Signs From a Loved One Who Has Died

You saw the cardinal on the fence rail the morning after the funeral. Or the song on the grocery store speakers — the one she used to hum — and you had to stop your cart because you couldn't breathe. A dime on the sidewalk, a butterfly on the porch, pipe tobacco in a room where nobody smokes, a dream so vivid you woke up sure your father had been there.

Whatever it was, you probably wondered — quietly, because these things are hard to say out loud — was that them?

This article will not tell you what to believe. It will tell you what researchers, clinicians, and millions of bereaved people across cultures have said about these experiences, so you can sit with your own more gently.

You are not imagining things, and you are not alone

The experience you had — whatever form it took — is one of the most commonly reported in the entire literature of bereavement. It has been documented in Welsh villages and Swedish nursing homes, in Buddhist monasteries and American suburbs, in the diaries of 19th-century widows and in survey data collected last year.

The bereaved rarely bring these experiences up on their own. In one of the earliest studies of the phenomenon, general practitioner W. Dewi Rees interviewed 293 widows and widowers in mid-Wales and found most had never told anyone because they feared being thought unwell. When he asked directly and without judgment, 46.7% described experiences of the deceased they considered real (British Medical Journal, 1971, summarized in a modern PMC review).

If you have not told anyone about your cardinal, or your dream, or the moment you heard your mother's voice say your name from the empty hallway, you are in extraordinarily wide company.

What researchers call these experiences

After-death communication (ADC)

The term after-death communication, or ADC, was coined in the late 1980s by Bill and Judy Guggenheim, two American researchers who spent seven years collecting firsthand accounts of what bereaved people described as contact from someone who had died. Their project — archived today in the Special Collections of the University of West Georgia — remains the largest qualitative catalog of the phenomenon ever assembled (Guggenheim ADC Project archive, University of West Georgia). The Guggenheims deliberately chose a neutral term: they did not ask interviewees whether the experience was "real," only what happened, when, and how it felt.

Bereavement hallucinations and sensed-presence experiences

In clinical journals the same experiences are usually called bereavement hallucinations or sensed-presence experiences. The word hallucination here does not imply mental illness — psychiatrists distinguish grief-related hallucinations from those of psychosis on the basis of context, insight, and functional impact. A recent review in Schizophrenia Bulletin argues these experiences occupy a healthy, non-pathological end of the human sensory spectrum.

Continuing bonds

The third name comes from grief theory. In 1996, psychologists Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman published Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, a volume that quietly overturned nearly a century of Freud-influenced assumption. Freud had argued that healthy grief required withdrawing one's emotional attachment from the dead. Klass and colleagues showed instead that most bereaved people never "let go," and that those who maintained an ongoing inner relationship with the deceased often coped better, not worse (Continuing Bonds Theory overview, The Loss Foundation UK). Under this framework, a sign is not evidence of a failure to move on. It is part of the relationship — one that has changed shape but has not ended.

The Guggenheim ADC Project: the first major study

Bill and Judy Guggenheim's Hello From Heaven! (1996) remains the largest qualitative study of these experiences in English. Over seven years (1988–1995) they conducted more than 2,000 in-depth interviews across all 50 U.S. states and 10 Canadian provinces, from participants ages 8 to 92, and catalogued more than 3,300 firsthand accounts, with 353 individuals revisited in depth.

From that corpus they distilled twelve broad categories: sensing a presence, hearing a voice, feeling a touch, smelling a fragrance, partial and full visual appearances, encounters during sleep (visitation dreams), telephone calls, physical phenomena (electrical or mechanical), symbolic signs (birds, butterflies, rainbows), out-of-body experiences, and "evidential" ADCs containing information the receiver could not otherwise have known. The Guggenheims estimated that at least 60 million Americans — roughly 20% of the U.S. population at the time — had experienced one or more of these events (BillGuggenheim.com).

How common is this, really?

Rees's 1971 Welsh study of 293 widows and widowers found that 46.7% reported at least one hallucinatory or quasi-hallucinatory experience of their late spouse; 39.2% reported a sense of presence, 13.3% heard the deceased, and 14.3% saw them. Rees noted the experiences were more common in longer, happier marriages and — contrary to his expectation — were not associated with poorer mental health.

Anders Grimby's 1993 study of 50 spousally bereaved elderly Swedes, published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, found even higher rates within the first month: 52% reported a sensed presence, 30% heard the deceased, 26% saw them, and 30% held conversations. Across the wider literature, prevalence for at least one such experience ranges from roughly 47% up to 82%, with the highest figures in widows during the first year (Grimby, Acta Psychiatr Scand 1993).

