If you have felt your person in the room, heard your name in their voice, or found something you cannot account for and then felt ridiculous about it, here is the first thing worth knowing: what happened to you is common, it has been studied, and the clinical literature has described it for over fifty years as a normal part of mourning rather than a sign that something has gone wrong. In a British Medical Journal study of two hundred and ninety-three widowed people, almost half reported hallucinations or illusions of their dead spouse, and the author concluded that these are normal and helpful accompaniments of widowhood. That was published in 1971, and the shift in grief theory that followed moved in the same direction: an ongoing inner bond with the person who died is now treated as an ordinary part of mourning rather than a failure to let go.

I am Elissa Rose. Twenty-five years of intuitive and psychic practice sit behind this, and more than ten years of formal mediumship training on top of it, set out with my teachers named. I run Sacred Soul Mystic Sanctuary near Abingdon and Glade Spring in the Blue Ridge mountains of southwest Virginia, where I sit with grieving people in 60-minute Spirit Connection Sessions at a flat 144 dollars, held online. I want to be careful with you on this page in a way that a lot of pages about signs are not. Nothing here will tell you that a cardinal on the fence is a message. Nothing here will decode anything for you. What this page does is tell you what people actually report, what the evidence does and does not establish, when an experience is worth talking to a doctor or a therapist about, and where a session with someone like me does and does not fit.

You are not losing your mind, and you are not being told what to believe. Those are two different reassurances, and you deserve both.

Estimated reading time: 11 min read

Key Insights

Sensory experiences of a deceased person are widely reported and have been documented in the clinical literature since at least 1971, when a BMJ study of two hundred and ninety-three widowed people found almost half reported them and called them normal and helpful. Grief theory shifted decades ago from severing bonds with the dead to maintaining them, and an ongoing inner relationship is now treated as an ordinary part of mourning rather than a failure to move on. None of that is proof of survival after death, and this page does not claim it is. What matters practically is knowing which experiences are ordinary, which warrant a conversation with a clinician, and what a mediumship session is and is not for.

What People Actually Report

The experiences people bring to a medium are rarely the dramatic thing films have trained us to expect. They are small, domestic and specific, and they recur in the bereavement literature as well as in practice.

A sense of presence in a particular room, usually theirs. Hearing their voice, often saying something ordinary. Catching their smell: tobacco, a perfume, the particular soap. Waking at the hour they died. A dream that does not feel like the other dreams, and which people describe as a visit rather than a dream, unprompted and in almost identical words. Objects turning up, stopping, or not being where they were left. Birds and animals that arrive at a moment that means something. An electrical thing behaving oddly.

If you are about to apologize for any of that, do not. Whatever these experiences are, the research says they are not rare and not a sign that grief has gone wrong, and you do not owe anyone an explanation for having had one.

• A sense of presence, usually in a specific room or chair
• Hearing their voice, most often saying something ordinary
• Their smell arriving with no source
• Dreams that the dreamer insists were not like other dreams
• Objects moved, missing, or returned
• Animals, birds and timing that lands on an anniversary or an hour that matters

What the Research Says, and What It Does Not

The foundational study is Dewi Rees’s 1971 paper in the British Medical Journal, which interviewed two hundred and ninety-three widows and widowers in mid-Wales, over eighty percent of all the widowed people in the area who could be interviewed. Almost half reported hallucinations or illusions of their dead spouse. Rees’s conclusion was not that these people were unwell. He wrote that the experiences are normal and helpful accompaniments of widowhood.

That word helpful is the one that gets left out when this study is quoted at people. The finding was not merely that the experiences are common. It was that they appeared to do some good.

The second piece of context is that grief theory itself changed. For much of the twentieth century the goal of mourning was understood as detachment: a healthy griever was one who let go and reinvested elsewhere, and continuing to feel bonded to the dead was read as a failure of the process. That model was substantially revised. The continuing-bonds account, which is now mainstream in bereavement work, treats an ongoing inner relationship with the person who died as an ordinary and often healthy part of grief rather than a problem to be resolved.

Now the part I will not skip. None of this proves that your person contacted you. Rees documented prevalence, not cause. Continuing-bonds theory describes how mourning works psychologically; it makes no claim about survival after death. A finding that an experience is common and beneficial is not a finding about where it comes from, and anyone who hands you the Rees study as evidence of the afterlife is stretching it past what it says. I am a medium and I am telling you that, because a page that overstates the evidence is not actually on your side.

What the research does support is the thing you probably came here for: you are not unusual, and you are not unwell.

When It Is Worth Talking to Someone

Because the experiences are common, it matters to be clear about where the line sits, and I am not the person who draws it. A doctor or a therapist is.

The American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for prolonged grief disorder require, for adults, that the loss occurred at least a year ago; that there is intense yearning or longing for the person, or preoccupation with them; that at least three further symptoms have been present nearly every day for at least the previous month; and that the grief lasts longer than would be expected given social, cultural or religious norms and interferes substantially with daily life. Every one of those elements has to be present, which is why this is a clinician’s judgment and not a checklist to run on yourself at two in the morning. The distinction being drawn there is not about whether you sense your person. It is about whether daily life has stopped working.

So the useful question is not whether the experience was real. It is how you are, around it. If you are eating, sleeping some, getting through the week, and occasionally undone by a smell in a doorway, that is grief. If the days have gone flat and stayed flat, if you cannot work or care for anyone including yourself, that is worth a professional conversation and worth it soon. Your doctor is a reasonable first call and a counselor a good second; if the thought of getting through tonight is the problem, a crisis line is the right call and it is not a drastic thing to use.

