Art Bell and Dianne Arcangel explore grief-driven afterlife encounters, with Arcangel citing over 10,000 verified cases—like Tommy’s mother directed to his blood in snow or Murphy’s widow and Charles Vance both receiving hidden-money clues—while Bell shares an anonymous medium’s claims about his late wife Ramona, including her refusal of assigned roles post-death and Yeti as her familiar. Arcangel distinguishes apparitions (person-oriented, lifelike) from ghosts (place-specific, residual energy), referencing thermal imaging studies like George Anderson’s. Skepticism arises over induced spiritual experiences via hallucinogens like psilocybin, with Arcangel dismissing them as mere hallucinations, though Bell questions scientific certainty. Their discussion underscores how grief and unexplained phenomena challenge traditional beliefs about death, consciousness, and the boundaries between science and spirituality. [Automatically generated summary]
And uh then in the second hour um I'm really gonna take a leap and um I don't know if it's good or bad, but we're gonna be talking to somebody whose name interestingly is Diane Archangel Archangel and she will be talking to us about After Death Encounters the real McCoy.
I mean she worked for all the real people here, Elizabeth Gubler-Ross, she worked for that agency, I'll call it in Las Vegas.
You know, all the real, she's been down all the real roads.
So that's going to be a bit of a challenge for me, I suspect, but that's what's coming up.
And I think it's good.
As one of the old men of the Internet, Lauren, who's coming up at a moment, has been involved with the development of the net for decades now.
He began his involvement in the early 70s at the first site of the Internet's ancestor, the Defense Department ARPANET.
He created and moderates the Privacy Forum, which was founded a dozen years ago, and co-founded PFIR People for Internet Responsibility.
Where the hell are those people, by the way?
Lauren, we'll ask about that.
Lauren is an expert regarding a wide range of privacy issues and many other topics related to technology's impact on individuals and society.
He writes and speaks about these issues in a broad variety of published and broadcast venues.
Oh, boy, do we have a lot of questions for Lauren and then Ms. Archangel in the next hour?
It'll be quite a night.
Stay right there.
I find this a very, very interesting night.
This is one of those nights where, believe me, don't touch that dial applies.
The whole point really is that there are people who are really concerned and take a responsible view toward these issues that we're going to talk about.
But it's easy for them to get lost in all the hype, which has, of course, over the recent years has tended to overtake everything regarding the Internet and the web.
But there are people that are concerned, and I think a lot of recent events have caused even more people to become concerned as they've started to see how the Internet can really impact their life in ways that maybe they hadn't anticipated.
The Internet is beginning to be where it's really happening.
Now, here's a question for you, Lauren.
If somebody slanders somebody else or commits libel, is it more difficult these days or now easier for it to become actionable if it occurred on the Internet?
But really the interesting part is that there's a real battle going on right now concerning under what circumstances should you be able to identify people who have been accused of committing various wrongs on the network.
And so on one side of it, you have situations like you've just mentioned, like slander and libel and things like that.
But then you get into the question, well, what's slander and what's libel?
What happens if it's someone criticizing a company, for example, and saying that they were cheated by a company?
But what tends to happen is in some cases, the action of trying to find out who that person is can be seen as an attempt to tamp down on the speech in the first place.
In other words, because people don't have lawyers to deal with it.
And then on the other side of this, you have situations, for example, involving piracy, music piracy and film piracy and such, where the MPAA and the RIAA and such have been going after the people that they believe are committing these crimes or again, accused crimes in file changes.
Well, there have been cases where the wrong person has been accused and it's caused a lot of problems.
But in most cases, it tends to be fairly straightforward because a lot of people don't realize this, but the ISPs have records of all the connections When you dial up, when you get an IP address from your ISP for a day or a week or however long, the lease lasts on the IP number in a lot of the standard cases, most people's residential service.
So, what will happen is the party that feels it's been wronged will go to the ISP and say, you know, here's a subpoena or here's some other kind of order, and we want to know who was on this IP address at this time.
And you run into some of these interesting situations where, like, they accuse a 90-year-old grandmother of downloading 50,000 rap songs.
So there's a real battle right now going with back and forth and back and forth trying to reach a balance between what's reasonable and what's unreasonable in this regard.
On the other hand, here's the other hand of this, it's very important that attempts to prevent piracy not infringe on legitimate applications.
And some of the cures that have been proposed for stopping piracy basically amount to, well, shut down file sharing or build technology into digital television or into the other kinds of computer systems that do these conversions of analog to digital.
I mean, why is it not fair for the artists and those who represent them to try and make deals with the distributors of machines that copy this stuff to prohibit it?
That would seem kind of like a fair thing to do on their side.
It would probably be fair if you could do that without preventing non-infringing uses at the same time.
That's the problem.
The kinds of cures that have been suggested, even in terms of legislation, in some cases, proposed legislation, would make it impossible for legitimate applications to be conducted without being affected as if they were piracy.
So what you have is very broad attempts to deal with a very real problem.
So are you telling me that, for example, anything they would do to, say, a DVD so that it could not be copied would affect its use so that you couldn't properly use the product?
Which is that people, according to various interpretations of the law, people have a right to back up materials that they buy and to keep backup copies, because DVDs do go bad.
Yeah, I've been reading about that lately, that the original lifetime they thought for C Ds is all wet and that they're actually going to deteriorate pretty quickly.
All those numbers they came up with originally were based on, you know, because obviously no one's been around for 100 years with C Ds to really sit around and see what happens.
So they do accelerated testing, which attempts to simulate being around for all those years.
And it's starting to turn out, both for C D's and D V Ds, that depending on a lot of factors, how they're stored, the humidity, the temperature, all kinds of things like that, they can deteriorate.
So people feel, well, not only should they have a right to be able to back up that material, but they should have a right to watch it on more than one TV in their house, for example.
