4

THE GRATEFUL DEAD

In a number of apparitions, the deceased are asking the living to do something for their own well-being in the afterlife. Sometimes they demand rituals to help them ascend to a higher state of consciousness, or that something be done about their sepulcher, or they ask for a dignified burial. In the astounding Baron Basil Driesen case below, it seems that the deceased, after becoming able to see things from a higher and more spiritual standpoint, now is eager to be forgiven by the person he has unjustly judged and wronged. Then, after being granted their postmortem wish, the dead are known to be grateful toward the persons who heard them and acted accordingly. Hence the legend of the grateful dead carried from the Middle Ages, and we’ll see an ancient account from this period, the thirteenth-century Willekin case. The fact the dead could be thankful is immensely informative. It means first that the dead have a clear memory of their past lives; and second, that, in the soul dimension, they are endowed with clairvoyance about their surviving family and about earthly matters; third, it shows they are able, reaching out from the soul hyperdimension, to come in contact with the living and find ways to express their wishes. In other words, they display a supernatural knowledge and are able to cross dimensions.

In fact, the apparition at her annual birthday of their dead child to my Burgundy family (discussed in chapter 2) could be counted as a cordial and heartening response to their immense grief, which had overwhelmed her mother and nearly destroyed the couple. It was a way for the soul of the child to show them she was a living soul, caring for her distressed parents.

THE GRATEFUL DEAD: THANKING THE LIVING

The following cases all have in common that they involve the deceased making a request of the living.

The Brewer Thanking a Friend for Taking Care of His Children

This case reported by Myers has several striking and rare features. First the farmer, Karl D., a sober man, awakens some time before midnight with a funny dream about his upbeat brewer friend (who, unknown to him, died in the afternoon). Still in bed, he now hears the brewer’s loud voice just outside his window, and that upsets him. But then the brewer walks right into his bedroom, “wildly gesticulating with his arms” in his usual manner, and talks to him as in a normal conversation, telling him he just died. Then, on hearing the farmer promising “I will look after your children,” he comes forward to embrace him, at which point the farmer, horrified, stops him from approaching.

About a year ago there died in a neighboring village a brewer called Wünscher, with whom I stood in friendly relations. His death ensued after a short illness, and as I seldom had an opportunity of visiting him, I knew nothing of his illness nor of his death. On the day of his death I went to bed at nine o’clock, tired with the labors which my calling as a farmer demands of me. . . .

In my dream I heard the deceased call out with a loud voice, “Boy, make haste and give me my boots.” This awoke me, and I noticed that, for the sake of our child, my wife had left the light burning. I pondered with pleasure over my dream, thinking in my mind how Wünscher, who was a good-natured, humorous man, would laugh when I told him of this dream. Still thinking on it, I hear Wünscher’s voice scolding outside, just under my window. I sit up in my bed at once and listen, but cannot understand his words. What can the brewer want? I thought Suddenly he comes into the room from behind the linen press, steps with long strides past the bed of my wife and the child’s bed; wildly gesticulating with his arms all the time, as his habit was, he called out, “What do you say to this, Herr Oberamtmann? This afternoon at five o’clock I have died.” Startled by this information, I exclaim, “Oh, that is not true!” He replied: “Truly, as I tell you; and, what do you think? They want to bury me already on Tuesday afternoon at two o’clock;” . . . I asked myself: Is this a hallucination? I say to the brewer, “Herr Wünscher, we will speak softly, so that my wife may not wake up, it would be very disagreeable to her to find you here.” To which Wünscher answered in a lower and calmer tone: “Don’t be afraid, I will do no harm to your wife.” I said to Wünscher: “If this be true, that you have died, I am sincerely sorry for it; I will look after your children.” Wünscher stepped towards me, stretched out his arms and moved his lips as though he would embrace me; therefore I said in a threatening tone, and looking steadfastly at him with a frowning brow: “Don’t come so near, it is disagreeable to me,” and lifted my right arm to ward him off, but before my arm reached him the apparition had vanished. My first look was to my wife to see if she were still asleep. She was. I got up and looked at my watch, it was seven minutes past twelve. My wife woke up and asked me: “To whom did you speak so loud just now?” “Have you understood anything?” I said. “No,” she answered, and went to sleep again. . . . I must further remark that the brewer had died that afternoon at five o’clock, and was buried on the following Tuesday at two. (Myers 1903, 375; 2013, 162, app. 4F)

