In the summer of 1968, an employee of one of the Chicago banks, Solomon Vidal, as usual, was already at his workplace before the start of the working day. The bell rang, and the first, still few, visitors entered the hall through the revolving door.
Out of the corner of his eye, Vidal noticed that first a young couple entered, followed by three or four young men with raincoats and hats pulled down over their eyes. But then the internal phone rang, and he was distracted. And when he looked up to the checkout window, he saw a large pistol pointed straight at his forehead. With the other hand, the raider slipped a black bag through the window.
- Quickly put everything here, you will peep - a bullet in the forehead!
With shaking hands, folding the bundles of dollars into a sack, Vidal noticed that the same thing was happening in the next window.
- Now hands behind the head and do not move! the bandit ordered, watching his partner, who had something stalled there.
The alarm button was very close under the tabletop, but Vidal knew perfectly well that at the slightest attempt to reach out to it, the bandit would pull the trigger. And there was no guarantee that the raiders would leave witnesses who saw their faces alive. Being in the strongest stress, Vidal mentally reached for the panic button, when suddenly he saw a strange sight: a ghostly hand suddenly appeared and began to stretch out right from his stomach. And this hand reached for the cherished button. Most of all, he was now afraid that this incredible sight would be seen by a raider, but he did not seem to notice anything.
And then the alarm sounded loudly. The raider tore off his sack and rushed to the door, followed by his companions, posing as visitors. But they did not manage to get far with the booty: a police patrol was passing by and saw robbers running out of the bank door. A shootout ensued in which one policeman was wounded and two robbers were killed.
Of course, Vidal told reporters everything as it was, without hiding about the ghostly hand. The police officer who heard this story tried to remove his fingerprint from the button and made sure that a human hand did not touch him.
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“Apparently, you involuntarily pressed it with your knee,” he explained to the hero of the day. But from the knee to the button it was almost half a meter, and without changing the position, he could not reach her with his knee. But at gunpoint, he was afraid to even move.
In the early seventies, the famous American writer Andre Norton wrote a novel unusual for her work: There are monsters : it was unusual, almost documentary, and the action took place in modern America. Literally from the first pages, she quoted famous researchers of the unknown in it: Charles Fort, Keel, Sanderson, the plot was built on the well-known phenomenon of one American road, where people periodically disappeared along with cars.
But in addition to the phenomenon of disappearance, the novel contains telepathy, teleportation, including temporal, flying saucers, kidnapping people and other set of modern horror films. But what is more interesting for us now is the fact that she included the Vidal phenomenon in it.
At some point, the main character is captured by creepy bandits who tie him to a tree, intending to do something bad to him, and, perhaps, just eat him. But then something even more terrible happens, from which all the bandits flee in horror, and the hero, tied to a tree, struggles to free himself. A knife thrown by the bandits lies nearby, but, naturally, he cannot reach it. And being in such stress, he, like Solomon Vidal, grows a phantom hand in himself and reaches for the knife with it.
Of course, not only a pragmatic policeman, but also many Americans hardly believed the story of a bank employee, but a similar phenomenon really exists and is described in the works of researchers of anomalous phenomena since the 18th century. In the book published at the beginning of the last century by the famous French researcher G. Durville, The Ghost of the Living, there is a reference to the work of Abbot Hannapier, published in 1822:
“I know a young girl whose thigh was cut off. Several times it happened that she stood and made several steps with both legs, i.e. a healthy leg and a leg of the fluid of life, which usually happened when she got out of bed. Her mother, a witness to this, involuntarily cried out: "Oh, poor thing, you don't have a wooden leg with you." The doctor of my friends told me that he saw an officer with his hip taken off to the middle of the room, not noticing the absence of a wooden leg, and stopped only when he remembered that; then the leg of the vital fluid was no longer able to withstand the weight of his body."
