CHAPTER XII.
COLLECTIVE HALLUCINATIONS.
We have now to discuss that numerous class of cases in which the phantasm was perceived by two or more persons. The difficulties of interpretation which such cases present are enhanced for us by the various defects to which the evidence is here peculiarly liable. Many so-called cases of collective apparition, especially when the figure is seen out-of-doors, were probably real men and women.[121] In others we have to deal with a collective illusion, a quasi-hallucinatory superstructure built up by each witness, aided by hints from the others, on a common sensory basis. Such, for instance, appears to us the most probable interpretation of the following singular case.
From MRS. ALDERSON.
"My son and I were staying in the town of Bonchurch (Isle of Wight) last Easter vacation (1886). Our lodgings were close to the sea, and the garden of our house abutted on the beach, and there were no trees or bushes in it high enough to intercep our view. The evening of Easter Sunday was so fine that when Miss Jowett (the landlady's daughter) brought in the lamp, I begged her not to pull down the blinds, and lay on the sofa looking out at the sea, while my son was reading at the table. Owing to a letter I had just received from my sister at home, stating that one of the servants had again seen 'the old lady,' my thoughts had been directed towards ghosts and such things. But I was not a little astonished when, on presently looking out of the window, I saw the figure of a woman standing at the edge of the verandah. She appeared to be a broad woman, and not tall (Mrs. A. is tall), and to wear an old-fashioned bonnet, and white gloves on her closed hands. As it was dark the figure was only outlined against the sky, and I could not distinguish any other details. It was, however, opaque, and not in any way transparent, just as if it had been a real person. I looked at it for some time, and then looked away. When, after a time, I looked again, the woman's hands had disappeared behind what appeared to be a white marble cross, with a little bit of the top broken off, and with a railing on one side of the woman and the cross, such as one sometimes sees in graveyards.
"After looking at this apparition, which remained motionless, for some time, about twenty minutes, perhaps, I asked my son [then an undergraduate at B.N.C.] to come and to look out of the window, and tell me what he saw. He exclaimed, 'What an uncanny sight!' and described the woman and the cross exactly as I saw it. I then rang the bell, and when Miss J. answered it, I asked her also to look out of the window and tell me what she saw, and she also described the woman and the cross, just as they appeared to my son and myself. Some one suggested that it might be a reflection of some sort, and we all looked about the room to see whether there was anything in it that could cause such a reflection, but came to the conclusion that there was nothing to account for it."
Mr. Alderson writes:—
"Staying at B. (Isle of Wight) during the Easter vacation of 1886, I remember distinctly seeing an apparition in the form of a woman with her hands clasped on the top of a cross. The cross looked old and worn, as one sees in churchyards. My mother drew my attention to the figure, and after we had watched it for some time we rang the bell and asked the servant if she saw the figure. She said she did. I then went out to the verandah (where the figure was), and immediately it vanished.
"E. H. ALDERSON."