Signs From a Loved One Who Has Passed: What They Mean

Sep 25

8 min read

TL;DR — Most people who sense a loved one after a death are describing something researchers treat as common and benign. A 2020 review in Schizophrenia Bulletin found that between 47% and 82% of bereaved people report at least one sensory or quasi-sensory experience of the person who died, and a felt sense of presence is the most commonly reported of all. Signs are not a test. Not receiving one says nothing about the strength of your bond.

A woman wrote to me about a hummingbird.

It came to the same window every morning for eleven days after her husband died. On the twelfth day it stopped. She had two questions, and she was more frightened of the second one than the first. Was it him? And had she done something to make it leave?

I think about that second question more than the first. It sits underneath almost every message I get about signs, and it is the one almost nobody answers.

What counts as a sign from a loved one who has passed?

A sign is any moment that arrives carrying a sense of contact or recognition. A bird at an unlikely time. A song on in a store. A scent in a room where nothing should smell like that. A dream that feels different in kind from other dreams. There is no official list, and no medium owns one. What makes a moment a sign is that it landed as one for the person it happened to.

The ones people describe to me most often fall into a few shapes. An animal that turns up repeatedly, usually a bird or a dragonfly or a particular dog. Music, which is the most common of all, because a song can be so exactly tied to one person that hearing it in the wrong place feels like being addressed. Smells, especially tobacco, a specific perfume, or something baking. Electrical oddities. Numbers and names that cluster in a week in a way that starts to feel less like coincidence and more like emphasis.

And dreams, which get their own category, because people are unusually careful about them. Almost everyone who tells me about a dream they think was a visit says some version of the same sentence first: it was not like a normal dream. They are usually describing vividness, a sense of the person being fully themselves rather than a dream-collage, and a quality of the dream being about something rather than being random.

I am not going to tell you which of these counts. That is not a decision that belongs to me.

How common is it to sense someone who has died?

Far more common than most people realize. A 2020 interdisciplinary review in Schizophrenia Bulletin gathered decades of studies and reported that between 47% and 82% of bereaved people describe at least one sensory or quasi-sensory experience of the person who died. A felt sense of presence is the most frequently reported, followed by hearing and seeing.

The individual studies inside that review give a sense of the range. In one group of fifty bereaved spouses, 52% reported a sense of presence and 30% reported hearing something. In a much larger sample of 293, the figures were lower but still substantial. Methods differ, populations differ, and the numbers move around. The pattern does not.

The reviewers' conclusion matters as much as the numbers. They describe these experiences as benign for the vast majority of people, and as a common and normal occurrence in bereavement that most people find comforting or reassuring. That is a meaningful thing for a psychiatric journal to say plainly, because for a long stretch of the twentieth century this kind of experience got filed under something to be worried about.

I want to be precise about what that research does and does not say. It documents how often people have these experiences and how they tend to feel about them afterward. It is not a study of whether the dead can reach us. I am not going to hand you a journal article and tell you it settles that question, because it does not, and pretending otherwise would not be fair to you. Those are two different questions and they get answered in two different rooms.

Why don't I get signs when I ask for them?

Because asking changes how you are looking. Grief makes people scan, and scanning is a different state from noticing. Most of the experiences described to me arrived while the person was occupied with something else: driving, washing dishes, halfway through a sentence about something unrelated. Wanting it badly is not the obstacle. Watching for it every waking minute usually is.

There is a practical version of this that has nothing to do with spirit. When you are monitoring for something, you generate a lot of candidates and you reject almost all of them, and the rejecting is exhausting. People describe coming home from a day of looking for their mother everywhere and feeling further away from her than when they started.

The people who tell me about the experiences that shook them are almost never the people who were trying hardest.

What if I haven't had a sign at all?

Then you are in very good company, and it says nothing about your relationship. In the same body of research, a substantial share of bereaved people report no such experiences at all. Temperament, sleep, how you process loss, and whether you grew up around people who talked about this all shape whether it happens. Absence is not rejection.

