Consider the cases of the appearance of the ghosts of deceased people. Famous scientists take such cases seriously. For example, William James put it this way: "Science can keep repeating that" such things are simply impossible "and, nevertheless, because the number of such stories only increases in different countries and so few of them are fully explained, ignoring them will not be the best way out. They need to be taken, if only for further investigation … Now let's look at a few cases. I agree with James that "ignoring them will not be the best way."
Astronomer Camille Flammarion recognizes "the possibility of communication between incarnate and disembodied spirits." He added that his personal research had led to conclusions supporting "the plurality of inhabited worlds … and the indestructibility of souls as well as atoms." Flammarion's best work is Death and Its Mystery, a three-volume collection of evidence of the soul's existence outside the body and its survival after the death of the physical body. The book contains several cases of the phenomenon of ghosts of dead people.
Here is a description of the appearance of a ghost two hours after the death of a person. The entry was made by Charles Tweedale of the Royal Astronomical Society of London in The English Mechanic and World of Science (20 July 1906).
Tweedale recalls an incident from his childhood. On the evening of January 10, 1879, he went to bed early. When he woke up, he saw a figure in the moonlight in front of him, which gradually took on clear outlines. He noticed that moonlight was coming from a window on the south side of the room.
Gradually, the figure acquired more and more clear outlines, until he could recognize the face of his grandmother. She was wearing an "old-fashioned shell-like cap." After a few seconds, the figure split in two and disappeared. At breakfast, Tweedale told his parents about his vision. His father silently left the table. The mother explained: “In the morning your father told me that when he woke up at night he saw his mother, who was standing by his bed. But as soon as he was about to speak to her, she disappeared. " A few hours later, the family received a telegram about the death of Tweedale's grandmother.
Later, Tweedale learned that his father's sister (Tweedale's aunt) had also watched the ghost on the night of the woman's death. Death came at 15 minutes of the first night. Tweedale's father noted that his vision was at 2 a.m. Tweedale himself did not have a clock, but based on the position of the moon, he calculated that he saw the ghost also at about 2 am.
Aunt Tweedale also had a vision much later than the stated time of death. Tweedale stated: “This proves that we are not dealing with telepathic or subjective manifestations that occur before or at the very moment of death, but with a real objective vision of a ghost after life leaves the body.
Therefore, we can conclude that the deceased woman, although without obvious signs of life, was so alive for several hours after death that she appeared to different people at a considerable distance. The details in Tweedale's report were confirmed by his mother and aunt's husband.
Based on the evidence presented in his books, Flammarion came to the following five conclusions: “1) The soul is a real body, independent of the physical body; 2) she has abilities that are not known to science to this day; 3) she is able to act at a distance, telepathically, without the medium of the senses; 4) there is a mental element in nature, the essence of which is still hidden from us; 5) the soul experiences the physical body and can appear after its death."
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On the relationship between soul and body, Flammarion said that: “the body is nothing more than an organic garment of the spirit; it dies, it changes, it collapses, but the spirit remains … The soul cannot be killed. " This is very similar to the saying from the Bhagavad-gita: "As a person puts on new clothes, getting rid of old ones, so the soul goes into new physical bodies, getting rid of old and unnecessary bodies."
April 1880 - Mrs. N. Crans went to bed in New York on Friday night. This is what she said in a letter to Richard Hodgson of the American Society for Psychical Research: “I remember that after I went to bed, I had the feeling of flying, as if I was leaving my body. My eyes were closed; and soon I realized, or it seemed to me that I was flying somewhere quickly. It was dark all around, but it became clear to me that this was a room; then I saw Charlie sleeping in his bed; then I examined the furniture in the room, and I saw every object very clearly, even the chair at the head of the bed, which had a broken back."
Charlie was Mrs Crans's son-in-law, Charles A. Kernochan, who lived in Central City, South Dakota. Mrs. Crans continued: “At that moment the door opened and the ghost of my daughter Ellie entered the room, stopped by the bed, bent down and kissed Charlie. He immediately felt her presence and tried to restrain her, but she fluttered out of the room like a feather in the wind. Ellie was the daughter of Mrs. Crans and the wife of Charlie Kernochan. She died in December 1879, about 5 months before the event described.
Mrs. Crans told several people about her dream and then wrote a letter to Charles on Sunday. He, meanwhile, wrote a letter himself, which he sent simultaneously with her. In the letter, Charles wrote: “Oh, my dear mommy Crans! My God! I dreamed that I saw Ellie on Friday night! Mrs Crans says that Charlie described Ellie “as I saw her; when she entered the room. He cried and wanted to hug her, but she evaporated.
After Charlie sent this letter, he received a letter from Mrs. Crans and answered her. Mrs Crans said that Charles "wrote that everything I saw was exactly like that, even all the things, the furniture in the room, and the dream he had."
In this case, both percipients were asleep when Ellie appeared to them. It can be assumed that there was an unconscious telepathic connection between Mrs. Crans and Charles, and together they could create a joint appearance in an intersubjective dream. However, there is no less reason to suggest the presence of some third party in this intersubjective encounter, namely Ellie herself, as a subtle physical form.
Sir Arthur Bacher, General of the British Army, was serving in India when he saw the manifestation of the spirit of a deceased person. 1867, March - he went to the Kassouli mountain station (Kussouri) to visit the house where he and his family planned to live during the hot season. His son accompanied him on the trip. In the middle of the night, the general woke up and saw an Indian woman who was standing next to his bed.
As soon as he got up, the woman withdrew through the door that led from the bedroom to the bathroom. The general followed her, but the woman was not there. He found that in addition to the door through which he got here, there was another door from the bathroom outside, and it was locked. The general went to bed again, and in the morning left a pencil note on the doorframe that he had seen a ghost. But he did not tell anyone about the incident.
