another case she worked on where a family had come to her and said that they’d lost someone through an accident, but the police had never figured out if this had been an accident or a suicide or a murder, and it caused a lot of pain in the family. She goes on to say that, “Megan’s case sounds something like this to me. There’s something about Megan that the family does not fully know. But based on the way she’s presented this to me, I’m not sure that the family knows that there is something they don’t know yet.”
Now this part of the reading turns out to be very significant to Megan’s mom. In fact, it was the primary reason she contacted me. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I only knew it after I revealed this reading to her and she came back and said, “I have to tell you, Megan’s death has caused a major divide in our family. Her death was clearly a suicide, but there’s a part of my family that isn’t willing to accept that she really killed herself, and they think that there’s other reasons behind it. She was on medication, antidepressant medication. She had gone through some car accident and was on pain medication. And they want to believe that there are other reasons behind it, and it’s caused a real divide in our family.” So that is certainly a very, very unusual set of circumstances, and I have no way of explaining how Marilynn could possibly tune into that.
Marilynn provided three more e-mail readings for the family. Two of them were very brief, and one of them was pretty long. The amount of factual, verifiable data in them is relatively small, but they altogether had a very, very profound effect on the family. There is one other little verifiable fact that came through that I think is amazing in the way that so many of these readings are amazing. It’s a very, very small point, but it had great significance to the family.
It’s in the last reading that Marilynn provides, and she says, “I see Megan and she’s smiling, and there are these flowers all around her face. It’s a strange symbol.” Then she goes on to say, ”I think these flowers are peonies.” Now the only reason this point’s important, and the only person at this point that is important too, is Megan’s mom. Right around the time that she received this message, she had been talking to her husband about planting a garden specifically for Megan, to honor Megan. She was asking her husband what kind of flowers he thinks she should plant in there. Just about this time, she gets this message. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Who knows? Just another point to add to the whole story.
You’ll hear more about that a little later when we talk to Megan’s mom. First I want to go back to my second interview with Marilynn. This is a follow-up, the trial’s basically over, I’m ready to share the results with Marilynn, and I also want to talk about the process that she went through in arriving at this rather remarkable data.
Alex Tsakiris: So what was your process in terms of connecting with Megan?
Marilynn Hughes: Well, you know, with Megan it was almost instantaneous. You had given me, I think it was via e-mail – I don’t know if we spoke on the phone or I think you gave it to me by e-mail. Then I asked for the date of death, because sometimes it’s very important and helpful when you know how long someone has been crossed over. There are different stages in death, and so different types of timing you’re going to be more likely to reach them in different locations. But with Megan, as soon as I got her name and you gave me those dates, I could feel her. She was just all over me. And it was like, “Wow, this girl wants to talk to her family, you know what I mean?” [Laughs] Then it was that very night.
The process is really not something that I control. It’s a process where when I go to bed at night, I have these out-of-body experiences and then the person who is deceased will show me things. A lot of times they show you — and I believe I experienced based on what you just shared with me — her moment of death. In the last reading I think that’s when she probably died, because I had woken up bone-cold. I don’t know if you recall this – she was in a room, and I woke up bone-cold and that’s what felt like, oh, she must have died then.
So the process is going out-of-body, the person takes you on a visual where you almost experience it with them. It’s almost like you become them in the experience, where you’re experiencing part of their life as them so you can feel their emotions, their feelings. Everything that’s going through their mind. That’s part of the process that is very important for the remaining family members because a lot of times in a situation like this, the difference is exactly what was it that this person was confused about. Because the families always blame themselves, and it’s always helpful for them to know, if it’s possible, what was it that led to the moment of their death? What were they thinking? How did that come about? Who were the people that led them there?
What was the actual – and a lot of times, too, it’s about taking that personal responsibility which they always do after death. We all have to take the personal responsibility for our own decisions and stuff. There’s so many things involved in it, but it’s primarily something that is led by – I believe that it’s led by God, and he allows people to do this when it’s helpful for their spirit and for someone who might be left behind.