Once they figure they've bought it, they should be able to maybe watch it on their television or watch it on their digital computer system, watch it on that screen.
And most of these copy protection systems that have been proposed would prevent that.
In some cases, they would even have locked the DVD to a particular player.
So you can see that all this stuff seems easy at the start, but once you get into the deep deal, devil in the details, right?
But I've just got so much sympathy for the people who pour their lives into the creativity that are these things, and they have some right to be compensated for that and not to be ripped off.
I agree, and I have friends here in L.A. and in both of those industries who are very concerned about it.
Though you will find when you talk to people that even in the industries, they have a wide spectrum of views.
Everyone knows they want to deal with this problem, and they don't want those industries to be just sapped away to nothing by piracy.
On the other hand, not everybody agrees, even within those industries, what the best approach is.
Because one big concern is that if you try to swat at this problem with too big a weapon, you know, like using a nuclear bomb where you need something maybe a little bit less onerous, you can drive away consumers.
If consumers start to feel that they're being too restricted in how they legitimately use these materials, that can drive people to piracy just out of spite.
But as with everything else, there's a lot of interesting corporate interplay involved.
So, for example, while Apple iTunes, which is the 800-pound gorilla in that space, charges a flat 99 cents for basically all music, they are under a lot of pressure to change that pricing scheme by many of the record labels who want them to charge more.
And Apple is concerned, well, if we charge Too much more, then this model will start to fall apart and then get back to people trying to do it with piracy again.
There's a lot, and there's estimates all over the place, but the really tricky part of it is to figure out what the dollar losses are because not every pirated copy necessarily represents a copy that would have been bought if it hadn't been available through a pirated means.
In other words, there are people who collect everything that they can get their hands on, like every Frank Sinatra song that's ever been done just because it passed by on a file sharing system.
But they never would have bought those Frank Sinatra songs.
Piracy has clearly had an impact on the industry, and legitimate downloading is clearly having an impact on the business models in a positive way also.
But I think we're going to find that it's very sensitive to pricing.
In other words, if you make it too expensive, people are going to move back toward the illegal side again.
It's also changing some other aspects, like when you can buy songs a la carte, it kind of threatens certain aspects of the whole album.
Well, the reason I wanted to separate the music and the movies is because with the music, I think they can come up with and maintain a model that will move people, most people away from piracy or enough people away.
In the case of a motion picture, they're so damn expensive that I don't think they're going to get a model that's going to prevent piracy.
Even though I must say I know people who have downloaded movies, and it's a pain in the butt.
It's long, it takes tremendous amounts of bandwidth, and then you've got to put it all together.
It's not even worth it from my point of view.
I mean, 20 bucks for a DVD or whatever, who cares from my point of view?
But from the industry standpoint, I think there's a realization that that's only sort of a temporary condition because the real difference between music and movies in terms of how hard it is to download it or to make an illegal copy is just the number of bits.
Otherwise, it's the same stuff.
And as people do have faster broadband connections, as they have bigger and bigger hard disks, we're going to reach a point in the very near future, for those who haven't reached it already, where it'll be just as easy to download a movie in, say, a year or two as it was to download a CD a year ago.
And it's really a situation where I wish we could get people together.
One of the groups that I'm involved in is trying to bring together people from the entertainment industry and from the computer industry to actually meet and talk and try to reach a middle ground on this.
And it's very difficult because everyone is looking not only at the short-term situation, but also what's going to happen in the long term.
And as usual, it can be very hard to get people to kind of come together for their common interest.
Well, all of this is let's keep in mind that what's happened now, these problems that we're looking at are technology-driven problems that are all intertwined in policy.
And if you view them in isolation, if you look just separately at technology and you look separately at policy and for that matter you look separately at business, you're not going to get anywhere in terms of solving these problems because the technology rushes ahead much faster than policy does.
So what you need to do is get people together in the same room, even if you have to lock them in there effectively and say, hey guys, unless you settle this in a reasonable way, in the end, there's not going to be anything left for anyone.
We're going to have our movie industry move to China like everything else.
If you were in front of a Senate committee and they were to ask you for a recommendation about how much oversight there ought to be, what would you be saying?
The idea is that as long as you Have enough different branches of government involved, of which we only have basically three, you help to minimize the potential for risks and for abuse.
That's why, of course, there's all this current controversy over the NSA domestic program listening to certain international calls.
And primarily, I think the view is, from Congress certainly, that if there was appropriate oversight, a program like that might be very, very valuable.
But without oversight, that's when you start to have questions of who's making the decisions about particular taps, how long the information is being retained, all those sorts of things.
And then you have ways that all of this applies to the Internet, too.
In a lot of cases, what oversight means is having appropriate reporting so that you can judge to what extent what's been going on was proper and didn't go too far.
And on top of that, you have the issue of archives, right?
What happens to the information?
So, for example, if people are being tapped and it turns out that they had nothing to do with terrorism, which reportedly is pretty much what's happened most of the time with this domestic program in the program.
The other day, you know, I heard a report that they only had like 10 or 12 things even of interest, which is a little difficult to believe considering the probably billions of things they have to monitor.
I don't think that's the kind of thing that's likely to come up in those contexts.
And NSA does have rules concerning what's called minimization, which is basically when you hear things that you're not supposed to hear, you kind of get rid of the identifying parts of it if it's outside your mission.
On the other hand, with the domestic program that's currently in controversy, there are concerns that some of the information that might have been picked up through the warrantless wiretaps might have been used to then get warrants for wiretaps.
And that, from a legal standpoint, gets very, very complicated very quickly.
So we don't really know.
At this stage, I guess there's more congressmen now who have been briefed to a certain extent than there were a couple of weeks ago.
But this is the problem we're faced.
