Voices of the Departed: The Rhetoric of After-Death Communication
- eoldeathscholars
- Mar 26
- 8 min read
In 2011, Theresa Caputo rode on the reality television wave with her hit show on TLC called “Long Island Medium.” In each episode, Caputo, a psychic medium with a trademarked bleach blonde bouffant hairstyle, helps her clients communicate with loved ones who have died. These deaths are often tragic and traumatic, touching audiences with their emotional narrative resonance. Clients in each episode appear to achieve psychological closure and comfort through these readings. As the show’s popularity grew, so did Caputo’s reach, with a peak of 2.6 million viewers in 2013. Now, 14 years later, Caputo tours the country performing live readings in concert halls - for $60 a ticket.
With the modern prevalence of social media, psychic mediums can gain even more broad notoriety and reach, without TV shows or touring, through platforms like TikTok. Amie Balesky is a psychic medium with 3.1 million followers on TikTok. She goes “live” on TikTok several days a week to promote her readings, and now, her line of $30 luxury candles. Amie’s readings are booked a year and a half in advance and a single 30-minute session runs $390, according to her website.
The rise of psychic mediumship was first associated with the spiritualism movement, which was at its height in the late 19th and early 20th century (Wooffitt, 2006). This movement sought to communicate with spirits–both of the dead and of spirit “guides”--through public displays of mediumship (in spiritualist churches or other venues) or private paid sessions. In a typical mediumship reading, the psychic will often enter a meditative state and receive information through various visual, auditory, olfactory, sensory or intuitive ways of knowing to offer insight to the “sitter,” or paying client (Rock, Beishel & Schwartz, 2008; Woolacott et al., 2022).
A 2019 Gallup poll found that 41% of Americans believe in extrasensory perception and 73% believe in at least some aspect of the paranormal (including ghosts, hauntings, the ability to communicate with the dead, etc.). The power of this belief is what drives the after-death communication (ADC) market and provides an audience and income for psychics like Caputo and Balesky. Belief and emotional vulnerability are a lucrative combination. It is critical to examine the rhetoric of psychic mediums and the rhetoric of after-death communication (ADC). Can psychic medium ADC help people through grief? Or exploit people in their most sensitive and difficult moments?
What is After-Death Communication (ADC)?
After-death communication (ADC) is communication or communicative events with deceased persons (Guggenheim & Guggenheim, 1997). These events could involve things like seeing, witnessing, or speaking with a ghost, receiving signs from deceased loved ones, or communicating with the deceased through a psychic medium reading.
Can we talk to our loved ones after death? What are the persuasive and ethical considerations of after-death communication (ADC)? Rhetoric, or the study of the ways we use language to shape reality and persuade people, can be a helpful tool for understanding these questions.
Psychic medium rhetoric appeals to what David Riche (2017) calls a “rhetoric of vulnerability.” The scholarship of rhetorical vulnerability positions it as:
the notion that vulnerability is simultaneously (1) a predisposition to being affected by others that is mutually experienced by all, including humans and nonhumans, and (2) a precarious position that is uniquely experienced by each of us based on an ever-changing configuration of external forces, contingencies, and interdependencies.
Bereaved individuals are vulnerable to ADC by virtue of a predisposition (grief/grieving) and a precarious position (being bereaved of a loved one). So, they may be more susceptible, and likely to believe, the rhetoric of someone delivering messages from a departed loved one, such as a psychic medium. As Riche maintains, being vulnerable to rhetoric isn’t a bad thing:
It seems to me that this more expansive understanding of vulnerability as a basic condition of mutual, material, and managed exposure offers a great deal to the study of rhetoric, writing, and literacy. After all, what purpose would communication or persuasion serve in a world where we could fully inoculate ourselves against the effects of language? Similarly, what purpose would rhetorical awareness serve in a world where we are all vulnerable to the same appeals in exactly the same ways at all times? How can we study the uses and effects of rhetoric in our world without first presuming that others are (or can become more) affect-able?
In other words, no one is immune to rhetoric and being aware of vulnerabilities can enhance our understanding and self-awareness, allowing us to think critically about the ways we participate and create rhetoric. ADC offers something to the rhetorically vulnerable, which is why individuals seek it out and consume medium media. Rhetorical examination allows for both skepticism and belief.
Rhetorical Skepticism of ADC
Magician Harry Houdini was famously critical of the spiritualism movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, believing that mediums exploited vulnerable bereaved people using the same rhetorical tactics of illusion that magicians often employed (cold reading, smoke and mirror illusions, etc.). Shortly before his untimely death, he even testified in front of Congress to criminalize fortune telling.
Houdini’s crusade against charlatans continued in the modern era through magician James Randi’s Educational Foundation, which was established “to help people defend themselves from paranormal and pseudo-scientific claims.” Randi, a performance magician and escape artist, dedicated his late career to outing psychics by building awareness of their techniques. Randi also proposed a public challenge promising one million dollars to anyone who could prove their psychic abilities based on a defined set of scientific testing criteria. Despite hundreds vying for it, no one ever won the prize. The “Randi Prize” as it became known, was disbanded in 2015 and the foundation money was repurposed for grants to support anti-pseudoscience research.
James Randi’s public pursuit for truth against psychics, as well as his own personal struggles with truth, is documented in the award-winning 2014 film, An Honest Liar.