A few days later, the general and his family, including his wife Lady Bacher, arrived at the house. Lady Bacher decided to use the room in which the General slept on his first visit as a dressing room. On the first night at the house, Lady Bacher was changing for dinner in the same room when she saw the Indian woman in the bathroom. Thinking that this woman was her new aya (maidservant), Lady Bacher asked what she was doing there. There was no answer. When Lady Bacher entered the bathroom, the woman was not there, and the door to the street was locked.
At dinner, Lady Bacher mentioned this strange event in a conversation with the general, who in response told her his story. After a while they went to bed. Their youngest son, who was 8 years old, slept on a bed in the same room. He knew nothing about the ghost. His bed was close to the door to the dressing room and bathroom. At night the child woke up and the parents heard him shouting in Hindi: “What do you want, ayah? What do you want? It is absolutely clear that he saw the figure of the Indian woman. But this time neither the general nor his wife saw her. After this incident, she no longer appeared.
The general wrote about the last appearance of the ghost: “This confirmed our suspicions that the same woman appeared to the three of us, and after questioning the inhabitants, we learned that the ghost often comes into the house when new tenants first settle there. Several years ago, a local woman, a Kashmir woman, very beautiful and fair-skinned, was killed in a hut a few yards from her house, right under the door leading to the bathroom and dressing room, through which in all three cases the ghost appeared and disappeared. I can name other previous inhabitants of the house who told us the same story."
Serviceman Charles Lett recalled his meeting with the ghost, notable for the fact that several people saw the ghost at the same time. 1873, April 5 - His father-in-law, Captain Townes, dies at home. After 6 weeks, Lett's wife was in one of the bedrooms of the house and saw Captain Townes' head and torso in great detail on the polished surface of the wardrobe. With her was a young lady, Miss Burton, who also saw the image. At first, they thought that someone had hung a portrait of the captain. At this time Mrs. Lett's sister, Miss Townes, entered the room and before Mrs. Lett or Miss Burton could say anything to her, Miss Townes exclaimed, “Good God! Do you see daddy?"
Several domestic servants were summoned in turn, and each of them was dumbfounded at the sight of the ghost. Charles Lett recalled: “In the end, Mrs. Townes was called and she, seeing the ghost, went to him with her hand outstretched, as if wanting to touch him, and when she ran her hand along the wardrobe door, the figure gradually evaporated, and never appeared again.
Was this ghost really the soul of Captain Townes, who revealed himself in this form? Adherents of the theory of superpsychic abilities (superpsi) would answer in the negative. However, cases of this kind, when several people saw ghosts, are rather difficult to explain using the superpsi theory. It could be assumed that an image of Captain Townes appeared in the head of the main percipient, reproduced from memory or by means of extrasensory perception "caught" from the memory of another person. The main percipient should have seen this image in the room.
By telepathic transmission of thoughts, the same image would then be transmitted to the heads of other people. But experiments on the telepathic transmission of images prove that it is not at all easy to transfer an image completely from one consciousness to another. There may be another explanation - super-psychokinetic (super-pc) abilities, when the main percipient creates a real form in three-dimensional space. But, if we are talking about super-psi or super-pc abilities, then a number of difficulties should be noted here.
In this case, 7 people saw the image and it looked the same to all of them. In addition, the percipients stood in different parts of the room, and the image was in the right perspective in relation to each of them. It is also important that everyone saw the image as soon as they entered the room, and after that the ghost ceased to exist for everyone at the same time. This discussion is based on an analysis by Griffin, who noted that ghost appearances to several people are not at once isolated, and concluded: "The opinion that at least some of the visions appear with the participation of souls themselves can provide at least some explanation."
To explain the phenomena of ghosts to several percipients in terms of super-psi and super-pc theories, the imagination of the main percipient is cited as the reason. Thus, it is assumed that he knew the deceased, and he had reasons for wanting to see him. In another case, the motivation for the appearance of a ghost comes from the deceased, which proves the existence of the soul after the death of the body - that is, what is excluded in the super-psi and super-pc theories. There are, however, cases of collective visions where the principal percipient did not know the deceased. Here is one such case from Myers' Human Personality.
On Christmas Eve in 1869, a woman and her husband were about to go to bed when she suddenly saw a man in naval uniform at the foot of the bed. She touched her husband, who was lying with his face to the other side, and asked, "Willie, who is this?" Her husband said loudly, "What the hell are you doing here sir?" The figure reproachfully said, "Willie, Willie!" And then moved to the bedroom wall. The woman recalls: "When she walked past the lamp, a dark shadow fell on the room, as if a real person blocked the light from us with his body, and then left through the wall."
After the ghost disappeared, Willie told his wife that it was an image of his father, a naval officer, who passed away 14 years ago. She had never seen him. Her husband was very worried about one deal and took his father's vision as a warning not to make a deal. And if we consider the wife as the main percipient, and the vision as a hallucination, then it seems strange that her husband’s deceased father, whom she had never met before, became her hallucination.
A researcher of paranormal phenomena could assume that the wife, through her super-psychic (super-es) abilities, felt her husband's concern and his subconscious memories of her father, and from this material, with the help of super-pc abilities, she materialized an image so that she saw not only herself, but and her husband.
However, this whole explanation looks too far-fetched to dispense with the assumption of the soul's life after death. In this case, it is much easier and easier to assume that the soul of Will's father, wanting to save his son from financial ruin, itself wished to appear to his son. Griffin noted that in such cases "Frederick Myers assumed that the soul of the deceased, or separate elements thereof, performed some semi-physical actions in the space where they saw the ghost."
M. A. Kremo