The Complete Book of Ghosts

AFTER DEVOTING MUCH of his life to paranormal research, Sir Oliver Lodge came to the conclusion that ghosts were not conscious entities but emotional energy recorded in matter. He wrote:

THE STONE TAPE THEORY

This theory was to become known as the ‘stone tape’ theory, and may account for those sightings in which ghosts replay events from the most traumatic moments in their lives, exhibiting no conscious awareness of any witnesses who may be present. According to the hypothesis this type of ghost is merely an echo. But it does not explain the many incidents where apparitions of the living appear in one location while their body resides elsewhere. Neither does it explain how a living apparition can appear carrying an object, unless they have charged that object with their personal energy at the moment they are projecting their etheric body to the second location.

The SPR recorded a typical example of this in which a lady saw her uncle appear in her home carrying a roll of paper. She naturally assumed that he had decided to pay her a visit, but her uncle looked anxious as he strode across the room and out through an open door. By the time she had followed him outside he was nowhere to be seen. Later that day she received a letter from her father informing her that her uncle was gravely ill. He had died at the very same moment he had appeared in her home. As she stood by her uncle’s bed, she felt an urge to look under his pillow and there she found a roll of paper on which, she assumed, he had intended to write a new will favouring her or her father.

It seems that the connection between the uncle’s spirit and his body were weakening in the final moments of his life and so he was able to project his essence or his thought form to his niece’s home. However, there are also well-documented cases of people who were in the best of health when they projected their image many miles away. The most famous example is that of the French school teacher Emilie Sagee.

IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE

Miss Sagee was a popular addition to the staff at the Neuwelcke finishing school for young ladies at Livonia (now Latvia) in 1845, but there was something unsettling about her which her pupils could not put into words. She was pretty, capable, conscientious but at the same time distracted, as if her mind was elsewhere. The trouble was that it was not only her mind that was elsewhere. So was her doppelgänger, her spirit double.

For weeks there had been rumours that Miss Sagee had been seen in two parts of the school at the same time. Naturally, her colleagues scoffed at the very idea and dismissed it as schoolgirl gossip, but they were soon forced to face the fact that there was more to Emilie than met the eye. One of her pupils, Antoine von Wrangel, was unusually anxious the day she prepared for a high society party. Even so, her girlish excitement cannot account for what she thought she saw when she looked over her shoulder to admire herself in the mirror. There, attending to the hem of her dress, was not one but two Mademoiselle Sagees. Not surprisingly the poor girl fainted on the spot. It became no longer a matter of rumour when a class of 13 girls saw Miss Sagee’s doppelgänger standing next to its more solid counterpart at the blackboard one day, mimicking the movements of the ‘real’ Emilie.

However, no one could blame the teacher – she had done nothing improper. By now the whole school was on edge and rife with wild unfounded stories as the girls embellished their experiences for the entertainment of their friends. Eventually, these stories reached the ears of the headmistress, but there were no grounds for a reprimand, never mind a dismissal. Emilie continued to be a conscientious member of staff. The next summer, matters came to a head.

The entire school was assembled one morning in a room overlooking the garden where Miss Sagee could be seen picking flowers. But when the supervising teacher left the room another Miss Sagee appeared in her chair as if from nowhere. Outside, the ‘real’ Emilie could still be clearly seen gathering flowers, although her movements appeared to be sluggish, as if her vitality had drained away. Two of the more inquisitive girls took the opportunity to step forward and gingerly touch the double in the chair. To one it felt like muslin, but not entirely solid. Another girl passed right through the apparition by walking between the table and the chair. The doppelgänger remained still and lifeless. Moments later it faded and the girls observed that the real Emilie became herself again, moving among the flower beds with some purpose.

The girls quizzed Miss Sagee at the first opportunity, but all she could remember was that when she had seen the teacher leave the room she had wished that she could have been there to supervise the class until their teacher returned. Evidently, her thoughts had preceded her.

Unfortunately for Miss Sagee and the school this incident was not the last. Thirty fee-paying pupils were removed by their concerned parents over the following 18 months after stories about the phenomenon became the prime subject of the girls’ letters home. Reluctantly, the headmistress was finally forced to let Miss Sagee go. Emilie was saddened but not surprised. It was the nineteenth position she had been forced to leave in her 16-year career.

THE ABSENT MP

Politicians are not usually considered to be imaginative individuals and so the British newspapers made the most of an incident in 1905 in which the living apparition of British MP Sir Frederick Carne Rasch appeared in the House of Commons at the same moment that his body lay in bed suffering from influenza. Sir Frederick had been so anxious to attend the debate that he had obviously willed himself to appear, but his concentration must have weakened because he vanished before the vote was taken. When he returned to Parliament a few days later MPs delighted in prodding him to see if he was really there in the flesh.

PHANTOM FORERUNNERS

Bi-location may be uncommon, but it is not inconceivable that the mind might be capable of disassociation to such a degree that it enables the essence of a person to appear elsewhere. However, the phenomenon known as the ‘phantom forerunner’ is far more difficult to explain. The best known example is that of businessman Erkson Gorique who visited Norway in July 1955 for the first time in his life. Or was it?

When Erkson checked into his hotel the clerk greeted him like a valued customer. ‘It’s good to have you back, Mr Gorique,’ said the clerk. ‘But I’ve never been here before,’ Gorique replied. ‘You must have mistaken me for someone else.’ The clerk was certain he was not mistaken. ‘But sir, don’t you remember? Just a few months ago you dropped in to make a reservation and said you’d be along about this time in the summer. Your name is unusual. That’s why I remembered it.’ Erkson assured the clerk that this was his first visit to the country. The next day he went to introduce himself to his first potential client, a wholesaler named Olsen, and again he was greeted like a valued customer. ‘Ah, Mr Gorique. I’m glad to see you again. Your last visit was much too short.’ Erkson was confused and explained what had happened to him at the hotel. To his surprise, Olsen just smiled. ‘This is not so unusual here in Norway,’ he said. ‘In fact, it happens so often we have a name for it. We call it the vardoger, or forerunner.’