If you recall, in our first conversation I said the one factor that I have no control over is whether or not it’s allowed. A lot of times in a situation, because I don’t control it and I don’t just conjure it up and stuff, it comes to me or it doesn’t. Generally, in a situation where someone has some unfinished business after crossing over, there’s more likely a chance that they will be allowed to do this and to share this kind of experience and come back through someone who has a gift like this, than if there’s not any major unfinished business.
Alex Tsakiris: You know, it’s interesting and it’s also interesting that you’re talking about God and the religious mysticism aspect of it. It’s particularly interesting in this case, and it’s going to be very controversial and very challenging for a lot of folks. These are just the facts of this case. One of the things that you reported in your reading was this struggle that Megan was having and how she had gone and drifted away from her spiritual path and had run into some pretty bad people along the way. Then she had found her way back on her spiritual path and was, I don’t know if you said specifically that she was reading the Bible or not, but…
Marilynn Hughes: She was back in a church…
Alex Tsakiris: Back in a church, well…
Marilynn Hughes: …and was back in a group, a religious group of some kind. The way she presented to me it was the face of her youth.
Alex Tsakiris: This is exactly what happened in Megan’s case. So again, this is…
Marilynn Hughes: Wow, okay.
Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, while she was at the university she had befriended this woman who was really kind of a bad news person. This woman was somewhat of a psychic but was running a psychic scam and had kind of a bank of phones. This woman also had a Wicca background, whether that’s good or bad.
Marilynn Hughes: That explains a lot, explains a lot. Yes.
Alex Tsakiris: This relationship was quite troubling to Megan and to her family, but her mother reports that near the end, she had come back to her Christian faith and was trying to get back into that and was reading the Bible regularly and that.
So again, these are just the facts, and they match perfectly with the reading that you gave and there really isn’t a good or reasonable explanation for why you would connect any of that or why you would provide any of that information.
Marilynn and I went over a number of other points about her reading. I’m going to skip ahead a little bit in our conversation.
Alex Tsakiris: You’ve given a lot of information here. It’s not like talking on a phone. [Laughs]
Marilynn Hughes: Right. [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: I’m sure it isn’t for you, but it certainly isn’t in terms of the information you’re getting. Some of it is allegorical and has kind of other kinds of meaning that has to be kind of teased out of it. Some of it’s very specific…
Marilynn Hughes: Right, yes.
Alex Tsakiris: …so it’s kind of giving a summation. I’ll tell you one specific thing that you gave that had tremendous meaning for Megan’s mom was the flowers.
Marilynn Hughes: Really?
Alex Tsakiris: Yes.
Marilynn Hughes: She made a big deal about the flowers and I was almost hesitant to even write it because it was like, how could this mean something? [Laughs] I said, okay, I’ll just say it. That’s interesting. What meaning did that have?
Alex Tsakiris: Megan’s mom was in the process of building a flower bed specifically for Megan, to kind of celebrate Megan, and had been talking to her husband about, you know, I really want to start a little flower garden…
Marilynn Hughes: Wow, I’m getting slammed. [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: [Laughs]
Marilynn Hughes: Now I understand, because she had the flowers around her head. It was just kind of like it didn’t quite make sense, you know, but now it makes perfect sense that the flowers would be surrounding her. [Laughs] Wow.
Alex Tsakiris: And those specific flowers that you said, I can’t say, I can’t pronounce it.
Marilynn Hughes: Peonies? Were they peonies?
Alex Tsakiris: Oh, peonies, okay. I can’t remember but Megan’s mom was so moved by this that she went and researched these flowers and found that they were exactly the kind that you were looking for. They were indigenous to Texas. They met all the criteria that she had laid out in her mind in terms of how to construct this flower bed to honor her daughter. So I think this is…
Marilynn Hughes: Wow. That’s so exciting to hear that. One of the interesting things about doing an experiment like this is that most of the time when this sort of thing is happening, I know a little bit about the family. Sometimes I don’t know a whole lot, like in that particular instance that I mentioned where it reminded me of where they didn’t know if it was an accident, suicide, or murder, but I didn’t know that until the deceased person had come and told me, “Tell my brother it was an accident.” And then he said, “Wow. That’s really great because we didn’t know if it was an accident, a murder, or suicide. The police could never figure it out.”
