Original subtitles

The world you know is not what it seems.

Buried deep inside

one of America's leading universities

lies one of the largest collections

of paranormal research in the world.

This thing is slowly...

This is the spirit. This is your proof.

I saw this little object hovering.

From telepathy, possession,

the abduction experience...

They said, we're coming.

Collected over decades,

much of it has never been seen by the public.

This is truly a halfway house

between your world...

and ours.

I'm scouring the globe looking for new people

with extraordinary stories.

I realized, my dream is about to happen.

Their accounts will be preserved

alongside some of the most remarkable cases in history.

She's more than telepathic.

I felt like I was being watched.

I saw really horrific things.

There's no way for me to put into words

what I went through.

The practice of communicating with spirits

is a global phenomenon going back thousands of years.

Our archives are filled

with incredible cases of people

who can communicate with the dead.

Tonight I have invited

two more experiencers with this ability

to come and tell their story.

Their testimonies will be recorded

so future researchers can continue investigating

this phenomenon.

My question is, if someone can speak to the dead,

what does that tell us

about where the soul goes when it dies?

I have asked Professor Nicole Bauer,

one of the world's leading authorities on the subject,

to come and help me answer that question.

I am a cultural historian,

and I'm doing my research at Harvard Divinity School.

Mediumship is a really interesting phenomenon

where people channel spirits,

entities, other beings.

But what the evidence shows us

is that if you go through a door to another realm

or place of being, things could go wrong,

or you might even get possessed

by negative spirits of the dead.

Our first experiencer, Annette,

has spent decades coming to terms

with her uncanny gift.

Her haunting story

could change everything we know

about life, death, and what comes after.

I talk to the dead.

I help the FBI in finding missing children.

There were many times that scared me.

What I know for sure is that when we die,

there is no end to us.

There is no death.

It is just the beginning of a new chapter.

I grew up in Chicago.

In 1972, my parents got divorced,

and my sister, my brother, and I moved in with my mother.

But my mom had a lot of substance-abuse problems.

When I was six, everything changed.

My life blew up.

In the middle of the night, my sister started crying,

and I just woke up,

and I could see that my sister was looking at something

that was in the doorway.

There was a shimmery figure.

It was like a man.

He didn't speak.

But here's the strange thing.

I knew that he was there for me.

I kept looking at this figure, and I started crying.

I didn't know what this was.

And the next morning we were eating breakfast,

and my sister--

she goes, well, do you remember what happened last night?

My grandmother turned around really quickly, horrified,

and she said, is this what you saw?

She described, as if she were in the room,

exactly what we had seen.

She says, "I know because it happened to me

"when I was a kid.

It's your spirit guide."

And I said, "what?"

I said, "I don't want this.

I don't want this dead person coming to me."

Annette's grandmother had this ability,

and then Annette starts manifesting at a young age.

There is actually a lot of research going on right now

about how there seems to be some ability

that can pass through a family line.

But this, in traditional societies in history,

is a long-accepted idea--

that psychic abilities are hereditary.

I felt like it was too much.

And she said, "Well, you're going to need him."

She goes, "Name him."

I came up with the name David,

because a kid in the apartment building next to us--

his name was David.

I had a sense that this was just the beginning

of things to come.

What Annette's describing as her spirit guide

is a really important concept.

Going back to ancient Greece with Socrates,

he would talk about having a spirit guide like this.

And the Romans picked it up, and they call it the genius.

This is where we get the term "genius."

It's not a great, creative person.

It's actually a spirit that accompanies you.

Now I have this ghost figure that keeps appearing.

I just wanted to slow it down.

So I'm like, hey, David, wherever you are,

I don't want you to come.

But David would show me really horrific stuff.

It was a Friday, and my uncle had just retired that day.

Everyone called him Uncle Bubby.

My father gave him a beer

and said, hey, Uncle Bubby, how does it feel being retired?

All of a sudden, I saw my Uncle Bubby's face melt.

I was, like, hyperventilating. I couldn't even talk.

I called my grandmother,

and I said, I saw Uncle Bubby's face melt.

She looked at me, and she was really weepy.

