N. E.'s husband was awakened by the sound of her voice and asked her with whom she was speaking; but she did not reply. N. E.'s younger sister furnished me with a statement (in 1984) from which I quote the following: 

This is to certify that my sister, N. E., told me [that] two nights after our mother died she was in bed and a great light with different colors appeared in her room and a vision of our mother floated toward the bed. N. E. asked mother if she was in heaven and she smiled and nodded her head. N. E. also told our brother G., and possibly other members of our family, about this. The statement was also signed by N. E.'s brother G.

N. E. told me that at the time of her vision of her mother she had not been thinking about her mother's pact to communicate with N. E. after her death.

Comment

This apparitional experience is typical of those occurring during bereavement. Although the percipient denied that she was consciously expecting a communication from her mother, the expectation was at least latent in her mind and might have stimulated the experience. For N. E., however, the vision was satisfying evidence that her mother had survived death and rejoined her husband in a heavenly realm. The appearing figure communicated no information outside the knowledge or expectations of the percipient.

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Case 2

R. N., the percipient in this case, is a resident of Cardiff, Wales, who was born in 1945. She has had a number of apparently paranormal experiences, including at least two apparitional ones. The experience of this report occurred on July 20, 1989 in R. N.'s office in Cardiff. I learned about it in 1992 from Mr. Jeffrey Iverson, also a resident of Wales, who put me in touch with R. N. (Mr. Iverson, a television producer, had recently made a documentary film in which my research had figured, and he was aware of my interest in apparitions.) She wrote out for me an account of the experience dated June 3, 1993. Subsequently, on June 7-8, 1993, I met her in Cardiff and discussed details of the experience with her. R. N. took me to the office where she had had her experience. I examined the area and sketched the office, locating the place where R. N. had stood when she saw the apparition and where the apparition had seemed to be. I obtained some additional information later through correspondence.

The person figuring in R. N.'s experience was T.I., who had formerly been employed by the company for which R. N. worked. He had quarreled with his associates (not with R. N.) and quit the company abruptly. R. N. had known T.I. well when they were employed together, but did not keep in touch with him after he left their company. At the time of her experience she had not seen him for what she described as "yonks," meaning a time of indefinite length, not precisely remembered. R. N.'s husband (in a later conversation with me) estimated that a month had elapsed between T.I.'s leaving the company (where he also worked and had known T.I.) and R. N.'s apparitional experience. The experience occurred on the afternoon of July 20, 1989 at around 3:00 p.m. R. N. remembered that she had had that afternoon an appointment with a fellow-employee whom she was advising. (She showed me the entry in her appointment book for this meeting.) R. N. and her visitor were seated in her office, but several telephone calls interrupted their conversation. When these occurred, R. N. had to get up from her chair and walk over to her desk in order to answer the telephone. The outer wall of the office behind her desk was a full sheet of glass (from floor to ceiling), and this gave a clear view of a flat walkway between two stairs that led from a parking lot to an entrance for the building. As R. N. answered the telephone on one occasion, she noticed T.I.walking past. He was wearing a navy blue shirt, a navy blue sailing sweater, and navy trousers. She remembered his "sailor's gait.". (T.I. had sailed a great deal and had developed this kind of gait.) R. N. thought that T.I. seemed to be in a hurry. T.I. ordinarily had a ruddy complexion, but on this occasion - to quote now from R. N.'s account - "he was very red and he looked very troubled. He appeared perfectly solid, and I did not attract his attention through the window. I thought no more about this, it was nothing unusual." The distance between R. N. and the appearing figure of T.I. was about 10-12 feet. On the following day, July 21, a secretary of the company told R. N. that T.I. had died. R. N. commented that his death must have been sudden, perhaps from a traffic accident, because she had seen him just the day before.

The secretary replied that this could not be so, because T.I. had died in the hospital. I was able to obtain a copy of T.I.'s death certificate, which confirmed that he had died in the hospital on July 20, 1989. Mr. Iverson further learned from T.I.'s widow that T.I. had been unconscious for almost the entire day before he died and that he had died late in the evening, perhaps around 11.OO p.m. I obtained a copy of the "clinical notes" of T.I.'s admission to the hospital. They were lamentably sketchy. The notes for July 20 stated that he was unconscious that day before he died, on the same day. They did not record the time of death.

Comment

According to the ascertained facts, R. N. saw T.I. in clothes that seemed natural for him at a time when he was not dead, but dying and unconscious in a hospital 4 miles away. There he would have been dressed in hospital clothing. For investigators of paranormal phenomena there is nothing especially unusual about a person appearing as an apparitional figure while still alive. In their classic study of apparitions, Gurney, Myers, and Podmore (1886) considered an experience to be coincident with death if it occurred within twelve hours before or after the death. It is also common in such experiences for the percipient to perceive the appearing figure in clothes familiar to the percipient, but different from those in which the appearing person was then dressed.