Now, obviously, you can't have every intelligence program out in the open, or otherwise it's not going to do a lot of good.
But there are ways to build these things within the law and to have oversight that doesn't disrupt the programs, but gives you some assurance that these programs falling into the wrong hands won't cause a lot of grief.
Because remember, somewhere down the line, these same capabilities are going to be in the hands of future presidents.
But the real answer to the question is that if I was the President of the United States and I was dissatisfied with the state of the current legal intelligence apparatus, what you could do legally, or what you could do under the FISA court, which is the court that approves these things, I would say, all right, let's change that law.
Let's get a change in the law that allows us to do what we need to do.
And there's ways to do this without it being all out in the open.
Congress has ways of dealing with highly secure information.
In the interest of time, on to one other item, and that is China.
The word is that China has blocked the Internet, that China has brought down the steel curtain of communism across the copper pair and the fiber optics, and they are in control of what happens, What comes and goes from mainland China.
And in fact, in some cases, they're doing it with the cooperation of large U.S. companies.
Now, it's not all black and white completely, but it's a very, very upsetting situation to many who look at it.
The Chinese Internet is probably, I think certainly the most highly monitored data network in the world.
It's very hierarchically based.
They have tens of thousands of people who monitor what people write, what people say.
Now, they also have access to a great deal of information that they didn't have access to just a few years ago.
But if you try to say something political, if you try to say something about various dissident groups, or if you appear to be a dissident or something like that, that kind of information is not only removed in a lot of cases or blocked in a lot of cases, but you can end up in jail.
And we have a bunch of situations in the news right now that apply directly to this.
So for example, there's a case where Yahoo turned over addressing information.
You were talking about figuring out who's at the other end of an IP address.
On the other hand, at some point, many observers say you have to take an ethical stand.
Because in a lot of cases, what's happened with China is people have been jailed for long periods of time because they say things that, to most of the Western world, would be completely reasonable things to say.
So there is concern when companies get too far into bed in these situations.
Like I said, it's not black and white.
These are complicated situations.
i personally think that google went too far in this case with actually setting up a a chinese google that that obeys what the chinese uh...
Where the Justice Department ordered them to turn over masses of search strings for their attempt to defend the COPA case.
That's the Child Online Protection Act.
So the Justice Department went to Google and they went to AOL and they went to MSN and Yahoo and everybody basically turned over the data except Google.
And Google had various reasons for this.
They had privacy and trade secrets and various other things.
But they have said they didn't want to do it.
And I support that view because even though the argument was made, well, they're not asking for who made the searches, you know as well as I do that there's plenty of personal information that's in those searches that we do on Google.
And on the other search, people put in addresses, they put in phone numbers, they put in names, they put in social security numbers.
They shouldn't.
They shouldn't, but they do.
And there's all kinds of personal information in there.
And then you have the question, well, what's next?
I mean, if the government feels they can get Hold of a week's worth of searches without the IP addresses, what happens when the next question comes up?
Remember, this wasn't a terrorism case.
This wasn't a crime that was committed.
This was attempting to support the government's case on a law that would prevent access of children to harmful material, however harmful material would be defined.
It's already been turned down by the Supreme Court a couple of times.
So in that case, Google was on its view on the right side.
Well, coming up then pretty soon because there's a lot of really heavy-duty stuff here.
So I want to, number one, thank you for being here tonight.
A little over a month ago, I lost my dear love, my soulmate, Ramona.
And so this is going to be inevitable.
It's going to be inevitable that that subject is going to come up.
And I have a few things to sort of tell you, run by you, and certainly run by Diane.
So we'll see how this goes.
It's going to be about communication with those who have passed on.
And it's coming up in a moment.
Music I did indeed lose my soulmate a little over a month ago now, and I told you when it came in, I would give you the results after even the deep tissue samples came back.
My dear wife died of severe asthmatic, chronic, obstructive pulmonary disease.
Asthma.
She went in her sleep.
And so I have that to hold on to, and I'm going to dispense with anything else other than to tell you if you have a husband or you have a wife and you're listening to me right now, don't ever go to bed at night without telling the person you're with you love them.
Don't ever do that.
I have little to hang on to.
I have the fact that in 15 years my wife and I never were apart.
We were as close as two people can possibly be.
And the day of her passing, I put my arms around her, and as I did every day, I gave her a kiss and said, honey, I love you.
And that was the last time I saw her.
So if there is a message, and there is, don't ever let that day pass because you have to know it can always be the last day.
Now, Diane is a southerner, as you're going to detect right away.
In fact, several of his friends came to me after losing children, and I worked with them, and He saw the difference that it made when they believed, and especially after they had had an afterlife encounter.
That is such an unusual position, very unusual, actually.
But I guess that's great.
He supported your work.
Now, you have worked with the best.
I mean, I've looked carefully at where you've been, and, you know, the people you've worked with, for example, I think a friend of mine in Las Vegas, perhaps, eh?
This is, I'll tell you, we are so much just on the cutting edge of trying to understand what afterlife encounters are, what survival is, what consciousness is.
I mean, we're just now beginning to understand the brain.
Well, the mind is so much, oh, it's fast in comparison.
We're moving into areas of consciousness research and all the rest of it that are probably going to meet up with, I don't know, what scientists are talking about with regard to other dimensions and all sorts of things.
It's like the whole world is ahead of us and open in this area.
And finally, we're beginning to move into it and investigate it.
And it's sort of coming out of the closet a little bit.
So there are some exciting things happening.
Do you imagine, Diane, that one day communication with consciousness not encased in a physical body will be possible?
Beverly said, Diane, I couldn't call the police until my dead son told me this.
So she said, went to a phone booth, I called him, and said I had an anonymous tip.
Sure enough, the police came out.
They took the DNA samples.
It was Tommy's blood.