In Feigelman and colleagues' work with people bereaved by suicide, 63% reported after-death spiritual experiences, and — perhaps the most consequential figure in this literature — 74.5% described those experiences as helpful, versus only 4.8% who found them harmful (PMC systematic review). A 2024 study of bereaved partners similarly found 82.5% reported at least one dream or waking experience of the deceased within the prior month (Death Studies summary).

Across cultures and centuries these experiences have been reported with striking regularity — a fact we can honor without needing to settle their ultimate cause.

The most-reported signs

Certain images recur so often across ADC accounts that they have become almost archetypal.

Birds — cardinals, robins, blue jays, hummingbirds

The northern cardinal is the single most frequently named animal in North American ADC reports. Hummingbirds are especially common in accounts from the American Southwest and Mexico; robins in the UK and eastern U.S. Hospice chaplains often note the timing — the bird arrives at a graveside, on a birthday, on the drive home from the hospital.

Butterflies and dragonflies

Butterflies carry ancient symbolic weight — in Greek the same word, psyche, means both butterfly and soul — and the monarch's metamorphosis reads almost too neatly as a metaphor for what the bereaved are hoping to believe. Dragonflies appear frequently in accounts from lakeside funerals and summer memorials.

Feathers, coins, and small found objects

Small feathers, especially white, found in unexpected places — on the pillow, in a locked car, on a hospital bed. "Pennies from heaven" is folk shorthand for finding coins in places one is sure they were not before; in some regions dimes are said to represent a specific loved one.

Familiar songs and familiar scents

Hearing "their song" on the car radio the moment you turn the key, or in a coffee shop the morning of the anniversary, is among the most frequently reported experiences in the Guggenheim archive. Olfactory experiences are among the most vivid: pipe tobacco in a nonsmoking house, a grandmother's specific perfume in an elevator, the smell of a particular bread baking — described with unusual emotional force, likely because olfaction is neurologically routed directly through the limbic system, bypassing the usual cognitive filters.

Electrical anomalies — flickering lights, appliances, clocks

Lights that flicker at meaningful moments, appliances turning on by themselves, or a clock that stopped at the exact time of death. Old pendulum clocks in particular are famous for this — reinforced by the Northern European and Appalachian folk practice of stopping the clocks in the house of a person who has died.

Dream visits, felt presence, and warm sensations

Visitation dreams — vivid dreams in which the deceased appears, communicates something meaningful, and leaves the dreamer feeling that the encounter was qualitatively different from an ordinary dream — are among the most extensively documented categories. Alongside them is the most common experience of all and the hardest to describe: a wordless, sensory-adjacent sense that the deceased is there. Grimby found 52% of the recently bereaved report it. A related experience is a sudden warmth in a specific part of the body, sometimes accompanied by a feeling of being embraced.

Why signs feel more real than coincidence

Even if some of these experiences have natural explanations, why do they feel so viscerally different from ordinary coincidence? Part of the answer is attentional. Acute grief slows everything down. Bereaved people move more carefully, sit longer at windows, notice small details they would have missed the week before. The cardinal that was always in the crape myrtle finally lands close because you are finally looking. Grief also strips away the ordinary background noise of a life, so a small event fills the whole frame.

Part is neurological. In acute grief, sleep is fragmented, cortisol is elevated, and the boundary between waking and dreaming softens. This is not evidence that the experience is "just" neurological — it is context for why the felt intensity is real regardless of interpretation. And part is that meaning is not a lesser category of truth. A cardinal on the fence rail on the morning of the funeral is not just a cardinal, even if it is a cardinal.

Bereavement hallucinations — the clinical picture

Contemporary clinical psychology increasingly treats sensory experiences of the deceased not as symptoms to be eliminated but as ordinary features of grief. Recent reviews — including the 2017 paper by Badcock, Dehon, and Larøi and the more recent BJPsych Open phenomenology paper — argue these experiences occupy a healthy end of the sensory-experience continuum and are associated with a preserved inner relationship with the deceased rather than with psychopathology. What clinicians look for is not the experience itself but its function. A sensed presence that brings comfort and does not interfere with daily life is a feature of ordinary grief; one accompanied by distress, disorientation, command hallucinations, or loss of insight is a different clinical picture and worth a conversation with a physician.

Continuing bonds — a paradigm shift

It is hard to overstate how much has changed in grief theory since 1996. The old model, drawn from Freud and popularized through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages, framed grief as a project of eventual detachment — the mourner's task was to "let go." The continuing-bonds framework — now the dominant model in bereavement research — replaces that picture. The bereaved do not have to choose between the dead and the living. Most people who lose a spouse, child, or parent maintain some form of ongoing inner relationship, and its presence is generally protective, not harmful. Kübler-Ross herself, in her 2005 book On Grief and Grieving with David Kessler, acknowledged that the stages had been widely misread and that the goal of grief was never severance. If you are noticing signs, you are not stuck. You are in a relationship that is finding a new shape.

Religious and spiritual perspectives

Every major religious tradition has an established vocabulary for what you are experiencing.

Catholic. The communion of saints holds that the Church on earth, in purgatory, and in heaven remain in real communion. Praying for the dead, especially on All Souls' Day (November 2), is a formal act of that communion. The tradition has never required the bond with the deceased be severed.

Protestant. Traditions vary widely. Cessationist and Reformed strands tend to be cautious about interpreting sensory experiences as direct contact, emphasizing the comfort of Scripture and the resurrection promise. Pentecostal and charismatic streams are more open. Most mainline pastors will neither confirm nor debunk a reported sign — they will sit with the person and hold space for what it means.

Jewish. Judaism marks the ongoing relationship through the mourner's kaddish, the annual yahrzeit observance on the anniversary of the death, and the everyday blessing zichrono livracha — "may their memory be a blessing." Visitation dreams have a long and respected place in rabbinic literature.

Buddhist. Buddhist traditions frame the period after death as a transitional passage. In Tibetan Buddhism the bardo — the intermediate state between death and rebirth described in the Bardo Thödol — is understood to last up to 49 days, during which offerings, chanting, and dedication of merit help guide the consciousness of the deceased. Household altars and offerings to ancestors are ordinary practice.

Hindu. Hindu tradition observes the thirteen-day śrāddha rites and the annual Pitru Paksha ("fortnight of the ancestors") each autumn, when offerings are made to the pitṛs — the ancestral spirits, understood as an ongoing presence in family life rather than figures who have departed.

Muslim. In Islamic teaching, the deceased enter barzakh — an interval state between death and the Day of Judgment. Sunni and Shia views differ on the specifics of contact, but visitation dreams (ruʾyā ṣāliḥa, "righteous dreams") are taken seriously across traditions, drawing on Quranic and hadith references to true dreams as a form of divine mercy.

Secular and humanist. A secular framing takes the experience seriously as human meaning-making without requiring a metaphysical claim. The cardinal is a cardinal and a symbol. For more on how bereaved people integrate spirituality, faith, and doubt after a loss, see /resources/grief-and-faith.

How to journal your signs

Whatever you make of these experiences, keeping a simple record is worth ten minutes. Writing them down slows the moment enough to notice it, preserves details memory will otherwise soften, and gives you something to look back on later. A useful template:

• Date and time. Timing patterns — repeated dawns, the anniversary hour — often only emerge in retrospect.
• What happened. A sentence or two of description — not yet what it meant.
• Where. The physical place and its context.
• What you were doing or thinking beforehand. Sometimes signs land in the middle of thinking of the person; sometimes not. Both patterns are worth noticing.
• How you felt in the moment, and after. Comfort, awe, grief, all three? This may be the most important line.
• What you think it meant, if anything. You are allowed to write I don't know, and to change your mind later.

For a broader set of grief journaling prompts, /resources/grief-journal-prompts may be useful.

When comfort tips into complicated grief

For most bereaved people, signs bring peace and a gradual re-emergence into ordinary life. Occasionally the pattern shifts, and it is worth knowing the warning signs — not to police your own experience but so you can recognize the moment to reach for more support.

The DSM-5-TR, published by the American Psychiatric Association in March 2022, formally added prolonged grief disorder as a diagnosable condition. Grief may warrant clinical attention when — at least twelve months after the loss for adults, six months for children — persistent intense yearning or preoccupation with the deceased is accompanied by identity disruption, marked disbelief about the death, intense emotional pain, difficulty reintegrating into life, emotional numbness, or a sense that life is meaningless, to a degree that interferes with daily functioning.

Applied to signs specifically, the pattern to watch for is when the sign becomes not a source of meaning but the only one; when hours are spent seeking or missing signs; when the absence of a sign produces intense distress; when the bereaved withdraws from living relationships; or when the felt communication becomes so continuous it interferes with sleep, work, or self-care. None of this makes earlier experiences invalid. Our fuller discussion lives at /resources/complicated-grief-vs-normal-grief; if the loss was sudden or violent, /resources/traumatic-grief-and-ptsd covers how trauma and grief can compound.

What to say to someone who tells you they've seen a sign

If you are on the receiving end of this conversation, the most helpful thing you can do is very small. Not correct. Not explain. Not rank one person's experience against another's.

What tends to help: "That sounds like it meant a lot," "Tell me about it," "What was it like?", "Do you want to tell me about them?"

What tends to hurt: immediate natural explanations ("well, cardinals are territorial…"), immediate metaphysical claims ("that was definitely them"), any variation on "you need to move on," or comparisons to other people's signs.

The experience is theirs. Your job is only to make it safe to say out loud.

Skeptical explanations, offered without dismissal

In the interest of honesty: there are natural explanations for many of these phenomena, worth naming without letting them do all the work. Confirmation bias is real — we notice the cardinal on the anniversary and forget the dozens on ordinary Tuesdays. Pattern recognition is a deep feature of the human mind, and grief sharpens it. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences become more common in bereavement. Coincidences, in a life full of possible signals, are statistically inevitable.

All of this can be true. None of it settles the question, because the question is not only about mechanism. A sign may be a cardinal, a coincidence, a memory-priming effect, and a genuine consolation. These are not mutually exclusive categories.

The bottom line

These experiences are common. They cross cultures, centuries, and religious frames. They are more often comforting than distressing. In the modern peer-reviewed literature they are associated with better grief outcomes, not worse. Whatever you believe about their ultimate cause, you are entitled to let them mean what they mean.

If a birthday, anniversary, or the season around the death is approaching, our pieces on /resources/anniversary-grief, /resources/grief-triggers-on-special-days, and /resources/how-to-honor-a-loved-one-on-their-birthday-after-death may help. If you want to write to the person you lost, /resources/letter-to-a-deceased-loved-one offers a starting point. And on days the signs feel far away, /resources/self-care-during-grief is a reminder that ordinary care of your body and rest is also part of staying in relationship with the person you love.

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal to see signs from a deceased loved one?

Yes. Across the peer-reviewed literature, somewhere between roughly 47% and 82% of bereaved people report at least one sensory or quasi-sensory experience of the deceased, and majorities describe those experiences as comforting rather than distressing.

Does seeing signs mean I haven't accepted the death?

No. Under the continuing-bonds framework, an ongoing inner relationship with the deceased is a normal, generally healthy feature of grief. Acceptance and connection are not opposites.

Are bereavement hallucinations a sign of mental illness?

Not in themselves. Contemporary clinical psychology treats grief-related hallucinations as ordinary features of bereavement, distinct from those of psychosis. If they are accompanied by disorientation, loss of insight, or major impairment, that's worth discussing with a physician.

What if I want a sign and haven't received one?

Many bereaved people describe long stretches with no perceived signs, sometimes followed by a single vivid experience much later. The absence of a sign is not a verdict on the relationship, and not a failure on your part. Continuing bonds are maintained through many channels — memory, ritual, writing, ordinary acts of love — not only the dramatic ones.

Sources

• Guggenheim, Bill & Judy. Hello From Heaven! A New Field of Research — After-Death Communication — Confirms That Life and Love Are Eternal. Bantam, 1996. ADC Project archive, University of West Georgia Special Collections. https://uwg.galileo.usg.edu/repositories/2/resources/588
• Guggenheim, Bill. Overview and prevalence estimate. http://www.billguggenheim.com/hello-from-heaven.html
• Rees, W. D. "The Hallucinations of Widowhood." British Medical Journal, 1971;4(5778):37–41. Summarized in the PMC review below.
• Grimby, A. "Bereavement Among Elderly People: Grief Reactions, Post-Bereavement Hallucinations and Quality of Life." Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 1993;87(1):72–80. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8424323/
• Sensory and Quasi-Sensory Experiences of the Deceased in Bereavement: A Critical Review. Schizophrenia Bulletin, National Library of Medicine PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7707065/
• Sabucedo, P., et al. "The Phenomenology and Impact of Hallucinations Concerning the Deceased." BJPsych Open. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8388006/
• Klass, D., Silverman, P., & Nickman, S. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis, 1996. The Loss Foundation UK overview: https://thelossfoundation.org/stages-of-grief/continuing-bonds-theory-klass-silverman-nickman-overview/
• Feigelman, W., et al. Post-suicide after-death spiritual experiences — systematic review, PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8910367/
• Black, J., Belicki, K., & Ralph, J. Dreams and waking experiences of the deceased — 2024. Death Studies, summarized at Dashnaw. https://danieldashnawcouplestherapy.com/blog/dreaming-of-the-dead-new-study-grief
• Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. Scribner, 2005.
• American Psychiatric Association. Prolonged Grief Disorder fact sheet, DSM-5-TR, March 2022. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/prolonged-grief-disorder
• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. https://988lifeline.org