What to Wear In the Afterlife? – Interview TWO With Rock Star Animal Communicator Charles Peden

“I can communicate with insects, and I can communicate with whales,” animal communicator Charles Peden told Digital Dying when we spoke five years ago.

Since then, more than 165 people have commented on our story about Charles and his work communicating with dead, lost, and misbehaving pets, as well as humans who have passed (for readings, we recommend people contact Charles on his website). A lot has happened on earth in the last five years, and we figured it was time to get back in touch with Charles and see who he was chatting with on the other side. Turns out massive hurricanes and fires have thrown the world of animals and humans into disarray, and Charles has been quite busy. Plus, he’s got a new plan to literally bring everyone and their mother into the afterlife.

First thing’s first, how is business going?

I am up to my eyeballs in work. I’ve got readings coming out of my ears. I actually was approached by two production companies simultaneously, they want me to send a reel so they can pitch a show to Animal Planet. I just had an article come out in Chewy.com. I am also doing classes. Right now I have 27 students tuning in from all over the world, South Africa, Australia, Hong Kong. The class teaches people how to communicate telepathically. There are four lessons, one is an introduction to telepathy, two is communicating with live animals, three is communicating with spirits and four is working with your spirit guide. Basically, I am taking the twelve and a half years of knowledge I’ve acquired since starting down this road and sharing the techniques and insights with others. Like singing, communicating is a talent but also something we all possess the capability to do, and I can show people how.

So, you’re saying we all have the ability to talk to dead people?

Yes. It’s all based on energy. If you’ve ever had a situation where you’re weighing one decision versus another, “Should I go left? Should I go right?” You may hear this invisible buzzing energy when you think of one choice versus the other. That might be a grandparent or spirit saying, “Do it, go to the right, choose that one.” And then the other choice goes cold. It feels like you have this baseline emotional state then all the sudden you experience a ratcheting up of your emotions, almost like someone has reached inside and grabbed your thermostat. What you’re feeling is their energy reaching inside you. That is just someone reaching back through the veil, in order to help you.

Why do spirits nudge us from across the veil?

You have heard the expression “the other side”. I think that’s a horrible name for what it is. It’s not even another side, it is here. Say you crash your car, the airbags deploy but you are gone. Now, what are you going to do? You’re probably going to walk home. You still care about your family, your friends. The thing you are going to do is connect with those who have preceded you, your grandma, your dad etcetera. We continue to have an interest in the same things we liked in this life and the same people we liked because at some point we’re going to join them again. Those individuals that have already had time in the physical and are now backstage are not off the stage. They are still on the stage and can hold up cue cards and say, “Don’t put your hand on that door!” And the person on the stage can hear that.

So we all get to hang out backstage together—with all the dead people we have ever known?

We all meet up backstage. You have full closure. There are director notes. Then we all get to audition for another production. Once you get backstage everything gets stripped away, everyone’s equal. There are no secrets. The problem is that every single thing that we do, those backstage can look back and see what has transpired. We have no privacy. Anything we did while living, once our loved ones pass, they will know. In addition to that when you are in spirit you can read everything else, just like dogs can read people. Whether or not we volunteer that information is irrelevant, it is there. And it is extremely, extremely detailed and includes all your secrets, kind of like having your resume stapled to your head.

Seems like you are doing a lot of human readings, are you still doing pet readings too?

Oh yeah, about 80 percent of my readings are still animals. Like today, my client had three animals she wanted me to communicate with. Two had passed and one was a new puppy (I’ve changed the names here to protect my client’s privacy). One dog, Sage, had been struck by a car three weeks ago. We connected with her and she told me very clearly she was eight, and she told me all sorts of stories. In fact, it was an incredibly detailed description, it was a fantastic connection with her. Then we spoke with Bandit, and Bandit had died of renal failure at 16. Claire was a new puppy in the home and had exhibited behavior similar to what Sage used to do, so Sage was trying to come through Claire. That is common. In my second appointment I connected with a husky, he was absolutely gorgeous and very easy to talk to. My third client had a living cat who was dealing with some really bad itching problems and thought it was from stress. Well, I talked to the cat and the cat told me he had no stress in his life. The cat said it has to do with his food. So, that was pretty simple and now we are going to look at changing up his diet and then talking again.

There has been some major natural disasters of late, Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, the California wildfires—Have you communicated with people affected by some of these events?

