by Joe Nickell
LATER YEARS
The Book of Mormon was published in 1830. Shortly afterward, Joseph Smith and his associate, Oliver Crowdery, having been conferred priests by divine revelation to Smith, officially founded the Church of Christ at Fayette, New York. Eight years later the name was changed to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Hansen 1995, 365).
An invitation from Sidney Rigdon, onetime associate of revivalist Andrew Campbell, led Smith and his New York brethren to found a Mormon settlement at Kirtland, Ohio. There, Smith claimed to experience a further series of revelations (published in 1833 under the title Book of Commandments), which expanded his theological principles. The revelations directed the Saints to gather into communities in a patriarchal order and to erect a temple at the center of the community.
When Smith ran out of money after buying up land surrounding his Kirtland, Ohio, Mormon community, he decided to open his own bank. According to one source:
There was just one problem: you had to have money to open a bank. Never a stickler for details, Smith went out and borrowed the money to open the Kirtland Safety Society Bank and have plates made up for printing the currency the bank would issue. To assure depositors that their money would be secure, he filled several strong boxes with sand, lead, old iron, and stones, then covered them with a single layer of bright fifty-cent silver coins. Prospective customers were brought into the vault and shown the heaping chests of silver. “The effect of those boxes was like magic,” claimed one witness. “They created general confidence in the solidity of the bank, and that beautiful paper money went like hot cakes. For about a month it was the best money in the country.” (Naifeh and Smith 1988, 25–26)
Eventually, of course, the bubble burst, the bank failed, and in 1838 Smith “declared bankruptcy with his feet,” fleeing the community along with his followers.
Smith also founded communities in Missouri, but in 1839 he and his followers were driven ruthlessly from that state by anti-Mormon vigilantes. The Saints then gathered at a settlement called Nauvoo on the Mississippi River. By 1844, it was the most populous city in Illinois, and it was entirely under Mormon control (Hansen 1995, 365).
It was at Nauvoo that Joseph Smith met his end. He had increasingly acted on pretensions of grandeur that led him to become leader of the Mormon militia, bedecked in the uniform of a lieutenant general, and an announced candidate for the United States presidency. As before, anti-Mormon mobs plagued Smith and his followers, and when the latter destroyed an anti-Mormon press, Smith was jailed on a charge of riot. On June 27, 1844, a mob stormed the jail, killing Smith and his brother Hyrum (Hansen 1995, 365). Concludes Taves (1984, 213): “It was over. The gangly, ill-clad youth who had regaled his Palmyra neighbors with fanciful tales had come a long, long way before reaching the end of his road. Others would continue what he had started.”
Those who suffer the loss of a loved one may experience such anguish and emptiness that they are unable to let go, and they may come to believe they have had some contact with the deceased. “It's commonly reported that the deceased person has communicated in some way,” says Judith Skretny (2001), vice-president of the Life Transitions Center, “either by giving a sign or causing things to happen with no rational explanation.” She adds, “It's equally common for people to wake in the middle of the night, lying in bed, or even to walk into a room and think they see their husband or child.” These experiences are sometimes called “visitations” (Voell 2001), and they include deathbed visitations (Wills-Brandon 2000).
During over forty years of paranormal investigation, I have encountered countless claims of such direct contacts (as opposed to those supposedly made through Spiritualist mediums [Nickell 2001a; 2001b]). I have also occasionally been interviewed on the subject—sometimes in response to books promoting contact claims (Voell 2001). Here is a look at the evidence regarding purported signs, dream contacts, apparitions, and deathbed visions.
“SIGNS”
In her coauthored book Childlight: How Children Reach out to Their Parents from the Beyond, Donna Theisen relates a personal contact she believes she received from her only son, Michael, who had been killed in an auto accident a month before. She was browsing in a gift shop when she noticed a display of dollhouse furnishings. Nearby, on a small hutch, were a pair of tiny cups that were touching, one bearing the name “Michael,” the other the words “I love you, Mom.” Although at the time a “strange, warm feeling” came over her, she was later to wonder: “Was I merely finding what I so desperately wanted to see? Was I making mystical connections out of ordinary circumstances?”
