By now we’ve considered a fairly wide variety of cases, exhibiting distinctive strengths and weaknesses. But despite their differences, they share an important common feature: an apparent postmortem agent trying to identify itself and communicate actively through gifted (or perhaps afflicted) individuals. Now we examine cases of a different sort, in which surviving personalities seem to manifest only (or primarily) dispo-sitionally . Here we don’t find, at least to the degree we did in other cases, indications of entities actively attempting to make themselves known, discuss their histories, or express their needs and interests. Rather, we see apparent postmortem entities or remnants of personality merely attached to things, without attempted self-identification and without the conversational and behavioral self-expression displayed in most cases of mediumship, reincarnation, and possession.
It’s not surprising to find such cases. In some ways they seem to be stripped-down variants of the case-types considered earlier. After all, in mediumship, reincarnation, and possession, postmortem entities seem to do two things. First, they apparently attach to or “hover” around people. And second, they apparently try to identify themselves and communicate. But why should the second of these always happen? If survival is a fact, it seems reasonable to think that postmortem individuals might do no more than hover or linger. And in that case, we might expect to find traces or remnants of their activity. Like more ordinary loiterers and hangers-on who simply won’t go away or who have trouble letting go, they might make their “presence” felt without actively trying to communicate. And if postmortem individuals can attach to (or hover around) people, then presumably they can attach to other things as well.
We’ll now look at two classes of evidence suggesting this sort of persistence. First, we’ll consider cases of apparent haunting, in which postmortem agency seems to attach to a location (rather than a person). And then we’ll examine transplant cases, in which agency or remnants of personality seem linked to bodily organs.
Haunting phenomena resist neat classification. In one direction they shade off by degrees into poltergeist phenomena, and in another direction they morph gradually into cases of haunting ghosts or recurrent localized apparitions. One crude way to distinguish hauntings from poltergeist cases is that most of the former are place-centered, whereas most of the latter are person-centered. That is, we can usually trace poltergeist phenomena to the (presumably unconscious) psychic activity of a poltergeist-agent. In fact, the phenomena sometimes follow the presumed agent from one place to another. But generally speaking, no living agent seems causally linked to haunting phenomena. Instead, those phenomena apparently attach to a location, never mind who happens to be there.1
Gauld offers a useful profile of haunting phenomena.
The leading characteristic of hauntings are these: the phenomena centre round a place, usually a house, rather than round a person, and often continue off and on for several years (which is not generally so with poltergeists). The phenomena take place mainly at night, and prominent amongst them are what may be called imitative noises—sounds resembling those which normally accompany people treading on the floorboards or opening doors or breaking crockery or dropping heavy weights or banging walls, but to which no observable breakages, displacements, marks, etc., correspond; or sounds like human whispers, groans, distant conversations or articulate phrases. Other phenomena not infrequently reported in such cases include the appearance of luminosities and balls of light; disturbance of and tugging at bedclothes; and the actual opening of room and wardrobe doors with visible turning of handles or lifting of latches. (Gauld & Cornell, 1979, p. 178)
Gauld recognizes that these cases make a smooth transition into haunting ghost cases, where subjects repeatedly see apparitional figures, sometimes nondescript, sometimes distinctive and apparently resembling previously living persons. And those cases may also include some of the haunting phenomena noted above.
Haunting ghosts may also be classified as a subset of apparitions of the dead, and not all of these are recurrent. Like apparitions of the living, they may be unique episodes in the life of the percipient. Moreover, these apparitions often seem purposive, even if they don’t attempt to identify themselves. For example, percipients frequently identify apparitional figures as relatives, and sometimes the apparitions apparently manage (or at least try) to deliver crucial information to the percipient, such as the existence of a hidden will or a piece of timely advice. (See the examples noted in Gauld, 1982, pp. 233–235. See also MacKenzie, 1982; Myers, 1889, 1903; Podmore, 1890, 1910/1975; Sidgwick, 1885; Tyrrell, 1942/1961.)
But unlike the best cases of mediumship, recurrent haunting apparitions don’t provide a regular (much less long-term) stream of verified material. So the problem of crippling complexity doesn’t seem to arise, at least in an acute form. Nevertheless, the best of these cases (both recurrent and unique) pose a clear problem for the super-psi hypothesis, even if they don’t strain it to the breaking point. When apparitions (like drop-in communicators) provide obscure information and manifest a clear agenda, I agree with Gauld that it seems
obviously simpler to suppose that…there was at work some further agency, to be identified with a still surviving portion of a formerly incarnate human being, which somehow shaped the experience of the percipient or percipients in accordance with its own persisting knowledge and purposes. (Gauld, 1982, p. 235)
In fact, insofar as apparitions exhibit purpose and supply information unknown at the time to the percipients, they present many of the challenges we’ve considered already in connection with mediumship. And although the best veridical cases are quite impressive, space limitations prevent me from covering what is by now familiar ground. We need to focus here on what makes haunting cases distinctively puzzling: namely, the status of the apparitional phenomena themselves. These may be visual, auditory, olfactory, or tactile, and in some instances at least, they seem best explained as genuinely external, intersubjectively perceptible physical objects (however peculiar their causal histories might be). But we need to consider why that conclusion sometimes seems so promising and how it affects our assessment of the survival evidence.
In order to appreciate the theoretical challenge posed by these cases, let’s look briefly at examples of the phenomena in question.
Case 1 (Myers, 1889, pp. 25–29; Myers, 1903, vol. 2, pp. 326–29):
In this case the apparition is purposive and collectively perceived. The percipients were Mr. and Mrs. P., the latter of whom, once before and in answer to a prayer, had experienced a non-veridical apparition of her father.