She had said also she saw faces melting.

It was always an indication that they were going to pass.

She said to me, you're just like me.

You have the gift.

My uncle died the next morning.

I was 10 years old.

I was laying on my bed,

and all of a sudden, I was shown a series of events,

like it was watching a videotape.

That's the only way I can explain it.

I knew it was David who was showing me it.

There was this young girl.

I saw that she would be abducted from her home.

I saw really horrific things

that I...

could never even have imagined.

I didn't know who she was.

I couldn't see her face.

I felt sure that she could hear me.

I said to her, "Keep your head above water."

At ten years old, I had never used that phrase.

But then my sister walked in the bedroom,

and my eyes opened,

and it, like, brought me back to reality.

I knew it was a game changer.

Didn't know yet how profound it would be.

A couple years later,

I was just finished sixth grade.

It was Labor Day weekend.

I fell asleep.

The next thing I know,

there was a man kneeling on the side of my bed

with his hand over my mouth and his hand behind my head.

And I instantly...

got afraid for my life.

I instantly knew

that something terrible was gonna happen.

He put me in the back seat of the car.

He took duct tape,

and he wrapped it around my mouth,

and he wrapped it around my eyes,

and I was terrified.

I was taken out of the car,

and I was brought into a house.

And then I said to myself, "Keep my head above water."

That was the first time that I said it.

And all of a sudden, I realized that that's what I said

to the girl in that videotape that I had seen.

I had realized.

I thought, oh, my God, I am that girl.

What Annette is relating here is extraordinary,

but we know that people who have psychic abilities

often develop very pronounced precognitive ability.

It's just that she's so young,

she doesn't realize that she's seeing herself.

And how could she?

It's such a terrible experience.

I was on a mattress on the floor.

This went on for days and days and days.

They would keep coming up and beating me up and raping me

and doing all these terrible things to me.

And then I started, like, in my head, yelling for David.

I'm like, "David, I need help.

I don't--How am I gonna get out of this?"

He instantly appeared.

He's like, I'm here.

I want you to take the tape off your eyes.

I took the tape off my eyes, and I looked around the room.

I saw an old-fashioned telephone.

I got really brave.

I took the tape off my mouth, and I called my mom,

and the FBI got on the phone.

They said, you don't have much more time,

because usually by this point, they will kill you.

You have to get out of there.

All of a sudden,

I heard the kidnappers come up the stairs.

I was on the second story.

And that's when David said to me,

you have to jump out of the window.

There was no way

that I could imagine how I could get out of this.

And all of a sudden, David shows up,

and he told me to jump out the window.

I put my clothes on,

and I jumped out of a second-story window.

I broke my foot.

My foot was instantly swollen,

and I couldn't really walk.

I hobbled down the street.

And lying in the front of his house

was a guy who was working on his Corvette.

The guy rolled out from underneath the car,

and he rushed me in his house.

We called 911.

Within a minute, the police and the FBI were there,

and my mom was there.

And then they took me to the hospital.

I can see the people listening to this story saying,

why doesn't her spirit guide just protect her

from every painful thing? - Yeah.

They're not there to prevent every negative thing

in your life.

They're there to kind of keep you on course

with your main spiritual goals

and allowing spiritual growth in that lifetime.

I couldn't agree more.

As a historian of religions, what fascinates me

is how often this idea appears across cultures.

Spirit guides rarely appear to avoid pain.

Their role is more about transformation than happiness.

They caught them.

When I was preparing for my trial,

me and my brother and my sister

moved in with my father.

I was really going through this really terrible, awkward time,

and I had gone through this horrific experience.

I was getting counseling and psychiatric therapy for it

and trying to be okay, but I wasn't really.

I always wondered, how could they find me in that bedroom?

Why would they come and get me?

And I said to my father,

you know, "I want to know, how could this happen?"

And my father...

Said to me...

"It was your mother."

She was in a bar with her boyfriend,

and she made a $5 bet with one of the kidnappers

that if she lost the bet, she would leave the back door open,

and they could come and get me.

It, like, blew my mind.

I couldn't--I go, "What--kidnap me?"

He actually couldn't even say yes.

He just...

He just kept saying, "I'm so sorry."

The kidnappers got sentenced

to 30 to 60 years each in prison.

And it ends up that my mom brokered a deal

with the state, and they let her go.

And then she had to give up custody.

Everybody now knew who I was all over America,

'cause I was all over the news.

And then the FBI contacted me.

One of the FBI agents had known my grandmother

and knew that she was psychic.

And he said,

"Tell me how you jumped out of the window.

What made you do that?"

And I remember at 12 years old,

I was embarrassed,

'cause now I have to tell him about David,

and he's gonna think I'm a crackpot.

And I go, well...

I know things.

I think trauma opens the door, as it were.

It's a sort of portal through which these things can come in.

And I think sometimes the human being

suffers a lot

because of these things that come through.

All of a sudden, he looked at me differently.

He said, what kind of things do you know?

When I told the FBI agents about the girl in the video,

they were on the edge of their seats.

And then all of a sudden, the FBI agent--

he said to me, "There's a lot of missing girls like you.

Can you help us find them?"

I said, "I have no idea how I would,

but I could try."

It speaks to the practicality

of the authorities.

They don't, frankly, care what people think

about these abilities. - Yes.

- They just want to know... - Absolutely.

Where to find the kidnapped person or the body.

Absolutely. Authorities are pragmatic.

The FBI and the police-- they want something that works.

If a psychic is effective,

they're going to call on that psychic or medium.

I then started working for the FBI,

helping solve two missing-child cases.

I provide the information.

I tell them everything I know. They go with the information.

And a lot of times, the children

weren't even found alive, but they were found,

and it helped give the family closure.

One of the reasons why I kept doing it

is because I never forgot what it felt like

when it happened to me,

when I did not know how I was gonna get out.

So now when I think about any person

that is in that position,

knowing what they're going through,

I can never say no.

David gave me this ability to connect with the other side.

I want to help as many people as I possibly can.

When I graduated from high school,

I did this professionally.

I would have a lot of people come to my home

and do readings, and they want to talk

to people that have passed away.

I was just so good at what I was doing,

and I actually feel that being a psychic is my calling.

I moved to New York, got married, had my daughter.

People would hear about me, and just wherever I was living,

people would come to me.

But then something happened to me

that had never happened before.

I was at my girlfriend's house,

and she was telling me a story about somebody that she knew

whose daughter recently went missing.

I said, she disappeared from New York City in December,

and no one's heard from her.

Her family hasn't heard from her.

And so Annette closed her eyes,

and she was quiet.

I instantly saw that 20-year-old girl in real time.

She was being raped and beaten and tortured

and held against her will.

It was just like what happened to me.

It was extremely violent, really horrific.

My whole life leading up to this point,

I would see information about people

that had already passed over.

This was the first time that somebody

who I felt was alive was telling me in real time

what was currently happening to them.

I had never had an experience with somebody

who was predicting their own murder.

This was the first time I was communicating

with somebody who was alive.

She made it a point to communicate with me--

her consciousness with my consciousness in real time.

I knew she wasn't gonna be okay,

but she was showing me what was happening.

She wanted somebody else on the planet

to know what happened to her.

Annette said, she's no longer with us.

And she said that she was murdered

and that she was stabbed.

And I said, when she's found,

she's gonna be found in a suitcase.

I shouldn't ever doubt her,

but it just seemed so far-fetched to me.

It just didn't seem like it would've happened.

A few weeks later, my daughter's friend

called me to tell me that they had found the body.

She was taken in a car forcibly

out of New York City into Queens,

and she was stabbed repeatedly.

It was, like, exactly what Annette had said.

I honestly think that the trauma she went through

probably acts as a homing beacon

to find these other people. - Yeah.

After I had that experience with the girl,

I had another experience with a person named Miles.

His mother, who's a client of mine--

she called me up,

and she said, my son, who's in his 30s--

he's in Chile, and he's been missing.

And do you think you can help me?

I agreed to it.

And the minute I said that out loud,

Miles came through.

He showed me He was on the other side.

He wanted me to convey to her that he had passed over.