The phantom forerunner is not exclusively a Norwegian phenomenon, but the country has such an uncommonly high occurrence of such incidents that it has given rise to the greeting, ‘Is that you or your vardoger?’

In England such apparitions have traditionally been filed away as just another inexplicable ghost story. In 1882, Dr George Wyld reported an incident involving a close acquaintance, Miss Jackson. She had been distributing food to the poor in the neighbourhood on a bitterly cold day when she had a sudden urge to return home to warm herself by the kitchen stove. At that moment her two maids were sitting in the kitchen and observed the door knob turning and the door open revealing a very lifelike Miss Jackson. Startled at their employer’s early return they jumped to their feet and watched as she walked to the stove, took off her green kid gloves and warmed her hands. Then vanished. The maids ran to Miss Jackson’s mother and described what they had seen, but the old woman assured them that her daughter did not own a pair of green gloves, so they must have imagined it. Half an hour later the lady herself arrived, walked to the kitchen stove, removed her green kid gloves and warmed her hands.

GETTING AHEAD OF THEMSELVES

Frederick Myers’ Phantasms of the Living includes a case of a multiple forerunner, complete with a horse and carriage.

The Reverend W. Mountford of Boston was visiting a friend when he looked out of the dining room window and saw a carriage approaching the rear of the house. ‘Your guests have arrived,’ said Mountford, whereupon his host joined him at the window. Both men observed the carriage turn the corner as if it was going to the entrance. But no one rang the door bell and the servants did not announce the arrival of their visitors. Instead, the host’s niece entered looking rather flustered having walked all the way from her home, and informed Mountford and his host that her parents had just passed her without acknowledging her or offering her a lift. Ten minutes later the real carriage arrived with the host’s brother and his wife. They denied all knowledge of having passed their daughter en route.

Such incidents are not, however, confined to the nineteenth century. As recently as 1980 an Austrian woman, Hilda Saxer, reported seeing a grey Audi belonging to her sister’s fiancé, Johann Hofer, passing by at 11.30pm as she left the restaurant Where she worked. She waved and the driver, whom she saw clearly and recognized as Johann, smiled and waved back. As she watched the car disappear into the distance the incident struck her as odd because Johann had left the restaurant half an hour earlier.

An hour later Johann’s father heard his son’s car pull into the driveway and the characteristic sound of the engine as the young man manoeuvred into his parking place. But he did not hear Johann enter the house. The next morning the father was worried when his son did not join him for breakfast. The radio had reported a tunnel collapse on the route Johann had taken on his way home from the restaurant at 11.30pm that same night. The father had heard the car in the drive and assumed his son must have left early that morning. It was only days later that rescuers found the wreckage of the car and its driver, crushed beneath tons of rubble.

THOUGHT FORMS

Science is slowly and reluctantly beginning to acknowledge that the human mind has the power to project a self-image to another location or to separate spirit and body at will. But what is not generally known, even among the earlier pioneers of parapsychology, is the capacity of the human mind to create and sustain images, or thought forms, which can be empowered with a life of their own. Such forms are known as tulpas in the Tibetan esoteric tradition and Golem in the Jewish magical tradition where their creation is considered one of the advanced techniques which must be mastered by initiates before they can become adepts.

The only known record describing the creation of one of these man-made ghosts is the account written by the French mystic and adventurer Alexandra David-Neel (1868–1969) who became the first female lama and the only outsider to be initiated into the secret doctrine of Tibetan Buddhism.

‘Besides having had the opportunities of seeing thought-forms, my habitual incredulity led me to make experiments for myself, and my efforts were attended with some success ... I chose for my experiment a most insignificant character: a monk short and fat, of an innocent and jolly type.

I shut myself in tsams (meditative seclusion) and proceeded to perform the prescribed concentration of thought and other rites. After a few months the phantom monk was formed. His form grew gradually ‘fixed’ and life-like. He became a kind of guest, living in my apartment. I then broke my seclusion and started for a tour, with my servants and tents.

The monk included himself in the party. Though I lived in the open, riding on horseback for miles each day, the illusion persisted. I saw the fat trapa (novice monk), now and then it was not necessary for me to think of him to make him appear. The phantom performed various actions of the kind that are natural to travellers and that I had not commanded. For instance, he walked, stopped, looked around him. The illusion was mostly visual, but sometimes I felt as if a robe was lightly rubbing against me and once a hand seemed to touch my shoulder.

The features which I had imagined when building my phantom, gradually underwent achange. The fat, chubby-cheeked fellow grew leaner, his face assumed a vaguely mocking, sly malignant look. He became more troublesome and bold. In brief, he escaped my control.

Once, a herdsman who brought me a present of butter saw the tulpa in my tent and took it for a live lama. I ought to have let the phenomenon follow its course, but the presence of that unwanted companion began to prove trying to my nerves; it turned into a ‘daynightmare’. Moreover, I was ... [going] to Lahsa ... so I decided to dissolve the phantom. I succeeded, but only after six months of hard struggle. My mind-creature was tenacious of life.’

CRISIS APPARITIONS

Sailors have always been notoriously fond of a good ghost story, but the tale told by seaman Robert Bruce to the nineteenth-century paranormal researcher Robert Dale Owen is both singular and significant as it is one of the earliest recorded examples of a crisis apparition, a phenomenon which is more common than one might imagine.