The time was approximately 9:30, and Mr. and Mrs. P. had retired early that night, about 30 minutes before. Mrs. P. was resting in a near-sitting position on top of her bed waiting to feed her baby, who usually awoke around that time. Mr. P. was asleep under the covers, and because Mrs. P. anticipated arising soon to feed the baby, a lamp had been left burning in the room. Mrs. P. writes that she was
thinking of nothing but the arrangements for the following day, when to my great astonishment I saw a gentleman standing at the foot of the bed, dressed as a naval officer, and with a cap on his head having a projecting peak. [Because of the position of the lamp]…the face was in shadow to me, and the more so that the visitor was leaning upon his arms which rested on the foot-rail of the bedstead. I was too astonished to be afraid, but simply wondered who it could be; and, instantly touching my husband’s shoulder (whose face was turned from me), I said, “Willie, who is this?” My husband turned, and for a second or two lay looking in intense astonishment at the intruder; then lifting himself a little, he shouted “What on earth are you doing here, sir?” Meanwhile the form, slowly drawing himself into an upright position, now said in a commanding, yet reproachful voice, “Willie! Willie!”
I looked at my husband and saw that his face was white and agitated. As I turned towards him he sprang out of bed as though to attack the man, but stood by the bedside as if afraid, or in great perplexity, while the figure calmly and slowly moved towards the wall at right angles with the lamp…As it passed the lamp, a deep shadow fell upon the room as of a material person shutting out the light from us by his intervening body, and he disappeared, as it were, into the wall.
Mr. P. said he would look throughout the house for the figure. But Mrs. P. recalled that the bedroom door was locked, and she reminded her husband that the figure hadn’t exited through the doorway. Nevertheless, Mr. P. unlocked the door and searched unsuccessfully through the house. During his absence, Mrs. P. speculated to herself that the apparition might have been her brother Arthur, who was in the navy at the time and en route to India. She suggested this to Mr. P. after he returned from his unsuccessful search, still “looking very white and miserable.” But Mr. P. declared that the figure was his father, who had been dead for fourteen years, and who had also been in the navy.
Mr. P.’s health declined in the following weeks, and he eventually disclosed to his wife that the apparition discouraged him from taking what would have turned out to be disastrous financial advice. Mr. and Mrs. P. agreed that the apparition was a “direct warning to my husband in the voice and appearance of the one that he had most reverenced in all his life, and was the most likely to obey.” Mr. P. confirmed the details recorded by his wife.
Case 2 (MacKenzie, 1982, pp. 196–200; Zorab & MacKenzie, 1980):
This is a modern case of recurrent apparitions. The home, occupied by Mrs. Graham (pseudonym) and her family during the period in question, was built in 1871 and is located in a prosperous London suburb. Mrs. Graham wrote her account of the haunting while still in residence, adding notes as additional phenomena occurred. Mr. Graham and two of their three daughters later signed the account (the third daughter was away at the time), as did Mrs. Turner (pseudonym), their housekeeper. Evidently, the two eldest daughters experienced few or no phenomena. But Mr. and Mrs. Graham, their youngest daughter Thelma, and Mrs. Turner experienced quite a few. At least one visitor to the home also experienced an apparition. Both Zorab and MacKenzie conducted follow-up interviews with Mrs. Turner and the family members.
The Graham’s home was formed from what were originally two cottages. Zorab and MacKenzie describe the house as “a substantial detached building, standing on high ground facing a park, and the exterior does not contain any cracks such as would occur had the house been affected by subsidence or ‘settling’ of the foundations.” The Grahams moved into the house in 1946 and remained there until 1977.
According to Mrs. Graham, she and her husband often sat in the downstairs lounge, and “countless times” they heard the sound of footsteps going upstairs, followed by noises in the five upstairs bedrooms as if someone was walking around. Invariably, Mr. Graham investigated, checking every room for signs of a burglar. But he never found traces of an intruder, and the doors to the house would also be locked.
In December 1973, the eldest daughter Helen and her husband George Wells (pseudonym) moved into the house temporarily, as their own house underwent alterations. One morning around 3 or 4 a.m., while Helen slept, Mr. Wells awoke
to see the seemingly solid figure of a young woman reaching upwards toward the wardrobe as though she were dusting. She was wearing a long, faded, washed-out-looking rust-coloured dress and a long white apron. Her sleeves were rolled up and her hair was dressed in an upswept fashion. The dress suggested that of a domestic of the last century.
Mr. Wells didn’t wake his wife. He simply watched the apparition from a sideways view for several minutes, after which it faded away. This was Mr. Wells’s first apparitional experience, and he claimed that until this time he had always been very skeptical. The next morning he told Mrs. Graham what had happened, and Mrs. Graham then realized that the footsteps she and her husband had been hearing might have been those of a ghost.
In the meantime, however, Mrs. Turner had been experiencing various odd phenomena around the house, but she hadn’t mentioned that to her employers. She came to the home two or three mornings each week, beginning in 1965, and from the start she felt that there was some sort of presence in the house. In fact, she often felt that someone wanted to pass her on the stairs. But Mrs. Turner never mentioned those experiences to Mrs. Graham, until by chance they both heard a noise and Mrs. Graham joked “Perhaps it’s our ghost.” Mrs. Turner then said, “Oh, so you do know.” In 1975 Mrs. Turner apparently had her closest encounter with the ghost. As she walked along the upstairs landing she experienced what she described as a “physical push” and “quite a nasty experience.” When Mrs. Graham returned home she found Mrs. Turner in “an extremely shocked state.”
Thelma Graham had numerous apparitional encounters, the majority of which seem to have been exclusively auditory. She heard footsteps on many occasions. And in 1972, as she lay in bed one evening when she was alone in the house, she heard noises, apparently from the kitchen below her room. It sounded as if at least three people were talking, and their conversation was accompanied by bangs and crashes resembling the sound of saucepans being placed on metal shelves. Then she heard heavy footsteps coming up the creaking stairs and stopping outside her door. Thelma was “absolutely petrified,” convinced that burglars were in the house. She hid under the blankets, and eventually she fell asleep. The next morning, she went downstairs expecting to find “total destruction,” “but everything was absolutely normal. Nothing had been moved. I could not believe it.”