But here, Art is the thing, is that from there, the police found three eyewitnesses.
All three eyewitnesses told exactly what happened with Tommy.
Someone, a man, was trying to rob him, chased him round and round and round the van until finally, of course, they were stabbing him as he was running.
But then they took his Bilfo and they took his ring, threw him in the van, and sped off.
This is the thing.
They said, can you tell us the suspect's name?
They said, all we know is his nickname was Light.
Ah, there was the light shaking overhead in Beverly Chandelier.
There are Buddhists, for example, who believe that if a loved one dies, that you have some number of days, maybe 20, 21 days, in order to concentrate hard on this person and invite their spirit into you.
And the reason I'm mentioning this is because there are many who think that when somebody passes, that their spirit is more connected to earth for some period of time, some relatively short period of time, before they move on more reasonably.
Is there a period of time, I shouldn't have said earthbound, is there a period of time when the spirit or while the spirit is more connected to what the spirit just left than it ultimately will be?
You know, and here again, it's just in my case studies of over 10,000, I have never found anything negative, anything hellacious, anything other than positive love, light, healing.
In fact, I had a call this afternoon.
Somebody found from your website called me and said, how can I get in touch with my mom?
I've just begged, I've pleaded, I've tried everything I can to get her to come in and see me.
But you know what?
They're so used to love, light, peace, and joy.
They won't come down to anything that's what they consider grasping or clinging.
They're not used to that.
They're only used to positive love, light, peace, and joy.
The second condition, whereby we find evidence for life after death, is collective.
In other words, when more than one person witnesses the apparition.
An example of this is Charles Vance.
Charles Vance is a very wealthy businessman in Houston.
He's successful.
He's just not the type you would ever think would have anything like an afterlife encounter.
He's busy.
He pushes through.
He's kind of a bull.
And a friend of mine told me that Charles Vance had encountered Murphy.
Now, Murphy, now what surprised me about this was Murphy owned a little tiny vacuum cleaner store.
He took an old home, an old, not even a brick home, just a little frame house.
In the front of it, he put his vacuum cleaner store and parts.
In the back, he lived with his wife and children.
No one would ever dream Murphy had any money.
Well, according to this friend of mine, Charles Vance, had this apparitional experience with Murphy, and Murphy told him there was an astonishing amount of money he had hidden in the wall.
Yes, and he wanted Charles to call his widow and tell him.
And I had probably, I don't know, maybe 200 cases in my files with money hidden in the rafters, hidden in the basement, hidden in jars.
But what attracted me to this account was, number one, Murphy, I mean, he wore old overalls that were holy and shirts that were just he would never dream he had a dime.
So I went over and talked to Charles, interviewed him and his wife.
Now, Gene, his wife, said Charles would not have ever told anybody about this, never.
Okay, one example is also in the book, and this again is a very quick synopsis.
Debbie Fancher is a high school teacher here in Houston.
She called me one morning, told me that she was having this dream of this young girl, beautiful, beautiful young girl, a teenager.
And the teenager kept saying, tell my dad not to feel guilty.
Be sure and go tell my dad not to feel the guilty.
Debbie said, the problem is, I don't think it's a dream, and I have a horrible, horrible feeling it's an apparition, but I don't know who this girl is.
Debbie and I talked back and forth, back and forth.
Finally, she said the only teenager that she knew had even been sick was her high school principal's daughter.
But he was brand new to the school.
She knew nothing about him except somebody mentioned that his daughter was sick.
She had some type of infection.
But no big deal.
Debbie said, I said, well, can you go back to school and don't ask if the daughter died, but can you say, how is the principal's daughter doing?
She went back to school, found out that in fact her name was Amanda, that she did not survive the infection.
Debbie was at school some weeks later, walking down the hall, looked up, and here was this exact duplicate of the girl who had been coming to her in her dreams.
Another teacher was standing there and said, Debbie, Debbie, you look like you've seen a ghost.
Debbie said, I think I have.
He said, oh, no, no, no.
That was Amanda's sister.
They're identical, almost like twins.
Of course, they're sisters, but they look like twins.
They're so much alike.
Like you said, Art, I went, checked out all these stories.
Debbie invited me to meet with the principal, his wife, and their two children.
They verified that, in fact, Amanda was so identical to the sister that when they were in high school, the teachers and the students confused the two of them all the time.
And the thing that was so outstanding that Debbie said she just thought it was something in her imagination was why would a dad feel guilty when his daughter had succumbed to some kind of an illness?
But they, in fact, verified that as well, that he did.
It's personal, so I won't go into why, but he did.
Okay, if, you know, these stories you're telling me are really beyond the pale.
I mean, they really would suggest we're looking at proof here, Diane.
And since you're the one who's done the investigative work in many cases in nailing down the truth of these stories, I wonder how you can be left with any doubt at all about the whole question of communication.
Or do you not have any doubt?
I mean, earlier you suggested that maybe you did.
So I can't.
How could you do these investigations and still have doubt?
So I'm not sure how can you come back from that, knowing that you physically did die and you had an experience that you could probably relate to us, I'm sure, in great detail, which included talking to God.
I mean, that would seem fairly strong evidence that would give you quite a bit of faith regarding afterlife.
Well, wouldn't it be a reasonable conclusion that consciousness, if it survives one minute outside the physical, would survive eternally, more than likely outside the physical, absolutely eternally.
If it can make one minute, it can make forever, can't it?
Does it occur frequently that a departed one contacts somebody absolutely unrelated to the person grieving, for example, and makes a request to have a message passed?
least eight ounces There are many things that you don't know about my wife, Ramona.
You're about to learn a few of them.
I've been contacted.
I do believe that I've been contacted.
I received, I don't know, about 11,000 condolence messages.
I understand there are thousands of cards that have come in that I haven't had.
I don't know the I haven't said go ahead and send them to me, and they've been sent to the network.
Anyway, of these thousands, I was unable, of course, to read them all.
Thank you all again so much for them all.
But something popped out at me, and I believe I've been contacted.
And here's the way I'm going to leave it.
What you're about to hear came from a German lady in the southern part of the U.S. I'll leave it at that, all right?
I'm not going to name her because she doesn't want to be named.
I'm going to read you what she has written to me.
She's spoken to me.
She has never asked me for anything.
She is not a public figure in any way.
I'll just read this.
Dear Art, I'll try to read it.
Dear Art, first of all, I want to express my sincere and heartfelt sympathy that Ramona had to leave you behind here on Earth.
Art, she didn't leave you by choice.
Matter of fact, she just passed away so rapidly that at first even she didn't know what was happening to her.
I'd really like to talk to you about Ramona since I am a medium and empath.
Ever since I was a child, I picked up spirits and it scared me.
I felt them around me when they decided to use me to deliver messages to their loved ones that had been left behind.
I hear their messages.
I feel their spirit around me.
I don't see them.
Not until 1997 did I find out I was a medium.
A psychic told me that.
And now it all makes sense and it's no longer scary to me.
Why Ramona chose me instead of say Sylvia Brown or somebody else like her was decided long before her passing.
Arn, I heard you last night.
That was the night I talked about, Ramona, and you need to know what happened and are waiting for further reports from the coroner.
We have those now, of course.
Ramona's heart just stopped.
Arn, it happened within a second or two.
How do I know that?
Well, one day after her passing, I was lying on the couch watching TV, getting a sensation that my heart would just stop.
It was scary to me because my doctor had just ordered a cartilite stress test for me.
My heart is just fine, by the way.
However, I asked my spiritual guide what was going on.
I was told that it was not me, but rather Art.
Art's Ramona trying to tell me something.
She has been around me a lot wanting me to get in touch with you.
I kept putting it off.
But your wife is very persistent.
You see, I had the experience before.
A soul doesn't leave me alone until I deliver the message to their loved ones.
Ramona can be very persistent when she wants to and does not take no or procrastination for an answer.
And so here I am.
I told her that you don't know me from beans.
She just said, don't worry about it.
Just deliver the message.
She guided me to write, and there were some people at Premiere, asking them to contact you.
But now back to what Ramona told me.
No, she didn't know it was her time to go.
It came as a total surprise to her.
She had no pain or distress passing over.
Her heart just stopped.
Her heart was also weakened from all the medication she had taken for so many years.
Her allocated time on earth was finished.
Only Ramona didn't know about it.
My departed mother and Tower were there to greet her.
As far as I understand, it was my mother that had some input that I was chosen to be Ramona's messenger.
Ramona was first in shock that she had crossed over.
Then she got a temper tantrum about it.
She felt that it wasn't fair.
Then she tried to negotiate to come back into her body.
She didn't want to leave you.
She was thinking more about you than about herself.
She has calmed down now, but Art, she's not a happy camper.
She's at peace and accepted that she's not allowed, that which she is not allowed to change, but it doesn't mean that she still doesn't have a little temper every now and then.
But there are many other souls that are helping her along, and shortly she'll be all calm.
About paying those bills ahead of time, as you mentioned on the air, maybe deep down in her subconscious, she knew, but what I'm getting at is she liked to pay bills ahead of time.
She liked to be organized and ahead of things.
Boy, is that right.
And the temper, let me tell you folks, Ramona had a flash temper.
Sometimes she would get angry and, you know, you'd ask her, what's the matter, hun?
And she wouldn't know.
She would just be angry.
She ended up taking something that was a miracle for her about five years ago called Zoloft.
I'm sure you've heard of it.
And for her, it was a miracle.
But she had this flash temper.
This lady could not have known that, not possibly.
And so that would be Ramona getting on the other side, and she'd be angry, to use a polite term.
Anyway, she goes on here.
I'm also picking up from the other side, but it hasn't come through very clearly yet that you are left behind to finish something big.
Ramona also said that for you to return more actively to the airwaves is a first step.
I get this.
She also said to watch Yeti and pay very close attention to him.
Yeti is special.
He can pick up Ramona's spirit in the house.
Those two always had a special bond between them, kind of a silent understanding art.
Yeti is going to need special attention right now.
He's missing Ramona very much.
Now let me stop reading this and tell you Ramona practiced the craft.
Ramona.
Yeti was Ramona's.
What's the right word?
Familiar.
I guess familiar is the right word.
This lady.
I've never said that on the air.
There's no way this lady could have known about Yeti.
No way in hell.
Anyway, she goes on.
Ramona likes very much when you talk to her, which I've been doing constantly.
She's still with you and will be until the day it will be your time to cross.
She told me to tell you to relate to the song of the movie Titanic.
Yeah, that'd be her.
And the love will go on and on.
She also wants me to tell you, thank you for your love and all those wonderful years and the wonderful life you gave me.
I love you for eternity.
My flesh is in the ground, but I'm still with you now and always.
Arn, I'm sorry to put all this into a cold email.
I would rather have related it to you via telephone or in person, by the way.
We did do that.
I'm a 66-year-old retired senior.
I'm not a professional psychic.
I'm trying to eliminate parts here that would identify her.
I haven't written a book.
Don't talk about my gift to the media.
What I told you is between you, Ramona, and me.
If you want to relate the message, that's up to you.
I'm here for you 24-7.
Anyway, it goes on and on.
Let me see if I can pick up other parts that are important.
S qualifies it at the end.
I'm not a drug addict.
I don't have mental illness or take prosatic or anything, and so forth and so on.
So then there Was another communication.
I'm going to give you a little of that.
Actually, there have been several more.
