In 1863, two groups of people, located at a great distance from each other, participated in a ghostly meeting aboard a steamer. This is a very unusual case that has become a classic in the history of mental research.
SR Wilmot, an entrepreneur from Bridgeport, Connecticut, sailed on October 3, 1863, on the City of Limerick from Liverpool, England to New York. His sister Eliza was with him. Wilmot occupied the aft cabin, sharing it with the Englishman William J. Tate.
On the second day of their voyage, a violent storm broke out at sea, which did not subside for nine days. The ship was damaged. Wilmot did not tolerate the roll and did not leave the cabin for several days.
After eight days of storm at night, the sea calmed down a bit and Wilmot finally managed to fall asleep, which was absolutely necessary for him. Towards the morning he dreamed that he saw that his wife in a white nightgown was approaching the cabin door. In the doorway, she hesitated, because she noticed that he was not alone. Then she went to his bunk, bent over, kissed and caressed him, and then calmly left.
When Wilmot woke up, he noticed with dismay that Tate was bending over to look at him from the upper bunk. “Well, you're good, ladies come to visit you,” Tate said. Wilmot could not understand what he was talking about. Tate explained that he woke up and saw a woman in a white nightgown who entered the cabin, kissed and stroked the sleeping Wilmot. His description exactly matched Wilmot's dream.
Then Tate asked Wilmot's sister if she had come into their cabin, but Eliza said no. Then Wilmot told her about his dream and about the amazing coincidence of the dream with what Tate had seen.
Wilmot was so startled by this incident that he asked Tate three times, and all three times he told him the same thing. On October 22, the steamer arrived in New York, Wilmot and Tate went about their business and never saw each other.
On October 23, Wilmot rode the train to Watertown, Connecticut, to visit his wife and children, who lived there with Mrs. Wilmot's parents. The wife immediately asked Wilmot if he had seen her that night when he had that dream.
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Then she told him that when she heard reports of a storm at sea, she became very worried about him. Even more uneasy came when she learned that another steamer, the Afrika, had run aground during the same storm and was taken to St. John's Cove in Newfoundland with serious damage.
On the night that the storm began to subside, Mrs. Wilmot lay awake for a long time, thinking of her husband. At about four o'clock in the morning, it seemed to her that she had left the house and went to look for him. She crossed the raging sea and approached the long black steamer. She boarded, walked aft, and eventually found Wilmot's cabin. She described in detail
Wilmot's cabin and said that when she went to the door, she saw a man on the upper bunk, who was watching her closely. There was a moment when she was frightened and hesitated whether to enter. Then she decided to go in, went up to Wilmot, kissed and stroked him, and then left.
When she woke up in the morning, she told her mother about her journey; it was all like a dream, but it was so vividly remembered that Mrs. Wilmot could not shake the feeling that she had in fact visited her husband on the steamer.
In 1889 and 1890, members of the Society for Psychical Research considered this case. The details of the incident were given to them by a friend of Wilmot's. Richard Hodgson, Edmund Garney, and Eleanor Sidgwick interviewed Wilmot, his sister, and his wife; Tate had died by this time. Researchers assessed this case as very significant, despite the fact that a whole 20 years passed between the incident and its detailed description. Even considering the inevitable errors of memory and the inability to get information from Tate, it had to be admitted that the case was clearly different from the known cases of collective bilateral visions. Researchers searched for explanations for what happened, but none of them could be fully accepted.
Collective visions, in which visions are taken by not one, but several people at once, is a very unusual phenomenon. Even more unusual are bilateral visions, when the agent and the percipient see each other, as was the case with Mrs. Wilmot and Tate. The situation is even more complicated by the fact that one of the percipients saw all this in a dream, and the other in reality, as if it were a phenomenon of the material world. (Wilmot said that he had prophetic dreams as a child, but never anything like this.) In turn, the agent, Mrs. Wilmot, felt that she had been on a steamer, but that what happened was in the form of a dream.
Garney and Sidgwick attributed this incident to telepathy and clairvoyance. Mrs. Wilmot's intense anxiety and the concentration of all her thoughts on her husband, her desire to see him and calm him down - were telepathically transmitted to Wilmot. They took the form of a dream, since she was sleeping at that time. Sijwick believed that the dream is a confirmation of the telepathic hypothesis. And the desire to see her husband brought the woman into a state of clairvoyance, and she saw his cabin. To explain Tate's vision, the researchers suggested that Tate, in turn, received a telepathic signal from Wilmot. There is another variant, rejected by the researchers, in which a certain object was actually present in the cabin - the so-called "phantasmogenetic reality", localized in space and affecting Tate's senses. In other words, perhapsthat Mrs. Wilmot spontaneously left her body and appeared on the steamer, and Tate saw her take.
From a modern perspective, the telepathy explanation seems unnecessarily cumbersome and does not explain Tate's vision. Going beyond the body is more likely. However, modern researchers cannot agree on what transcendence is. Wilmot's case remains a mystery to this day.