Another type of phenomenon concerned the opening and closing of doors. Sometimes, either Mr. or Mrs. Graham simply heard the sound of a door banging shut, even though they ascertained that the windows were closed and nobody else was in the house. On one occasion Mr. Graham was standing on the landing at the top of the stairs. He was alone in the house, and the street doors and all the windows were closed. Nevertheless, he saw the five open bedroom doors bang shut one after the other. And in 1976, while Mrs. Graham spoke to a friend on the telephone upstairs, she observed the bedroom door open about a foot, close again, and then open again. After this repeated several more times, Mrs. Graham stopped her conversation and checked the windows, which were firmly closed. Mr. Graham was downstairs at the time, and when Mrs. Graham went to tell him what had happened, she found him watching the television and their two cats were curled up peacefully in the hall. No one else had been upstairs.
Case 3 (Podmore, 1890 pp. 255–270; Gauld & Cornell, 1979, pp. 186–195):
This older case from Brighton was examined carefully by two of the SPR’s original leading researchers, Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore. The phenomena consisted mostly of imitative noises, but they were reported by four groups of witnesses, the second of which for a long time knew nothing of the first group’s experiences. Moreover, two diary records of the phenomena exist, one of them very detailed.
The first two residents of the house, Miss Morris and Mrs. Gilby, had been told that a woman had hanged herself in the upstairs back bedroom, and they both tended to believe that this was connected to the phenomena they and their families experienced. But although the story of the suicide was later confirmed, this case can’t be considered veridical. In fact, even though the two women reported seeing a female phantasm, the experiences were too indistinct to establish a clear connection between the apparitions and the person who committed suicide.
Miss Morris was the first to provide testimony in the case (the previous tenant told her that nothing abnormal had occurred in the house). She rented the house from October 1882 to December 1886, and her written statement is dated June 1888. Miss Morris shared the house with her aunt and a maidservant, and two of Miss Morris’s sisters visited occasionally. Podmore interviewed Miss Morris and one of the sisters in July 1888. Gauld and Cornell describe Miss Morris as “a fairly strong-minded person, who did not hesitate to search the house, poker in hand, to discover the source of persistent heavy footsteps and banging” (Gauld & Cornell, 1979, p. 190).
Those noises began the first evening Miss Morris spent in the house. Both she and her sister Charlotte experienced them, and so Miss Morris took up her poker and explored the house to make sure that no one else was there. That night, the “ceaseless and unwearying footsteps” (Podmore, 1890, p. 256) kept Miss Morris awake. Three weeks later,
it was about five o’clock one afternoon in November, and so light that I had no need of the gas to enable me to read clearly some music I was practicing, and which engrossed my whole attention and thought. Having forgotten some new waltzes I had lain on the music shelf in the back drawing-room, I left the piano, and went dancing gaily along, singing a song as I went, when suddenly there stood before me, preventing me getting the music, the figure of a woman, heavily robed in deepest black from the head to her feet; her face was intensely sad and deadly pale. There she stood, gazing fixedly at me. (Podmore, 1890, p. 257)
Soon afterwards, the figure vanished. Miss Morris rushed upstairs looking for her aunt and found her alone in her room. Her sisters and the servant were out at the time. Miss Morris’s aunt told her that she had been in her room the entire time and hadn’t entered the drawing-room.
Miss Morris also records that in June 1884
our hall-door bell began to ring incessantly and violently. We had frequently heard at intervals a ring, and discovered no one was at the door, but this especially annoyed us, and puzzled everyone inside and outside the house by the noise repeatedly made. We had always put it down to a “runaway ring” [i.e., a prankster] and took no notice, but for three weeks, at intervals of a quarter of an hour or half an hour, it rang unceasingly, and such peals, it electrified us. We put ourselves on guard and carefully watched, believing it a trick. We had everyone up from the basement, out of connection with the wire, in the front drawing-room, and placed the hall door and our doors wide open; it was the same result: loud and piercing peals from the bell, which, at last, after three weeks, we had taken off, when we saw the wire in connection with it vibrated as if the bell was attached to it.
After Miss Morris moved away, in December 1886, the house remained vacant until November 1887, when it was rented by Mrs. Gilby, a widow with two girls (ages 9 and 10) and one maidservant. She had moved to Brighton only six months earlier and apparently knew nothing about the phenomena reported by Miss Morris. During her tenancy, the phenomena were so extreme and incessant that they drove her from the house in May 1888. The following month, at Gurney’s request, Mrs. Gilby provided a detailed account of the family’s experiences, which included many reported sightings of apparitional figures. That account was compiled with the help of a diary in which Mrs. Gilby had recorded the unusual phenomena. The maid also provided an account. Gurney spoke at length with Mrs. Gilby and wrote,
She struck me as an excellent witness. I have never received an account in which the words and manner of telling were less suggestive of exaggeration or superstition. There is no doubt that she was simply turned out of a house which otherwise exactly suited her, at very serious expense and inconvenience. (Podmore, 1890, p. 264)
Mrs. Gilby’s account contains many interesting (and spine-chilling) passages. A few extracts will have to suffice.
We had not been more than a fortnight in our new home…when I was aroused by a deep sob and moan. “Oh,” I thought, “what has happened to the children?” I rushed in, their room being at the back of mine; found them sleeping soundly. So back to bed I went, when again another sob, and such a thump of somebody or something very heavy….I sat up in bed, looked all round the room, then to my horror a voice (and a very sweet one) said, “Oh, do forgive me!” three times. I could stand it no more; I always kept the gas burning, turned it up, and went to the maid’s room. She was fast asleep, so I shook her well, and asked her to come into my room. Then in five minutes the sobs and moans recommenced, and the heavy tramping of feet, and such thumps, like heavy boxes of plate being thrown about. She suggested I should ring the big bell I always keep in my room, but I did not like to alarm the neighborhood….I told her to go to bed, and hearing nothing for half-an-hour, I got into mine, nearly frozen with cold and fright. But no sooner had I got warm than the sobs, moans, and noises commenced again….Three times I called Anne in, and then in the morning it all died away in a low moan. (Podmore, 1890, pp. 259–260)
Like her predecessor, Mrs. Gilby experienced problems with the door bell. Her diary for March 3 reads, “Heard the bell ring about 11. No one at the door.” In her subsequently written account, she elaborated,
March 3rd I was writing in the drawing-room, when the front door bell rang violently. I asked who it was; “No one ma’am.” I thought I would stand by the window, and presently it rang again; down the servant came, no one there, and after the third time I told her not to go to the door unless she heard a knock as well. I knew no one had pulled the bell, as I was standing by the window. (Podmore, 1890, p. 263)
Also in June 1888, Anne, the servant, provided her own, much more economical, account of the phenomena. Here are some extracts,
We used to hear noises in the roof of a night as if someone was up there throwing something about; then it would seem to give a great jump down, and run up and downstairs, and they tried the handle of the children’s door; we heard something move across the room and back again….Then we heard that screaming again; we heard it in the children’s room this time; it was most dreadful. Then we heard some door shook as if to shake it down; then it kept banging all night long….Then we used to hear a great crash every night about 10 o’clock; it was downstairs in the kitchen….Then the same night as mistress went to London I heard that screaming again as if they was knocking someone about dreadfully. There was such a row. Father was in the house; he did not hear anything; then he felt something breathing on his face; got a light and looked about, but he could not see anything. (Podmore, 1890, p. 266)
The house was not rented again until August 1888. But shortly after Mrs. Gilby’s departure, four men interested in psychic matters obtained access to the house on May 23 and 28. They also reported some unusual experiences, but they “were clearly such dedicated believers in the supernatural that their evidence is of very little value” (Gauld & Cornell, 1979, p. 191). The next residents were Mr. G. A. Smith, an associate member of the SPR, his wife, and a maidservant. Smith left the house in September 1889, and during those thirteen months 137 guests slept in the house. He also kept a diary of occurrences, extracts from which can be found in Gauld & Cornell, 1979, pp. 192–95. The reported phenomena are similar to those noted by Miss Morris and Mrs. Gilby, including ringing of the door bell while no one was at the door.
Looking generally at the class of ostensible hauntings, anti-survivalists have several explanatory options. If they shun any kind of paranormal explanation, they must claim either that the apparitions are mistakenly identified normal physical objects or (possibly shared) hallucinations. And in fact, some cases seem amenable to this approach. For example, recent studies plausibly trace some non-veridical haunting experiences to the effects of infrasound standing waves at the relevant locations (Tandy & Lawrence, 1998; Tandy, 2000). Others have suggested—with varying degrees of plausibility—that the culprits might be movements of the earth, magnetic fields, or sudden changes in the magnitudes of such fields (see, e.g., Persinger, 1985; Persinger & Cameron, 1986; Persinger, Tiller, & Koren, 2000). Not surprisingly, however, good cases allow us to rule out geophysical causes, malobservation, and other Usual Suspects.
Of course, even if every haunting apparition was mediated by localized geophysical processes, those processes alone wouldn’t explain why some cases are veridical. And it’s dubious that geophysical explanations would work for phenomena that seem to be products of design or human intelligence—for example, the neat or artistic arrangement of moved or overturned objects, or the utterance of distinct sentences or phrases (especially those heard by more than one witness). Geophysical explanations may also have difficulty explaining the variety of haunting phenomena at a given location. In case (2), for example, these include the sighting of apparitional figures, crashing and banging sounds similar to those produced by kitchen implements, physical pushes, sounds as of footsteps, and the opening and closing of doors. In case (3) the phenomena include sounds of thumps, banging doors, sobs, moans, screams, identifiable English phrases, and also the tactile experience of breathing on one’s face. (For recent cases boasting a wide variety of phenomena at a given location, see Maher, 2000; Maher & Hansen, 1995).
In the most refractory haunting cases, the content of the hallucinations seems to be shared, either between several individuals at the same time, or between independent observers at different times. Moreover, sometimes pets and other animals seem to be aware of something happening at the locations where people experience haunting phenomena. So apparently, psi-unsympathetic accounts of hauntings won’t get us very far; an appeal to telepathy, at least, seems unavoidable.
But even the appeal to telepathy has limited utility. In an earlier book (Braude, 1997, chapter 4), I looked closely at the puzzles presented by collective apparitions, and I explained in detail why telepathic theories are unsatisfactory. I’ll also discuss the matter again, briefly, in the next chapter. But for now, we’ll have to settle for more cursory remarks still. The problem, in a nutshell, is that telepathic explanations have trouble accounting for the similarity and simultaneity of the different percipients’ experiences. That’s why I proposed interpreting collective apparitions as products of PK, at least when survivalist explanations seem unwarranted. We could view those apparitions as being analogous to the materialized figures reported throughout the history of mediumship.
Apparently, then, a viable anti-survivalist account of hauntings must appeal to super (or just dandy?) psi. It will need to interpret at least some apparitional figures either as telepathic constructs or as products of PK. Of course, we’ve noted that apparitions may also be veridical. Sometimes apparitional figures reportedly resemble people who previously occupied (or were connected with) the place where they appear, and sometimes those figures provide information unknown to the percipients. So in those instances, super-psi explanations also require an appeal to percipient ESP.
But for now, we can ignore the issues posed by the veridical nature of haunting cases. We’ve already discussed their counterparts in connection with mediumship. Besides, the vast majority of haunting cases provide no verifiable evidence of survival, and most veridical cases are not much better. However, that still leaves us with the following problem, unique to cases of haunting. As I noted above, the fact that some apparitions are perceived collectively counts against telepathic explanations and in favor of interpreting them as paranormally produced physical objects. Moreover, some other haunting phenomena (e.g., object movements) seem undoubtedly to be physical, irrespective of the number of observers. So, assuming that some psi hypothesis is called for in these cases, several related questions arise: First, do we have any reasons, apart from these haunting cases, for thinking that enduring physical objects can be paranormally produced? And second, is it more plausible to trace these putatively physical objects and phenomena to living or to deceased agents?