On the other hand, the fact that the two cups were displayed together, out of dozens of others sold there, convinced Theisen that the incident “defied the odds.” Soon she “began looking for more strange occurrences” so as to confirm that the cups incident was “a real sign.” Her book chronicles them and the experiences of other grieving parents (forty of forty-one of them mothers). One, whose son was killed by a train, was wondering whether to give his friend some of his baseball equipment when she heard a train whistle blow and accepted it as an affirmation. Others received signs in the form of a rainbow, television and telephone glitches, the arrival and sudden departure of pigeons, a moved angel doll, and other occurrences (Theisen and Matera 2001).
To explain such “signs” or “meaningful coincidences” (conjunctions of events that seem imbued with mystical significance), psychologist Carl Jung (1960) theorized that—in addition to the usual cause-and-effect relationship of events—there is an “acausal connecting principle.” He termed this synchronicity. However, in The Psychology of Superstition, Gustav Jahoda (1970) suggests that there may often be causal links of which we are simply unaware.
Even in instances where there may in fact be no latent causal connections, other factors could apply. One is the problem of overestimating how rare the occurrence really is. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez (1965) told how, while reading a newspaper, he came across a phrase that triggered certain associations and left him thinking of a long-forgotten youthful acquaintance; just minutes afterward, he came across that person's obituary. On reflection, however, Alvarez assessed the factors involved, worked out a formula to determine the unlikeliness of such an event, and concluded that three thousand similar experiences could be expected each year in the United States, or approximately ten per day. Synchronous events involving family and friends would be proportionately more common.
A related problem is what psychologist Ruma Falk (1981–82) terms “a selection fallacy” that occurs with anecdotal events, as contrasted with scientifically selected ones. As he explains: “Instead of starting by drawing a random sample and then testing for the occurrence of a rare event, we select rare events that happened and find ourselves marveling at their nonrandomness. This is like the archer who first shoots an arrow and then draws the target circle around it.”
Some occurrences that are interpreted as signs probably have mundane explanations. Although unexplained, they are not unexplainable. For example, the mother of a severely handicapped little boy reported that on the morning of his funeral she awoke to see a small, glowing red light on the dresser where his baby monitor had been. It was in fact a tiny lantern on her keychain. “It had never been turned on before,” she says. “In fact, I didn't even know it worked! The moment I touched the light, it went out.” This happened for several subsequent mornings (Theisen and Matera 2001, 192). How do we explain such a mystery? One possibility is that the light was not turned on at all but only appeared so as sunlight reflected off its red cover; when it was picked up, the illusion was dispelled.
Photographic “signs,” which are also becoming common, may be easily explained. I recall a Massachusetts woman approaching me after a lecture to show me some “ghost” photographs. I immediately recognized the white shapes in the pictures as resulting from the camera's flash bouncing off the stray wrist strap—a phenomenon I had previously investigated and replicated (Nickell 199
6). In fact, in one snapshot, the strap's adjustment slide was even recognizable, silhouetted in white. But the lady would not hear my explanation, instead taking back the pictures and stating defiantly that her father had recently died and had been communicating with the family in a variety of strange ways.
In addition to numerous glitches caused by camera, film, and other factors, photos may also exhibit simulacra, random shapes that are interpreted, like inkblots, as recognizable figures (such as a profile of Jesus seen in the foliage of a vine-covered tree [Nickell 1993]). These can easily become visitation “signs,” as in the case of a photo snapped from a moving vehicle at the site of a young man's auto death. “When this photo was developed,” the victim's mother wrote, “the tree branches formed a startling figure that looked just like Greg wearing his hat. In addition, there appeared to be an angel looking out toward the road.” She added, “We all viewed this photo as more evidence of Greg's ongoing existence” (Theisen and Matera 2001, 47).