So most of the time I know a little bit about the people or they’ve written to me and they have information, so I have a little bit to go on. And then they give me feedback. So this was actually very interesting for me to do, as well, because of the fact that there was the no feedback rule so it was kind of running blind and just hoping that you’re catching what she’s saying correctly and seeing things correctly and translating it correctly. You know what I mean? So that’s really exciting to hear of so many of the things that she had shared with me, that I got it right. And that it was helpful, you know what I mean?
Alex Tsakiris: And I think you can tell me if this is typical or not, and this is also going to be very, very challenging for a lot of folks who aren’t comfortable with this whole idea. Beyond the specific data that was evidential — and there was a lot of it — there were a lot of just uncanny coincidences that happened with Megan’s mom during this process, during this…
Marilynn Hughes: Really?
Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, in terms of e-mails that she got, in terms of lights going on and off completely in a way that she had associated in the past with Megan’s presence being close to her. And in terms of her just knowing and feeling Megan’s presence and feeling resolution to these things. So I don’t know if that’s typical, but it sounds like, to me from talking to Megan’s mom, that this process that she went through in working with you without even knowing your name or knowing who you were…
Marilynn Hughes: [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: …but the process was very transformative for her.
Marilynn Hughes: A lot of times it does happen like that. Not necessarily always like lights going on and off, where there’s physical phenomenon, but a lot of times people will actually have – of course, this will happen more with people like may have been to my Web site and they know what I look like. They’ll see me in dreams and I’ll tell them things, or things like that. There will be kind of a mutual – where there’s information that’s kind of moving through both parties at the same time.
Of course, I think in Megan’s case, she obviously – it was so strong, and it’s interesting because just yesterday I was meeting with somebody who really wants to make contact with a daughter who had died about 16 years ago. I didn’t feel a thing. It might be something where it comes up in a week or two, because I mentioned to you in our first conversation, sometimes it happens immediately, sometimes it takes three months, sometimes it takes six months, and sometimes it never happens. It’s all up to the will of God, not me. It was very interesting with Megan because she was just immediate. She really wanted to communicate with her mother. She made a lot of effort to do so.
It was almost difficult to keep up with her because there were so many interesting twists in her story, and knowing nothing about the story it was like, okay, well, I think I might have mentioned this in my first e-mail. This is either really right on or just really crazy stuff. [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: [Laughs]
Marilynn Hughes: Because I had no idea about all these interesting twists and turns, but that’s what kind of ironically makes doing an experiment like this very interesting, too. Because she had a case where it would be highly difficult to guess that all the circumstances around it. When she was showing them to me, it was a little bit, well, this is kind of a little far out.
This is probably – it was kind of difficult just receiving it and saying well – and you know even with the issue of questioning her sexuality and the woman who was a lesbian, you don’t want to make things worse with the family if this is something they don’t know about. Or, if it’s not correct. [Laughs] So this was actually probably a very interesting case to utilize because it had so many interesting facets to it.
Alex Tsakiris: I think we stayed very true to our original goal of keeping it blinded in a scientific…
Marilynn Hughes: Totally blind, yes.
Alex Tsakiris: And I think it’s also – it’s been a learning process for me, too, in terms of how to do these experiments. I think so many things came out of this process for me. One of the big things that came out is just how important this work is for the people involved. I want to make sure that going forward, I really honor that and I really respect that and do that work from that. You do this experiment, which is important, the scientific part of it is important, but going forward I really want to make sure that we do this from that place. From that place of honor and respect, because there is some kind of higher meaning to all this. That’s that we have to honor that while we discover it.
Marilynn Hughes: It’s really important that people know that — a lot of people hear about the people who will just say they connect with the dead for random purposes. It’s really important for people to know that when this kind of contact is actually allowed, it’s for what I would call an eternal purpose. You’re absolutely right. It has to be respected and honored because the purpose of it has to do with that family and that soul who have something they need to communicate to one another.
