by Colin Wilson
The next case has also become famous, and is regarded as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for survival after death. In June 1925, James Chaffin of Davie County, North Carolina, dreamed that his father stood by his bedside, wearing an old black overcoat, and told him: ‘You will find the will in my overcoat pocket.’ The father, James L. Chaffin, had died four years earlier, leaving his farm to his third son Marshall, and nothing to his wife or other three sons. The will had not been contested, since there seemed no reason to do so.
The next morning, James Chaffin hurried to his mother and asked about his father’s old black overcoat; she told him it had been given to his brother John. He found the coat at John’s house and examined it carefully. Sewn into the lining of the inside pocket — which his father had indicated in the dream — he found a roll of paper stating: ‘Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddy’s old Bible.’
Taking a neighbour as witness, James Chaffin went back to his mother’s house, and unearthed the old Bible. In the 27th chapter of Genesis there was another will — made later than the one that left everything to Marshall — dividing the property between the wife and four sons. The first reaction of Marshall Chaffin was to contest the will, assuming it to be a forgery. But once he examined it, he had to admit that it was obviously genuine. Ten witnesses testified that it was in old Chaffin’s handwriting. So the property was divided according to the wishes of the second will.
Like Marshall Chaffin, the reader’s first reaction is to suspect skulduggery. But the Canadian member of the SPR who heard of the case hired a lawyer to investigate it, and the genuineness of the will was established beyond all doubt. The significance of the 27th chapter of Genesis is that it contains the story of how Jacob deceived his blind father Isaac into granting him the inheritance of his brother Esau. This thought had apparently come to old Chaffin not long before his death, and he made the new will. But instead of having it properly witnessed, he inserted it in the Bible, no doubt expecting it to be found after his death — together with its implied criticism of his son Marshall. Unfortunately, the Bible was decrepit, and it may have been that the Chaffin family was simply not religiously inclined; so after four years, it seems the old farmer had to draw attention to his change of heart …
Mrs Crowe’s Night Side of Nature has a whole chapter devoted to similar cases, in which important messages are delivered by dreams or appartions. She tells, for example, of a butcher who dreamed that he was going to be attacked and murdered on his way to market by two men dressed in blue. He decided to go to market with a neighbour, and when he came to the place where the attack had taken place in his dream, saw the two men in blue waiting there … But all she tells us by way of detail is that the butcher’s name was Bone and that he lived in Holytown. This can hardly be regarded as ‘confirmatory detail’. The records of the SPR contain many equally melodramatic cases. But they took the trouble to get signed statements from all concerned, and the result is far more convincing. In a typical case of 1869, a couple identified as ‘Mr and Mrs P’, were lying in bed in a dimly lighted room when ‘Mrs P’ saw a man dressed as a naval officer standing at the foot of the bed. Her husband was dozing, and she touched his shoulder and said: ‘Willie, who is this?’ Her husband roared indignantly: ‘What on earth are you doing here, sir?’ The naval officer said reproachfully: ‘Willie!’, and as ‘Mr P’ leapt out of bed, walked across the room, and disappeared into the wall. ‘Mrs P’ said he looked like a solid human being, and that as he passed a lamp on his way across the room, he threw a shadow.
Realising that they had seen a ‘ghost’, ‘Mrs P’ began to wonder if it foreboded some disaster to her brother, who was in the navy. When she mentioned this to her husband, he said: ‘No, it was my father.’ ‘P’ ’s father had been dead for some years.
After this visitation, ‘Mr P’ became seriously ill for several weeks. When he recovered, he told his wife that he had been in financial trouble for some time, and before seeing the apparition, he had decided to take the advice of a certain individual which, he now realised, would have ruined him and probably landed him in jail. He was convinced that the ‘ghost’ had come to warn him not to do it.
Intrinsically, this case is no more convincing that that of Mr Bone of Holytown. But the SPR obtained signed depositions from ‘Mr and Mrs P’, and from two friends to whom ‘Mrs P’ had told the story immediately after it had happened. It is still possible to dismiss it as a dream or a ‘collective hallucination’, or simply as a downright lie. But the signed statements make this seem at least unlikely.