DREAM CONTACTS
A significant number of after-death “contacts” come from dreams. They have been associated with the supernatural since very ancient times, and attempts to interpret them are recorded in a papyrus of 1350 BCE in the British Museum (Wortman and Loftus 1981). Now New Age writers like Theisen and Matera (2001) are increasingly chronicling instances of people having dreams about their departed loved ones.
It has been estimated that the average person will have approximately 150,000 dreams by age seventy. Although most are forgotten, the more dramatic and interesting ones are those that are remembered and talked about (Wortman and Loftus 1981). But people's reports of their dreams may be undependable due to the effects of memory distortion, ego, superstition, and other factors.
Even an ordinary dream can be especially powerful when it involves after-death content, and there are types of dreams that can be extremely vivid and seemingly real. They include “lucid dreams,” in which the dreamer is able to direct the dreaming, “something like waking up in your dreams” (Blackmore 1991a).
A powerful source of “visitations” is the so-called waking dream (discussed in chapter 40), which occurs in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep and combines features of both. Actually a hallucination—called hypnagogic, if the subject is going to sleep, or hypnopompic, if he or she is awakened—it typically includes bizarre imagery such as apparitions of “ghosts,” “angels,” “aliens,” or other imagined entities. The content, according to psychologist Robert A. Baker (1990), “may be related to the dreamer's current concerns.”
For example, here is an account I obtained in 1998 from a Buffalo, New York, woman: “My father had passed away and I was taking care of my sick mother. I went to lay down to rest. I don't remember if I actually fell asleep or if I was awake, but I saw the upper part of my father and he said, ‘Mary Ellen, you're doing a good job!’ When I said ‘Dad,’ he went away.”
To say, correctly, that this describes a rather common hypnagogic event, does not, however, do justice to the person who experienced it. For her, I think, it represented a final goodbye from her father—and therefore a form of closure—and provided a welcome reassurance during a period of difficulty.
Sometimes, a waking dream is accompanied by what is termed “sleep paralysis,” an inability to move caused by the body remaining in the sleep mode. Consider this account (Wills-Brandon 2000, 228–29): “My sister said she was abruptly awakened from a very deep sleep. When she woke up, she said her body felt frozen and she couldn't open her eyes. Suddenly she felt a presence in the room and knew it was Mother. She felt her standing at the foot of the bed.”
By their nature, waking dreams seem so real that the experiencer will typically insist that he or she was not dreaming. One woman, who “hardly slept” after her daughter's suicide, saw her, late at night, standing at the end of a long hallway, smiling sadly then walking away into a brilliant light. “At first I thought I was hallucinating,” the mother said, “but after a new round of tears, I realized that I was wide awake and I had indeed seen Wendy” (Theisen and Matera 2001, 130). Another, describing a friend's “visitation” experience of her deceased mother-in-law, said, “At first my friend thought she was dreaming but quickly realized she was wide awake” (Wills-Brandon 2000, 60)—a confusion typical of a waking dream.
APPARITIONS
Some “visitations,” however, are reported as being quite undreamlike, in the sense that they occur during normal daily activity. However, my own investigatory experience, as well as research data, demonstrates that apparitions are most apt to be perceived during daydreams or other altered states of consciousness. Many occur, for example, while the percipient is in a relaxed state or concentrating on some activity like reading, or is performing routine work. In some instances the person may simply be tired, as from a long day's work. Under such conditions, particularly in the case of imaginative individuals, a mental image might be superimposed upon the visual scene to create a “sighting” (Nickell 2001a, 291–92).
