“‘I thought something had surely happened to you. I saw you standing in front of the bed the night you left, as plain as could be, and I have been worrying about you ever since.’
“After explaining my effort to find out her condition, everything became clear to her. She had seen me when I was trying to see her. I thought at the time I was going to see her and make her see me.”
In at least one instance another experimenter, a German savant named Wesermann, performed the seemingly impossible feat of creating, by a simple act of volition, a ghost not of himself but of a person who was dead.
Herr Wesermann had been greatly troubled by the conduct of a friend, a young officer in the German army, and in the hope of reforming him, “willed” one evening that at eleven o’clock that night he should see in a dream an apparition of a lady in whom he had once been greatly interested, but who had been dead five years.
It chanced that at eleven o’clock, instead of being in bed and asleep, Herr Wesermann’s friend was chatting with a brother officer. Nevertheless, the apparition came to him at the hour appointed, and was seen, not only by him, but by his companion also.
The door of his chamber seemed to open, and the ghost of his dead sweetheart walked in, “dressed in white, with black kerchief and bared head.” Both officers started to their feet, and watched with bulging eyes while the ghost bowed gravely to them, turned, and without a word disappeared.
They followed instantly, rushing into the corridor, but saw only the sentry, who solemnly assured them that nobody but themselves had entered or left the room.[8]
Facts like these naturally raised in the minds of many of the investigators a belief that quite possibly ghosts could be explained without resorting to the alternative of dogmatically denying their reality or regarding them as supernatural beings. This belief was strengthened by other facts brought to light in the course of experiments to determine the actuality of telepathy, or thought transference as it used to be called.
It was discovered that, under certain favoring conditions, thoughts could indeed be transmitted from mind to mind without passing through the ordinary known channels of communication; and furthermore that thoughts thus transmitted were often apprehended, not as mere ideas, but in the form of auditory or visual hallucinations.
Thus, if it were a question of “telepathing” the idea of a certain playing card, say the three of diamonds, the recipient, instead of simply getting the thought, “three of diamonds,” might hear an hallucinatory voice saying to him, “three of diamonds,” or might see three diamond-shaped objects floating before his eyes, the “ghosts” of three diamonds, so to speak.