In 1828, Bruce was the first mate aboard a cargo ship ploughing through the icy waters off the Canadian coast. During the voyage he entered the captain’s cabin to find a stranger bent over a slate, writing intensely and in great haste. The figure appeared solid, but there was an other-worldly aspect to him and a grave expression on his face which unnerved Bruce. When the stranger raised his head and looked at him, Bruce fled fearing that the presence of the phantom foretold disaster for all on board. He found the skipper on deck and persuaded him to return to the cabin. ‘I never was a believer in ghosts,’ said Bruce as they made thier way below deck, ‘but if the truth must be told sir, I’d rather not face it alone.’ But when they entered the cabin it was empty. However, they found the slate and to the nor‘west.’

At first the skipper suspected that the crew were playing a practical joke, so he ordered them all to copy the message. After comparing their handwriting with the original he had to admit he could not identify the culprit. A search of the entire ship failed to find any stowaways, leaving the captain with an unusual dilemma: to ignore the message and risk having the lives of untold lost souls on his conscience, or change his course and risk being thought of as a superstitious old fool in the eyes of the crew. He chose to change course.

Fortunately, he had made the right decision. Within hours they came upon a stricken vessel that had been critically damaged by an iceberg. There were only minutes to save the passengers and crew before it sank beneath the waves. Bruce watched with grim satisfaction and relief as the survivors were brought aboard, but then he saw something which haunted him to his dying day. He came face to face with the stranger he had seen scrawling the message earlier that day in the captain’s cabin.

After the man had recovered sufficiently to be questioned, Bruce and the captain asked him to copy the message on the slate. They compared the two sets of handwriting. There was no question about it – they were identical. Initially, the ‘stranger’ couldn’t account for his early presence on the ship until he recalled a dream that he had had about the same time that Bruce had seen his ‘ghost’ in the captain’s cabin. After falling asleep from exhaustion he had dreamt that he was aboard a ship that was coming to rescue him and his fellow survivors. He told the others of his dream to reassure them that help was on its way and he even described the rescue ship, all of which proved correct in every detail. The captain of the wrecked ship confirmed his story. ‘He described her appearance and rig,’ he told their rescuers, ‘and to our utter astonishment, when your vessel hove in sight, she corresponded exactly to his description of her.’

ESCAPING WORLDLY BONDS

One of the most revealing examples of an out-of-body experience happens to be one of the first to be published in a respected medical journal, the St Louis Medical and Surgical Journal, in February 1890. It is also of great interest because the subject was a doctor who understood what was happening to him and was able to observe his own ‘death’ with clinical detachment.

Dr A.S. Wiltse of Kansas contracted typhoid fever in the summer of 1889. After saying his last goodbyes to his family, he lapsed into unconsciousness. But although his body exhibited no signs of life – neither pulse nor heartbeat – inside his own dead body Dr Wiltse was fully conscious and observing the grieving around him with a curious detachment. It was as if he had reverted to pure consciousness, acutely alert but unemotional. ‘I learned that the epidermis [skin] was the outside boundary of the ultimate tissues, so to speak, of the soul.’ He then felt a gentle swaying and a separation which he compared to the snapping of tiny cords. In another moment he was looking out from his skull. ‘As I emerged from the head I floated up and down ... like a soap bubble ... until I at last broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor, where I slowly rose and expanded into the full stature of a man.’ At this point he felt embarrassed to discover that there were two women in the room, but then he realized that he was not naked but clothed – merely by wishing to be so.

Here, perhaps, is a crucial clue as to why ghosts appear in the form that they do, often younger and in better health than when their physical shell expired. Dr Wiltse had left his body as a shapeless, colourless bubble of etheric energy, but as soon as he became aware of his surroundings he was able to assume a more acceptable form and projected his own self-image which would have been his ideal self. It was then that he passed straight through another man in the room before he realized what he was doing. He saw the funny side of the situation, which may have been partly due to the relief in finding himself very much alive in this new reality. He intuitively ‘knew’ that this was his natural state, his true self. His personality was the same after death as it had been in life, but he had left behind his fears and his sense of identity. He no longer identified with the body on the bed. He was no longer concerned with what happened to it. That was the part of him that felt pain, disappointment, regrets. This ‘greater self’ was beyond those petty, worldly concerns. If this was ‘death’, it was nothing more than slipping off a worn out coat or walking through an open door into the world outside.

He was becoming accustomed to his new ‘body’ and was eager to explore. As he passed through the door he looked back and saw a thin elasticated web-like cord connecting him to the lifeless body on the bed the etheric equivalent of the umbilical cord. So long as he remained attached by this cord he knew he could return to his body at will. He was not dead, as he had originally thought, but merely temporarily detached – a living ghost. He walked along a road idly wondering where the other ‘dead’ people might be and if this is all there was to being dead. Suddenly he lost consciousness and when he next became aware of where he was he found himself in an unfamiliar landscape over which hung a black cloud. Ahead he saw three enormous rocks which an inner voice informed him was the boundary to the ‘eternal world’. At this point he intuitively knew that this was as far as he would be permitted to go on this occasion and with that realization he woke up – much to the surprise of his doctor. Dr Wiltse had been clinically dead for four hours, but had suffered no permanent brain damage or other ill effects, contrary to the laws of medical science. A religious man might call this a miracle, but in the years that followed it became increasingly evident that such out-of-body experiences have been shared by hundreds of thousands of people around the world and that they are neither miraculous nor supernatural. They are perfectly natural.