And I said, but she's hopeful. What do I do?

He actually danced in front of me physically.

He was showing me the way that he danced.

And he said, you're gonna have to convey it to my mom.

Sure enough, she calls me.

I said, "He's here."

And she's like, "He passed?"

And I said, "I'm so sorry, yes."

And then I started telling her about how he was dancing,

and she started crying hysterically.

And she said, "Oh, my God."

She goes, "I know for sure that it has to be him."

They did find his body after four days.

I now know Miles like he's my friend.

I have talked to him every day.

Miles helped me a tremendous amount.

My mother ended up passing away.

Years later, she came through

to ask for my forgiveness.

And I was angry, and I was having a hard time.

And then Miles put love in my heart for my mother...

and I did forgive her.

Even though I'm still a human being

that has somewhat a hard time with it, I have forgiven her.

And I try to forgive myself

because I was really awful to my mom.

Annette's story is extraordinary

and unique in many ways.

Because of the terrible traumatic experiences

that she's gone through, she's able to say,

"I understand the pain you're going through,

and I want to help you."

I think what the evidence shows us

is that there is something about trauma that...

breaks through someone's regular sense

of ego consciousness.

It seems to be that we have

a regular sort of eggshell around us.

And trauma might crack that eggshell,

letting in different beings

that have always been there.

And this is true in many religions and belief systems.

Trauma might do that.

It might sort of leave the door ajar between realms.

And because there's that crack,

things are able to come in.

When I do readings and people come through,

I used to think that it was to give their loved one...

a message to help them with their grieving.

Now I think it's even more profound than that.

I think that they're trying to let us know--

humanity as a whole-- that we've got it wrong.

They're actually really alive.

They're all around us, but just in a different realm,

a different way.

When I think of death,

I used to think that it was a sad ending

to this person's life.

My husband passed away unexpectedly,

and he has come to me every single day since he passed.

Everybody can do this.

We all can and should be communicating

with the other side.

I'm not afraid to die, yeah.

Annette is a striking example

of a powerful medium.

But for many people, the very idea

of being able to communicate with the dead

is just too impossible for them to imagine,

despite the evidence.

That was certainly true

of the philosopher Stephen E. Braude,

whose life's work is preserved here in the archive.

Steve was a respected academic and committed skeptic.

But one unexpected encounter

forced him to question everything he knew

about the world.

It was a slow day, and some friends came over,

and they said, "Let's play this game called Table Up."

What they meant was, let's have a seance.

To my horror, for the next three hours,

I watched my table rise in the air

and spell out answers in response to questions.

It was broad daylight.

It was my house. It was my table.

That made a great impression on me, as you can imagine.

What is so moving to me

is Steve's interest in using lab conditions,

science itself, to understand this experience

and the experiences of others.

It seems to me the world is generally a lot stranger

than most people appreciate.

And if we've learned anything from the history of science,

it's that humankind is not a very good judge

of the empirically possible.

The world usually turns out

to be more interesting than each generation thinks it is.

He came to believe something beyond our understanding

was happening,

potentially even evidence

of communication from the other side.

He did find compelling evidence

of what we would call mediumship.

If something impossible is really happening,

the next question isn't just, what is it?

It's whether we should engage with it at all.

Some people, like Annette, dedicate their lives

to communicating with the dead.

Others believe opening that door

can have dangerous consequences.

Ivani's story explores

that darker possibility.

I lived my entire life being terrified

of seeing things

that other people didn't really see.

It was exhausting and terrifying.

Eventually, I was told that I was demonically possessed.

I was born in Brazil.

And my entire family

practice spiritism.

It's a belief system that mediums

invite the spirits to speak through them.

It's like a séance.

It was, for many generations, practiced in my family.

I grew up seeing my grandparents

become possessed with their spirit guides.

It was hard for me as a child to deal with that.

Then one night, the spirits came for me.

I was in bed, and I woke up.

And I just sensed that horrible feeling

of something.

And I saw this humanoid...

very dark figure.

Felt like it wanted to hurt me...

and I felt like I was gonna die.

And I couldn't move. I couldn't scream.