Also, as indicated earlier, faulty recall, bias, and other factors can betray even the most credible and sincere witness. Consider, for instance, an anecdotal case provided by Sir Edmund Hornby, a Shanghai jurist. He related how, years earlier, he was awakened one night by a newspaperman who had arrived belatedly to get the customary written judgment for the following day's edition. The man would not be put off, and—looking “deadly pale”—sat on the jurist's bed. Eventually Judge Hornby provided a verbal summary, which the man took down in his pocket notebook. After he left, the judge related the incident to Lady Hornby. The following day the judge learned that the reporter had died during the night and—more importantly—that his wife and servants were certain he had not left the house; yet with his body was discovered the notebook, containing a summary of Hornby's judgment!
This apparent proof of a visitation was reported by psychical researchers. However, the tale soon succumbed to investigation. As it was discovered, the reporter did not die at the time reported (about 1:00 a.m.) but much later—between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning. Furthermore, the judge could not have told his wife about the events at the time, since he was then between marriages. And, finally, although the story depends on a certain judgment that was to be delivered the following day, no such judgment was recorded (Hansel 1966).
When confronted with this evidence of error, Judge Hornby admitted, “My vision must have followed the death (some three months) instead of synchronizing with it.” Bewildered by what had happened, he added, “If I had not believed, as I still believe, that every word of it [the story] was accurate, and that my memory was to be relied on, I should not have ever told it as a personal experience” (quoted in Hansel 1966, 188–89). No doubt many other accounts of alleged visitations involve such confabulation—a term psychologists use to refer to the confusing of fact with fiction; unable to retrieve something from memory, the person—perhaps inadvertently—manufactures something that is seemingly appropriate to replace it. “Thus,” explain Wortman and Loftus (1981, 204), “the man asked to remember his sixth birthday combines his recollections of several childhood parties and invents the missing details.”
Tales such as that related by Judge Hornby represent alleged “moment-of-death visitations” (Finucane 1984). In that story the reporter had allegedly died approximately the same time (“about twenty minutes past one”) that he appeared as an apparition to Judge Hornby, although, as we have seen, the death actually occurred several hours later. This case should serve as a cautionary example to other such accounts, which are obviously intended to validate superstitious beliefs.
DEATHBED VISIONS
Another type of alleged visitation comes in the form of deathbed visions. According to Brad Steiger (real name Eugene E. Olson), who endlessly cranks out books promoting paranormal claims, “The phenomenon of deathbed visions is as old as humankind, and such visitations of angels, light beings, previously deceased personalities and holy figures manifesting to those about to cross over to
the Other Side have been recorded throughout all of human history.” Steiger (2000) goes on to praise writer and family grief counselor Carla Wills-Brandon for her “inspirational book,” One Last Hug before I Go: The Mystery and Meaning of Deathbed Visions (2000).
Like others before her (for example, Kubler-Ross 1973), Wills-Brandon promotes deathbed visions (DBVs) largely through anecdotal accounts that, as we have seen, are untrustworthy. She asserts that “the scientific community” has great difficulty explaining a type of DBV in which the dying supposedly see people they believe are among the living but who have actually died. She cites an old case involving a Frenchman who died in Venezuela in 1894. His nephew—who had not been present—reported:
Just before his death, and while surrounded by all of his family, he had a prolonged delirium, during which he called out the names of certain friends left in France….
Although struck by this incident, nobody attached any extraordinary importance to these words at the time they were uttered, but they acquired later an exceptional importance when the family found, on their return to Paris, the funeral invitation cards of the persons named by my uncle before his death, and who had died before him.
Unfortunately, when we hear two other accounts of the reported events, we find there is less to this story than meets the ear. A version given by one of the man's two children says nothing of his being delirious, implying otherwise by stating that “he told us of having seen some persons in heaven and of having spoken to them at some length.” But she had been quite young at the time and referred the inquirer to her brother. His account—the most trustworthy of the three, since it is a firsthand narrative by a mature informant—lacks the multiple names, the corresponding funeral cards, and other elements, indicating that the story has been much improved in the retellings. The son wrote:
