Jeff also experienced something similar to an apparition, but perhaps more beautiful. Three or four months after Gabriel died, he was in his son’s room in deep mourning. He was sitting on Gabe’s bed with all the lights off and it was totally dark. At the foot of the bed and to his right, he saw a golden, oval ball of light about twelve inches wide by eighteen inches high, suspended in the air six or seven feet away. It had soft edges and a distinct shape. He tried to determine what it could be. Moonlight reflecting off a car window, or maybe a streetlight? No…if that were the case, the light would be on the wall or ceiling, not suspended in one place in midair. He thought, well, maybe there is some particulate matter there; but light would still go through the matter. No, this was a self-contained, suspended ball of light; there was no unusual particulate matter. Jeff watched it for over a minute, and intuitively he felt he might be seeing Gabriel so he concentrated on the light intently. Then it slowly faded away. He told Janet later, “I think I just saw Gabriel…”

Several months later, Jeff went to see the well-known mental medium George Anderson. Anderson told him in the middle of the session, “You’ve seen him. You saw him as a light in a darkened room. You didn’t know if it was him, but he’s telling me to tell you that it was.” Jeff was astounded. He gained the confidence to meditate and ask Gabriel why he showed himself like that rather than as an apparition, which would be something recognizable. Gabe answered that he came like that in order to teach an important lesson. “Gabriel explained that the light I saw was the very same light that exists in all human souls,” Jeff said. “Everyone has, everyone is, that same golden light.”

Even so, on the question of the survival of consciousness after death, Jeffrey Kane recognizes that the most anyone can actually say is “I don’t know.” There is no certitude about it, and there never will be. “We will never have proof because the knowledge that life after life is possible emanates from an intuitive level of experience. If you think that even proof within a high degree of probability is ever going to satisfy you, it won’t. But there are sufficient questions here so that you can’t just dismiss this. I’m not saying life after life is the only answer, although I do believe it is correct, but I’m saying that no materialist framework can accommodate it.”

Ultimately, experiences like this teach us something; they are transcendent. If one embraces them, their power and intimate quality of connection are very hard to convey in words. Those with similar experiences understand. Jeff’s final thought to the question of survival was “I can’t see a reason not to believe.”

Sir William Barrett (experimental physicist and parapsychologist, 1844–1925) reported on an experience investigated by Henry Sidgwick (economist and philosopher, and first president of the SPR) in 1892. Sometimes “the phantasm is not only seen but also apparently heard to speak; sometimes it may announce its presence by audible signals,” Barrett wrote. This particular case involved “rapping” made by an apparition seen by Rev. Matthew Frost of Bowers Gifford, Essex, who made the following statement:

The first Thursday in April 1881, while sitting at tea with my back to the window and talking with my wife in the usual way, I plainly heard a rap at the window, and looking round at the window I said to my wife, “Why, there’s my grandmother,” and went to the door, but could not see anyone; still feeling sure it was my grandmother, and knowing, though she was eighty-three years of age, that she was very active and fond of a joke, I went round the house, but could not see anyone.

My wife did not hear it. On the following Saturday, I had news my grandmother died in Yorkshire about half-an-hour before the time I heard the rapping. The last time I saw her alive I promised, if well, I would attend her funeral; that was some two years before. I was in good health and had no trouble, age twenty-six years. I did not know that my grandmother was ill.

Sidgwick learned that when Frost last saw his grandmother two years earlier, she had promised to appear to him at her death. The conditions were decidedly nonspooky: he saw her in full daylight and even, for a moment, thought it was his grandmother physically present. “Had there been a real person Mrs. Frost would both have seen and heard her; nor could a living person have got away in that time,” Barrett states. The house stood in a garden a good way back from the road, and Mr. Frost immediately went out to see if his grandmother was really there. Actual news of her time of death came to Frost by letter two days later.

In 1985, Donna McCormick, a knowledgeable and very careful researcher whom I worked with for a few years, provided me with an example of an interesting, ongoing apparition case. In the following interview, Donna mentions three psychics, “Alex, Ingrid, and Ann.” One is Alex Tanous, a well-known, gifted psychic with many academic degrees, who taught theology at Manhattan College and St. John’s University in New York City.

It began shortly after her [the woman of the couple] grandfather died. She was extremely close to him. They lived on the second floor of a two-family house. They would hear footsteps coming up the stairs, the lock being turned, the door opening, the door closing, the footsteps coming in, then ending up at the children’s bedroom, the nursery, or going straight to their room. They’d go out and look. They wouldn’t see anybody, they wouldn’t hear the footsteps anymore. This was a repeated pattern.

They’d see apparitions of this individual. Some of them were clear sightings, very concrete seeming, to the point where people who were visiting would ask, “Who’s that in the house?” Other times, just vague shadows would be seen.

They determined on their own that it was her grandfather. We brought Alex in, and Ingrid, and Ann, and they all gave descriptions of the grandfather. She had a picture of him, so we put that among several others for the psychics to choose from, and each one picked the grandfather’s. They all gave good descriptions of what he was like in life, interactions that occurred, where the phenomena occurred, really an excellent case of everything being very clear-cut.

Also, the family moved recently, and the phenomena are still continuing at their new location, which suggests that it’s person-related rather than house-related. The psychics had given the explanation that the grandfather was watching over them. He’s not “earthbound,” as some people like to characterize these things. He knows he’s dead and is just keeping an eye on the family.

The family really doesn’t mind at all. And it’s not like they’re clinging to this for any strange purpose. It’s just not frightening to them. In some ways it’s a little reassuring. They have had experiences that suggest that the children are being looked upon; blankets being pulled up over the children. The baby a few months old lying in the crib wouldn’t have a blanket on him, but then they’d find a blanket on him.

The grandfather had not lived with the family, and the activity was seemingly independent of the activity of the grandfather when he was alive. But one case in particular, early in my career, pushed me much more firmly into the survival camp.