There was no way to...

to defend myself...

until it went across, you know, the room

through the wall

that I was able to scream out for my mother.

And my mother explained to me that the shadowy figures

were called vultos

and that they were spirits of the dead.

They didn't know they had died yet,

and they wanted to communicate through me.

She said that I had the gift of being a medium.

I was considered a seer, clairvoyant.

We know that in many Indigenous religions,

people find that abilities like this are hereditary.

They pass through family lines.

And I think this might have been

really difficult for Ivani.

It's something imposed upon her by her family line.

And this is probably really frustrating for her.

These experiences happened many, many times.

I just wanted to be like my sister

and my other cousins.

I felt threatened and afraid and basically terrorized

by these entities

that were surrounding me all the time.

I didn't consider it a gift.

She didn't want it because it frightened her.

And, you know, people would just say,

this is your calling, so you have to live with it,

and you have to learn.

But it's very hard to tell a child to learn that,

because the fear that she felt

was very strong.

When I was 14,

my sister and I stayed with my grandparents.

And we were all watching TV,

and I saw an entity

come in through the hallway.

I could see all the features

of an older man scowling, very angry.

I started screaming.

Some of her fear is probably being projected

onto this figure. - Yeah.

It's sort of this figure that appears very much

like Annette's David.

But to Ivani, it's terrifying.

My grandmother said,

you need to be able to control these spirits.

And that's when one of my aunts invited me

to go to the Umbanda temple.

It's a religion that comes from West Africa--

very similar to voodoo.

When I walked into the Umbanda temple,

the first thing I felt was my heart racing.

And as soon as the drumming

and the music chanting started,

it just took me to another dimension.

And then I was invited into the circle.

The priest told me that my spirit guide was Iemanjá,

which is the goddess of the sea.

I felt like I had found my calling.

I wouldn't be afraid anymore.

I was possessed by her.

In Umbanda, like Haitian voodoo,

they really believe

that the person who can get possessed

and act as a medium is someone who is really chosen

and blessed by the gods and the divinities

and the spirits.

The priest of the Umbanda temple warned me

that I was not allowed to channel

my spirit guides on my own.

It was dangerous.

I believed that...

by worshiping Iemanjá and practicing Umbanda,

all my troubles would end.

But then my father said,

"We are moving to America."

And then things got a lot worse than they ever were.

I turned 16 the day after I came to America.

I didn't have the community.

I didn't have the temple to go to.

It was very difficult.

But I got married.

And I had both our children.

We moved to Florida.

I had everything to be happy for, but I wasn't.

Many times I would not only see the voodoo,

I would feel that presence, that threatening

as I did as a child.

I almost felt like I was being punished

for not being faithful

to my Umbanda faith.

I would go to the beach

and do offerings to Iemanjá and give flowers.

I would light candles

and sing the worship songs to her.

It was almost like,

because I didn't have the temple to go to,

then these spirits were allowed to hurt me again.

In my work, I compare religions.

So I'm very interested

in where different traditions overlap.

Umbanda isn't unique in believing

there are consequences

to engaging with the spirit world.

Across cultures and religions,

we find remarkably similar ideas.

Engaging with the spirit world requires discipline,

guidance, and protection.

Otherwise, it can be extremely dangerous.

These things were not just affecting me.

It got worse, to the point that it was affecting

the entire household-- my children and my husband.

We had problems in the house.

We had, you know, the noises at night.

We used to hear banging on the wall,

you know, right over our bed.

One night we heard crashing, glass breaking,

and we all jumped out of bed and ran,

looking for-- maybe something broke.

And there was no glass, nothing there.

And this happened quite often.

We tried different things.

We tried to sage the house

to clear all the bad spirits,

and the situation continued--

the noises and everything else.

There were just that overwhelming feeling of...

something evil in the house.

In Umbanda, they will say that if a medium is called

and then they don't complete their training,

that negative things will happen to them.

They call it mediumship disorder.

So things could go wrong,

or you might even get possessed by negative spirits of the dead

that they call "obsessors."

My behavior changed to the point

that I became more and more aggressive and angry.

I would be driving, and all of a sudden,

I would drive like a maniac.