This is the part I most want you to take with you, so I am going to say it without decoration. Some of the most devoted, most attentive, most heartbroken people I have ever worked with have never had a single experience they would call a sign. It is not a measure of love and it is not a measure of worthiness. There is no queue and you are not at the back of it.

The hardest version of this is when someone else in the family is having experiences and you are not. A sister who dreams about your father every few weeks while you get nothing. That comparison can do real damage, and I would rather you hear from me that it is not evidence of anything about you.

Is there a way to invite a sign without forcing it?

There is a way to make room, which is not the same as summoning. Three things help more than anything else I know: keeping a short record instead of a vigil, giving the week an unhurried hour where your attention is not on a screen, and asking once rather than continuously. None of it is a guarantee, and I would not trust anyone who told you otherwise.

Keep a record, not a vigil. One line in your phone. The date, what happened, and nothing else. No interpretation, no verdict, no deciding. The point is that you stop carrying it all in your head, and that a month from now you can look at the list rather than trying to remember. People are often surprised by what the list says. They are also often relieved to find it is shorter than the anxiety suggested, or longer.
Give it an hour with nothing in it. A drive with the radio off. A walk on the same route. Time in the garden. The common thread in what people describe to me is that they were doing something with their hands and nothing with their phone. You are not meditating and you do not have to be good at it. You are just leaving a gap.
Ask once, out loud, and then stop. Say what you want to say to them, plainly, and then let it go for a while. Asking every hour is not more sincere than asking once. It is usually just more painful, and it keeps you in the scanning state that makes noticing harder.

If nothing comes, nothing comes. You have still spent an hour a week in the company of someone you love, which was never a waste of time.

What I believe, said separately

Everything above is either research or what people have told me, and research is the only thing in this post I will ask you to take on that basis.

Separately, and on my own account: in my work I experience the people we love as continuing. That is my belief and my experience, and it is not what the studies above are about. I keep the two apart on purpose. You are welcome to sit with either one, or neither, and it will not change how I would work with you.

What I will say is that across all the hummingbirds and songs and dreams people have brought me, I have never once thought the honest response was to talk someone out of it.

Back to the hummingbird

I wrote back to that woman and told her roughly what I have told you. I do not think love keeps a schedule. I do not think a bird leaving is a verdict on anything, and I do not think she failed a test she was never entered into.

Eleven mornings happened. Nobody can take those from her. And she does not have to decide what they were in order to keep them.

If you are carrying a question like hers, you are welcome to write to me. And if you would like to sit down properly with it, you can see how sessions work or book one directly.

How Soon After a Death Should You See a Medium? | What Happens in an Evidential Mediumship Session | About Darren

Frequently asked questions

Is there a most common sign from a loved one who has passed?

A felt sense of presence is the single most frequently reported experience in the research, ahead of hearing or seeing anything. In practice, music comes up more than almost anything else when people describe it to me, probably because songs attach so tightly to specific people.

Do signs stop after a while?

Many people describe them clustering in the first months and becoming less frequent later, though the research does not establish a fixed pattern and plenty of people report experiences many years on. A gap does not mean something has ended.

Is it normal to hear a loved one's voice after they die?

Yes. Auditory experiences appear across the studies in the 2020 review, in some samples reported by around a third of bereaved people. The reviewers describe these experiences as benign for the vast majority.

Should I be worried if I am seeing or hearing my loved one?

Most of the time this is an ordinary part of grief rather than a warning sign. If the experiences are distressing rather than comforting, if they are frightening you, or if they come with confusion about what is real, it is worth talking to a doctor or a therapist. That is a sensible step, not a failure of faith.

Can a medium tell me whether something was really a sign?

I would be careful with anyone who promises that. I can tell you what I experience in a session, and you are the one who decides what it means. One hundred percent accuracy cannot be guaranteed by anyone doing this work honestly.