Some readers may suppose that a stranger unknown to R. N. passed the window of her office as she was at her telephone and that she misidentified this person with T. I. The short distance between R. N. and the appearing figure make this unlikely. Even if R. N. had misidentified a stranger as T. I., however, this would leave unanswered the question of why she mistook the stranger for T. I. instead of for someone else. Because T. I. had left the company, R. N. had no reason to expect that she would see him back at the company where he had worked. Could R. N. have overheard the secretary talking earlier about T. I.'s illness without registering this consciously and yet having this information influence a misidentification of someone else for T. I.? I cannot exclude this possibility, but it seems unlikely. The apparent sight of T. I. would surely have brought into R. N.'s consciousness an awareness that T. I. was ill and unlikely to be walking around. On the other hand, the hypothesis of misidentification receives some support from R. N.'s noting that the appearing figure looked even ruddier than T. I. usually did. It occurred to me that perhaps as T. I. was dying he had thought about the company with which he had worked and from which he had parted disagreeably not long before he became ill. He might have - I speculated even considered meeting his former colleagues and making peace with them. If so, he might have mentally projected himself, as it were, back to the company's building, and this might have stimulated R. N.'s perception of him. I was unable to obtain any confirmation of this conjecture. Mr. Iverson learned from T. I.'s widow that T. I. had not discussed the company with her before he lapsed into unconsciousness.

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Case 3

D. X., the percipient of this case, was born in 1939. She lived in Birmingham, England. Her experience occurred on June 2, 1983. An informant for another apparitional experience mentioned that of D. X. to me, and I wrote to her and asked her to send me an account of it. She did this, and subsequently I interviewed her and her husband at their home in Birmingham on September 12, 1992. I obtained some further information about details in correspondence and a telephone call. I also obtained a copy of the death certificate of S. T., who was the person figuring in D. X.'s experience. S. T. lost his sight when he was 17 years old. Subsequently, he trained in wood crafts and then for many years taught the making of cane furniture in a college for handicapped persons. D. X. worked at the same institution and there knew S. T. well and liked him, particularly for his honesty, his independence, and his sense of humor. Because of his blindness, S. T. had a restricted social life, and D. X. and her husband were the only colleagues at his place of work who invited him to social occasions. In about 1980 S. T. retired, and thereafter D. X. did not continue social relations with him, even though he lived not far from her. S. T. continued to be physically active. He mowed his lawn, and he went for walks with a seeing-eye dog (guide dog) he had. D. X. learned that he was not in good health, but had no reason to think his life was in danger at the time of her experience. On Saturday June 4, 1983, D. X. and her husband went for a pleasure drive in their car. D. X.'s husband was driving. As they passed a place near where S. T. lived, D. X. saw him on the street, standing close to a bus stop. The place was "not far" from where S. T. lived. D. X. mentioned seeing S. T. to her husband. He (her husband) did not see D. X., but he later confirmed to me that D. X. had told him she had just seen S. T. Later, D. X. had a clear memory of how S. T. appeared at the time of her experience. He did not have his seeing-eye dog with him. D. X. thought this unusual, but quickly surmised that perhaps the dog was hidden by the shelter at the bus stand. Also, although S. T. was seen close to his home, he was not on the street or park where he ordinarily walked. D. X. particularly remarked that S. T. had an angry expression on his face. This made her feel "dreadfully guilty," and she made a mental resolution to visit him the following week.

On the first day back at her work the following week, D. X. learned from a colleague that S. T. had died. She wrote: "I was on the point of saying that I had seen S. T. on [the previous] Saturday, and was shattered to learn that he had actually died earlier the previous week." As mentioned, S. T. was known not to be in good health. He had heart disease, but was not considered seriously ill. After mowing his lawn, he was walking to meet his wife when he "dropped dead" on the street. S.T's death certificate recorded his date of death as June 2, 1983. That day was a Thursday. Therefore, D. X.'s experience occurred two days after S. T.'s death. (D. X.'s husband later estimated the interval between the death and his wife's experience as "about a week," but it was less than that.) Comment. This case also lends itself to the interpretation of misidentification of a stranger for a person well known to the percipient. The appearing figure was seen at a place where S. T. would not ordinarily walk and without his dog.

Against that interpretation, however, one can point to the various details figuring in D. X.'s experience that made her quite certain that she had seen S. T. and no one else. She shared this certainty with her husband. The interval of two days between the death of the appearing person and the experience exceeds what investigators of these cases consider "death-coinciding," and places the case instead under the heading of "postmortem apparitions." Gibson (1944) studied the relative motivations to communicate of the percipient and the presumed surviving (after death) personalities who figured in postmortem apparitions - so far as these motivations could be known or reasonably conjectured - and found that, in general, the motivation to communicate was stronger in the agent (appearing person) than in the percipient. In the present case the percipient experienced guilt for not having visited S. T. after his retirement; but we cannot conclude from this that the angry expression on the face of the appearing figure of S. T. was intended as a reproach to D. X. for her neglect.

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Case 4

E. W., the percipient of this case, was born in 1907. She has lived all her life in Scotland, much of it in Skye. She had had numerous apparently paranormal experiences and was reputed among persons who knew her and knew about her to have what Scottish Highlanders refer to as "second sight." This phrase refers to a somewhat specialized type of paranormal perception, particularly of persons who are near to death or have died (Cohn, 1994). E. W. contributed a chapter to a book about seership (Davidson, 1989) in which she described some of her experiences, including the one I am here including. I am able to furnish some details that E. W. did not mention in her account. The case came to my attention through reading the book in which E. W. had given a brief description of her experience. I wrote to E. W. and after some correspondence went to Vatten, Skye, where E. W. was then living, on September 3, 1992. I tape-recorded a long interview with her. In essentials, E. W.'s account of her experience to me did not differ from the one she had published, but it was more detailed. Subsequently, I went to Dunfermline where I met and interviewed Betty McKay, the widow of the person (Ronald McKay) who had figured in E. W.'s apparitional experience.

The experience had occurred in Dunfermline, and in 1992 I saw the place where it had occurred and formed some impression of the distance between E. W. and the appearing figure that she saw. Later, I believed that I had not adequately examined the site of E. W.'s experience. Therefore, when I was in Scotland again in August 1994, I returned to Dunfermline and, accompanied by Betty McKay, examined the site closely. I made a sketch of the relevant roads and buildings. I also obtained a copy of Ronald McKay's death certificate. I learned about a further detail in subsequent correspondence with E. W. 

The experience occurred early on the morning of May 29, 1975. E. W. went to the outside door of her house (which faces the main road) in order to bring inside the delivered bottles of milk that had been left on her doorstep. She later thought she had done this between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. She looked across the road and saw her neighbor Ronald McKay walking out of the driveway of his house and then along the road or drive as if going toward the nearby factory of which he was the manager. E. W, and her husband had known that the McKays had been away on vacation and believed that they were still away. When E. W. went back inside her house, she said casually to her husband: "I see the McKays are back." Her husband asked her when they had come back. E. W. replied: "I don't know, but I saw Ron go down the drive." About half an hour or perhaps an hour later, a senior employee of Ronald McKay's factory came to the house and spoke with E. W.'s husband. He then asked her when she had seen Ron McKay, and she repeated what she had said earlier. Her husband then said that the factory employee had information that Ronald McKay had died that morning while on vacation in England about 150 miles away from Dunfermline.

The temporal coincidence between E. W.'s apparitional experience and Ronald McKay's death must have been close. The interval could not have been more than 3-4 hours. Ron McKay's widow, Betty McKay, told me that he had died at 7:00 in the morning. She and her husband had not yet dressed for breakfast. Ronald McKay had awakened with a headache, had taken a mild analgesic tablet, and gone back to sleep. A little later, when his wife tried to arouse him, she could not do so and realized that he had died. The death certificate attributed his death to "severe coronary sclerosis." E. W. saw Ronald McKay wearing a nylon shirt tucked into flannel trousers. At the time of his death Ronald McKay had not got up and dressed. He was in fact naked; he always slept naked and was in that state when he died. I estimate that E. W. had the figure of Ronald McKay in view for at least 10 seconds, because she watched him come out of the driveway behind his house and walk along the road toward his factory. The garage of this house and the driveway to it were at the back of the house as was a door of the house. Part of the driveway near the road was visible from where E. W. stood. She would have seen Ronald McKay's face as he came out of the driveway, but when he turned to walk toward the factory his back would have been toward E. W. The distance between E. W. and the appearing figure would have varied during the period of her observation. When they were closest they might have been about 50 feet apart. The figure was lifelike, and E. W. did not think she had seen a dead person until she learned about Ronald McKay's death an hour or so after her experience.

Comment

Given the facts that the appearing figure came out of Ronald McKay's driveway and that E. W. watched him for, I have estimated, 10 seconds, misidentification seems an unlikey interpretation of the case. Moreover, at the time of E. W.'s experiences there were no other houses in the immediate area except those of E. W. and her husband and the McKays. Betty McKay was quite certain that no other human being would have been walking out of the driveway at the back of their house at the time E. W. had her experience. In this case, as in Case 2, the percipient saw the appearing figure wearing clothes that the percipient was accustomed to seeing him wear, but that the appearing person was not wearing at the time.

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Case 5

D. I., the percipient of this case was born in 1951. The experience she reported occurred in Groton, Connecticut. She later moved to a small town in North Carolina. Her experience occurred when she was 14 years old. She described it afterward to members of her family, but they told her not to talk about it and forget it. She could not forget it, but she seems to have discussed it with almost no one else until she communicated it to our Division in a letter dated July 17, 1991. I corresponded with D. I. about details of the experience and on February 13, 1993 went to the town in North Carolina where D. I. then lived and tape-recorded a long interview with her. D. I. showed me copies of the death certificates of her maternal grandparents. By the time I came to investigate this case (in the 1990s) two persons who might, at least to some extent, have corroborated D.I's account of the experience - her mother and stepfather - had died. From what she said, however, it is doubtful whether they would have made willing informants. D. I. was a girl just under 14 years of age at the time of her experience, which occurred on January 4, 1965. Her maternal grandfather was living with her, her mother, stepfather, and two brothers. He was dying of leukemia and in such an enfeebled condition that it had been decided to admit him to a hospital. The day before his transfer to the hospital he had been heard calling for D. I.'s father (not her stepfather, who was a member of the current family). Later, D. I.'s mother thought that her father was calling for her first husband (whom she had divorced) because he wished to become reconciled with him before he (her father) died. Such a wish on the part of a dying person for reconciliation with persons from whom the dying person has been alienated occurs not uncommonly (Callanan and Kelley, 1994).

