The evidence for life beyond death comes from several sources. There are cases of hauntings and apparitions, mediumistic communications and automatic writings, possessions, incidences of child prodigies, and ostensible reincarnation data. A large amount of this evidence was gathered during the heyday of spiritualism in the nineteenth century, and is recorded in The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by F. W. H. Myers. Modern research places a much greater emphasis on laboratory studies and is predicated upon a much different approach to the evidence.

Many levels of the human personality clearly exist and are still generally unexplored and untapped. Yet a number of cases can be cited where even such explanations do not account for all the observed phenomena.