I have been very closely involved. Let’s talk about the fires first. Santa Rosa, holy cow, I have friends who evacuated and they came back to the area and it was toast. I have friends who lost houses. That one hit me personally. I think over 20 people died. One client, I had lost her sister in the fire, and she wanted me to contact her. So I reached out to bring her through and I said, “Bring me something that is not public record.” Immediately, I feel braille under my fingertips. I said, “Wow, what’s your connection to the blind?” She died in her vehicle, she was in the garage trying to get the garage door open and the garage had lost power and then she got asphyxiated in the car and passed out, then she burnt. Her sister said she donated her estate to the school of the blind, hence the brail. So that was a solid connection.

What about the animals—Did you have any animal related natural disaster clients?

I had a client who had horses in the Santa Rosa fire, they were actually left in the stall and that was horrible. My client was boarding her horses at another facility and couldn’t make it over there because roads were blocked. And the people who owned that property didn’t open the gates for the horses, I feel they were trying to grab their own important documents rather than help the animals. That was my understanding in talking to the horses because the horses told me that they had been neglected. They died in their stalls. They were trying to get out and couldn’t and in the process, they had beaten themselves up. They didn’t actually burn to death, they died from the smoke. So that was pretty intense. Sometimes I get off the phone after something like that and need another 20 minutes to compose myself. There’s nothing good with an incident like that.

In a case like that, will the horses remember the horror of the death itself?

It’s like going through security. Yeah, it is awful, but then you are at your destination and it’s like, “Vegas baby!” Those who have departed, they are not fixated on the departure gate, we are. Those we have departed, all the sudden the information stream grinds to a halt, it’s like a big black void, nothing. But for those who go through that experience, like the horses, the death itself is an extremely small experience, and it’s easy for them to put that in a little box and package away because that is not where they are anyway. They are in a completely different place, and they are still themselves. When we step out of a physical body we still feel like ourselves, we still feel like we have two arms, two legs, a head, and a horse feels like they have two arms, two legs, a head, and a tail. We still feel intact, the only difference is now we are invisible and can walk right through anything. Other humans can’t see you, but all the animals are aware of your presence. Once you are in spirit and go to wherever it is you are going you really don’t look back at your passing and think how horrible it was.

Where does an animal go after passing?

For most of the animals, there is no incentive for them to go elsewhere after passing. For many years they had this routine with you, and they can still stick to that routine, except they don’t need to take time for bathroom breaks and eat and all that. So after passing animals will come and watch TV with you, say a show about the French Revolution, and do whatever it is they used to do.

Given climate change and species extinction and all the environmental contamination going on in the world, from your connection with animals do you get the feeling they…

Want us gone?

Yes, exactly!

I got to tell you about this raccoon I had a chat with, I think its name was Iris. The client was an animal rehabber in Kentucky. I reached out to the racoon and said, “You got to tell me something she can confirm,” and the raccoon showed me a weight bench and a TV set, and I told my client and she confirmed the raccoon would hang out in the living room where there was a weight bench and sit and watch TV with her. I then asked the raccoon how it found her home. She said, “I was orphaned, my mom was hit by a car and I was clinging to her.” I asked the client and it checked out. The client had let the raccoon go back into the wild and my client wanted to check in on her. It was a fantastic report. The raccoon said, I am hanging out with other raccoons, and they’re being good to me. I reached back out a few weeks later and the wild raccoon was like, “I can’t talk to you anymore because you are humans and the wild raccoons are going to kick me out of their troupe!” Apparently the whole coonskin cap thing, they don’t like that. So we don’t have a good reputation with animals.

Oh yeah, what do the animals think about us?

They think we are pretty stupid, to be honest. I mean, we think we are superior, we are supposed to be the top thing on this planet and everything else a few rungs below us. But here’s the rub, do you know any other species that destroys its environment to get through the summer or winter. I mean fracking and oil and all that, and even wind farms kill birds, so there are obviously some problems here. When animals look at us they look at a species that is full of itself, that thinks they are superior but they are not, that is actually destroying the environment in many, many ways. And for the pursuit of what? Money? Okay, then we accumulate how much wealth? Even a billion is never enough. So, animals are aware of this kind of stuff. Wealth is simply power, a sort of balance of energy if you will. Or a lack of balance.

Charles Peden is presently living in Tucson, Arizona with a family of humans, and animals: two dogs, two cats, two rabbits, and numerous wild lizards. For his website click here. He has also gotten into photography.