On the day of this planned transfer to the hospital, D. I. had a throat infection and stayed home with her grandfather. Her siblings, mother, and stepfather were all out of the house, at school or work. Her stepfather was due to return home in time to be there when the ambulance came to take D. I.'s grandfather to the hospital. The apparitional experience occurred in the late morning of that day not long before D. I.'s stepfather was due to return to the home. I quote now from D. I.'s first letter about the experience: 

Granddaddy called to me to give him a drink of water. I failed in my attempts to lift him enough to wet his lips. The disease had reduced his once tall, strong stature to [that of] a frail, weak invalid. I called mom at work to ask for help, but she told me it would have to wait until dad [D. I.'s stepfather] returned from work at noon. Shortly thereafter I heard granddaddy calling out to his wife, Hazel. Grandmom had died nine years prior [on October 13, 1956], so I thought he must be losing his mind. I ran down the hall to make another attempt to help him. I was amazed to find him sitting up, smiling with his arms reaching out. The room was filled with a warm, bright light. He spoke to grandmom, who was standing at the foot of his bed. Neither of them acknowledged my presence. She was there but a brief moment, and when granddaddy laid back down, his soul escaped with her. He died with a smile on his face.

During my interview with D. I., I asked her about details of her vision of her grandmother. One question concerned her assurance that the figure she saw (and her grandfather seemed to see) was really that of her grandmother. Her grandfather's calling out the name "Hazel" was part of the evidence, but apart from that D. I. had known her maternal grandmother well; D. I. had been five years old when her grandmother had died. D. I. furnished some further details about the clothing that her grandmother seemed to be wearing, or rather not wearing: 

D. I.: I remember that question in the first letter [of I. S.] and I have given that a lot of thought and I don't, I honestly don't recall clothes. I just recall that it ... a very bright white light and that her face is there and I see her hands. I can see an image of arms but I don't see clothing. She is either in all white or the white light is so bright I can't see the clothing.

I. S.: But you saw her face?

D. I.: Her face, right.

I. S.: And her arms?

D. I.: I can tell that the arms are out reaching but the light is so bright and I am not focusing so much on detail. I don't really recall.

I also asked for more details about how D. I.'s grandfather had called for "Hazel" and how the light had appeared. She replied as follows: 

I heard him calling me. But when he starts calling my grandmother's name I am at the other end of the hallway ... I don't remember exactly what I was doing but I heard him call, "Hazel." But it was in a very nice voice. It wasn't the command he had given me. And I was trying to figure out why is he calling her. 

He was calling my father last night and he knows my father doesn't live here and now he is calling my grandmother. So I went on down the hall and as I got down the hallway; the room is set where the door is here [meaning in the room where we were talking] and the room goes off in this direction from the hallway. And his bed is facing here and the pot is here. Now we were very cramped there. There is a bunk bed that is sitting here that my two brothers slept in the same room, and my bedroom is here. And I can still visualize it. 

If this was the room and his bed was here the light came out of that corner there of the ceiling and it came, shone right down at the very foot of his bed. And she was not on the floor. She, her, I didn't see her feet. But she was above the floor. And if a conversation was held between them it was not to my ears. You could see very beautiful, peaceful expressions on their faces. That is the most vivid part of it for me. That they both were just so at peace at seeing each other. And he raised up. 

By the time I get to the room he didn't even acknowledge that I had come to the room. He raises up and he raised his arms up to reach her and he just laid back. And when he laid back down he had a smile on his face and his eyes were open. And she. When I am looking at him, then I look back and she was gone. And I got hysterical because I knew without even knowing how. I didn't know how to check for vital signs or anything. I just knew that he was dead. That he had passed.

Comment

Given that 26 years elapsed between this experience and its first recording in written form some doubts may be expressed about the accuracy of D. I.'s memory. I will discuss the question of the accuracy of memories in these cases later. If we assume the accuracy in essential details of D. I.'s report, the case fits in the category of what Osis and Haraldsson (1977/1986) described as "takeaway cases." By this term they referred to the phenomenological appearance that the perceived figure has come to receive the dying person into the life after death. If we assume that D. I.'s grandfather perceived his late wife, Hazel, at the time he was calling out her name - and he certainly acted as if he perceived her - the case is also one of a collective apparitional experience. These are defined as experiences shared by two or more persons present at the time and in a position to perceive the appearing figure; definitions vary slightly according to the detailed requirements for "being present." Among all apparitional experiences collective ones occur in about a third of cases (Sidgwick et al., 1894) or perhaps in as many as 56% (Hart and collaborators, 1956).

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Case 6

B. I., the percipient of this case was born in 1921. He is a physician, who practiced as a pediatrician and has lived most of his life in a large city in North Carolina. His apparitional experience occurred on June 30, 1955. He first described it to my colleague Dr. Emily W. Cook (E. W .C.) in July 1983, and she made a written record of it on August 12, 1983. In 1992 I wrote to him and asked him to write an account of the experience, which he sent in a letter dated November 5, 1992. On December 12, 1994 I went to B. I.'s home in North Carolina and had a long interview with him. He mentioned at this time some additional details about his experience. The experience occurred at the time B. I.'s mother-in-law, F. C., died. His father-in-law, G. C., had died 7 years earlier, in 1948. I quote now from B. I.'s letter of November 5, 1992. F. C. had had several minor cerebral vascular accidents in the year before she died, but the one 3-4 days before her death was a devastating one. She never regained consciousness. Her children and her physician agreed to keep her comfortable at home and to avoid any life-extending procedures.

I was standing by her bed and no one else was in the room. She had an agonal inspiration, and at that moment I had a very clear picture of G. C. [her late husband] standing across from me with his arms outstretched, and he said: "Flora, I've been waiting for YOU." I did not really have to look to see that my mother-in-law had died, but the physician in me pushed me to verify that. 

At our meeting in December 1994, B. I. told me that the figure of his father-in-law was quite opaque, as he would have seen him in life. B. I. saw the figure only from the waist up, but he believed that the furniture in the room might have prevented him from seeing more of the figure if it had been visible. E. W. C. remembered from her conversations with B. I. about his experience that the appearing figure of B. I.'s father-in-law had addressed his dying wife as "Flossie," her nickname in the family. When asked about this discrepancy, B. I. checked with three other members of the family (with whom he had discussed his experience) and found that their memories of the name agreed with that of E. W. C. B. I. said that he deferred to their memories of what he had told them earlier. On the question of his acquaintance with his father-in-law, B. I. said that he and his wife married in 1950, two years after his father-in-law died. He thought that he might have met his father-in-law once or twice some years before his death. He was, however, familiar with his appearance from photographs in the family.

As a pediatrician B. I. had often treated children who had died. He had sometimes prayed for their sufferings to end. Sometimes, after a child had died, he had a kind of inner "flash of seeing" the child running around and playing after being released by death. B. I. attributed these images to "my own hopes that they were at last free to do so [run and play] and my own somewhat vivid imagination." He was sure, however, that he had no expectation of seeing his father-in-law at the moment his mother-in-law died. He wrote: "I was surprised but comforted by what I saw."

Comment

As with the preceding case, a long interval - in this one 28 years - elapsed between the experience and the first written account of it. Again, we confront the question of the accuracy of the percipient's memory over such a long interval.

Investigators of apparitions classify this case as one of the "bystander type." The phenomenal aspects of the experience, assuming survival after death, suggest that G. C. (B. I.'s deceased father-in-law) had come to receive his wife as she died. He (G. C.) had no special interest in B. I., whom he may have met once or twice. Yet B. I. perceived him, whereas his dying mother-in-law showed no evidence of having done so. (She was in a coma.) This is why the appearing person is described as appearing to a bystander rather than to the person with whom he or she presumably would have wished to communicate. Gurney (1888-89) and Haraldsson (1987) reported other bystander cases.

Discussion

As I stated in the Introduction, my purpose in publishing this paper is to draw attention to the continuing occurrence of apparitional experiences. I said that we know little about the incidence of such experiences because of a failure of full reporting, and I hope this paper will help to sustain interest in the subject until we or other researchers can conduct a systematic survey of these experiences and investigate the cases ascertained in the survey. An important advantage of such a survey followed immediately by investigation of the cases ascertained would be the likelihood of studying at least some of the cases closer to the times of their occurrence than I could study the six cases here reported. The interval for these cases between the apparitional experience and my investigation of it varied between 4 and 37 years with a mean of 18 years. In one case 26 years and in another 28 years elapsed between the experience and the first written record of it.

The folk myth about memories of such cases over a period of time is that they become embellished over the years. The evidence points away from this as a generalization. I have argued elsewhere, with supportive examples, that although in some persons fading and inaccuracies of memory occur in others they do not (Stevenson, 1971). Moreover, the greater the intensity of the emotion associated with an event, the more likely it is to be remembered accurately. Until recent years psychologists have often neglected this aspect of memory. Dutta and Kanunga (1975), however, reported experiments that showed a definite correlation between intensity of affect in an experience and memory for it later. In most experiments the results of which tend to discredit eyewitness testimony the subjects have been college students or other persons with little motivation to remember a testing event accurately. Yuille and Cutshall (1986) studied the memories of witnesses for an exciting event that occurred in real life - a shootout between a thief and his intended victim on a street in Vancouver. A comparison of the witnesses' memories with verified features of the incident showed that memories for such events can be highly accurate, even after several months (the study by Yuille and Cutshall did not report the accuracy of the memories over years).

Seeing an apparition is certainly an unusual experience and one nearly always fraught with strong emotion. Such experiences are likely to be remembered accurately. Unfortunately, given our limited knowledge, we have no way of telling which percipients have accurate memories for the events they narrate and which do not. I only contend here that there are no grounds for asserting that all memories of such unusual events become lost or distorted with time.

It would be inappropriate for me to make any generalizations from six cases, and I will therefore limit further discussion to a few additional remarks about these cases. First, I would draw attention to the ways in which I learned about the cases: through personal contact with persons who knew about my interest in such experience~. N. E. lived in my community, knew about me, and reported her experience to me; a friend notified me of R. N.'s case; colleagues informed me about the cases of E. W., D. I., and B. I.; and E. W., in turn, told me about the case of D. X. In short, personal acquaintances - call it a network, if you will - brought these cases to my attention. This suggests that many other cases occur that are never notified to investigators. Second, although N. E. and E. W. were the only two percipients of the six who said that they often had paranormal experiences, each of the other four reported having had some other experiences that they considered paranormal. These data accord with Palmer's observation, mentioned earlier, that persons who report apparitional experiences tend to report having had other apparently paranormal experiences (Palmer, 1979).

Third, readers will have noticed that every case coincided or nearly coincided with a death. I do not wish to attach any significance to this from these six cases. It has been argued, however, that apparitional experiences involved with death are more likely to be remembered than those in which no death figures. This assumption, in turn, has been used to devalue the role of death in such experiences. Such a question can only be resolved by the analysis of a large number of cases. This was accomplished in the Census of Hallucinations conducted in the 1890s by the Society for Psychical Research, and careful analysis of the data support the conclusion that the frequent occurrence of death in the reported cases is not the result of differential remembering, but a significant factor in the occurrence of many - certainly not all - apparitional experiences (Sidgwick et al,. 1894; Broad, 1962).

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the second European Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in Renfrew, Scotland, August 24-26, 1994. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to: Ian Stevenson, M.D., Division of Personality Studies, Box 152, Health Sciences Center, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908. The research of the Division of Personality Studies is supported by the Bernstein Brothers Parapsychology and Health Foundation, the Nagamasa Azuma Fund of the University of Virginia, and the Fash Foundation. I thank Shari Cohn, Emily Cook, Jeffrey Iverson, Justine Owens, and Eilidh Watt for informing me about five of the cases here reported. Emily Cook improved this report by helpful comments on an earlier draft. The suggestions of two anonymous referees have led to further improvements.

Here Stephen Braude notes that apparitions were studied extensively by the British Society for Psychical Research in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Basically, there are two categories of apparitions: those of the living and those of the deceased. Thousands of such cases have been reported and researched. The most common of these is known as the “crisis apparition” and often occurs in relationship to a death or accident. Often apparitions are thought of as a mental phenomenon, probably produced by telepathy. Sometimes they are pure psychological projections or are produced by hypnosis. However, Braude maintains that collective apparitions cannot readily be explained this way. He argues that apparitions that are seen by many people simultaneously may be physical phenomena produced by psychokinesis 

Stephen Braude, PhD, served as chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has also served as president of the Parapsychological Association. He is author of Crimes of Reason, The Gold Leaf Lady, Immortal Remains, The Limits of Influence, First Person Plural, and ESP and Psychokinesis. He is the recent recipient of the prestigious Myers Memorial Medal awarded by the Society for Psychical Research for outstanding contributions.

The question ‘Why do ghosts wear clothes’ is sometimes posed as a skeptical retort to reports of ghosts and apparitions. It’s one thing to say that when people die they survive as ‘spirits’, the argument goes, quite another to suppose that their clothes also survive in the spirit world. In fact, ghosts usually appear fully clad, and sometimes elaborately so—for example in costumes appropriate to the period in which they might have lived. But the question does in fact point to interesting and apparently serious theoretical obstacles for certain accounts of apparitions and out-of-body experiences (OBEs).

Introduction

As far as OBEs are concerned, explanations by parapsychologists divide into two broad classes. According to the first, externalist hypothesis, out-of-body consciousness is somehow physically separable from the body; the OBEr’s mind or mental states are literally at the sites from which the OBEr seems to perceive. According to the second, internalist hypothesis, nothing of the sort happens; the experience of being outside the body is always illusory. In short, it’s merely a misleadingly vivid, imagery-rich type of clairvoyance.

Most externalists adopt a form of animism, according to which one’s mental capacities can exist only so long as they are grounded in or supported by a kind of underlying substrate. So if our mental capacities and traits can operate apart from the body during an OBE (and persist even after bodily death and dissolution), it would appear that some substrate besides the normal physical body makes that possible. At this point, externalists typically assert that the human mind ‘is essentially and inseparably bound up with some kind of extended quasi-physical vehicle, which is not normally perceptible to the senses of human beings’.1 It’s this vehicle that some identify as the secondary or astral body they experience during OBEs, and which observers at remote locations apparently perceive in so-called reciprocal cases—that is, cases that typically take the following form: Agent A experiences an OBE in which she ostensibly ‘travels’ to percipient B’s location and is subsequently able to describe features of the state of affairs there that she could not have known by normal means. B, meanwhile, experiences an apparition of A at that location. (In a few instances, others on the scene also experience A’s apparition.)