It was just...

hard to handle, you know.

Her whole appearance changed.

Her voice changed-- really disturbing.

The children were scared of her.

You know, they didn't like what they saw.

I felt like I had no control over anything anymore.

I was working in my father's printing shop,

and a gentleman walked in,

and he introduced himself.

He said, "I'm Pastor Alexandre."

Meeting Pastor Alexandre

was very important in my life.

And I decided to be a Christian.

I felt that I needed to share that with Ivani

because she was going through so much difficulties,

and I wanted her to feel the peace

that I was feeling at that moment.

I was very angry.

As soon as my sister told me about meeting this pastor,

I immediately felt my spirit guide warning me.

It was like warning bells-- like, do not talk to this man.

He is dangerous.

I said, why are you so gullible?

Why do you believe in this guy?

My sister wanted to invite me over to meet him at her house,

and I said, "Absolutely not."

But things were happening more and more at my house,

and my husband said, "You should go meet this pastor."

Let's give this pastor a chance

to see if he can help us, you know,

as far as getting rid of these shadow people

and the noises and everything else.

I was adamantly against it, but I did go.

As soon as I walked in and I saw him,

I felt absolute hatred for him.

I said I wanted to leave.

And he said, "Well, I'm leaving, too--let's pray."

This laughter just poured out of me.

It wasn't even my voice.

And when I looked up,

my sister told me that my eyes were pitch-black

and I said, "Help me."

She started twisting like a convulsion.

Pastor said, "You need an exorcism."

I was horrified, thinking that these spirits

that I always thought were my spirit guides

were actually demons.

I blacked out.

I just remember feeling so much hatred

towards this man.

She looked very scary. Didn't look like Ivani anymore.

She looked...

distorted.

She was in the corner--

Ivani's body with the entity.

And the entity was laughing and screaming

and doing all this noise.

He had a cross.

As soon as the pastor put the cross on her forehead,

the entity started screaming,

yelling through Ivani's mouth...

"Stop, stop!"

"Take it away.

"You're burning me. You're burning me.

You're hurting me. Stop! Stop!"

The pastor said, "You don't like this?

Then you leave."

I screamed.

I remember there was a blinding light,

and immediately I open my eyes.

I ran to her,

and she goes like this-- "What happened?"

I said, "Oh, my God."

I said, "You are free. You are completely free."

The deliverance started in the afternoon,

close to, I would say, 5:00.

And it went to...

past close to 2:00 in the morning.

I converted to Christianity after that.

I never saw any of the vultos, the shadow people, again.

I was completely set free.

I believe that I was a medium.

I believe that everything I saw was real.

The only difference is, what I believed before

was that these were spirits of the dead,

or these were spirit guides.

But now, since my conversion,

I believe that they were actually...

demonic beings.

When Ivani goes through this exorcism with the pastor,

it seemed like he was successful

at driving out these spirits and bringing peace,

which is what she desired in her life.

From an Umbanda perspective and based on my own research,

pastors succeeded in driving out those spirits,

and they said, "All right, we tried.

"We're gonna go to someone else.

"This was your gift. This was your calling.

"Your ancestors wanted this for you,

"but you really, really didn't want it,

"and we fought to try to stay.

"And if this is not what you want,

we are going to finally let you go."

While Annette leans into it, Ivani pushes it away.

Because she's an immigrant,

she's dealing with American culture and Brazilian culture

and how to balance the two, and she has to choose,

and she goes through a lot of challenges.

I think the stories of Annette and Ivani

both suggest that the soul can survive bodily death

and that very special people can access a place

where they can communicate with spirits.

Annette has learned to harness her ability

to speak to the dead and use it for good.

But Ivani's mediumship was involuntary.

In reality, it was a possession

masquerading as mediumship,

which is why she had an exorcism.

For thousands of years,

humanity has tried to communicate with the dead,

yet we still don't understand what we're reaching for

or the dangers of letting it reach back.

By preserving stories

like those of Annette and Ivani in the archives,

we're moving closer and closer

to answering one of the oldest questions of human existence.

If consciousness survives death,

what other forces are out there?