I think the first of these questions has a fairly easy answer, although few are likely to find it satisfying. In my view, we have ample evidence that people can paranormally influence events at a distance. Although some disagree (inscrutably, in my view), let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we’re maximally sympathetic to the evidence for PK and that we accept not only the laboratory evidence (see, e.g., Radin, 1997), but also evidence for the large-scale phenomena surveyed in Braude, 1997. What we then need to consider is: How long can those effects linger, and how autonomous can they be? For example, would we be entitled to conclude that PK can produce localized processes that attach to a location and which may be activated by various nearby events (e.g., the presence or movements of living persons)?
As far as I can tell, there is no evidence, outside of the haunting cases themselves, for such processes. Granted, there’s an interesting body of data on materialization phenomena. But those phenomena seem invariably to be short-term. Typical reports describe objects materializing gradually (or appearing suddenly) and then dematerializing (or disappearing suddenly). There are also many accounts of so-called apports, where objects seem suddenly to move from one location to another, and those objects don’t subsequently disappear or dematerialize. But haunting cases seem to suggest something quite different from “standard” materializations or apports. Of course, survivalists would say they suggest the continuing presence at a location of a discarnate intelligence. But if we reject that, we’d presumably have to interpret recurrent haunting phenomena as being produced by something like a tape loop or remotely activated playback device.
So how serious a problem is this for advocates of super psi? It seems undeniable that some haunting phenomena are physical and intersubjectively perceivable. It also seems clear that some must be considered paranormal. But once we’ve made that concession, it may be irrelevant (even if it’s unfortunate) that no other body of evidence in parapsychology—that is, apart from apparition cases—provides evidence for similarly long-term phenomena. We can’t reject evidence for a phenomenon P just because P is unprecedented, and there’s nothing inherently peculiar or suspicious about a phenomenon that occurs only in a restricted range of situations. Presumably, then, we can’t reject a super-psi interpretation of recurrent localized haunting phenomena just because we’d have to interpret them as forms of PK unique to haunting cases. And remember, they’d be unique only with respect to their duration or persistence, not to their magnitude.
Still, some may feel that survivalists can tilt the interpretive scales in their direction, because they have systematicity on their side. That is, recurrent haunting phenomena seem to connect nicely with other bodies of survival evidence suggesting the influence of postmortem intelligence or agency on the physical world. In fact, recurrent haunting phenomena seem continuous with mediumistic phenomena suggesting the direct influence of surviving agency on a person. The principal difference between haunting and mediumistic cases is that in the former, the direct influence in question would be on a location rather than a person. Living persons (i.e., those who observe the phenomena) would be influenced only indirectly.
However, advocates of super psi can also appeal to a kind of systematicity. Apart from the persistence of observable effects, haunting phenomena connect to the extensive body of evidence for large-scale PK. Of course, most of that evidence is from cases of ostensible physical mediumship, but in many of those cases the effects have no distinctive association to a deceased person. In fact, as cases of apparent postmortem survival most of them aren’t remotely evidential. So there’s no reason on the face of it to treat them as survival cases, and it’s perfectly legitimate for anti-survivalists to see them as supporting their position. (There are, however, good reasons for thinking that spiritistic beliefs are unusually conducive to the production of large-scale PK. See Braude, 1997, chapter 2.)
These cases are valuable for several reasons. First, they constitute a significant body of new evidence. Although reincarnation and possession cases continue to appear, cases of mediumship declined sharply in the last half of the twentieth century along with interest in Spiritualism. Second, transplant cases reinforce the impression, easily gained from cases of mediumship, reincarnation, and possession, that the form of survival evidence is influenced by surrounding cultural and social forces. Mediumship is tied to spiritistic beliefs of some sort, and reincarnation and possession cases occur primarily in communities whose belief systems accommodate the phenomena. That doesn’t show that the phenomena are nothing but social constructs. But it suggests that survival evidence varies in its symptom language, like the varying and culturally specific forms of dissociative disorders. Not surprisingly, the evidence from transplant cases seems distinctively restricted to more technologically developed and affluent parts of the world, where transplant operations are accessible and affordable. And with the decline of mediumship, they might even act as a continuing counterweight to the large and growing body of reincarnation and possession cases, which cluster in less-industrialized societies.
Third, transplant cases introduce evidence of a new type. They expand the empirical horizon in our search for evidence of survival, and they present us with a distinctive network of needs and interests to which we can apply both the super-psi and survival hypotheses. When we think along survivalist lines, it’s easy to imagine why, after their tragic and premature deaths, organ donors might cling to their earthly connections. Of course, advocates of super psi would emphasize a different set of causally relevant motives. Donors would not be the only individuals with apparently burning needs. Organ recipients and the families of both donor and recipient will also have deep concerns, and they must be addressed as well. For example, we need to consider not simply how much the recipient and recipient’s family knew about the donor, but how much they wanted to know. Similarly, we need to consider whether members of the donor’s family urgently seek evidence of the donor’s survival. And of course, organ recipients tend to feel a deep bond with their donor, and that bond may be expressed in a variety of ways, both flagrant and subtle.
Some try explaining transplant cases in terms of cellular memory (e.g., Pearsall, Schwartz, & Russek, 1999). I suspect that approach is deeply flawed (in fact, incoherent), but space prohibits a critical discussion of the problems with the hypothesis of cellular memory. For now, it’s enough to note that it seems to face the same fatal difficulties confronting all trace theories of memory (Bursen, 1978; Heil, 1978; Malcolm, 1977; Braude, 2002). But more important, if cellular memory were to account for the transplant cases, then those cases wouldn’t be evidence of the type of survival concerning us in this book. The appeal to cellular memory is actually an attempt to explain away the evidence for postmortem survival by (a) recasting it in what its proponents believe are scientifically credible terms, and (b) linking personality (or at least a limited set of dispositions) to still-functioning body parts. So of course, that strategy won’t apply to types of survival evidence in which relatively robust personality, active agency, and clear postmortem agendas seem to persist even after all parts of the body cease functioning or decompose. Thus, explanations in terms of cellular memory treat transplant cases as limiting cases (given today’s technology) of antemortem survival. So long as (at least certain?) organs continue to function, bodily death hasn’t occurred, although of course bodily integrity has been seriously compromised.
So I propose that we try evaluating transplant cases as another potential source of evidence for noncorporeal survival. As I noted earlier, we can construe both transplant and haunting cases as indicating that surviving personalities hover around objects (bodily organs and locations, respectively). And as we’ll see, some transplant cases support that interpretation more clearly than others.
Public awareness of transplant evidence probably began with the publication of A Change of Heart in 1997 (Sylvia, 1997). In this book, Claire Sylvia described the personality shifts she experienced after her heart and lung transplant in 1988. She noted these changes before meeting her donor’s family and learning about his character. For example, she found herself craving food she had previously disliked, but which her donor, Tim, had enjoyed. Among these were beer (which Claire felt like drinking shortly after her surgery), green peppers, and Kentucky Fried Chicken nuggets. The last of these seemed particularly odd, considering that Claire was a dancer and choreographer who had always been very careful about her diet. Moreover, KFC nuggets were found in Tim’s jacket when he was killed. Claire’s color preferences and level of aggressiveness also changed in ways that seemed more Tim-like.
Claire’s changes were accompanied by some interesting dreams during the first few months after her surgery. In one dream, she met a man named Tim L, who (it turned out) resembled her donor, and at the end of the dream she kissed and inhaled Tim into her. In another dream she changed from a woman to a man, and then back to a woman.
But Claire’s experiences aren’t unique, and other cases seem even more remarkable. Consider the following case summaries, taken from a review of ten similar cases involving heart or heart-lung recipients (Pearsall et al., 1999).
Case 1
The donor was a 17-year-old black male student victim of a drive-by shooting. The recipient was a 47-year-old white male foundry worker diagnosed with aortic stenosis.
The donor’s mother reported:
“Our son was walking to violin class when he was hit. Nobody knows where the bullet came from, but it just hit him and he fell. He died right there on the street hugging his violin case. He loved music and his teachers said he had a real thing for it. He would listen to music and play along with it. I think he would have been at Carnegie Hall someday, but the other kids always made fun of the music he liked.”
The recipient reported:
“I’m real sad and all for the guy who died and gave me his heart, but I really have trouble with the fact that he was black. I’m not a racist, mind you, not at all. Most of my friends at the plant are black guys. But the idea that there is a black heart in a white body seems really…well, I don’t know. I told my wife I thought my penis might grow to a black man’s size. They say black men have larger penises, but I don’t know for sure. After we have sex, I sometimes feel guilty because a black man made love to my wife, but I don’t really think that seriously. I can tell you one thing, though: I used to hate classical music, but now I love it. So I know it’s not my new heart, because a black guy from the hood wouldn’t be into that. Now it calms my heart. I play it all the time. I more than like it. I play it all the time. I didn’t tell any of the guys on the line that I have a black heart, but I think about it a lot.”
The recipient’s wife reports:
“He was more than concerned about the idea when he heard it was a black man’s heart. He actually asked me if he could ask the doctor for a white heart when one came up. He’s no Archie Bunker, but he’s close to it. And he would kill me if he knew I told you this, but for the first time, he’s invited his black friends over from work. It’s like he doesn’t see their color anymore even though he still talks about it sometimes. He seems more comfortable and at ease with these black guys, but he’s not aware of it. And one more thing I should say: he’s driving me nuts with the classical music. He doesn’t know the name of one song and never, never listened to it before. Now, he sits for hours and listens to it. He even whistles classical music songs that he could never know. How does he know them? You’d think he’d like rap music or something because of his black heart.” (Pearsall et al., 1999, p. 68)
Case 2
The donor was a 24-year-old female automobile accident victim. The recipient was a 25-year-old male graduate student suffering from cystic fibrosis who received a heart-lung transplant.
The donor’s sister reported:
“My sister was a very sensual person. Her one love was painting. She was on her way to her first solo showing at a tiny art shop when a drunk plowed into her. It’s a lesbian art store that supports gay artists. My sister was not really very ‘out’ about it, but she was gay. She said her landscape paintings were really representations of the mother or woman figure. She would look at a naked woman model and paint a landscape from that! Can you imagine? She was gifted.”
The recipient reported:
“I never told anyone at first, but I thought having a woman’s heart would make me gay. Since my surgery, I’ve been hornier than ever and women just seem to look even more erotic and sensual, so I thought I might have gotten internal transsexual surgery. My doctor told me it was just my new energy and lease on life that made me feel that way, but I’m different. I know I’m different. I make love like I know exactly how the woman’s body feels and responds—almost as if it is my body. I have the same body, but I still think I’ve got a woman’s way of thinking about sex now.”
The recipient’s girlfriend:
“He’s a much better lover now. Of course, he was weaker before, but it’s not that. He’s like, I mean he just knows my body as well as I do. He wants to cuddle, hold, and take a lot of time. Before he was a good lover, but not like this. It’s just different. He wants to hug all the time and go shopping. My God, he never wanted to shop. And you know what, he carries a purse now. His purse! He slings it over his shoulder and calls it his bag, but it’s a purse. He hates it when I say that, but going to the mall with him is like going with one of the girls. And one more thing, he loves to go to museums. He would never, absolutely never do that. Now he would go every week. Sometimes he stands for minutes and looks at a painting without talking. He loves landscapes and just stares. Sometimes I just leave him there and come back later.” (Pearsall et al., 1999, pp. 67–68)
Case 3
The donor was a 16-month-old boy who drowned in a bathtub. The recipient was a 7-month-old boy diagnosed with Tetalogy of Fallot (a hole in the ventricular septum with displacement of the aorta, pulmonary stenosis, and thickening of the right ventricle).