An interesting point about the experience is ‘Mrs P’ ’s comment that the figure looked quite solid and normal — most ‘ghosts’ do — and that it cast a shadow. This obviously suggests that it was made of some kind of solid substance, like the ‘materialisations’ that appeared in the seance room.
A ‘warning’ of a different kind seems to have been involved in a case that came to be known as the ‘red scratch’ case. It involved a commercial traveller (identified as ‘FG’) who was in his hotel room in St Joseph, Missouri, in 1876, when he became aware of someone sitting at the table. It was his sister Annie, who had died of cholera nine years earlier. She looked exactly as she had when alive, except that she had a bright red scratch on her right cheek. As ‘FG’ sprang to his feet, his sister vanished.
He was so shaken that he took a train straight back to his parents’ home in St Louis. When he told them about the scratch, his mother fainted. When she recovered, she told them that she had accidentally made the scratch on the face of the corpse. She had covered it up with powder, and never mentioned it to anyone.
A few weeks later, the mother died, ‘happy in the belief that she would rejoin her favourite daughter’. Her son obviously took the view that the purpose of the apparition was to prepare her mother for her own death. This is another theme that runs fairly constantly through reports of apparitions and ‘death-bed visions’ collected by the SPR. Sir William Barrett was later to devote a book to them, and its opening case is typical of the kind of thoroughness the SPR brought to its investigations.
Barrett’s wife was an obstetric surgeon in the Maternity Hospital at Clapton in North London. A woman she calls Mrs B was in labour and suffering from heart failure. As Lady Barrett was holding her hands, she said: ‘It’s getting dark.’ Her mother and husband were sent for. Then ‘Mrs B’ looked at another part of the room and said: ‘Oh, lovely.’ ‘What is lovely?’ ‘Lovely brightness — wonderful things.’ Then she exclaimed: ‘Why, it’s father!’ Her baby was brought in for her to see, and she asked: ‘Do you think I ought to stay for baby’s sake?’ She looked towards her ‘father’, and said: ‘I can’t stay.’ When her husband had arrived, she looked across the room and said: ‘Why, there’s Vida!’ Vida was her younger sister, who had died two weeks earlier. But the death had been kept from ‘Mrs B’, so as not to upset her. She died soon after. Lady Barrett, the matron and the husband and mother all vouched that she seemed to remain conscious of the dead relatives up to the time of her death. With his usual thoroughness, Barrett obtained a letter verifying all this from the mother. It is the first of a number of cases cited by Barrett in which people on the point of death have ‘seen’ relatives whom they did not know to be dead. Barrett points out that there is no known case of a dying person ‘seeing’ someone who is still alive.
Sir Oliver Lodge, who was twice president of the SPR, was himself to supply one of the most convincing cases of ‘communication with the dead’; it is recorded in his book Raymond.
On 8 August 1915, Sir Oliver Lodge received a message from a Boston medium, Leonore Piper, containing an obscure reference to a poem by the Roman poet Horace, about a tree being struck by lightning. Lodge interpreted this as a warning of some disaster. The message purported to come from Frederick Myers, who had been dead for fourteen years. A week later, Lodge heard that his youngest son Raymond had been killed in the Ypres campaign.
After this, a number of med
iums relayed messages that purported to come from Raymond, but Lodge remained unconvinced — most of them were of the ‘Having a lovely time’ variety. But in the following month, Lodge’s wife was taken by a friend to a seance by a remarkable medium, Mrs Osborne Leonard. Neither the medium nor Lady Lodge knew one another by sight, and they were not introduced. Nevertheless, Mrs Leonard announced that she had a message from ‘Raymond’, who stated that he had met many of his father’s friends since death; asked to name one of them, Raymond replied ‘Myers’.