And then I'm going to tell you how all this, why all this is so impactful to me.
She writes, Dear Art, I feel you're not much better today.
Well, I wasn't.
Matter of fact, I'm picking up even more despair from you than yesterday.
You feel so lost.
Oh, yes.
Your mind and thoughts are going in all directions.
Feels as if you're lost in a fog.
Oh, man.
Everything is blurred.
Now, you might say all of this is general stuff that would relate to anybody grieving, and I guess it probably does.
I feel you have problems with thought patterns.
Yes, indeed.
Hell, I had problems driving.
What I'm picking up is that you're still asking the same questions in your mind over and over again, the same questions we talked about yesterday.
Ramona told me, this is after I had called her, that I need to write the answers down so you can read them again and again if need be.
She tells me your mind is wandering all over the place and that words over the telephone rush by you like waves rushing back into the sea from the shore, and God, that was true.
These are the questions you're still asking.
Why didn't she wake me up?
I could have helped her.
Maybe I could have prevented her from crossing.
The other thought that is constantly in your mind, why didn't I feel her getting up?
Why did I sleep through all of this?
To your question, why didn't she wake me up?
Ramona says she never really fell asleep after you went to bed.
She felt okay, but after a while, she felt that she might get up, get another flare up.
She also tells me she wanted to be more fit for the next day so you two could enjoy the day without her having breathing problems.
Oh, right on.
She tells me she would definitely have awakened you if she'd felt she would have another bad asthma attack and needed your help.
To could have I have helped her.
Maybe I could have prevented her crossing over.
No, Art.
There's nothing you could have done to change any part of the event.
It was Ramona's time to go.
Two, why didn't I feel her getting up?
Why did I sleep through all this?
Ramona slipped very quietly out of bed not to wake you.
She believed that everything was fine.
She just decided to give herself another treatment to prevent another severe asthma attack in the morning or afternoon.
She didn't want to worry you needlessly.
As I mentioned to you yesterday, Ramona and your guides decided that you should not be present when God took her home.
My guide tells me they tried to do this as gently as possible for you and Ramona.
He tells me they knew how traumatic it would have been for you and also Ramona.
She was so angry when she realized what happened, but it would have been much harder on her if you had been in the room with her.
They knew it would have been traumatic, and they wanted to make it as gentle as possible.
They wanted to take her to a place where she could be comforted and make her understand the why and the reason why they took her from you.
Anyway, there's one more part I want to cover here.
I've had much communication from this woman.
Now I have some more news about your Ramona.
What a wonderful person.
What a wonderful soul she is.
She's doing much better today.
I feel her around me, full of accomplishment, and she told me why.
Remember in my last email I wrote that she'll be with you until it's your time to cross?
At the time, I was not told the specifics, but today she did.
Art, she is, and please note I said is, really something else.
Wow, what a spirit, what willpower.
They'd never seen anything like that over there.
Ha ha, yes, that's Ramona.
She refused to have downtime to recuperate from crossing over so suddenly without warning, as most souls do.
She refused to take the assignment they'd chosen for her from birth.
That'd be her, all right.
She insisted to be your personal spiritual guide.
She fought like a tiger for days, and finally, today, they gave in.
Normally, it takes years of training to become a guide, but Ramona insisted.
She told them, I took care of art for 15 years.
What training do you think I need?
One of your regular guides will be with her at all times, but believe me, she's in charge.
Now, it goes on and on, and I will not burden you with any more, but I'm telling you that there are endless numbers of things like her flash temper, like her determination, like the fact that Yeti is indeed, I knew for a fact, and she told me that Yeti was her familiar.
All of these things, and especially the temper part, this woman never in a million years could have known about.
So I've been contacted.
Diane, I'm sorry to have absorbed so much time with all of that, but I'm telling you, Diane, it hit me between the eyes like a bullet.
And there's no question about it.
That's Ramona through and through and through and through.
And she contacted this lady who has had no relationship to me whatsoever.
I'll tell you, Art, I run across this so frequently.
Doing research with mediums at the University of Virginia, we found that they often pick up people they don't know, such as the case with this 66-year-old German lady picking up Ramona.
This happens.
They drop in, they talk to whomever they need to in order to get the message to their loved ones.
I mean, obviously, I'm going to attach meaning to things very easily in my state.
Now, Evelyn Paglini was very close to Ramona.
Evelyn Paglini is a witch.
Ramona was a practitioner of the craft as well as a Catholic, as well as that mixes.
Anyway, I read this to Evelyn, and she said, oh, my God, Art.
And she knew Ramona very, very well.
I'll have Evelyn on.
She'll confirm this later.
She said, oh, my God, Art, that's the real McCoy.
So this lady in the South, unknown to me, somehow, for some reason, I mean, it's so odd, but I'm telling you and I'm telling the audience in the world, it's the real McCoy.
In fact, if this lady, next time you talk to her, if she's interested, we can always use more really good mediums in our research program at the university.
And you know, that makes me wonder, Diane, how many people like this lady who wishes very much to remain anonymous, wants absolutely nothing, just had to get this off her chest, as it were.
She had to get the message through.
How many unknown, unsung psychics are out there like this lady that we would never know about?
In the category of evidence, we walked through the first three.
The fourth condition that we consider evidence for survival is when the apparition states current information that's unknown by the perceiver and is proven later.
Now, part of the reason that I took this into account is that, did you mention when we first began the show, I worked for the National Institute for Discovery Science.
One thing more that I want to get in here because I think it's important and relevant, and Diane can certainly comment on it.
Diane Archangel is my guest.
She has worked with the best in this field in the world, really, including just over the hill here in Las Vegas, the best in the world.
You know, NIDS and on and on, Cooper-Ross, on and on, just the best.
So you're here in the real McCoy here.
There is one other occurrence, so I'll just toss it in.