It’s very important that that be the primary target, so to speak, which is one of the things – part of my process as you asked earlier was every night as I was getting ready to go to bed and prepare to have out-of-body experiences and stuff, I would ask Megan and say, “Okay, Megan, what does your mother need to hear from you? What do you need to say to her, for her to be okay, and for you to be okay? You need to be real specific with me here so that we can get right to what she needs from you. And what you need from her.” I would try to focus her in also, and say, “Okay, now this going to be real hard for me to keep track of all these details right before your life because it’s very complicated, but we need to make sure that we get what she needs to know.” You know what I mean?
Sometimes, like in that one instance, it was simple. It was, it was an accident, not suicide or murder. In this case, it was a lot more complicated.
Alex Tsakiris: It was very complicated.
Marilynn Hughes: And that kind of made it interesting. [Laughs]
Alex Tsakiris: You know, that’s — even that is evidential, right?
Marilynn Hughes: Yes.
Alex Tsakiris: Because this is a very, very complicated situation. I’m just giving you kind of a thumbnail sketch of everything that went on, but it was very complicated. Well, Marilynn, I am going to be in touch with you and I’m hoping we can collaborate and do some other things in the future. I think your work is wonderful and I encourage everyone to check out, even though you may have those initial reservations and doubts whether it’s okay to go to something called The Out-of-Body Travel Foundation.org. Please do so and stretch your mind a little bit. You never know what you might discover.
Marilynn Hughes: The Web address is actually outofbodytravel.org, but it’s called The Out-of-Body Travel Foundation.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay. I’m sorry. I tell you what, you have quite a presence on the Web. If someone Googles “out-of-body travel,” they’re going to find you. I have no doubt about that.
Marilynn Hughes: That’s true. It’s number one on all the search engines, so they should be able to find it. If you just look up out-of-body travel, you’ll find it. The Out-of-Body Travel Foundation Web site and there’s all sort of resources on it, including there’s a special video section called, Science and Research, that has a lot of video footage of a lot of the science that’s being done around out-of-body travel, near-death experiences, and reincarnation. So there’s a lot of resources, even for those who want to look into the science of it.
Alex Tsakiris: Well, thanks so much for joining me today and we’ll be in touch.
Marilynn Hughes: Thank you, Alex, it’s been a great experience.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, the last interview I want to share with you is with Megan’s mom, Michelle. Here are some clips from that interview.
Michelle: Another of the most profound facets of the information that Marilynn sent was immediately where she conveyed that Megan was conveying to her that she had been seeking and searching spiritually before her death, and that she had been confused. She had been misled and she had been confused and now that she was communicating through Marilynn that she’s on the right track now. That was profound to me, because Megan was spiritually seeking and she had stumbled into some wrong paths.
Right before she died, she was reading the Bible every day and praying and she just – she felt like she had – that was where she needed to be. That’s where she was finding her answers, and I thought that was so profound that Marilynn was able to interpret that through Megan. And she knew nothing about that. I don’t feel like it was just irony, you know, I think that Megan was saying, “Ahh, this is the real answer, Mom, this is what I was seeking and this is the truth.” So I thought that was really amazing that Megan felt it important to even communicate that part.
Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, I thought it was pretty remarkable, too. It’s kind of hard objectively to pick out that kind of information, say that that’s some general information that someone would give. Again, through the whole process, suicide was never mentioned to Marilynn. She never knew until half an hour ago when I spoke to her on the phone that…
Michelle: Really?
Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. She never knew that. That was never disclosed to her, so she never knew the exact conflict that was surrounding the issue of Megan’s passing until I just told it to her. She was like, wow, that really makes a lot of sense in terms of what she was getting from Megan. So it’s been a very interesting experience. And a great experience.
And an opening experience for me, too. I mentioned to Marilynn this has helped me understand how I need to go forward in doing this work in the future and how we do need to really, really respect the work that’s being done from the other side and the work that’s being done with the people who are still here and all that. I really appreciate your openness, Michelle, and your willingness to share this story and to participate in this. It’s been really great.
