Is it normal to see dead relatives

Your Name:. Your Last Name:. Send Email Cancel. Dementia-related behaviors like delusions and hallucinations can be difficult for caregivers to accept and manage. These symptoms may manifest as dementia patients seeing and talking to dead loved ones. The emotional implications of these hallucinations are often intense for patients and caregivers alike.

Learning about the troubling behavioral symptoms of this disease and how to cope with them is crucial to caring for someone with dementia. He blogs for Psychology Today, and is on the NASW committee aimed at establishing national standardization of caregiving. With a practice in South Florida, he runs wellness workshops for professionals and family caregivers. Read 11 Comments. Related Articles. Recent Questions Any suggestions for my father in law with stage 3 dementia to keep him from getting up in the middle of the night?

The SPR hallucination surveys were, therefore, largely ignored by the scientific world. William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly from , defended the belief in ghostly visions from an emerging class of skeptics after his daughter Winny died in her twenties. Ghosts were disregarded and forgotten, except by all the people who continued to sense them. In this context, ghostly presences, now dubbed grief hallucinations, were viewed as obstacles to recovery because they represented an unhealthy clinging to the past.

A study of London widows undertaken in by British psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes led him to conclude that seeing or sensing a deceased partner—which the widows unexpectedly described to him—must pertain to a frustrated attempt to reaffirm a lost attachment. Likewise, psychiatrist Beverley Raphael dismissed grief hallucinations in her book, Anatomy of Bereavement , as common but unhelpful. One study of widows near Boston found that all sensed their spouses and none were swooning face down on their beds.

They seemed rather to be better at this style of expressing grief, more accepting of it and more convinced of its meaning. This accorded with the research of non-Westerners, many of whom have cultures that create space for ongoing engagement with ancestors. A study of Japanese widows, for example, found that their rituals of leaving food out and lighting candles for the present dead made them more psychologically resilient in grief.

Similarly, American anthropologist Charles Emmons once conducted a study of ghost belief in Hong Kong. The experience of sensing the dead has by no means been confined to women, though widows seem to be the cohort most studied.

The First World War is filled with reports of soldiers interacting with newly dead comrades and siblings-in-arms. One such encounter was the subject of a memoir by Canadian soldier Will R. One of his accounts comes from American astronaut Jerry Linenger, who sensed his dead father while aboard the Mir space station in the late s. Linenger addressed his dad, who conveyed back that he was proud his son had achieved his childhood desire to fly to space. Geiger noted that whatever accounted for these types of interactions, which he remains agnostic about, they tended to be reassuring rather than debilitating or symptomatic of poor coping.

In , UK bereavement counsellor Sally Flatteau Taylor conducted a study on the experiences of bereaved clients who had sensed dead loved ones. She found that 80 percent felt patronized, misunderstood, or dismissed when it came to this element of their lives.

That the dead do not always stay dead continues to rankle the scientifically minded. When Christopher Kerr, a Toronto-raised palliative care physician who heads Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo, first worked with patients on rounds, he was completely unprepared for the number of dreams and visions his patients described that featured the consoling dead. Nearly years after the first SPR studies, scientists still have no proven thesis on what, exactly, is happening when someone hallucinates or senses the dead.

Do the dead inhabit old houses? Most of the time, the dead will be around their loved ones, wherever they may be, not attached to a particular house. Why is it that we hear about the dead haunting a particular place? Sometimes a soul has a story to tell. For example, in historic places like a Civil War battlefield.

There are just so many spirits there. In these cases, there is a story about an incomplete life being cut down. Our history books only tell the smallest part of the story. We will never understand the real experience. And sometimes the dead do linger in these places in order to tell their story. They literally are lost souls. If it happened every time someone was murdered there would be such a thick painful energy all around us.

But where the story is important, some souls move on and some stay. In any case, they forgive the minute they go into the Light. In the Light there is no room for anything but forgiveness and love. How can a soul get out of limbo? As I understand it, limbo is a state of frustration due to not understanding. To escape limbo the soul must be willing to listen to and heed the spirit Master or guide — like a guidance counselor.

Then the kid gets it. He can apologize and get back into his classes. Is it hard for you to visit historic sites? At the Alamo, even just walking in the dirt around the fort was a very moving experience. You can feel the horses, the men, smell and taste the very blood. When I visited the Ann Frank Museum in Amsterdam the souls surrounding that place were completely overwhelming to me. Actually, I could feel the souls throughout the old part of the city. Amsterdam is breathtakingly beautiful.

Walking in the streets, along the canal, in the very stones of the buildings, they all hold the vibrations of the history that has taken place there, you can feel the energy. Both the innocent and the evil. Those who were killed and those who killed. When I do a reading, I am emotionally removed and uninvolved. But this is a very different experience for me.

I do get very emotional. At the Ann Frank house, I was just crying and crying. Did you lose your family? I just have such extreme empathy. But this is not just something that I can feel. So many feel drawn to places like this. Our souls are drawn to connect with these stories. The spirit who was Ann Frank is a Master and would not be held in limbo in that way, attached to a place. She had a mission and a purpose in that lifetime and she accomplished that.

Her life was brief, but what she accomplished was so powerful that it continues to resonate to this day. She has moved on. Do all places in which humans have lived hold vibrations? Anything we have touched will retain some energy. Joy, awe, sadness, horror. You can tell the difference between the energy in an old home and the energy in a brand new, just built suburban development home. Also, old objects, especially ones that have been handled a lot will have this energy.

I thought to myself: "Maturity? What did maturity have to do with anything? It would be arrogant to think we can explain everything, especially when it comes to dying.

My mother died when I was still a preteen. My father remained an incredible optimist his whole life, even when he was dying. I was busy trying to make sure he was comfortable and pain-free, and at first didn't notice he had become very sad.

He told me how much he was going to miss me once he was gone. And then he mentioned how much he was saying goodbye to: his loved ones, his favorite foods, the sky, the outdoors and a million other things of this world. He was overcome by sadness I could not and would not take away from him. My father was very down-hearted for the next few days. But then one morning he told me my mother, his wife, had come to him the night before.

I'm going to see her soon. Then he added, "We'll be there waiting for you. Over the next two days, his demeanor changed dramatically.