It's very quick.
And I always liked a cold house.
Not cool, but at least down to 68 degrees, particularly when I work, and as in being on the air here, you can call that work.
And Ramona would always complain that it's too damn cold.
She didn't like cold at all.
You've got to remember, she was born in Hawaii, raised in Southern California.
So she didn't like the cold.
But I always had to have it cool and enjoyed the cool.
Always.
Just a way of life with me.
And within a few days of her passing, on two separate occasions, I began to get these horrible, deep chills.
Now, maybe it's just a physical manifestation of grieving.
I have no idea.
But when I say horrible, deep chills, I mean I went in and pumped the heat in this house up to about 75 or 6 degrees, which for me is almost intolerably warm.
And I was still, get this, I was, I had two instances in which such a deep chill came to me that the only thing that relieved it was going in and turning on the shower, hot water, and getting in the shower and just letting it beat on my head and just standing in the shower or sitting in the shower and letting hot water beat on me until these chills would leave.
Now, is it possible that it was just a part of the grieving process?
Of course it is.
Is it possible that Ramona was close and I was feeling what many people have felt when there are spirits close to them?
And I think, of course, it's possible.
I mean, I'm telling you, Diane, that's so impossible for me because I'm always wanting it a little bit cooler.
It's just, it's never happened to me before.
And this occurred twice within the first week of her passing, Diane.
I was so freaked out, to be honest with you, as I said, I just turned on the shower and went in there and made it hot.
But I had a very, very strong sense that she was here.
And, you know, so that brings me back again to this when somebody has just passed, there appears to be a greater likelihood that they will make an attempt at contact, that it's very desperate to them to make contact, and there's sort of a window when they can, and then maybe they can't later, or do you not believe that?
And what I found is in doing the first study that I did, which was a five-year international study, which over 3,000 people submitted their surveys to me, what I recognized was a pattern.
Aren't some of these encounters had taken place 40, 50 years ago, and yet they were still rated on the highest scale for comfort.
And the people said they remembered them as if they happened yesterday.
But what I realized is that going back into history and going through the other studies, most of the old studies said within a 24-hour period, afterlife encounters from that point on decreased, decreased, until after the one-year period, very few people had an encounter.
I've always been dead flat honest with my audience, so I'm going to be honest now.
I have a very bad back, Diane.
I think most of my audience knows that, a very bad back.
And I have pain medicine for my back when I need it.
And in the first days and week or two of Ramona's passing, the grief was so unrelenting and so heavy that I was worried for myself.
So I, to some degree, self-medicated.
And I did that, I think, three times total when it was just so bad, Diane, that I simply just took a little more of my back medicine and it put a sort of a fog in my brain.
And I tell you, Diane, I needed that.
I had to take a break from the grieving.
I had to have some kind of break or I would have broken.
So to some degree, I self-medicated.
And I have a feeling that during that time, I made any contact much more difficult.
These are people who take recording tape or now they're into the digital world and they go to certain places and they create intent to get messages from the dead.
And we've had many discussions about, well, is this a current contemporary kind of thing where there's actual responses to things being said, or is it sort of like a big tape loop and sort of the psychic energy that's left over from whoever was there?
I mean, you would be shocked, for example, they go into a prison and they hear very violent, terrible things from these entities or whatever they are.
And so I kind of, I'm with you.
I think that it's some sort of leftover, or it seemed like some sort of leftover energy.
What he suggests, what he tells people, because he works more, I believe, with ghosts than he does apparitions.
But whenever a person has a ghost and it's disturbing them, of course, the ghost can't do anything because it's just psychic energy left behind.
But for some people, that's disturbing.
What he suggests is that they go in and they record over that psychic energy.
Now, if a ghost is there, it means that the energy is very high because something horrible happened.
They were killed, they were murdered, something terrible.
So according to Lloyd, they go in and they do something that has more energy.
Say, for instance, a group of teenagers will go in and have a huge party with loud noise and a band, but they get the energy so high that the new energy overtakes the old psychic energy.
Well, I'll tell you what, Bill Rowe and I are going to be at Eslin in August, and we are going to have them with us to demonstrate.
So I can either have Bill give you a call or, and actually there is an experiment written up in my book, Afterlife Encounters.
We took place in Nevada with George Anderson, and there's information in there as well as to some of the machines that we use for tapping into and measuring energy, heat, so forth.
Diane Archangel is here, and her book is After Life Encounters, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Experiences, Life After Loss.
And it's a pretty good-sized book.
i would uh...
hardly recommend uh...
to any of you who really are curious about this since it deals in hard evidence uh...
and and And I know that these are the major questions most of us at one.
It certainly would classify as in the top three things that anybody would want to know should they have an audience with God and be able to ask a question, though.
I suppose the audience itself would answer the question, wouldn't it?
It seems like it would answer the question, unless in your mind, Diane, you're concerned that perhaps what you experienced was just randomly firing neurons in a panicked stress, adrenaline-filled situation, otherwise called dying.
I was doing some research, and he spoke with me about it, invited me to fly into Las Vegas, do some research for him, which I did with George Anderson.
We brought George in and did some research that's never been published that is just, I can't explain it.
I actually, even though the quality was bad, I played, I don't know, about 45 minutes of one of the meeks tapes here on the air, and it was astounding.
Actually, until I go out and physically, with my own eyes, my own ears, my own fingers, have a one-on-one with the researcher, I don't judge.
In my book, in the chapter titled Considering the Controversial, I wrote about, as you know, there's a long list of how we refer to them, EVP, electronic voice, phenomena, speech voice, the whole thing.
I went out and I did research with who the people at the time were the reported top researchers in the field.
I couldn't find anything.
What they were doing is they were recording off of a C-band radio, playing it backward, and then interpreting what they heard as a spirit talking.
Do you remember back in the Beatles, I believe the album was called The White Album?
One very worrisome thing that they cannot account for, and I certainly cannot, is that perhaps even a majority of the voices that they capture are voices of children.
Well, I did include the book after my little research with the people who were either professionally taping in the field as opposed to people who were just, say, a grandmother who was at home and wanted to tape.
The people that I deal with, these GIS people, who are not profiteers, they don't write books, they don't take money for what they do, they're just fascinated with this.
They're a group and they do it.
And the fact that they don't, you know, write books, no offense, or whatever, you know, gives them, in my mind anyway, some credibility.
They just do this and spend their own money on it.
That's that.
They've never in all the years I've interviewed them asked for a thing.
So it's quite interesting.
They tend to go to graveyards and prisons and mental hospitals, and so they get associated material, material that you would expect to get in those places, if, in fact, these tape loops that we were talking about earlier really are true.
Because what's driven me now is that there were so many comments in the media about afterlife encounters and how valuable they were, how comforting they were.
So much so, my first focus is always with the bereaved.
I'm so concerned that someone's going to take advantage of them.
I've had it happen to me.
So I was concerned that they were exaggerating the value.
So I turned to my bereavement, my parapsychology colleagues.
We looked through every journal, every piece of literature that we could find, trying to find any kind of study that said, okay, do they bring comfort?
And if so, how much and for how long?
Do they have an effect on the grief?
No study had ever been done that specifically focused on comfort and grief.
And some, as I spoke earlier this evening, some had been 50 to 60 years since their account occurred, and they still rated them on the highest scale possible.
Actually, 3,000 took the survey, but I could only use, I believe it was some 900 and something people because this is something that I found.
If anyone out there is listening and is going to do a survey, it was on the Internet.
It was quite a lengthy survey of 24 questions, some in two and three parts.
What some of the respondents did is they began scoring, but then they were so excited that they skipped down and would write their questions or they would write about their encounters.
So those, anything that was not totally filled out, I couldn't use.
You really do fascinate me because you really have held to some pretty strict standards of investigation and statement, particularly the investigation part.
You've really taken a very straight course on this, and that makes your book very interesting, of course.
Thank you, Arnold.
Are you going to keep investigating?
This sounds to me like it's a lifetime mission at this point.
Had an after-life experience that has been verified by the police and detective bureau that I thought you might be very interested in for another upcoming book.
Oh, of course.
Worked in this area with you in the past, so it was in the realm of dreams, but it wasn't a dream.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Diane Archangel.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Hi, Diane.
This is Sandra in Ohio.
And I called last week, Art, too, by the way.
I've been a listener for nearly five years, and I love you and love your show.
I've been a professional astrologer and medium for over 20 years, and I write in biomolecular medicine.
A couple of things.
Diane, could you give a little more information on the acclimating period when someone crosses over, that concept?
And also, I've noticed in my own mediumship practice that runs in the family that some people in spirit, when I get in touch with them, seem to have an obsessive focus on a particular relative or person when they're relaying messages through me.
Usually the person is a child that there's an obsessive focus on.
And one of the things that I've come to the conclusion of about that is usually that happens when they're preparing to come back, when that spirit is preparing to come back through that individual, through the bloodline or the family line, and they almost end up with that person as a kind of an assignment.
But then, say, for instance, George Anderson, as an example, didn't have anyone else in his family.
So it really just depends on the individual.
Sometimes, early on in life, of course, mediums are born with the ability, but something will happen, say, for instance, in George's case, where he had a very serious illness.
I believe what happened with George is that he had a near-death experience.
He went out, came back.
So now it's easy for him to tap into that other world.
But then again, wouldn't there be some acclimating period?
In other words, if you pass, particularly if you pass suddenly, if your consciousness pops up somewhere else, there probably is going to be some sort of period where you're going, what the hell just happened?
However, at the exact time that consciousness leaves the body, it goes to that light, that brilliant, that wonderful, that warm light.
So when you say acclimate, that takes a time, a period, and it's different with each individual.
But for our consciousness to rise into that light and to unite, then when they get there, it is, could be disorienting, can be a time of looking around.
There's no set time for anyone that I know of.
It just depends on each individual.
Our consciousnesses after death are just as varied as they are while we're alive.
It's just a matter of saying, what have, as I was telling you earlier, have I seen with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, felt with my own fingertips.
This is what I'm going to present.
I don't want to present anything that I have not myself observed.
In other words, if the original dreams were all comforting in some way, I don't know that I've ever heard of such a thing where they suddenly become scary, disturbing, whatever.
I'm calling from Canada, and I'm impressed with your scientific rigor.
I really am, as opposed to some of the people who have such dogma about what they say.
The only thing is, it seems that you're crossing the line, you're walking a very thin line, occasionally jumping over, as Art just put it, that the temptation to fall over to the other side is very, very powerful, and I'm sensing that in you.
And the problem with that is this, that once you have stepped over the line into full belief, and you have to be very cautious, I think, about that, for this reason.
There's a reason why we die.
And when we do, we're dead, essentially.
And if you're able to step over that line, I don't think God or whatever power there be would allow us to step over the line.
There's a reason why there's death and no more discussion of any kind.
There's a reason for death in whatever God we believe in.
I mean, if you're listening to the results of the research, maybe that line is not so absolute.
In other words, you could hear in his voice, Diane, that he had dogma that there is that separation, and any evidence of that line being crossed just can't be true.
All I know is in our research, where we have research with trying to induce or actually inducing afterlife encounters, if the person was on any kind of medication or alcohol, it blocked it.
They didn't have anything.
So that's the basis of my statement for that.
Now, I'm not saying all or it can never be done, but in general, in the research that we've done, those people did not have an afterlife encounter if they were on any kind of medication.