A GHOST IN THE MIRROR

Vermont housewife Caroline Larsen considered herself an unremarkable person, preoccupied with social conventions, her standing in the community and her obligations as the dutiful middle-class wife of an amateur musician. But, one autumn evening in 1910, she discovered her true self as she went one step further than Dr Wiltse had done during a strikingly similar out-of-body experience.

As Mrs Larsen lay in bed listening to her husband and his friends practising a Beethoven string quartet she began to feel a creeping sense of foreboding. No matter how hard she tried to focus on the soothing strains of the music she was unable to relax and throw off her apprehension.

She observed that her room was unchanged. But after proceeding down the hall into the bathroom she instinctively reached for the light switch and was surprised that she couldn’t connect with it. It was then that she noticed that the room was illuminated by a softer light emanating from her own body.

‘Looking in to the mirror I became aware for the first time of the astonishing transformation I had undergone. Instead of seeing a middle-aged woman, I beheld the figure of a girl about 18 years of age. I recognised the form and features of my girlhood. But I was now infinitely more beautiful. My face appeared as if it were chiselled out of the finest alabaster and it seemed transparent, as did my arms and hands when I raised them to touch my hair ... But they were not entirely translucent for in the centre of the arms and hands and fingers there was a darker, more compact substance, as in x-ray photographs. My eyes, quite strong in the physical body, were piercingly keen now ... my hair, no longer grey, was now, as in my youth, dark brown and it fell in waves over my shoulders and down my back. And, to my delight, I was dressed in the loveliest white shining garment imaginable – a sleeveless one-piece dress, cut low at the neck and reaching almost to the ankles.’

She then had the idea to walk down the stairs and surprise her husband and his friends in her new youthful form.

Returning to her room she found her body on the bed, just as ‘still and lifeless’ as she had left it.

The image she describes may sound like an aging person’s fantasy, but the deceased often appear as their younger selves. In effect, they are so used to having a physical body that they cannot imagine themselves without one and so manifest as their ideal self-image.

PROJECTING HIS OWN GHOST

Most of the hundreds of thousands of out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences that have been recorded involve the involuntary separation of the spirit from the body at a moment of crisis or physical danger or during an altered state of consciousness. But there are a surprising number of incidents in which the astral traveller (see here) has consciously projected their spirit double to another location.

Sylvan Joseph Muldoon, the son of a spiritualist in Clinton, Iowa, claimed to have acquired the ability to leave his body at will. He had enjoyed dozens of liberating out-of-body experiences since the age of 12, but it was not until 10 years later, in 1925, that he had the confirmation that what he was experiencing was more than a lucid dream.

During this excursion he found himself propelled at incredible speed to an unfamiliar farmhouse somewhere in the same rural region where he lived. There he observed four people passing a pleasant evening, including an attractive young girl who was engaged in sewing a black dress. They seemed unaware of his presence so he wandered around the room noting the furnishings and ornaments until it occurred to him that he had no business being there. With that thought he returned to his body. It was more than a month later that Muldoon happened to see the same girl in town and asked her where she lived. She thought he was prying or being ‘fresh’ and told him to mind his own business, but when he described her home in astonishing detail and told her how he knew this, she confirmed everything that he had seen.

INDUCING AN OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE

If you wish to prove the existence of the etheric body for yourself, this exercise can be used to trigger an OBE. Although such experiences occur naturally and should never be forced, this safe and simple technique for the gradual separation of spirit and body has been practised by mystics through the centuries. However, it needs to be stressed that such techniques should never be attempted while under the influence of alcohol or drugs of any kind. Nor should they be attempted by anyone who has, or is currently suffering from, any form of psychological disturbance, abnormal grief or trauma. If in doubt you should seek medical advice before attempting any of these techniques.

1. Lie on your back on the floor, an exercise mat or bed and ensure you support your neck with a small pillow or cushion. Your arms should be loose by your side and not crossed over on your chest or stomach. Your legs must be straight.

2. Establish a steady rhythm of breathing and, as you dissolve deeper into relaxation, repeat a phrase that relaxes you and induces a sense of security, such as ‘calm and centred’ or ‘I am perfect and at peace’.

3. After a few minutes you may sense a warming of the solar plexus centre beneath your navel. Visualize a soft pulsing light in your abdomen as this energy centre softens, loosening the silver umbilical cord of etheric energy which connects your spirit double to your physical shell. Feel it unwinding as you sink deeper and deeper into a detached state. As you do so you will begin to lose the sense of the weight and solidity of your body. You become lighter with every breath.

4. Now visualize your breath forming a cushion of air under your back until you feel that you can float away like a cloud on the breeze. Feel yourself rising a few inches above your body and then being drawn back by the silver cord as you enjoy exercising control over your new found ability. You are safe and in control at all times. You only have to wish to return to your body and you will do so in an instant.

5. Transfer your awareness to this ‘real you’ by visualizing the room from a new perspective as if you were standing and walking around. Then imagine yourself looking down on your physical body from the ceiling – you may find you have ‘popped out’ and are now free to explore. If not, visualize yourself exploring the room in your spirit body and your awareness will be transferred to it. Until you are comfortable being outside your body it would be advisable to stay within the confines of your own home, but as soon as you feel confident you can begin to explore the neighbourhood and beyond.

• Be patient and persistent. It may take several attempts to make the breakthrough. You will know that you are out of the body and not dreaming because you will experience a euphoria as you realize you have liberated the real you. If you want to obtain absolute proof of this you can try the following experiment. However, if you do so, make sure your partner will treat it seriously or you risk having your confidence undermined.

• Remember: You are under no obligation to try this exercise. Out-of-body experiences are a natural phenomenon and should never be forced. If you feel uncomfortable for any reason do not attempt this exercise or you risk instilling fear in your self which may inhibit your development.