The donor’s mother is a physician:
“When Carter [recipient] first saw me, he ran to me and pushed his nose against me and rubbed it. It was just exactly what we did with Jerry [donor].”
“I’m a doctor. I’m trained to be a keen observer and have always been a natural born skeptic. But this was real. I know people will say I need to believe my son’s spirit is alive, and perhaps I do. But I felt it. My husband and my father felt it. And I swear to you, and you can ask my mother, Carter said the same baby-talk words that Jerry said. Carter is [now] six, but he was talking Jerry’s baby talk and playing with my nose just like Jerry did.”
“We stayed with the [recipient family] that night. In the middle of the night, Carter came in and asked to sleep with my husband and me. He cuddled up between us exactly like Jerry did, and we began to cry. Carter told us not to cry because Jerry said everything was okay. My husband, I, our parents, and those who really knew Jerry have no doubt. Our son’s heart contains much of our son and beats in Carter’s chest. On some level, our son is still alive.”
The recipient’s mother reported:
“I saw Carter go to her [the donor’s mother]. He never does that. He is very, very shy, but he went to her just like he used to run to me when he was a baby. When he whispered ‘It’s okay mama’, I broke down. He called her mother, or maybe it was Jerry’s heart talking. And one more thing that got to us: we found out talking to Jerry’s mom that Jerry had mild cerebral palsy mostly on his left side. Carter has stiffness and some shaking on that same side. He never did as a baby and it only showed up after the transplant. The doctors say it’s probably something to do with his medical condition, but I really think there’s more to it.”
“One more thing I’d like to know about. When we went to church together, Carter had never met Jerry’s father. We came late and Jerry’s dad was sitting with a group of people in the middle of the congregation. Carter let go of my hand and ran right to that man. He climbed on his lap, hugged him and said ‘Daddy’. We were flabbergasted. How could he have known him? Why did he call him Dad? He never did things like that. He would never let go of my hand in church and never run to a stranger. When I asked him why he did it, he said he didn’t. He said Jerry did and he went with him.” (Pearsall et al., 1999, p. 67)
Case 4
The donor was a 34-year-old police officer shot attempting to arrest a drug dealer. The recipient was a 56-year-old college professor diagnosed with atherosclerosis and ischemic heart disease.
The donor’s wife reported:
“When I met Ben [the recipient] and Casey, I almost collapsed. First, it was a remarkable feeling seeing the man with my husband’s heart in his chest. I think I could almost see Carl [the donor] in Ben’s eyes. When I asked how Ben felt, I think I was really trying to ask Carl how he was. I wouldn’t say that to them, but I wish I could have touched Ben’s chest and talked to my husband’s heart.”
“What really bothers me, though, is when Casey said offhandedly that the only real side effect of Ben’s surgery was flashes of light in his face. That’s exactly how Carl died. The bastard shot him right in the face. The last thing he must have seen is a terrible flash. They never caught the guy, but they think they know who it is. I’ve seen the drawing of his face. The guy has long hair, deep eyes, a beard, and this real calm look. He looks sort of like some of the pictures of Jesus.”
The recipient reported:
“If you promise you won’t tell anyone my name, I’ll tell you what I’ve not told any of my doctors. Only my wife [Casey] knows. I only knew that my donor was a 34-year-old very healthy guy. A few weeks after I got my heart, I began to have dreams. I would see a flash of light right in my face and my face gets real, real hot. It actually burns. Just before that time, I would get a glimpse of Jesus. I’ve had these dreams and now daydreams ever since: Jesus and then a flash. That’s the only thing I can say is something different, other than feeling really good for the first time in my life.”
The recipient’s wife reported:
“I’m very, very glad you asked him about his transplant. He is more bothered than he’ll tell you about these flashes. He says he sees Jesus and then a blinding flash. He told the doctors about the flashes but not Jesus. They said it’s probably a side effect of the medications, but God we wish they would stop.” (Pearsall et al., 1999, pp. 70–71)
Of course, the testimony in these cases is fascinating, and it should be clear that we can’t discount it simply by appealing to the Usual Suspects. Granted, the recipient in case 2 knew that his donor was female. So we might credibly interpret the recipient’s use of a purse and his new interest in shopping as a kind of role-playing due to suggestion. We could claim that knowledge of his donor’s gender unleashed his feminine side, which until that time had been largely latent. But other features of the recipient’s behavior seem not simply less generically feminine, but rather specific to the donor—for example, his newfound interest in museums and landscapes. Similarly, it’s unclear why knowledge of his donor’s gender would lead to the more specific and intimate knowledge about female anatomy demonstrated during lovemaking, much less the knowledge-how demonstrated at those times but never before. Case 1 offers even more striking examples of donor-specific behavior, because the recipient’s new interests ran counter to his expectations and racial stereotypes.
Appeals to psi among the living also have limited utility, although they seem to take us somewhat further. For example, recipient-ESP or donor-family telepathic influence might help explain the donor-specific behavior exhibited in case 1, young Carter’s Jerry-like behavior in case 3, and even the experiences in case 4 of the blinding light and image of Jesus. And in all the cases it’s easy to imagine why the donor’s family and the recipient might deeply wish for indications of the donor’s postmortem persistence.
But perhaps the principal issue before us is: How well do transplant cases support what we could call the hover hypothesis: that the donor’s surviving personality (or a fragment thereof) remains close (in a sense needing to be explained) to the organ recipient (or to the transplanted organs)? Some cases suggest this fairly clearly and even look a bit like possession cases. In fact, apparent possession might be a relatively clear exemplar of the sort of hovering at issue. If so, transplant cases would be a subset of possession cases: namely, those possession cases in which transplanted organs provide a clear motivating link between possessor and victim. And if that’s the case, then the transplant cases may not be nearly as unprecedented as they seem at first. They would still be cases of a new type, but that type would not differ radically from other forms of possession.