In fact I’ve seen only rare cases of apparitions that include some bold bodily touch, one being the handshake with a “hand, which was long and cold” when the deceased is granted forgiveness in the Baron Basil Driesen case below. Interestingly, in both cases, the behavior is a spontaneous gesture of thankfulness and gratitude from the part of the recently deceased person. However, percipients feeling light touches and strokes on the hand, the head, or the shoulder (as with my house genie) are not rare.

The Dead Voicing Specific Demands to the Living

Sometimes the reported cases don’t show the dead being grateful per se but having clear demands as to their burial site, their belongings, or the care of loved ones left behind. If they can thus ask the living to carry on specific tasks, we can be confident that they will be pleased with the outcome. Here are two instances in this category. The first one is reported by Myers in his 1889 article, “On Recognised Apparitions Occurring More Than a Year after Death.”

A man (let’s call him the tutor) was charged by a dying man with taking care of an elderly relative; the now deceased man appears to him more than a year later, to complain that he has not kept his promise. After this stunning encounter, the tutor launches a thorough investigation into the measures he had taken at the time of the death and how they were enacted, and to his great surprise finds out that somehow they have been modified and not executed properly. He proceeds to correct them in order to uphold his promise. In this case, we see that the deceased is aware of the fact that his elderly relative is not being properly taken care of, and he will certainly be comforted when things are straightened out.

We’ll also see a complex case of multiple and long-term apparition, that of Palladia (chapter 7), starting with the percipient feeling a strong invisible presence, and resorting to the Ouija to understand who is there. The dead, Palladia, is not a parent of the percipient, but the fragile younger sister of his best university friend, whom he had often helped when she was sick. Palladia’s first words are a demand concerning the statue of an angel on her sepulcher. When the percipient asks Palladia what she wants, the Ouija spells out: To replace the angel, it is falling. Then Palladia appears regularly, looking bright and alive, sitting across from his desk and smiling at him, her face leaning on her hand; for years to come, she’ll be the ally of the percipient, giving him hints about future events.

The Legend of the Grateful Dead: A Dead Knight’s Gracious Thanks

We find a trove of ancient accounts of deceased spirits’ apparitions, and genies, in the books of Claude Lecouteux—a Sorbonne professor of Middle Ages literature and civilization. Here is one case taken from The Return of the Dead (123) called “Willekin and the Ghost,” extracted from a thirteenth-century Germanic short story called “Knightly Loyalty.” Lecouteux says it “provides a finished form of the legend of the grateful dead. The dead individual of course appears as an ectoplasm, but the text shows how the importance of the sepulcher persisted and is reminiscent of what we know about Roman beliefs. We should also remember the words of St. Augustine: ‘Doing good for the dead is very useful.’”

The story, however, is deeply faulted in terms of our standard of human values, not to mention what should be Christian ones! In short, its obvious aim, beyond stating it’s a Christian duty to bury the dead, is to show that these dead will reward you because they are still conscious and they have the means to tinker with reality to do so (such as to find the perfect winning horse for you). Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a Christian virtue (at this epoch and place at least) to give the woman the right to decide about herself, nor the right to impose or defend her loyalty toward her just-wed husband. What counts is the loyalty for a vile oath taken in order to get to win. Thus, when reading this account with a big grain of salt for its moral shortcomings and its didactic embellishment, let’s nevertheless remember that Abrahamic religions hold as a dogma the resurrection in the flesh at the End Times, and also that the Christians believe in the resurrection of Lazarus of Bethany by Jesus four days after his burial and, as the thirteenth-century Limoges enamel in figure 4.1 exemplifies, in the resurrection of the saints.