Michelle: Well, I’ve been so grateful and I can tell you, Alex, that there has been a huge healing component in all of this. There really has. As sad and as traumatic and all of that that it’s been, if there can be good, there has been. There has been good from it, you know? This has been huge and it just was just a reminder that we really are just spiritual beings having a human experience. I know that she’s still here with me. Like you did mention that the lights went on and off, and yeah, that has been a very, very real phenomenon ever since she died.
More so in the beginning but it did happen the other day when I was specifically communicating over the phone to my husband. I was in tears, and I just received this e-mail, this answer that I’d been looking for for all this time. I was very emotional and my husband said – he had read the e-mail from Marilynn – and he said, “Marilynn said that Megan said that she’s going through this process of healing and understanding where she is, which is different from where you are, but it’s still a process. And she’s going through it just like you are, trying to understand and she’s seeking for answers.” And when he said that, and I started crying, the electricity in the whole entire house went out.
Alex Tsakiris: Right, right.
Michelle: I’ve lived here two years and that has never happened. When she died in the apartment that I had for the two years after she died, that happened all the time. I mean, just amazing, amazing miraculous ways. But it had not happened here. For it to happen at that moment, that was confirmation that Megan was listening in on that conversation. Megan knew exactly what we were talking about, and that was her way of communicating, “Right on. That’s exactly right.” You know?
Alex Tsakiris: So what do you think? Are we to believe everything that Marilynn Hughes has to say about the spiritual realm? Just because she gave some pretty accurate information on this reading? I don’t know, but I can tell you this. You know, a couple months ago, Dr. Julie Beischel from the Windbridge Institute, one of the foremost researchers in this area, she was out here in San Diego and gave a very excellent public presentation. She also, with the help of a very hard-working volunteer named David Jasperson, was able to set up some very interesting meetings with hospice workers on one hand and grief counselors on the other.
As Julie was recounting what had transpired during her trip and what she learned, it became clear to me just how outrageously out of balance our intellectual perspective is on this topic. I mean, consider for a minute. Whether you believe everything that Marilynn Hughes has to say or not, just consider for a minute that we’re training thousands of grief counselors across the United States, and we’re sending them out in the field and we’re not exposing them to any of this information. The reason we’re not is because we don’t know if it’s real. The reason we don’t know if it’s real is because we haven’t bothered to look.
I mean, if I can sit here, and in a couple months put together a demonstration like this, a demonstration that is highly suggestive of some kind of anomalous communication, and is at the very least highly suggestive that the process can be very beneficial to the grieving. How can we ignore it? And if you’re a skeptic, how can you possibly justify standing in the way of this research going forward? I’m not talking about taking sides. I’m not talking about converting you to believing.
I’m talking about why would you want to be an impediment to finding out whether this works? Whether it works in terms of communicating with the dead, or whether it works with comforting the grieving? Yet that’s the exact situation we’re in. We’ve allowed our “mainstream scientists” and the skeptical community to create a huge barrier. A barrier that’s been impossible for most researchers to overcome. Hence, this research just doesn’t get done.
Now in the months to come, I’m hoping to in a small way, change that. I’m hoping to fund a couple of research projects, perhaps at a couple of universities, and see if we can get some kindling going, and maybe get a little fire under a couple people to start this research. It’s desperately needed. And of course, if you have any ideas or suggestions about how we might do that or how we might do that most effectively, please let me know.
Well, this show has been running on pretty long here. A lot of interviews to get in. But before I leave, I want to give a special thanks to Marilynn Hughes for all the time that she devoted to this project. She did it on a volunteer basis, and with an open heart and a very open spirit of exploration. I also want to thank Megan’s mom, Michelle, for the time, energy, and openness that she showed towards this project.
If you’d like more information about this episode, or any of our previous episodes, please check out our Web site at skeptiko.com. You’ll also find a link to our forum, an e-mail link for me, and you’ll find a new Web site look there. I hope it didn’t give you too much trouble in turning over the feed to I-Tunes, but I think we have that straightened out. We have many, many more interesting interviews coming up in the near future. So stay with us for all of that. Until next time, take care, and bye for now.
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