Another ‘message’ from Raymond was relayed to Lady Lodge via a male medium called Vout Peters; in it, ‘Raymond’ spoke about a photograph showing himself in a group of people, and referring to a walking stick. The Lodges knew nothing about such a photograph. Two months later, the mother of one of Raymond’s fellow officers wrote to say that she had a group photograph including Raymond, and offering to send a copy. Before this arrived, Lodge himself visited Mrs Leonard, and when her ‘control’ ‘Feda’ announced Raymond’s presence, he took the opportunity to ask about the photograph. Raymond explained that it had been taken outdoors, and mentioned that someone had wanted to lean on him. When the photograph arrived a few days later, it showed a group of officers outside a billet. Raymond, sitting in the front row, has a cane resting on his leg, and the officer sitting behind him is using Raymond’s shoulder as an arm rest.
Lodge’s book gives many more examples of evidence of Raymond’s ‘survival’; but, as he points out, this one is particularly convincing because it involves two mediums, both of whom spoke of the photograph before Lodge knew of its existence — thus ruling out any possibility of telepathy.
To conclude this chapter, here is a final example of a type of phenomenon so beloved by Mrs Crowe and other early writers on the ‘supernatural’: the full-scale haunting.
In February 1932, the grandchildren of a chimneysweep named Samuel Bull refused to go to sleep, insisting that there was someone outside the door of the cottage. (They were sleeping in a downstairs room, recovering from influenza.) Their mother, Mary Edwards, looked outside the door, but there was no one there. Soon afterwards, she and the children saw the figure of Samuel Bull — who had been dead since the previous June — walk across the room, up the stairs, and through the door of the room in which he had died. (This was closed.) They all screamed. This was the first of many appearances of the dead man at his cottage in Oxford Street, Ramsbury, Wiltshire. The ‘ghost’ was apparently aware of the presence of his family, for he twice placed his hand on the brow of his invalid wife Jane, and once spoke her name. Samuel Bull — who had died of cancer — looked quite solid, and could be seen so clearly that the children noticed the whiteness of his knuckles, which seemed to be protruding through the skin. They also noticed that the expression on his face was sad. After the first appearance, the family no longer felt alarmed — the children seemed ‘awed’ rather than frightened. They assumed that the ghost was looking sad because of the miserable conditions they were living in — the cottage was damp and some rooms were unfit for habitation. On the last two occasions on which he appeared, Samuel Bull no longer looked sad, and Mrs Edwards assumed that this was because the family was to be re-housed in a council house.
The family was already on the move when the two investigators from the SPR arrived, but the local vicar had already interviewed the family and recorded their accounts of what took place. The investigators were understandably upset that they had not been told about the case earlier, but their conversations with witnesses, and the evidence of the vicar, left them in no doubt that the haunting was genuine.
This rag-bag of assorted visions and apparitions underlines the enormous variety of cases investigated by the SPR in the first century of its existence. None of them are, in themselves, more impressive than cases cited by Jung-Stilling or Catherine Crowe or Robert Dale Owen. But they are more convincing because honest investigators have obviously done their best to confirm that they are genuine. And anyone who is willing to spend a few hours browsing through volumes of the Proceedings of the SPR (or its American counterpart) is bound to end with a feeling that further scepticism is a waste of time. Even if half the cases proved to be fraudulent or misreported, the other half would still be overwhelming by reason of sheer volume. It is easy to understand the irritation of Professor James Hyslop when he wrote in Life After Death:
I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose to argue with him on the supposition that he knows nothing about the subject.
