Erlendur Haraldsson is an Icelandic psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Iceland1, where he taught from 1973 to 19992 after completing a PhD in psychology at the University of Freiburg in 19723. Since the 1970s he has researched apparitions, mediumship, and child reincarnation cases4. He was among a small group of researchers, alongside Ian Stevenson, Jürgen Keil, Satwant Pasricha, Antonia Mills and later Jim Tucker, who studied children reporting past-life memories in young children5; together they examined over twenty-five hundred such cases, identifying a matching previous person in roughly two-thirds6. Tucker reported that Haraldsson’s follow-up work found a surprising number of these children still recalled past-life details as adults7.
A major strand of Haraldsson’s work concerns after-death communication (ADC). In the mid-1970s he surveyed 902 Icelanders on whether they had ever sensed the presence of a deceased person8, an inquiry later published as The Departed Among the Living: An Investigative Study of Afterlife Encounters, in which thirty-one percent of respondents reported having had such an experience9. He went on to conduct in-depth interviews with over 450 people who described ADCs10, publishing findings including his paper “Alleged Encounters with the Dead: The Importance of Violent Death in 337 New Cases”11. According to this research, in 86 percent of cases occurring within twenty-four hours of death the percipient had not known the person had died12. About half of ADC events occurred within the first year after death, and three-quarters within four years13. He found that 28 percent of the deaths involved were sudden, unexpected or violent14, a rate far exceeding the 7.8 percent of violent deaths recorded in the general Icelandic population between 1941 and 197015; he attributed the resulting male predominance among communicators to men being more likely to die violently than women16. He reported a similarly elevated proportion of violent deaths among apparition cases17, and stated that violent death features predominantly across apparitions, cases of the reincarnation type, and mediumship18, observing that such cases often have an invasive character since the deceased are frequently unknown to those who experience them19. He considered these findings, taken together, to support the survival hypothesis20, while concluding more broadly that it seemed impossible to reject all the accounts he collected as deception or mistaken perception9. Separately, in 1987 work with Loftur Gissurarson, the Anomalica record on this research states no association was found between high-scoring Anomalous Cognition (AC) trials and low Geomagnetic Fluctuations (GMF)21.
Haraldsson also examined drop-in communicators1, investigating, with Stevenson, the case involving Runolfur Runolfsson (“Runki”) as it emerged through the mediumship of Hafsteinn Bjornsson22, a case previously described by Alan Gauld23. The two researchers judged it infeasible to attribute all the case’s information to any single source24, and considered the simplest explanation to be that Runki had survived physical death and communicated through Bjornsson’s mediumship25.
Haraldsson personally investigated in detail the physical mediumship of Indridi Indridason26, researching Indridason’s work at the University of Iceland27 and publishing on drop-in communicators connected to it over more than forty years28. Central to this work was the case of Emil Jensen, a communicator he considered comparable to the “Runki’s leg” case described by Gauld29, and one he regarded, together with a case of independent voices singing in a language unknown to Indridason, as among the best evidence for human survival he had encountered30. He argued that telepathy or clairvoyance among living persons could not adequately explain the strongest drop-in cases31. His records indicate that the 63 Store Kongensgade fire, Copenhagen likely began after nine o’clock, eleven o’clock Danish time32. He did not closely examine the rediscovered Minute books of the Experimental Society (Iceland) until 2008, an event he described as perhaps the most memorable finding of his life33, noting that no attempt had previously been made to verify the Jensen communicator’s biographical statements34. In 2009 he visited the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where he found annual volumes listing nineteenth-century businesspeople and, in the 1890 volume, a single manufacturer named Emil Jensen registered at Store Kongensgade 67, two doors from the fire at number 6335. Later that year he searched Copenhagen census records36, which showed Jensen living with four unmarried sisters at the same address37. He also checked the Copenhagen newspapers Politiken and Berlingske Tidende for an obituary of Jensen and found none38. All seven statements attributed to the Jensen communicator in the minute book of 1905-12-11 were subsequently verified39. Haraldsson concluded that identifying Jensen more than a century later confirmed him as an actual person, unknown to Indridason, who had died before appearing in Indridason’s séance room40; author Leslie Kean similarly described Jensen as a drop-in communicator whose biographical details allowed him to be identified as someone who had genuinely lived41, an account documented in Emil Jensen’s probate court document referenced in Haraldsson’s research alongside the Death of Emil Jensen (1898).