THE ASTRAL VISIT

A MESSAGE FROM THE OTHER SIDE

Near-death experiences typically involve an individual leaving their body, passing through a tunnel of light into a more vibrant reality and then returning to their body with a renewed appetite for life. But the experience of Dr Karl Novotny was different in one significant respect. He did not return. Instead he described the process of dying from the other side using the services of a medium. Such anecdotal evidence usually has the sceptics shrieking with derision, but the case of Dr Novotny is notable for several reasons.

Two days prior to his death in Easter 1965, Novotny’s friend, Grete Schroeder, dreamt that he appeared before her to announce his death. Neither Schroeder nor Novotny were interested in psychic phenomena – in fact quite the reverse. Novotny was a pupil of the celebrated psychologist Arthur Adler and was inclined to explain every phenomenon in terms of the untapped powers of the unconscious. When Novotny died as ‘he’ had predicted, Grete felt compelled to consult a medium rather than risk becoming prey to doubts for the rest of her life. She evidently chose a reputable psychic because not only did the details of his death – as relayed by the medium – tally with the facts, she also transcribed what he told her in a script which Grete recognized as Novotny’s own handwriting even though the medium had never met him. The description of his dying moments is uncannily similar to that related by thousands of other individuals from around the world who have had a near-death experience and it is worth quoting for comparison.

‘I turned back to my companions and found myself looking down at my own body on the ground. My friends were in despair, calling for a doctor, and trying to get a car to take me home. But I was well and felt no pains. I couldn’t understand what had happened. I bent down and felt the heart of the body lying on the ground. Yes – it had ceased to beat – I was dead. But I was still alive! I spoke to my friends, but they neither saw me nor answered me ...

And then there was my dog, who kept whining pitifully, unable to decide to which of me he should go, for he saw me in two places at once, standing up and lying down on the ground.

When all the formalities were concluded and my body had been put in a coffin, I realised that I must be dead. But I wouldn’t acknowledge the fact; for, like my teacher Arthur Adler, I did not believe in after-life.’

Novotny then visited his friend Grete and found her sitting alone and immersed in grief, but again his attempts to communicate were fruitless. She did not seem aware of his presence and did not respond when he spoke to her.

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AND THE SPIRIT

Dutch psychologist Elleke Van Kraalingen was a pragmatic, scientifically-minded woman who prided herself on having a healthy scepticism towards the supernatural. The demands of her professional life meant that she was totally grounded in the here and now and had no desire to probe the secrets of life and death. That was until she witnessed the sudden and violent death of her fiancé, Hermod, in a hit and run accident. In her autobiography, Beyond the Boundary of Life and Death, Elleke describes how she was awoken to the reality of the soul’s survival after death as she knelt over his body and sensed a ‘tearing apart’ of the subtle bond between them, as it was severed. She then ‘saw’ his soul leave his body as a mist and sensed his presence standing behind her during her desperate efforts to revive him. While the emotional part of her was in turmoil, the intellectual aspect of her being calmly reassured her that he was well. After the ambulance had taken his body, Elleke walked back to their hotel, all the while sensing that Hermod was beside her holding her hand.

That evening he materialized in their room, sitting on the edge of her bed as solid as he had been 24 hours earlier. Having been trained to dismiss everything connected with the paranormal as irrational and the creation of a troubled mind, Elleke instinctively denied what she was seeing as a hallucination brought on by grief. She covered her eyes and affirmed that she was imagining it, but when she looked again he was still there, as large as life. It was at this point that she heard him speak inside her head in a quiet consoling tone that was quite distinct from her own thoughts. ‘I’m still here,’ he told her. ‘There is no death, there is no time, there’s only reality.’

He was not the only discarnate spirit in the room. Elleke sensed the presence of others that she felt were here to help his transition from this world to the next. When he and his companions had gone she wrote everything down so that she could analyze her thought processes at a later date when she was not so emotionally involved. She hoped this would help her discover the cause of her delusion. Even at this point Elleke was convinced that what she had seen was a projection of her own internal turmoil. Perhaps this was a replay of her memories of Hermod triggered automatically as a result of an emotional crisis, like a drowning person who sees their life replayed in their mind like a film.

But the next day Hermod reappeared again, as solid as he was when he was alive. Elleke was the only person who could see him, presumably because she perceived him with the eyes of the spirit – the inner eye or third eye of psychic sight. That day he remained with her as she sleepwalked through the traumatic process of identifying his body and dealing with the police. It was only after the funeral that she sensed him withdraw, leaving her to cope with life alone.

And then an extraordinary thing happened. Several days later, while Elleke was meditating in an attempt to calm and centre herself, he reappeared and drew her out of her body. In this state she was able to look down at her physical self sitting cross-legged on the floor and view the world with a detachment she could not have attained while in her body. She described this state as liberating and more vibrantly real than what she had previously considered to be reality. When they embraced she felt totally absorbed in the core of his being, not merely comforted or connected as she had done when they were in their physical bodies. She sensed that it was only when they were out of body that they could truly know each other. Soon she felt drained and snapped back into her physical shell – either the effort of remaining out of the body for a long period was too much for her, or perhaps he was unintentionally draining her of her life force in order to remain at this level.

Over the following months, Hermod materialized and took her on an astral tour of other realms or realities where discarnate beings communicated with them by thought alone. In these realms the dead created their own heaven and hell according to their expectations and beliefs. Those who could not accept their own death remained earthbound, reliving the most significant experiences of their lives as if in a recurring dream and visible to the living as ghosts.