Where sceptics are concerned, he certainly has a point. Sir John Bland Sutton, a well-known surgeon, remarked: ‘Death is the end of all. My experience is that all of those who have studied the subject scientifically and deeply have come to the same conclusion.’ Such a statement simply lacks the ring of truth. There have been many basically sceptical investigators — Hyslop himself was notoriously ‘tough-minded’, and much disliked by fellow members of the SPR because he seemed an incorrigible ‘doubting Thomas’ — but in every single case where a sceptic has persisted in studying the facts, he has ended up more-or-less convinced of the reality of life after death. I say ‘more or less’ because a few investigators, such as Dr Gardner Murphy and Mrs Louisa Rhine, feel that most of the ‘facts’ can also be explained by what might be called ‘super ESP’ — mind-reading clairvoyance, and so on. Hyslop himself finally abandoned the ‘super ESP’ hypothesis through an experience that has become known as the ‘red pyjamas case’. He received a communication from a medium in Ireland to the effect that a ‘spirit’ calling itself William James had asked him to pass on a message asking him if he remembered some red pyjamas. Now William James, who had died in 1910, had agreed with Hyslop that whichever of them died first should try to communicate with the other. But the message about red pyjamas meant nothing to Hyslop. Then suddenly he remembered. When he and James were young men, they went to Paris together, and discovered that their luggage had not yet arrived. Hyslop went out to buy some pyjamas, but could only find a bright red pair. For days James teased Hyslop about his poor taste in pyjamas. But Hyslop had long forgotten the incident. As far as he could see, there was no way of explaining the red pyjamas message except on the hypothesis that it was really William James who had passed it on.
Twenty-six years after Hyslop’s death, he was quoted by the psychologist Carl Jung in a letter. Jung was discussing the question of the identity of ‘spirits’ who communicate through mediums:
I once discussed the proof of identity for a long time with a friend of William James, Professor Hyslop, in New York. He admitted that, all things considered, all these metapsychic phenomena could be explained better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious. And here, on the basis of my own experience, I am bound to concede he is right. In each individual case I must of necessity be sceptical, but in the long run I have to admit that the spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other.*
Yet it is significant that Jung never made this admission in any of his published work, where he continued to insist that the facts about the paranormal could be explained in terms of the powers of the unconscious mind.**
As far as the present investigation is concerned, we shall proceed on Jung’s assumption that the ‘spirit hypothesis’ fits the facts better than any other. The question of whether it is ultimately true must, for the time being, be left open.
*Trevor H. Hall, The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, 1964.
*John L. Campbell and Trevor Hall, Strange Things, 1968, p. 211.
*Collected Letter, Vol. 1, p. 431.
**This is discussed at length in my book on Jung, The Lord of the Underworld (1984).
CHAPTER FIVE
Rediscovering a Masterpiece
> In the autumn of 1863, a woman named Sarah Hall had the interesting experience of seeing her own ghost. She was sitting at the dining table, with her husband and another couple, when all four of them saw another Mrs Hall standing at the end of the sideboard. The figure was wearing a spotted dress, quite unlike the one Mrs Hall had on. Her husband said: ‘Why, it’s Sarah!’, and as they all stared at it, it disappeared.
The case is irritating because it has no sequel. Mrs Hall was still in good health when she wrote and told Gurney about the case twenty years later, so it was not some ominous portent. A few years later, Mrs Hall apparently owned a spotted dress like the one her ‘ghost’ was wearing, but that also seems to be neither here nor there. The only clue that makes any sense is Mrs Hall’s comment that the house they were living in used to be a church. We have seen that Christian churches were often built on pagan sites, as if the ground itself had some inherent ‘power’ or force that the ancients regarded as sacred. But that still takes us no nearer the explanation of how four people saw Mrs Hall’s ‘double’.
If the case were unique, we might dismiss it as a prevarication. But there are hundreds of reports of ‘doubles’ in the literature of psychical research. No less a person than the poet Goethe recorded seeing his own ‘double’ (or ‘doppelgänger’) riding towards him along a road in Alsace as he was taking leave of his sweetheart. The figure was wearing a grey and gold suit. Eight years later, on his way to visit the same girl, he passed the spot and suddenly realised that he was now wearing the grey and gold suit. And Robert Dale Owen recorded in detail the case of a schoolteacher named Emilie Sagée whose ‘double’ frequently appeared standing beside her in the classroom. One of her pupils noticed that the ‘real’ Emilie looked pale and ill when her ‘double’ appeared, as if the material for the ‘double’ came from Emilie’s own body.
