The Watseka Wonder was cited by Frederick Myers of the Society for Psychical Research as one of the main evidences for survival of the human personality after death. From the total body of evidence available to him, Myers drew the following conclusions about spirits and the spirit world: “Spirits may be able to recognize spatial relations (so that they can manifest at an agreed place) but they are themselves probably independent of space; their interactions with each other are all telepathic, and the laws of telepathy are non-spatial laws . . . The spirits of the recently dead may retain telepathic links with spirits still in the flesh and may endeavor to contact them, or to ‘guide’ their activities. Beyond and behind such spirits, but still with affinities to them, are the spirits whose advancement in knowledge and understanding has linked them in fellowship to higher souls” (Gauld 1968, pp. 309–310). These are, according to Myers, linked to still higher ones, and all are linked to a Universal Spirit, the source of love and wisdom.
Ian Stevenson, known for his work on past life memories, also did work on xenoglossy cases, in which subjects manifest inexplicable abilities to speak foreign languages. Xenoglossy cases can sometimes involve past life memories, but possession is another possible explanation. One of Stevenson’s principal xenoglossy studies involved an Indian woman, Uttara Huddar, and her case does seem to involve possession.
Uttara Huddar was born on March 14, 1941, in the town of Nagpur, in the Indian province of Maharashtra. Like most of the inhabitants of this province, Uttara was of the Maratha group and spoke the Marathi language. Both of Uttara’s parents were Marathas. In her twenties she was hospitalized for some physical disorders. During her stay in the hospital, she took lessons in meditation from a yogi, and afterwards, during altered states of consciousness, began speaking a new language and manifesting a new personality. Dr. Joshi (pseudonym), one of the physicians at the hospital, recognized the language as Bengali. Because the Bengali she spoke contained no English loan words, it appeared to date to the nineteenth century. After Uttara returned from the hospital, her parents began to try to find an explanation for their daughter’s strange behavior. They consulted M. C. Bhattacarya, a Bengali who served as a priest at a temple of goddess Kali, in Nagpur. To Bhattacarya, Uttara identified herself as a Bengali woman named Sharada, and gave many details about her life. All of this was communicated in Bengali. From the information given by Sharada, it appeared to Bhattacarya that she considered herself to be living some time in the past. She said her father, whose name was Brajesh Chattopadaya, lived near a Shiva temple in the town of Burdwan. Her mother’s name was Renukha Devi, and her stepmother’s name was Anandamoyi. She gave her husband’s name as Swami Vishwanath Mukhopadaya, and said her father-in-law’s name was Nand Kishore Mukhopadaya. When asked where she had been living before she came to Nagpur, Sharada replied that she had been living with her maternal aunt in the town of Saptagram. This information was recorded in Bhattacarya’s diary for the year 1974 (Stevenson 1984, pp.73–75).
In May of 1975, Dr. R. K. Sinha, making use of this information, visited the Saptagram region of Bengal, and attempted to verify some of the details of Sharada’s life. Satinath Chatterji, a living member of the Chattopadaya family, gave a genealogy of his male ancestors in which the name of Brajesh Chattopadaya appeared. Dr. Sinha got from Chatterji further names of Brajesh Chattopadaya’s relatives and contemporaries. Returning to Nagpur, Dr. Sinha questioned Uttara, without revealing any of the new genealogical information he had obtained. Stevenson (1984, pp. 88–89) reported: “The names Sharada gave for her father, grandfather, one brother (Kailasnath), and two uncles (Devnath and Shivnath) all appear in the genealogy with the relationship she attributed to them. In addition, she told him the name of another male relative, Mathuranath, without specifying how he was related to her. The genealogy does not include the name of Srinath, one of the brothers mentioned by Sharada. His existence, however, is established in a deed of agreement for the settlement of property between Devnath, on the one hand, and Kailasnath and Srinath, on the other. The deed is dated March, 1827. This property settlement between the uncle and two nephews indicates tacitly that the nephews’ father, Brajesh, had died by March 1827, and presumably not long before the property settlement. Satinath Chatterji had another deed (also dated in 1827), which identified Mathuranath as the grandson of Shivnath, who was one of Sharada’s (presumed) uncles.”
How are Uttara’s impressions to be explained? One explanation is that she was getting this information from living sources, by a process of “super-extrasensory perception.” In other words, perhaps she had drawn on knowledge existing in the mind of Satinath Chatterji and other persons living in Bengal in the 1970s. But Stevenson pointed out that Sharada’s language abilities could not have been acquired by simple extrasensory perception. Such a skill requires actual practice for its acquisition. Stevenson (1984, pp. 160–161) therefore concluded: “Any person (or personality) demonstrating the ability to speak a language must have learned the language himself some time before the occasion of demonstrating this ability. And if we can further exclude the possibility that the person concerned did not learn the language earlier in his life, it follows that it was learned by some other personality manifesting through him. That other personality could be a previous incarnation of the person concerned or it could be a discarnate personality temporarily manifesting through the living subject—possessing the subject, we might say.” In the case of Uttara, Stevenson showed that she had not learned Bengali before the time of the manifestation of the personality of Sharada. She had learned a few words of Bengali, but did not possess the fluent command of the language demonstrated by Sharada (Stevenson 1984, pp.
134–135, 137–138, 140, 146).
Philosopher David Ray Griffin proposes that Uttara was very unhappy with her childless, husbandless life, and wanted to adopt another personality (Sharada had a husband and children). Making use of his theory of surviving mental impressions (as opposed to surviving souls with memories), he concluded that Uttara, using a superpsi faculty, selected Sharada’s memories from some cosmic reservoir of memories and constructed from them an alternate personality for herself (Griffin
1997, pp. 180–182). This does not, however, account for Uttara’s mastery of Bengali. Recollection would allow only simple repetition of things said in the past, not the ability to compose new speech. Possession of Uttara’s body by the surviving Sharada personality seems to be the most reasonable explanation.
Here is a final detail. Uttara, speaking as Sharada, recalled that she had been bitten on her right toe by a snake and had died. Uttara’s mother said that when she was pregnant with Uttara, she repeatedly dreamed that a cobra was about to bite her on the right toe. The dreams stopped upon Uttara’s birth. Uttara herself had a great fear of snakes as a child. When the personality of Sharada overtook Uttara, she would sometimes experience physical transformations suggestive of a snake bite. Her tongue and mouth became dark, and there was a black area on her toe. During one such episode she pointed to the toe and said that a king cobra had just bitten her there. Stevenson (1984, p. 112) noted: “A present-day member of the Chattopadaya family, furthermore, reports hearing that during the time of his great grandmother a female member of the family had died of a snakebite.”
Apparitions of Departed Humans