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PARANORMAL

Mainstream science and orthodox religion are considered custodians of good sense by those who believe in the infallibility of science or the absolute truth of the Bible. But both fields have their share of individualists who are not as rigid in their thinking as one might suspect.

Carl Jung (1875–1961), the founding father of analytical psychology, was fiercely proud of his reputation as a pioneer of the new science, but in private he continually wrestled to reconcile psychology and the paranormal. He wrote:

Jung’s maternal grandfather was the vicar of Kesswil, Switzerland, and was said to be blessed with ‘second sight’. His family blithely accepted that he conversed with the dead in defiance of church edicts. As Jung wrote:

His own home life was equally unconventional. As a child Jung was constantly aware of the presence of spirits.

In his youth Jung witnessed at first hand phenomena during seances held by his 15-year-old cousin, Helene Preiswerk, who had developed mediumistic powers. Helene channelled a number of dead relatives who spoke in their own distinctive voices and passed on personal details which the young ‘Helly’ could not have known about. Jung was particularly struck by the change in his cousin’s manner when she went into a trance. She exhibited a maturity and breadth of knowledge that was at odds with her provincial frivolous nature. But although Jung was initially convinced that her abilities were genuine, he later felt obliged to find a rational explanation when writing up the case for his inaugural dissertation. It was a classic example of multiple personality, he concluded, brought on by hysteria and sexual repression. Although such a diagnosis might account for a good number of fraudulent mediums, Jung also knew that he risked being discredited as a serious man of science if he subscribed to the spiritualist creed. Privately, however, he remained a firm believer in the paranormal and was intolerant of those, like Freud, who scoffed at such things on principle.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes his own paranormal experiences including the plague of poltergeist activity with which his home was besieged in the summer of 1916.

Over three successive evenings he channelled a series of messages from discarnate spirits which formed the basis of Seven Sermons From The Dead, a series of Hermetic discourses on the nature of God, and Good and Evil in a contrived archaic style. It was only when he had completed this task that the spirits withdrew and the ‘haunting’ ceased. Jung dismissed the attendant poltergeist activity as ‘exteriorization phenomena’, meaning that he interpreted it as his own unconscious demanding his attention to the coming task.

THE HAUNTED COTTAGE

Despite a lifetime of witnessing paranormal phenomena at first hand, Jung still felt the need to hedge his bets. In 1919, he wrote a paper for the SPR entitled ‘The Psychological Foundation of Belief in Spirits’ in which he stated that such phenomena can be dismissed as projections of the unconscious mind. The following year the spirits had their revenge.

In 1920, Jung arrived in Britain on a lecture tour and stayed in a country cottage so that he could be alone. The rent was nominal, but either Jung did not suspect that this might be because the place was haunted, or he didn’t attach any importance to it. On the first weekend he was disturbed by a rancid odour permeating the bedroom, although there was no obvious source of the smell. The following weekend, the smell returned accompanied by a rustling noise as if an animal was exploring the room, or perhaps a woman in a crinoline dress was brushing against the walls. On the third weekend, his work was interrupted by inexplicable rapping sounds. Again, there was no obvious source for these noises. On the fifth weekend, he was startled to wake up next to the ghost of an old woman, her face partly dissolved as if pressed into a pillow.

The locals subsequently confirmed that the cottage was inhabited by a malevolent spirit and that is why they refused to stay there after dusk. But Jung was not so easily disturbed. He invited the friend who had rented the cottage for him to spend the night, and the man was so terrified when he heard phantom footsteps that he abandoned his bed after just a few hours and spent the rest of the night sleeping in the garden with a shotgun by his side. Jung recollected, ‘It gave me considerable satisfaction after my colleague had laughed so loudly at my fear of ghosts.’

His own attitude to such phenomena remained ambiguous despite his extraordinary experiences. He was clearly impressed with the ‘performance’ of respected medium Rudi Schneider (whose talents were detailed in Thomas Mann’s essay ‘An Experience With The Occult’) although he could not bring himself to credit his cousin Helly with the same abilities. For all his insights into the human mind, Jung was forced to admit that he did not have an explanation for these phenomena. ‘Either there are physical processes which cause psychic happenings, or there is a pre-existent psyche which organises matter.’

If he expected his mentor Sigmund Freud to resolve the question he was to be cruelly disappointed. In one particularly memorable episode, Jung and Freud were arguing about the existence of poltergeists when a loud report shook a nearby bookcase. Freud insisted it was merely the furniture settling, even though the weather was mild and could not have caused the wood to contract or expand. But Jung had felt heat building up in his solar plexus from his frustration at being treated like a wilful student of the great man and he was certain that he himself was the source of the kinetic activity. ‘There will be another report in a moment,’ he predicted and, sure enough, there was.

OUT OF THIS WORLD

Paranormal phenomena and psychic experiences pursued Jung all through his life. Then, in April 1944, at the age of 68, he had an out-of-body experience that was to have a profound effect on his perception of the world and which turned his concept of reality on its head. The extracts below are from his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961):

‘It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light ... I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.

Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so extensive a view – approximately a thousand miles! The sight of the earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen ... I myself was floating in space.’

While he was contemplating the significance of this greater reality he became aware of another presence, that of his doctor who appeared before Jung in his ‘primal form’.

‘... a mute exchange of thought took place between us. The doctor had been delegated by the earth to deliver a message to me, to tell me that there was a protest against my going away. I had no right to leave the earth and must return. The moment I heard that, the vision ceased.