As far as explanations of apparitions are concerned, the main contenders are various forms of a telepathic theory,2 and an objectivist account, according to which apparitions are distinct entities (perhaps psychokinetically-produced) actually located at the place where they are perceived. Of course the totality of apparitional cases needn’t be handled by just one theory of apparitions. Some cases may be most neatly explained telepathically, while others—collective apparitions especially—might be handled best by an objectivist approach.

The Problem of Apparitional Clothing

We may now consider how the old question about why ghosts wear clothes highlights a problem for both the externalist account of OBEs and the objectivist account of apparitions. Stephen Braude explains the problem as follows:

Suppose that, while decked out in my new Armani suit, I try to project myself in an OBE to a friend, who then has an apparition of me in my sartorial splendor. If we explain my friend’s ability to describe me accurately by positing a traveling ‘secondary body’, how do we explain my friend’s experience of my new suit? Does my Armani suit also have a double? It seems absurd to think so. But if we can—and indeed, should—explain the apparition of my Armani suit without appealing to a secondary or astral suit (e.g., if we explain the apparition of my suit in terms of ‘ordinary’, non-traveling ESP), it seems far less compelling to explain the apparition of me in terms of a detachable part of consciousness or secondary body.3

The following case illustrates the issue nicely. Early on the morning of January 27, 1957, ‘Martha Johnson’ (a pseudonym) from Plains, Illinois, had a dream in which she traveled to her mother’s home, 926 miles away in northern Minnesota. In a statement sent to the American Society for Psychical Research the following May, she wrote,

After a little while I seemed to be alone going through a great blackness. Then all at once way down below me, as though I were at a great height, I could see a small bright oasis of light in the vast sea of darkness. I started on an incline towards it as I knew it was the teacherage (a small house by the school) where my mother lives... After I entered, I leaned up against the dish cupboard with folded arms, a pose I often assume. I looked at Mother who was bending over something white and doing something with her hands. She did not appear to see me at first, but she finally looked up. I had a sort of pleased feeling and then after standing a second more, I turned and walked about four steps.4

Martha woke from her dream at 2:10 am (1:10 am in Minnesota). The dream ‘nagged’ her mind for several days, at which point she received a letter from her mother, who wrote that she had seen Martha. Martha then replied, describing her experience and asking her mother to identify what she had been wearing. A second letter from Mrs Johnson answered that question and provided further details about her experience.

In the first of her two letters, dated January 29, Martha’s mother wrote,

Did you know you were here for a few seconds? I believe it was Saturday night, 1:10, January 26th, or maybe the 27th. It would have been 10 after two your time... I looked up and there you were by the cupboard just standing smiling at me. I started to speak and you were gone. I forgot for a minute where I was. I think the dogs saw you too. They got so excited and wanted out—just like they thought you were by the door—sniffed and were so tickled.5

Mrs Johnson’s second letter was written on February 7, 1957. She wrote,

I was bending over the ironing board trying to press out a seam... You were standing with your back to the cupboard (the front of it) between the table and the shelf, you know, just sort of sitting on the edge of the lower part of the cupboard... I looked at the dogs and they were just looking at you. I’m sure they saw you longer than I did... I turned to go in the bedroom and you must have started to go out the door then. That’s when the dogs went wild.

Your hair was combed nice—just back in a pony tail with the pretty roll in front. Your blouse was neat and light—seemed almost white.... You were very solid—JUST like in life. Didn’t see you from the lower bust down—that I can remember, anyway.6

Martha confirmed in correspondence that during her ‘visit’ she had indeed experienced her hairstyle and clothing as her mother described.

It should be clear why this case poses a problem for both an externalist account of OBEs and an objectivist explanation of the reciprocal apparition. The clothing and hairstyle of the apparitional figure were not those of the sleeping Martha. They corresponded, instead, to the way Martha experienced herself during her OBE. Assuming that telepathic explanations are at least sometimes appropriate, one such explanation comes immediately to mind. Presumably, Martha’s hairstyle and clothing during her OBE are mental constructs, just as they would be if her experience were merely a dream. But then it certainly looks as if Martha telepathically communicated those features of the OBE to her mother, as well as influencing Mrs Johnson to experience her with arms folded, near the cupboard, and so on.

Of course, an apparitional experience could be a mixture of genuine perception (of an apparitional figure) with a telepathically induced quasi-perception (for instance of the figure’s attire), just as genuine and quasi-perceptions would combine if I were to hallucinate a hippo in the real corner of the room. But if we must appeal to ESP (telepathic influence) to explain parts of the apparitional experience, then it may simply be gratuitous to suppose that a detachable part of consciousness or astral body was actually present at the remote location.

Furthermore, in some reciprocal cases, it’s the percipient, rather than the OBEr, who seems to supply features such as apparitional clothing. In one such case,7 the Rev Clarence Godfrey tried to appear to a friend at the foot of her bed. He made the mental effort in the late evening after retiring to bed, and he fell asleep after about eight minutes. He then dreamed that he met his friend the next morning, and she confirmed that he had appeared to her. This dream woke him, and he noticed that his clock showed 3:40 am.