The cases most strongly favoring the hover hypothesis are those where the organ recipients are children. Survivalists could argue that children will be particularly open to postmortem influence, presumably because they haven’t had their receptivity “educated” out of them. Of course, advocates of super psi could make an analogous claim: that children are particularly receptive to ESP. And in fact (as I noted in chapter 4), there is some evidence that children score more poorly on ESP tests as they age, pass through the educational system, and presumably learn that others consider displays of psi to be unacceptable or impossible (Winkelman, 1980, 1981).
Of the cases presented above, number 3 most clearly suggests hovering or possession. Young Carter attributed his behavior in church to the donor, Jerry. He said it was not he (i.e., Carter) who ran to Jerry’s father (whom he had not met), hugged him, and called him “Daddy.” Carter said Jerry did this and went with him. And Carter told Jerry’s parents not to cry because Jerry said it was OK. On the surface, at least, this suggests an interaction between two distinct minds or individuals, Carter and Jerry. In fact, it resembles a form of mediumship in which the communicator interacts with and sometimes controls the body of the medium.
Another case from Pearsall, Schwartz, and Russek’s modest collection suggests a similar type of communication between organ recipient and the surviving personality of the donor. The donor was a 3-year-old girl who drowned in the pool at her mother’s boyfriend’s house. The mother and boyfriend had left the girl in the care of a teenage babysitter. Apparently, the girl’s parents had been through an ugly divorce, and thereafter the father never saw his daughter. Jimmy, the recipient, was a 9-year-old boy who claimed not to know who the donor was. He reported,
I talk to her sometimes. I can feel her in there. She seems very sad. She is very afraid. I tell her it is okay, but she is very afraid. She says she wishes that parents wouldn’t throw away their children. I don’t know why she would say that. (Pearsall et al., 1999, p. 69)
Jimmy’s mother added that since the operation, her son was “deathly afraid of the water,” although he had loved it before.
Although the hover hypothesis seems to handle transplant cases fairly smoothly, one striking feature of the cases may be problematic: namely, the apparently lasting personality alterations in the organ recipient. For example, in case 1 the recipient acquired what seems to be a new and abiding interest in classical music, and in case 2 the recipient began to manifest a new and apparently permanent interest in art and attitude toward sex. If these cases really form a subset of possession cases, then presumably we’d have to regard the possession as permanent, or nearly so. Now I see no problem with that. It’s a problem only if we suppose, apparently without justification, that possession (assuming it occurs) can only be temporary or sporadic. Of course, here, as elsewhere, the evidence is ambiguous. But it’s also a fertile source of clues for theory construction. So, once we decide to entertain the possibility of possession, we must try to let the data guide us, and we must try also not to be constrained by whatever biases we had at the start. Cases of ostensible possession cover a wide range, including traditional cases of mediumship, spirit possession in shamanic contexts, cases closely resembling reincarnation cases, and the transplant cases now under consideration. And to me at least, the totality of data suggest that possession—whatever it is—can occur in varying forms, varying degrees of completeness, and for varying periods of time.
We might want to modify this stance later, after hammering out a detailed and empirically adequate theory of postmortem existence. We might then decide to taxonomize possession cases so as to draw a sharp line between transient or temporary possession (as in mediumship or shamanic ritualistic possession) and its apparently more permanent forms. But for now at least, it seems that these cases all share a common crucial feature. The ostensible manifestation of another, postmortem, individual occurs well after the subject’s birth, typically following some sort of ritual, or induction, or other event (such as an organ transplant) that provides an occasion or motive for apparent possession. That may be enough to distinguish these cases from cases of ostensible reincarnation.
We noted in the last chapter that subjects in reincarnation cases tend to identify thoroughly with the past personality, whereas in most possession cases the previous personality seems more parasitic and apparently displaces the normal personality. And that distinction may, indeed, be one fair, if rough, way to distinguish most reincarnation from possession cases. But transplant cases don’t fit neatly in either category. In some of those cases, the original personality of the recipient isn’t displaced; instead, it’s modified in ways characteristic of the donor. And in others (sometimes in the same cases), the recipient does identify strongly with the donor, and we see the kind of personality blending characteristic of reincarnation cases. Yet in others (and again, sometimes in the same cases), the recipient (a child in these instances), apparently interacts, seemingly mediumistically, with the donor.
So we might well find it necessary or appropriate to develop a finer-grained taxonomy, of survival cases generally and possession cases in particular. But for now at least, my recommendation is that we interpret transplant cases as supplementing the evidence for possession. Moreover, as we noted earlier in this chapter and in chapter 6, it’s not unprecedented for survival evidence to take culturally specific forms. Similarly, the evidence for MPD/DID seems to vary (as a symptom language or idiom of distress) from culture to culture and from epoch to epoch.2 Analogously, it seems plausible to interpret the transplant cases as a culturally specific manifestation of possession, appropriate to societies that are technologically advanced and in which more classic manifestations of possession are not accepted as a matter of course. Moreover, children would tend to be relatively unbiased (or polluted) by a prevailing worldview in which spirit possession plays little or no role. So if transplant cases are really disguised possession cases, we would expect young organ recipients to express their conceptual innocence by providing more conventional signs of possession. And that, in fact, is what we find. As this body of evidence grows, it will be interesting to see whether the trend continues.
For a discussion of the subtleties and difficulties with the haunting/poltergeist distinction, see Gauld & Cornell, 1979, and Maher, 2000.
See Braude, 1995. Also Berger, Ono, Nakajima, & Suematsu, 1994; Gangdev & Matjane, 1996; Krippner, 1987; Martfnez-Taboas, 1995; Middleton & Butler, 1998; Osborne, 2001; Sar, Yargic, & Tutkun, 1995; 1996; Takahashi, 1990; Tutkun, Yargic, & Sar, 1995; Varma, Bouri, & Wig, 1981.