I was profoundly disappointed, for now it all seemed to have been for nothing. The painful process of defoliation had been in vain ... Life and the whole world struck me as a prison, and it bothered me beyond measure that I should again be finding all that quite in order. I had been so glad to shed it all ... I felt violent resistance to my doctor because he had brought me back to life. At the same time, I was worried about him. “His life is in danger, for heaven’s sake! He has appeared to me in his primal form! When anybody attains this form it means he is going to die, for already he belongs to the ‘greater company’.” Suddenly the terrifying thought came to me that the doctor would have to die in my stead. I tried my best to talk to him about it, but he did not understand me. Then I became angry with him.

In actual fact I was his last patient. On April 4, 1944... I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the first time since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day the doctor took to his bed and did not leave it again. I heard that he was having intermittent attacks of fever. Soon afterward he died of septicemia ...

It was not a product of imagination. The visions and experiences were utterly real; there was nothing subjective about them; they all had a quality of absolute objectivity.’

In Synchronicity (1952), Jung cites the case of a woman patient who left her body during childbirth and observed the medical procedures used to revive her which she described to her nurse after recovering consciousness. She was correct in every detail. The most astonishing part was her discovery that while in her astral body she possessed perceptions independent of her physical senses. At the same moment that she was watching the frantic efforts of the medical staff, she was also aware of a vivid pastoral landscape ‘behind’ her which she knew to be the ‘other world’. By a conscious effort of will she remained focused on the doctors and nurses for fear that she might be tempted by the bliss of the other world to drift into it and not return.

CRISIS OF FAITH

Eminent theological scholar Canon J.B. Phillips regarded himself as a conscientious servant of the Church of the England with an unshakable belief in the articles of his faith. These denied the existence of apparitions other than the Holy Ghost, yet Canon Phillips was convinced that he had had a visitation from C.S. Lewis, the recently deceased Christian philosopher and author of the Narnia novels, in late November 1963. He confided the details of his encounter in his journal.

‘Let me say at once that I am incredulous by nature and as unsuperstitious as they come. I have never bothered about ... any of the current superstitions which may occupy the human heart in the absence of faith ... But the late C.S. Lewis, whom I did not know very well and had only seen in the flesh once, but with whom I had corresponded a fair amount, gave me an unusual experience. A few days after his death, while I was watching television, he ‘appeared’ sitting in a chair a few feet from me, and spoke a few words which were particularly relevant to the difficult circumstances through which I was passing. He was ruddier in complexion than ever, grinning all over his face, and, as the saying has it, positively glowing with health. The interesting thing to me was that I had not been thinking about him at all ... A week later, this time when I was in bed reading before going to sleep, he appeared again, even more rosily radiant than before, and repeated to me the same message, which was very important to me at the time. I was a little puzzled by this and mentioned it to a certain saintly bishop who was then living in retirement in Dorset. His reply was, ‘My dear J. this sort of thing is happening all the time.’

Canon Phillips’ experience is noteworthy for several reasons. The first being that he was not a believer in spirits – in fact he was effectively under orders to deny their existence and had much to lose by admitting to what he had seen. Secondly, he saw the same apparition on two separate occasions which would seem to rule out the possibility that they were hypnagogic hallucinations (the hypnagogic state is that state between being awake and falling asleep), or waking dreams caused by fatigue or stress. Thirdly, Lewis’ ‘ghost’ spoke and the advice he gave was relevant to Canon Phillips’ situation. Furthermore, on the one occasion when Phillips had met Lewis during the latter’s lifetime, Lewis was dressed in clerical robes and not the ‘well-worn tweeds’ in which he appeared after death and which was his customary mode of dress. It was only after Phillips had reported his encounter with the author’s ghost that he learnt that Lewis dressed in tweeds. And, lastly, the bishop had evidently heard of such things in the course of his ministrations and took it all in his stride. If it was not a genuine encounter there is only one other explanation, that the apparition was a projection of Canon Phillips’ subconscious which took the form of a friend he admired and whose advice he would heed. And that is no less remarkable a phenomenon.

VOICES FROM BEYOND

In the 1920s, Thomas Edison, the prolific American inventor of the phonograph, the electric lamp, the microphone and the kinetoscope (a forerunner of the movie projector), to name but a few of his creations, admitted to working on a device for contacting the dead. He told Scientific American magazine that he believed it was perfectly possible ‘to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and Ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.’ Unfortunately, Edison passed over before he could build the contraption, but it now seems that his dream may be closer to being realized than ever before.

The first serious hint that audible communication with the departed may be feasible occurred in June 1959 when Swedish ornithologist Friedrich Jurgenson replayed a recording of birdsong and heard a faint Norwegian voice discussing the habits of nocturnal birds. At first he thought it must be interference from a local broadcaster or amateur radio enthusiast, but there was no transmitter in the area. Intrigued, he decided to make test recordings at his home to determine whether or not the tape recorder was faulty, but when he listened to the recordings he caught something which chilled him to the marrow. There were voices on the tape that he had not heard when he was recording. They mentioned Jurgenson and his dog by name and correctly predicted an incoming phone call and the name of the caller. In subsequent recording sessions, Jurgenson merely had to turn on the tape for an unspecified length of time and then play it back to hear a babble of faint voices talking among themselves, commenting on him and the other people whom he had invited to be present as witnesses.

As Jurgenson researched the subject he discovered that EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) were only one aspect of a wider range of phenomena known collectively as Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) covering spirit communication through all manner of electronic equipment including radios, telephones, television sets and even computers. Although the more common forms of ITC are indistinct disembodied voices, there have been incidents where the face of the deceased has been seen and positively identified by their relatives breaking through a regular broadcast on a television screen.