To make it clearer what is at stake, replace the concept of "vital fluid" with "astral". According to Durville, some psychics can see amputated limbs in people, i.e. their astral projection. This is also seen by the electrophotograph obtained by the Kirlian method; if a piece is cut off from a freshly plucked leaf of a tree, then the glow surrounds its missing part.
The most famous specialist in phantomogenesis, in this case a person with the ability to "produce" phantom hands, was D. Hume (better known for his demonstrations of levitation). Here is how an eyewitness who was present at Hume's session in 1853 tells about it: “The gas light was reduced, but there was enough light in the room to clearly see the surrounding objects, the faces and hands of those present lying on the table. There were six of us.
And now the 13th hand appeared on the free side of the table opposite the medium (D. Yuma). It faded as we all stared at it, but reappeared, a flickering elbow-length hand, and slowly moved towards the middle of the table. We counted our hands again - everyone was in place. This hand extended to the elbow, and then nothing was visible. It gave off a faint but visible light. Soon it disappeared, but then we saw the process of its emergence from the elbow to the hand - it was the left hand.
Then a hand took the bell, rang about six feet from the table, and then brought it to me. But instead of a bell, I took this hand. It was a real hand, with fingers and nails, soft and warm. But she melted in my hand - dissolved, blurred, disappeared!"
Curiously, this quote almost literally describes an event that will happen in more than a hundred years: the phantom hand turned out to be quite capable of taking a rather heavy bell and ringing. Pressing the panic button was probably easier.
Another session of Hume took place in March 1855. Session participant, editor of the Hartward Times, Barr says:
“First a hand appeared, then she took a pencil and began to write. This happened in front of everyone, the hands of the participants in the session were in plain sight, on the table, so that none of those present could write. Being closest to the hand, I bent down to see it all. It extended no further than the wrist. Then the hand disappeared. What was written was later examined and turned out to be the name of a relative and close friend of one of the members of the circle, who had died a few years before, a name written in her own handwriting. Probably, it is worth telling about the future: surprisingly strong nerves were present in those present at this session.
This disappeared hand reappeared and began to shake hands with everyone present (let me remind you that they did not yet know who it belonged to). When it came to Barr, he, like the author of the previous story, held her back and began to consider. It was a normal human hand, but somehow white as snow. It ended at the wrist. Barr checked - there was nothing further! Then, turning this hand with his palm towards him, he pierced it with his finger, and the end of the finger came out on the other side of the palm. As soon as he pulled his finger back, the resulting "wound" closed, and the hand disappeared again. Brrr.
In another session, D. Hume was given a more difficult task: the accordion was placed in a cage made of metal mesh and asked to play on it. Hume put one hand on the outside of the cage, and the accordion began to spontaneously play the required melody.
A curious case of phantomogenesis was observed by witnesses at a session of the Polish medium Franek Kluska in the 1920s:
“Someone asked to turn off the red light. The medium stirred, and in the light of the red lamp we saw a third hand growing straight out of the medium's right shoulder and moving rapidly towards the lamp. From fingers to elbows, this hand looked completely material, but then it turned into a kind of foggy trail that disappears near the medium. Finally, the hand turned off the light by flipping the switch."
By the way, these extra hands that appeared during Kluska's sessions were so material that it was possible to make paraffin casts from them. Moreover, this was additional confirmation that this was not some kind of sophisticated trick. The medium is asked to immerse his hand in a bath of molten paraffin. In air, paraffin hardens, and then the hand immersed in it dematerializes, leaving a volumetric impression. It is impossible to do this with the hand of a living person.
In the 30s of the last century, experiments with the medium Ruda Schneider were carried out on a completely scientific basis using a veil of invisible sources of infrared rays, which the normal hand could not overcome. Remember Mikhalkov's lines from "Uncle Styopa": "Sitting books he took from the closet …". So Ruda, sitting at the table, could take books with his phantom hand from the wall shelf, which was very remote from him. When this phantom hand crossed the infrared beam, it was not interrupted, but its intensity dropped by 8 percent, which was recorded by the recorders.