Fig. 4.1. Three Saints rising from the dead. Limoges artwork, circa 1250, champlevé enamel on copper.

Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen (2012), CC BY 2.5

Count Willekin von Montabur came to an inn one day and learned that a knight had died there but a short while before. Because the knight had not paid his bill, the innkeeper had the corpse thrown under a pile of manure. Willekin paid off the dead man debt’s and obtained a decent burial for him. Seeking a good horse to take part in a tourney whose prize was the hand of a noble lady, Willekin saw a man in the street astride a magnificent charger. He addressed him, offering him money in exchange for the horse. The other turned down the sum and surrendered his mount in return for half the prize of the tourney.

Willekin was victorious and took the prize, thus the wedding occurred. The next day, when he shut the door of the nuptial chamber, the knight with whom he had concluded the bargain arrived, demanding his half. The count offered him money and goods, but in vain. In order not to break his oath, he left the room. To his great surprise, his interlocutor followed him and declared: “I am the dead man whose body you redeemed and to whom you provided a sepulcher; I wanted to test your loyalty.” Not daring to rejoice, Willekin sought tangible proof of what he was hearing. He stuck out his hand and encountered nothing but air. The dead man thanked him again for his good deed and vanished, renouncing the price of the horse.

THE DECEASED COMES BACK TO ASK FOR FORGIVENESS

Here is an interesting related example, in which it is not the living asking the deceased for atonement and reparation of past deeds, but the recently deceased who appears to ask for forgiveness—the Baron Basil Driesen case.

The baron states in his report:

I had not been on good terms with M. Ponomareff [his father-in-law who died after a long illness]. Different circumstances . . . had estranged us from each other He died very quietly, after having given his blessing to all his family, including myself. A liturgy for the rest of his soul was to be celebrated on the ninth day. . . . On the eve of that day I read the Gospel before falling asleep. My wife was sleeping in the same room I had just put out the candle when footsteps were heard in the adjacent room—a sound of slippers shuffling I called out “Who is there?” No answer. I struck one match, then another I saw M. Ponomareff standing before the closed door. Yes, it was he, in his blue dressing-gown lined with squirrel furs white waistcoat and his black trousers. It was he, undoubtedly. I was not frightened “What do you want?” I asked my father-in-law. M. Ponomareff made two steps forward, stopped before my bed, and said, “Basil Feodorovitch, I have acted wrongly towards you. Forgive me! Without this, I do not feel at rest there.” He was pointing to the ceiling with his left hand, whilst holding out his right to me. I seized this hand, which was long and cold, shook it, and answered, “Nicholas Ivanovitch, God is my witness that I have never had anything against you.” [The ghost of] my father-in-law bowed [or bent down], moved away, and went through the opposite door into the billiard-room, where he disappeared. I looked after him for a moment, crossed myself, put out the candle, and fell asleep with the sense of joy which a man who has done his duty must feel. . . .

[Then, the next day, the confessor doing the liturgy asked to talk to me and] said to me in a rather solemn voice, “This night at three o’clock Nicholas Ivanovitch [Ponomareff] appeared to me and begged of me to reconcile him to you.” (Myers 1903, 415–16; 2012 181, app. 7D)

For a seasoned researcher like me, there is a rare and absolutely remarkable element in this account, which, being originally from the Proceedings of the SPR 10 (385–86), is as usual corroborated by witnesses (namely that of the confessor), and thus a very solid case. The deceased appearing to two distinct persons the same night at the same hour, both times with the same intent to beg for forgiveness, is already quite a feat. Note also the precise description of the deceased’s clothing. But furthermore, we have quite material effects of these apparitions, namely the “sound of slippers shuffling,” the walking and approaching nearer, and the most astounding of all, the actual handshake with the ghost hand: “I seized this hand, which was long and cold.”

The semimateriality of the soul body and of genies is something Claude Lecouteux was keen to stress, as well as their capacity to do all kinds of actions in the matter world, thus being proficient at moving and handling objects and matter.