RECORDING EVP

If you want to experiment with EVP all you need is a digital recording device such as a mini-disc, DAT recorder or computer and an analogue radio. Cassette recorders are unsuitable as they produce excessive hiss at low volume and also mechanical noise which can cloak the signal. The radio needs to be tuned to a frequency between stations so that a background of white noise is audible for the voices to print through. You will have to be objective when analyzing what you have recorded as it is possible to interpret random interference, ‘print-through’ from previous recordings, digital ‘artefacts’ and signals bleeding from adjacent stations as being significant. The potential for misinterpretation is so common that a medical term has been coined to describe it – auditory pareidolia. Consequently, it is necessary to remain detached and foster a healthy scepticism, otherwise you are at risk of reading something significant into what is really only random interference.

THE POPE’S PARAPSYCHOLOGISTS

In 1952, two Italian Catholic priests, Father Ernetti and Father Gemelli, were I playing back a tape recording they had made of Gregorian chants when they heard an inaudible whispering in the silence when the singing had stopped. At first they thought it might be radio interference or ‘print through’, the echo of an earlier recording which occurs when the tape has not been properly erased or the playback heads are misaligned. But when they turned up the volume Father Gemelli recognized the whispering as the voice of his father who had died many years earlier. It was calling Gemelli by his childhood nickname. ‘Zucchini, it is clear, don’t you know it is I?’

Contact with the dead is forbidden by the Catholic church, but there was no denying what they had heard. So the priests dutifully asked for an audience with Pope Pius XII in Rome and put the problem before him. The Pope’s verdict was later published in the Italian Journal Astra.

The nonchalant reply stunned the priests, but evidently such phenomena were not news to the Vatican. It later transpired that the Pope’s cousin, the Rev Professor Dr Gebhard Frei, co-founder of the Jung Institute, was the President of the International Society for Catholic Parapsychologists and had collaborated with an early pioneer of EVP, Dr Konstantin Raudive, of Germany.

Before his death in October 1967, Frei had gone on record as a staunch advocate of investigating EVP. ‘All that I have read and heard forces me to believe that the voices come from transcendental, individual entities. Whether it suits me or not, I have no right to doubt the reality of the voices.’ Ironically, as if to validate his own life’s work, just a month after his death, the voice of Dr Frei was caught on tape and identified by Professor Peter Hohenwarter of the University of Vienna.

Pope Paul VI, successor to Pope Pius XII, continued the good work, giving his blessing to researches carried out by Swedish film producer Friedrich Jurgenson, who confided to a British voice researcher in the 1960s, ‘I have found a sympathetic ear for the Voice Phenomenon in the Vatican. I have won many wonderful friends among the leading figures in the Holy City. Today “the bridge” stands firmly on its foundations.’ Presumably, ‘the bridge’ referred to the work which would reconcile the Church with what it insisted on calling spiritism.

It is believed that the Vatican even agreed to novice priests attending a course in parapsychology under the auspices of Father Andreas Resch. The Church’s interest in these phenomena was hardly a secret although it was certainly not widely known. In 1970, the International Society of Catholic Parapsychologists convened in Austria and openly discussed such phenomena as EVP.

Perhaps the Church’s most active involvement with such matters was the Pye Recording Studio sessions which took place in England in 1972, funded by the Sunday Mirror. The sessions were conducted by theologian Dr Peter Bander, a senior lecturer in Religious and Moral Education at the Cambridge Institute of Education, who was initially hostile to the whole notion of communicating with the dead by any means. Prior to the experiment, Bander declared that it was ‘not only far-fetched but outrageous’ to even consider the possibility of recording spirit voices. He invited four senior members of the Catholic hierarchy to witness the proceedings in expectation that they would put the matter to rest once and for all. But during the recordings, which were held in a soundproof studio to eliminate the possibility of external interference, it was claimed that the participants heard the voice of a naval officer who had committed suicide two years earlier, a voice that had been recorded by Dr Raudive at an earlier session. The studio’s chief engineer, Ken Attwood, conceded, ‘I have done everything in my power to break the mystery of the voices without success; the same applies to other experts. I suppose we must learn to accept them.’

When the Sunday Mirror refused to publish Bander’s conclusions, he published them himself the following year in a book entitled Breakthrough. Father Pistone, Superior of the Society of St Paul in England, gave Bander’s experiment and his book what sounded like a positive endorsement.

‘I do not see anything against the teaching of the Catholic Church in the Voices, they are something extra-ordinary but there is no reason to fear them, nor can I see any danger. The Church realizes that she cannot control the evolution of science. Here we are dealing with a scientific phenomenon; this is progress and the Church is progressive. I am happy to see that representatives of most Churches have adopted the same attitude as we have: we recognize that the subject of the Voice Phenomena stirs the imagination even of those who have always maintained that there could never be any proof or basis for discussion on the question of life after death. This book and the subsequent experiments raise serious doubts, even in the minds of atheists. This alone is a good reason for the Church supporting the experiments. A second reason may be found in the greater flexibility of the Church since Vatican II; we are willing to keep an open mind on all matters which do not contradict Christ’s teaching.’

Bander also managed to convert Archbishop H.E. Cardinale, Apostolic Nuncio to Belgium, who remarked, ‘Naturally it is all very mysterious, but we know the voices are there for all to hear them’. The Right Reverend Monsignor, Professor C. Flagger added, ‘Facts have made us realize that between death and resurrection, there is another realm of post-mortal existence. Christian theology has little to say about this realm.’

Following the publicity surrounding the Pye sessions, the Vatican commissioned Swiss theologist Father Leo Schmid to embark on further research. Schmid went on to amass over 10,000 recordings which were transcribed and edited in his posthumously published book When the Dead Speak (1976). More recently, Vatican spokesman Father Gino Concetti told the papal newspaper Osservatore Romano:

CHAPTER 3

Living apparitions