Having considered cases of communication through mediums and cases of possession as evidence for spirits of departed humans continuing to exist in some other level of a cosmic hierarchy, let us now look at cases of apparitions of departed humans. Prominent scientists have taken such cases seriously. For example, William James said: “Science may keep saying: ‘Such things are simply impossible’; yet so long as the stories multiply in different lands, and so few are positively explained away, it is bad method to ignore them. They should at least accrete for further use. As I glance back at my reading of the past few years . . . ten cases immediately rise to my mind” (Murphy and Ballou 1960, pp. 62–63). Let’s now look at a few cases. I agree with James that it is “bad method to ignore them.”
The astronomer Camille Flammarion (1909, p. 303) accepted “the possibility of communication between incarnate and discarnate spirits.” He added (1909, p. 303) that his own research had led him to conclusions favoring “the plurality of inhabited worlds . . . and the indestructibility of souls, as well as of atoms.” Flammarion’s masterpiece was Death and its mystery, a three volume compilation of evidence for the existence of the soul apart from the body and its survival after the death of the body. The book contains several apparition cases.
The following is an account of an apparition that appeared about two hours after death (Flammarion 1923, v. 3, pp. 133–136). It was recorded by Charles Tweedale of the Royal Astronomical Society of London in the english mechanic and World of Science (July 20, 1906). Tweedale recalled an incident from his boyhood. He went to bed early on the evening of January 10, 1879. He awoke and saw a form taking shape before him in the moonlight. He noticed that the moonlight was coming in from the window on the south side of his room. The form gradually became clearer until he recognized his grandmother’s face. She was wearing “an old-fashioned cap which was fluted in a shell-like design.” After a few seconds, the form gradually disappeared. At breakfast, Tweedale told his parents about his vision. His father left the table without speaking. His mother explained, “This morning your father told me that he had waked up in the night, and that he had seen his mother standing near his bed, but just at the moment when he wished to speak to her she had disappeared.” A few hours later the family received a telegram bearing the news of the death of Tweedale’s grandmother. Tweedale later learned that his father’s sister (Tweedale’s aunt) had also seen the apparition on the night of the old woman’s death. The death occurred at fifteen minutes past midnight. Tweedale’s father had noted the time of his vision as two o’clock in the morning. Tweedale himself did not have a timepiece, but from the position of the moon, he estimated that his vision had also taken place at two in the morning. The vision of Tweedale’s aunt also took place well after the reported time of death. Tweedale stated: “This proves that we are not concerned with a telepathic or subjective manifestation, occurring before death or at the very moment of death, but with a really objective apparition occurring after life had left the body. We may conclude, therefore, that the dead woman, though apparently lifeless, was sufficiently alive some hours later to manifest herself to different persons separated by considerable distances” (Flammarion 1923, v. 3, p. 135). Details of the report given by Tweedale were confirmed by his mother and his aunt’s surviving husband.
From all the evidence recorded in his books, Flammarion (1923 v.3, p. 348) arrived at five conclusions: “(1) The soul exists as a real entity, independent of the body. (2) It is endowed with faculties still unknown to science. (3) It may act at a distance, telepathically, without the intermediary of the senses. (4) There exists in nature a psychic element, the character of which is still hidden from us. . . . (5) The soul survives the physical organism and may manifest itself after death.”
Concerning the relationship of the soul to the body, Flammarion (1923 v. 3, p. 346) said: “The body is but an organic garment of the spirit; it dies, it changes, it disintegrates: the spirit remains. . . . The soul cannot be destroyed.” This is remarkably similar to the following statement from Bhagavad Gita (2.22): “As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.”
On a Friday night in April of 1880, Mrs. N. J. Crans went to sleep in New York. She reported in a letter to Richard Hodgson, of the American Society for Psychical Research: “After lying down to rest, I remember feeling a drifting sensation, of seeming almost as if I was going out of the body. My eyes were closed; soon I realized that I was, or seemed to be, going fast somewhere. All seemed dark to me; suddenly I realized that I was in a room; then I saw Charley lying in a bed asleep; then I took a look at the furniture of the room, and distinctly saw every article—even to a chair at the head of the bed, which had one of the pieces broken in the back.” Charley was her son-in-law, Charles A. Kernochan, who was living in Central City, South Dakota. Mrs. Crans continued: “In a moment the door opened and my spirit-daughter Allie came into the room and stepped up to the bed and stooped down and kissed Charley. He seemed to at once realize her presence, and tried to hold her, but she passed right out of the room about like a feather blown by the wind.” Allie was the daughter of Mrs. Crans and the wife of Charles Kernochan. She had died in December 1879, about five months before this incident. Mrs. Crans told several people about her dream, and then on Sunday wrote a letter to Charles. Meanwhile, Charles himself had written a letter which crossed hers in the mail, delivery of which took about six days between New York and South Dakota. In this letter, Charles wrote, “Oh, my darling mamma Crans! My God! I dreamed I saw Allie last Friday night!” Mrs. Crans said that Charles described Allie “just as I saw her; how she came into the room and he cried and tried to hold her, but she vanished.” After Charles sent this letter, he received the letter sent by Mrs. Crans, and wrote another letter in reply. Mrs. Crans said that Charles “wrote me all that I had seen was correct, even to every article of furniture in the room, also as his dream had appeared to him” (Myers 1903, v. 1, p. 244). In this case, it appears that both percipients were in the dream state when Allie appeared to them. One might propose that there was an unconscious telepathic link between Mrs. Crans and Charles, and that together they manufactured the joint appearance in an intersubjective dream state. But there is hardly any less reason to suppose that there could have been a third party to this intersubjective encounter, namely Allie herself, in some subtle material form.
General Sir Arthur Becher was serving with the British Army in
India when he saw an apparition (Myers 1903, v. 1, pp. 250–251). In March,
1867, he went to the hill station of Kussowlie (Kussoorie) to inspect a house where he and his family were planning to reside during the hot season. He was accompanied by his son. During the night, the General woke up to find an Indian woman standing near his bed. As he got up, the figure went through a door leading from the bedroom into a bathroom. The General followed, but the woman was not there. He noticed that aside from the door by which he had entered, the only other exit, a door leading from the bathroom to the outside of the house, was securely locked. The General went to sleep again, and in the morning wrote in pencil on a doorpost a brief note that he had seen a ghost. But he mentioned the matter to no one.
After a few days, the General and his family, including his wife Lady Becher, arrived to set up residence in the house. Lady Becher decided to use the room in which the General had slept as her dressing room. On her first evening in the house, Lady Becher was dressing for dinner in this room when she saw an Indian woman standing in the bathroom. Thinking the woman to be her own ayah, or maidservant, Lady Becher asked her what she wanted. There was no reply, and when Lady Becher went into the bathroom she found the woman gone and the door to the outside locked.