When his friend confirmed the experiment’s success the following day, she noted that it occurred at about the time the servant put out all the lamps, which usually took place around 3:45. In her written account, she says that Godfrey ‘was dressed in his usual style’. Frank Podmore, an early investigator in the British Society for Psychical Research, recognized the significance of this. He wrote that the apparition’s dress

was that ordinarily worn in the day-time by Mr. Godfrey, and that in which the percipient would be accustomed to see him, not the dress which he was actually wearing at the time. If the apparition is in truth nothing more than an expression of the percipient’s thoughts, this is what we should expect to find, and as a matter of fact in the majority of well-evidenced narratives of telepathic hallucination this is what we actually do find. The dress and surroundings of the phantasm represent, not the dress and surroundings of the agent at the moment, but those with which the person is familiar.8

In a similar case, Mr G Sinclair tried mentally to ‘visit’ his ailing wife, whom he had left back at home while he was traveling.9 At the time of Sinclair’s attempt, he was undressed and sitting on the edge of his bed. Mrs Sinclair later wrote, ‘I saw him as plain as if he had been there in person. I did not see him in his night clothes, but in a suit that hung in the closet at home’. Because the apparitional clothing in these cases seems to be supplied by the percipient’s mind, the cases clearly support the view that the apparition itself is likewise (as Podmore puts it) ‘an expression of the percipient’s thoughts’ and not an ordinarily perceived astral body or localized objective entity.

Before leaving this topic we should consider another issue. If an apparition’s clothing is constructed subjectively in response to telepathic influence, then what (according to externalists or objectivists) would observers perceive if the telepathy were unsuccessful or—as is often noted—deferred to a later time? If externalists want to say that only the secondary body is genuinely perceived, are we to suppose that this body is unclad and that the clothing is supplied telepathically? What would happen, from that point of view, if the telepathy were unsuccessful? Would there be, in those cases, perceptions of naked secondary bodies? In fact, if externalists contend that our secondary bodies go forth into the world unclad, one would expect at least some reports of naked apparitions. Given the vagaries of successful ESP and PK, one would expect the genuine perception of naked secondary bodies to occur more reliably than the associated quasi-perceptions of their clothing. But the extensive literature on apparitions contains almost no reports of naked human figures. According to Irwin, ‘in Crookall’s extensive case collection only four such cases occur and in some of these the astral body quickly became clothed’.10

At this point, OBE externalists might argue that one’s secondary body has a certain degree of malleability, so that it can alter its age, size, and other features (such as whether or not it has a beard or long hair). So perhaps this malleability can also extend to the simulation of clothing. However, certain cases make this externalist strategy seem particularly incredible. Consider the following example,11 in which two persons agreed to experiment with producing OBE apparitions.

JAKOB: The day after our decision I drove my daughter to her job, the time was 6 P.M. I was suddenly reminded of this agreement with Eva. Then I transported myself astrally to her home and found her sitting on the sofa, reading something. I made her notice my presence by calling her name and showing her that I was driving my car. She looked up and saw me. After that I left her and was back in the car which I had been driving all the while without any special awareness of the driving.

EVA: I was sitting alone in the room in an easy chair.... Suddenly I saw Jakob sitting in front of me in the car, saw about half the car as if I were in it with him. He sat at the wheel: I only saw the upper part of his body. I also saw the clock in the car, I think it was a couple of minutes before six. The car was not headed towards our house but in another direction.12

Presumably, positing the existence of a duplicate car is even less plausible than positing the existence of duplicate clothes. And as Alan Gauld notes, even if the externalist manages to explain how a secondary body might transform its outer parts into semblances of clothing, it seems excessive to suppose that our subtle bodies might also shape-shift into a half car with a clock showing the correct time. A telepathic explanation is obviously most compelling in this case, and that seems to weaken considerably the externalist recourse to secondary bodies in other reciprocal cases.

Conclusion

Of course the variety of OBE accounts and apparitional cases accommodates—in principle at least—a variety of explanatory options. And there is no reason to insist that all cases must be explained along the same general lines. Nevertheless, the problem of apparitional clothing serves as a useful reminder that some popular externalist accounts of OBEs might be considerably more simplistic than is usually appreciated.

Stephen Braude

Literature

Braude, S.E. (2003). Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life after Death. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Broad, C.D. (1962). Lectures on Psychical Research. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Dale, L.A., White, R., & Murphy, G. (1962). "A Selection of Cases from a Recent Survey of Spontaneous ESP Phenomena." Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 56: 3–47.

Gauld, A. (1982). Mediumship and Survival. London: Heinemann.

Irwin, H.J. (1985). Flight of Mind: A Psychological Study of the Out-of-Body Experience. Metuchen, N.J. & London: Scarecrow Press.

Myers, F.W.H. (1903). Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. London: Longmans, Green, & Co. (Label: 545)

Source: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/why-do-ghosts-wear-clothes