Mrs. Lett assures me that neither she nor her sister ever experienced a hallucination of the senses on any other occasion. She is positive that the recognition of the appearance on the part of each of the later witnesses was independent, and not due to any suggestion from the persons already in the room.
There is another collective case which is noticeable from the fact that the departed spirit appears to influence two persons at a distance from each other in a concordant way, so that one of them becomes conscious of the appearance to the other.[152] Compare with this the incident given at the end of Appendix VII. G, when Miss Campbell has a vision of her friend seeing an apparition at a time when this is actually occurring.[153]
The case given in Appendix VII. F—which comes from excellent informants—is one of those which correspond most nearly to what one would desire in a posthumous message. I may refer also to General Campbell's case (in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 476) in which a long continued series of unaccountable noises and an apparition twice seen by a child in the house suggested to the narrator the agency of his dead wife. The case, which depends for its evidential force on a great mass of detail, is too long for me to quote; but it is worth study, as is any case where there seems evidence of persistent effort to manifest, meeting with one knows not what difficulty. It may be that in such a story there is nothing but strange coincidence, or it may be that from records of partially successful effort, renewed often and in ambiguous ways, we shall hereafter learn something of the nature of that curtain of obstruction which now seems so arbitrary in its sudden lifting, its sudden fall.
I will conclude this group by referring the reader to three cases closely similar, all well attested, and all of them capable of explanation either on local or personal grounds. In the first (Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 619 [744 A]) an apparition is seen by two persons in a house in Edinburgh, a few hours before the death of a lady who had lived there, and whose body was to be brought back to it. In the second (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 57 [744 B]) the dead librarian haunts his library, but in the library are members of his old staff. In the third (Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 212 [§ 744]), the dead wife loiters round her husband's tomb, but near it passes a gardener who had been in her employ.
In this last case the apparition was seen about seven and a half hours after the death. This, as Gurney remarked, makes it still more difficult to regard the case as a telepathic impression transmitted at the moment of death, and remaining latent in the mind of the percipient. The incident suggests rather that Bard, the gardener, had come upon Mrs. de Fréville's spirit, so to say, unawares. One cannot imagine that she specially wished him to see her, and to see her engaged in what seems so needless and undignified a retracing of currents of earthly thought. Rather this seems a rudimentary haunting—an incipient lapse into those aimless, perhaps unconscious, reappearances in familiar spots which may persist (as it would seem) for many years after death.
A somewhat similar case is that of Colonel Crealock (in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 432) where a soldier who had been dead some hours was seen by his superior officer in camp at night rolling up and taking away his bed.
It is, indeed, mainly by dwelling on these intermediate cases, between a message-bringing apparition and a purposeless haunt, that we have most hope of understanding the typical haunt which, while it has been in a sense the most popular of all our phenomena, is yet to the careful inquirer one of the least satisfactory. One main evidential difficulty generally lies in identifying the haunting figure, in finding anything to connect the history of the house with the vague and often various sights and sounds which perplex or terrify its flesh and blood inhabitants. We must, at any rate, rid ourselves of the notion that some great crime or catastrophe is always to be sought as the groundwork of a haunt of this kind. To that negative conclusion our cases concordantly point us.[154] The apparition is most often seen by a stranger, several months after the death, with no apparent reason for its appearance at that special time. This last point is of interest in considering the question whether the hallucinatory picture could have been projected from any still incarnate mind. In one case—the vision of the Bishop of St. Brieuc (given in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 460), there was such a special reason—the Bishop's body, unknown to the percipient, was at that moment being buried at the distance of a few miles. Mr. Podmore suggests (op. cit., vol. vi. p. 301) that it was from the minds of the living mourners that the Bishop's phantasm was generated. That hypothesis may have its portion of truth; the surrounding emotion may have been one of the factors which made the apparition possible. But the assumption that it was the only admissible factor—that the departed Bishop's own possible agency must be set aside altogether—lands us, I think, in difficulties greater than those which we should thus escape. The reader who tries to apply it to the apparitions quoted in my earlier groups will find himself in a labyrinth of complexity. Still more will this be the case in dealing with the far fuller and more explicit motor communications, by automatic writing or speech, which we shall have to discuss in the two next chapters. Unless the actual evidence be disallowed in a wholesale manner, we shall be forced, I think, to admit the continued action of the departed as a main element in these apparitions.
I do not say as the only element. I myself hold, as already implied, that the thought and emotion of living persons does largely intervene, as aiding or conditioning the independent action of the departed. I even believe that it is possible that, say, an intense fixation of my own mind on a departed spirit may aid that spirit to manifest at a special moment—and not even to me, but to a percipient more sensitive than myself. In the boundless ocean of mind innumerable currents and tides shift with the shifting emotion of each several soul.
But now we are confronted by another possible element in these vaguer classes of apparitions, harder to evaluate even than the possible action of incarnate minds. I mean the possible results of past mental action, which, for aught we know, may persist in some perceptible manner, without fresh reinforcement, just as the results of past bodily action persist. This question leads to the still wider question of retrocognition, and of the relation of psychical phenomena to time generally—a problem whose discussion cannot be attempted here.[155] Yet we must remember that such possibilities exist; they may explain certain phenomena into which little of fresh intelligence seems to enter, as, for instance, the alleged persistence, perhaps for years, of meaningless sounds in a particular room or house.
And since we are coming now to cases into which this element of meaningless sound will enter largely, it seems right to begin their discussion with a small group of cases where there is evidence for the definite agency of some dying or deceased person in connection with inarticulate sounds, or I should rather say of the connection of some deceased person with the sounds; since the best explanation may perhaps be that they are sounds of welcome—before or after actual death—corresponding to those apparitions of welcome of which we have already had specimens. One of our cases (see Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 639 [§ 747]) is remarkable in that the auditory hallucination—a sound as of female voices gently singing—was heard by five persons, by four of them, as it seems, independently, and in two places, on different sides of the house. At the same time, one person—the Eton master whose mother had just died, and who was therefore presumably in a frame of mind more prone to hallucination than the physician, matron, friend, or servants who actually did hear the singing—himself heard nothing at all. In this case the physician felt no doubt that Mrs. L. was actually dead; and in fact it was during the laying out of the body that the sounds occurred.