The rhetorical overlap between performance magic and ADC is tangible. Both require a demonstration that asks the audience to suspend disbelief–both ask the audience to let go of the idea that “seeing is believing.” Rhetoric is about the persuasive action of language–how does the language and symbols we use create certain expectations and actions? How does language persuade? And centrally: what is this rhetoric doing to an audience? Helping or hurting or both?
While research on ADC rhetoric is scarce, some scholars have explored this space. Joane Naboka (2020) wrote a comprehensive Medium article with examples of psychic medium strategies of cold reading and sequencing.
In their often-cited book, The Language of Mediums and Psychics (2006), Wooffitt describes how psychics use implicative questions that seemingly cannot be derived from previous questions to demonstrate their ability. In other words, they ask questions that imply knowledge to evoke a positive (“yes”) confirmation from the sitter/client and then offer information to demonstrate their psychic ability. For example:
Psychic: “Did they collect something like, I’m seeing small figurines of some kind?” (question implying knowledge)
Sitter: “Yes she did.” (minimal confirmation, reveals gender)
Psychic: “She said she wants you to have them.” (attribution of the information to a paranormal source)
Enoksen and Dickerson (2018) expanded this discourse analysis research by examining what happens in the exchange if a sitter/client negatively responded to these implicative questions, disconfirming the psychic (saying “no”). They found that the psychic would respond to the negative response in one of three ways:
They may emphasize the different access that sitter and medium have to knowledge (e.g., about the future).
Example: “Okay, no, they are showing me something else that will be important in the future…”
They may use the disconfirmation as evidence that the medium has access to the actual voice of the deceased (and may therefore mishear what the deceased has said to them).
Example: “Okay, it’s kind of confusing, I’m getting a lot of messages. Your dad is also showing me...”
They may use the disconfirmation as an important truth that has previously been concealed from the sitter.
Example: “You don’t know this, but (insert detail). Make sure you find out about that.”
Wooffitt and Gilbert (2008) examined the rhetoric of stage mediumship readings. They examined several stage performances of a famous UK psychic medium. They describe how the initial set up of stage medium readings and the psychic’s pre-performance introductory remarks may precondition audiences to respond in a preferred way (giving quick ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers) that maximizes “the likelihood that members of the audience will interpret the subsequent demonstration positively and thus as a genuine exhibition of spirit communication.” In other words, the medium told the audiences how to respond, which allowed for less perceptual reading error and fostered greater perception that the psychic’s reading was authentic.
Benefits of ADC
Despite skepticism for ADC, research demonstrates its potential benefit. Niemeyer, Baldwin, and Gilles (2006) found that the continuing bonds that we experience with deceased loved ones can cause extreme ongoing distress and trauma if we are not able to make sense of the loss through “personal, practical, existential, or spiritual terms.”
From a treatment perspective, ADC through a mediumship reading could demonstrate these continuing bonds and offer relief for a grieving individual by providing a means of sense-making (Beischel et al., 2015).
Communication is a key way that continuing bonds are maintained between the living and the dead, so it’s unsurprising that people are likely to consider their deceased friends and family as still a part of their social circle (Stemon, 2020). In an analysis of ADC narratives, Stemon 2020 found that individuals prequalified their ADC stories by stating that they can’t explain the communication they had with their departed loved ones or that it even took place, but later in the story, stating they felt certain that it did occur. This finding shows the importance of validating individuals’ ADC stories as a means of also validating their continuing bonds with their deceased loved ones. As Dannenbaum and Kinnier (2007) note, even “imaginal relationships” with deceased loved ones have perceived therapeutic benefits for the bereaved such as “feeling cared for and loved, experiencing resolution of grief and relationship conflicts, and experiencing increased confidence in problem solving and decision making.”
In writing for Skeptic, grief counselor Russel Freedman (2003) is careful to caution against using psychic medium ADC in lieu of therapy. Freedman encourages people to talk to their deceased loved ones as necessary part of recovery, but discourages magical thinking:
The actions of grief recovery involve the need to communicate certain thoughts and feelings to someone who is no longer alive, or who is alive but not present in the same place as the speaker. We counsel very carefully that the people we help should never ask any questions of the people to whom they are communicating, because we do not believe that you can get direct answers. It is as dangerous to ask an intermediary to ask a question of a dead person as it is for you to ask it yourself. If you can't get the answer, neither can anyone else. Anything that creates or contributes to an illusion that people have done their "grief work," actually sets them further away from emotional completion of the pain caused by that loss.
Psychic medium ADC can be a tool, but perhaps should not be a substitute for grief counseling.
Ethical Dimensions of ADC
Whether psychic mediumship is real or not is subject to individual belief and values. If you find it helpful, instructive, or just entertaining–amazing! If you find it to be scammy and weird–don’t seek it out. The study of rhetoric allows for multiple things to be true–the rhetoric of ADC can be both helpful and manipulative, therapeutic and exploitative, performance and spiritual ritual.
ADC can occur without the use of a psychic medium. As the research cited above indicates, talking to loved ones and looking for signs from them can be just as beneficial.
As with all rhetoric, be sure to temper your expectations of psychic medium communication. A reading may not cure your depression or give you the closure to grief that you so desperately want following a death. And we should always be skeptical of the rhetoric we encounter, thinking critically about the communicative messaging and rhetor’s persuasion and influence. What does this person want you to do? To buy? To think? To believe?
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