Signs: gifts from dead?

Here's one of the stories Bob tells about his daughter: About a year after Bailey died, Phran started noticing that whenever she drove past the accident site, a sound came out of the radio, even if the radio was off. Bob describes the sound as "a Morse code cadence," and at first he dismissed it as an electrical problem. A few weeks later, driving their truck instead of the car, Phran heard the same sound. Then the Ginsbergs started hearing it in other places — on the telephone and on the TV, even when the TV was turned off, and once over the public address system when University of Arizona researcher Dr. Gary Schwartz was giving a lecture about afterlife research.

Earlier this year the Ginsbergs launched a Web site called thesignregistry.com. The rules: When you're still alive, think of the sign you'll want to send your loved ones after your death, then log onto the Web site to store your secret. The Forever Family Foundation notifies the designated loved ones that you've registered a sign but doesn't divulge what it is. After you die, if loved ones think they've received an after-death communication from you, they can log onto the site to check whether the sign they believe they've received can be verified.

"It's not 100 percent scientific," acknowledges Phran. In fact there's no way the Ginsbergs can totally eliminate fraud on the site, says researcher Schwartz, who is honorary president of the Forever Family Foundation. The sign registry, he says, is "more of a service" than a research tool. "But, having said that, it is possible that meaningful data will be collected. But it will be of the exploratory sort: Let's amass data and see if there's something there."

Start hunting around in the "survival" field and you'll soon stumble on Schwartz's work. A professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona, he is also director of the school's Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, where he does survival research. It's not your typical academic pursuit, especially since he is most known for his afterlife experiments using mediums who purport to receive information from the dead.

Contacted by the Ginsbergs after the Morse code episodes, Schwartz proposed an experiment. He told Phran to ask Bailey to contact one of his research mediums if, in fact, she was sending a code to her parents. "The next day," Bob reports, "I got an e-mail from Gary, which was the forward of an e-mail from the medium. It said, 'Somebody is sending me Morse code.' "