And there are experiences that belong to medicine rather than to grief or to me. Sensory experiences alongside confusion, a new medication, a head injury, a fever, or any marked change in thinking are a reason to call a doctor, not a mystery to sit with. That is not a disclaimer written to protect me. It is the actual advice.

Mediumship supports people in grief. It does not treat it, diagnose anything, or replace therapy or counseling. Those are different jobs done by different people, and one of them is not mine.

What I Tell People Who Ask Me to Interpret a Sign

Asked what a particular sign meant, my answer is the same every time and it is not the one people expect: I do not think that is mine to decode, and I would be careful with anyone who charged you to.

The interpretation is not the missing piece. Permission is, and being told a thing is allowed to matter is a much smaller thing to need than a reading. Nobody should be selling it back to you at a premium.

So my advice is unglamorous. Write it down. The date, the detail, the ordinary specifics. Not to build a case, and not to prove anything to a skeptical relative, but because these moments blur and the record is yours.

And be careful with anyone who tells you a sign is urgent, or that it carries a warning only they can read, or that your person is unsettled and needs something purchased to be at peace. That is not mediumship. That is the oldest machinery in this business, and grief is exactly when it works.

Where a Session Fits, and Where It Does Not

A Spirit Connection Session is 60 minutes, online, 144 dollars, posted before you book, with nothing sold inside the hour. What happens in it is that we talk first, I explain what I do and what I do not, you tell me what you are hoping for, and then I tell you what I receive, plainly, and you say whether it lands.

What it is not is a decoder for the cardinal on your fence. And it comes with a limit I state before anyone pays: you cannot choose who comes through. Spirit decides. I will not promise you will hear from a specific person, and a practice that does is either guessing or lying.

On timing, the only honest answer is that there is no correct interval and I am not going to invent one. Some people come within weeks and some after years, and I am glad to sit with either. If you are still in the part where you cannot breathe, know only that there is no hurry and a session will keep.

If you want the fuller account of what mediumship can and cannot do for grief, it is in can a medium help with grief. If you have decided and want to know what an hour is actually like, what to expect from your first session covers it.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Is it normal to sense a deceased loved one?

A: Yes, and it has been documented in the clinical literature for over fifty years. A British Medical Journal study of two hundred and ninety-three widowed people found that almost half reported hallucinations or illusions of their dead spouse, and the author described these as normal and helpful accompaniments of widowhood. Being common is not the same as being explained, but it does mean you are not unusual.

Q: Do signs from a deceased loved one prove there is an afterlife?

A: No, and this page will not tell you otherwise. The research documents how often people report these experiences and that many find them helpful. It does not establish where the experiences come from. You are entitled to your own conclusion about your own experience; what you are not owed is a practitioner overstating the evidence to get there faster.

Q: When should I speak to a doctor or therapist instead?

A: If daily life has stopped working. The clinical criteria for prolonged grief disorder involve a loss at least a year ago, intense yearning for the person or preoccupation with them, at least three further symptoms nearly every day for at least a month, and grief that interferes substantially with living. It is a clinician’s assessment, not a self-test. Separately, and this one is simple: sensory experiences alongside confusion, a new medication, a head injury or a marked change in thinking belong with a doctor, not with a medium and not with a signs article.

Q: Can a medium tell me what a sign meant?

A: I do not think that is mine to decode, and I would be careful with anyone who charges you to. If a sign meant something to you, that meaning is already yours and does not need buying back. Writing it down with the ordinary details is worth more than an interpretation.

Q: How soon after a death should I book a session?

A: There is no correct interval and I will not invent one. Some people come within weeks of a death and some after years, and I am glad to sit with either. There is no hurry, and if it is right later it will still be right later.

Citations

• W Dewi Rees, The Hallucinations of Widowhood, British Medical Journal, 1971. A study of 293 widows and widowers in mid-Wales in which almost half reported hallucinations or illusions of the dead spouse; the author concluded these are normal and helpful accompaniments of widowhood. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1799198/
• American Psychiatric Association, Prolonged Grief Disorder. The clinical criteria distinguishing prolonged grief disorder from ordinary grief, including the one-year threshold for adults and the requirement that symptoms interfere with daily life. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/prolonged-grief-disorder
• Continuing Bonds Scale validation study, National Library of Medicine. Peer-reviewed work treating the ongoing inner relationship with a deceased loved one as a measurable, ordinary part of mourning rather than a failure to detach. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11100273/
• Sacred Soul Mystic Sanctuary, Sessions. The posted session price and the published limits quoted on this page. https://soulmysticsanctuary.com/sessions/

Related reading

• Can a Medium Help with Grief? How Mediumship Supports Healing After Loss
• Mediumship for Grief After Losing a Parent
• What to Expect from Your First Mediumship Session
• How Should You Prepare for a Mediumship Reading?
• Will a Medium Tell You What to Do?
• Are Psychic Mediums Real? What the Evidence Actually Shows
• What Is the Sanctuary Process? Elissa Rose’s Three-Stage Mediumship Methodology

About the Author

Michael listens to the pulse of the earth. His dowsing offers a grounded path to inner knowing, through stillness, presence, and trust. Together, we offer a place of authenticity, where roses bloom and the veil thins.