These phantasms appear, either in dreams or in broad daylight, to the friends of dying persons. They may announce in words, “I am dying,” or “I am dead.” They may merely appear with signs upon their faces of alarm or of impending dissolution. They may appear as bodies lying dead upon a couch or in a coffin. They may predict the hour of their death, but more usually their appearance coincides with the exact moment at which their physical bodies ceased to exist.
M. Flammarion gives numerous instances of these apparitions seen under such varying circumstances as have been named. In certain examples the phantom appears to have substance and to be capable of making its presence actually felt. Thus in one case the subject saw the apparition of her sister who was dying in a place far away, and at the same time “felt a hand brush lightly against the sheets.” The subject, when questioned, said: “No, no, it wasn’t a dream! I heard her steps; they made the floor creak. I’m sure of it; I wasn’t dreaming; she came; I saw her” (p. 345).
It may be further noted that persons who announce their deaths to others by visions or by spoken words may at the time of such warning be in perfect health. Moreover, the apparition may announce to the dreamer the exact date of the speaker’s own death many days in advance. In one such instance a man—then in sound health—appeared to a friend in a dream on August 2 and informed him that he (the subject of the apparition) would die on August 15. The event happened as foretold. An instance which involved an interval of years is recorded by Robert Browning the poet. Seven years after his wife’s death she appeared in a dream to her sister, Miss Arabel Barrett. Miss Barrett asked the apparition, “When will the day come on which we shall be reunited?” The dead woman answered, “My dear, in five years.” Five years, lacking a month, after this vision, Miss Barrett died of heart disease.
In messages or warnings from the dying M. Flammarion affirms that telepathy (or the transmission of thought to a distance) plays an important part. More than this, he says: “It is beyond doubt that at the moment of death a subtle shock, unknown in its nature, at times affects those at a distance who are connected with the dying person in some way. This connexion is not always that of sympathy.” The method in which telepathy acts is explained by the author in the following words: “It is admitted that a kind of radiation emanates from the dying person’s brain, from his spirit, still in his body, and is dispersed into space in ether waves—successive, spherical waves, like those of sound in the atmosphere. When this wave, this emanation, this effluvium, comes into contact with a brain attuned to receive it, as in the case of a wireless-telegraph apparatus, the brain comprehends it—feels, hears, sees” (p. 284).
The manifestations produced by these passages between the living and those who are on the point of death are very varied. They may take the form of warnings, predictions or notifications of death. They may be conveyed vast distances and are usually received at the very moment at which the body from which they emanate ceases to be. Warnings or announcements may be conveyed by voices or by visions of various kinds. The voices may be recognized as those of the dying, or the actual death scene, “visioned from a distance,” may be presented complete in every detail. Some of the manifestations may take a physical form, such as knockings upon doors and windows, the sound of footsteps or of gliding feet, the moving of articles of furniture, the falling of portraits from the wall, the opening of doors, the passage of a gust of wind.
Many of the phenomena appear to me to be hardly worthy of being recorded. As illustrations I may quote the movement of a hat on a hat peg used by the deceased, the violent shaking of an iron fender to announce a daughter’s death, the fact that about the time of a relative’s decease a table became “split completely along its whole length,” while on another like occasion a gas jet went out in a room in which a party was sitting, playing cards.
The following circumstance will not commend itself to the reasonable as one that was dependent upon a supernatural agency. “My grandmother,” a student writes, “died in 1913. At the hour of her death the clock which hung in her room stopped, and no one could make it go again. Some years afterwards her son died, and the very day of his death the clock again began to go without anyone having touched it.” “It is strange,” comments M. Flammarion, “that the spirit of someone dying or dead should be able to stop a clock or start it again.” Assuredly it is more than strange. The same comment might apply to the following testimony provided by a gardener in Lunéville. “A friend, when one day cleaning vegetables, seated in a chair, was struck on the knee by a turnip which was on the ground, and heard at the same instant two cries: ‘Mother! Mother!’ That same day her son, a soldier, was dying in our colony of Guiana; she did not hear of his death until very much later.”
M. Flammarion’s work is probably the most orderly, temperate and exact that has appeared on the subject of death from the point of view of the spiritualist. It has been the work of many years and its conclusions are based upon hundreds of reports, letters and declarations collected by the writer. To many readers the book will, no doubt, be convincing and inspiring, while possibly to a larger number of people the author’s position will appear to be untenable, and much of the evidence upon which his conclusions are based to be either incredible or impossible. With those who may hold this latter opinion I am entirely in accord.
Many of the so-called manifestations, such as the spirit visitants, the visions and the voices, can be as fitly claimed to be illusions and hallucinations as affirmed to be due to the action of the psychic element or astral body. The tricks of the senses are innumerable. The imagination, stimulated and intensified, can effect strange things in sensitive subjects; while, on the other hand, the powers of self-deception are almost beyond belief, as the experience of any physician will attest. Belief in the supernatural and the miraculous has a fascination for many minds, and especially for minds of not too stable an order. Such persons seem to prefer a transcendental explanation to one that is commonplace. Apparitions are not apt to appear to those who are healthy both in body and in mind. Dreams, it will be admitted by all, are more often due to indigestion than to a supernatural or a spiritual agency. Voices are heard and non-existing things are seen by those whose minds are deranged, and it must be allowed that not a few of the men and women upon whose evidence M. Flammarion depends exhibit a degree of emotional excitement or exaltation which borders on the abnormal.
I think, moreover, it would not be unjust to suggest that certain of the narratives are exaggerated and that an element of invention is possible and, indeed, probable in many of them. There is an impression also that some of the circumstances detailed have been misinterpreted or misapplied or have been modified by events which have followed later and to which they have been adapted as an afterthought. Above all I am reluctant to believe that the dying, in the solemn and supreme moment of passing away from the earth, can be occupied by the trivialities—and, indeed, I would say by the paltry tricks—which are accredited to their action in this book.