9 - From The Edge Of The Grave

Dr. Augustus Jessopp was in high spirits on that chilly autumn night in 1879. Lord Orford had invited him to spend the night at Mannington Hall and had given him permission to examine some very old books in his extensive library.

Although Dr. Jessopp enjoyed the animated conversation with the other guests, he could hardly wait until the others had gone to bed so that he could begin taking notes from the old books in the library. A dentist by profession, Dr. Jessopp was an antiquarian by hobby.

At last, by eleven o'clock, Lord Orford and his other guests had retired for the evening, and Dr. Jessopp was alone in the library with all the treasured volumes. He set immediately to work, taking notes from six small books. He had four large candles on his desk and a crackling fire in the fireplace. The light was excellent. Exhilarated from an evening of stimulating and delightful companionship, he felt as though he could work through the night.

At 1:30 A.M., Dr. Jessopp glimpsed something white about a foot from his left elbow. Upon closer examination, the object proved to be a large, extremely pale hand with dark blue veins across its back.

Putting his pen aside, Dr. Jessopp turned and saw that he shared the desk with a tall, solidly built man, who seemed to be intent upon examining both the dentist and the books he had been studying. The strange visitor had a lean, rugged profile and reddish-brown hair, which had been closely cut. He was dressed in a black habit of the type worn by clergymen in the early 1800's, and he sat in a posture of complete relaxation with hands clasped lightly together. After a few moments, Dr. Jessop realized that the man was not staring at him at all; rather, the stranger seemed completely unaware of his presence.

Dr. Jessopp had not for one moment considered his late evening visitor to be anything other than a living person, but he did think it most peculiar that he had not met the clergyman earlier in the evening and a bit strange that the man would enter the room and seat himself so silently at the same desk. It was not until the man vanished before his eyes that Dr. Jessopp realized he had been visited by a ghost.

Dr. Jessopp was a very stolid sort of individual, not easily frightened or easily impressed by anything out of the ordinary. His most pronounced reaction was one of disappointment, because he had not had time to make a sketch of the ghostly clergyman.

He had returned to his note-taking and was perhaps wondering how he could sensibly relate the story of his spectral visitor to Lord Orford when he once again saw the white hands appear next to his own. The figure sat in precisely the same position as before and the expression on his face had not changed the slightest. The ghostly clergyman still seemed to sit, hands folded, in an attitude of contemplation or complete relaxation.

Dr. Jessopp turned to give the ghost his full attention. It had occurred to him that he might speak to the specter, and he had begun to form a sentence in his mind. He wanted it to be just the kind of provocative statement that would prompt a ghost to utter a response. Then, before his lips could form the sentence and give it utterance, he seemed suddenly to fully realize the eeriness of the whole situation. A sense of deep dread and fear began to permeate his entire being. An unconscious reflex knocked a book to the desk, and the ghost vanished instantly at the harsh sound.

The story of Dr. Jessopp's ghost became so exaggerated in the telling and re-telling by others, that the dentist allowed the London Athenaeum to print an authorized account of the incident about two months after the uncanny experience.

Dr. Jessopp emphasized in the article that he was not in the habit of engaging in flights of fancy and did not wish to be "looked upon as a kind of medium to whom supernatural visitations are vouchsafed ... or a crazy dreamer whose disorganized nervous system renders him abnormally liable to fantastic delusions." The dentist also stressed the point that he had been in perfect health on the night of the visitation and had been in no way approaching weariness or fatigue. He also stated that the talk at Mannington Hall that evening had concerned itself with travel and art and had in no way touched upon the supernatural. The ghost, he added, did not appear wispy or cloaked in a traditional sheet. The figure appeared lifelike, natural, and so solid that it had blocked the light from the fireplace.

After the aforementioned experience, there was no question in Dr. Jessopp's mind - as there is none in mine - that "ghosts" do exist. But the ghosts, which we might suddenly encounter some night on the stairs or in a hotel room where we have elected to spend the night, differ in many respects from the portrayals of ghosts in horror films and stories. These differences will be noted in the examples that follow.

Early in 1950, Ted Henty, an ex-cop from Brighton, England, formed his own group of professional "ghost hunters." These men arm themselves with dozens of microphones, six cameras of conventional design, an infrared camera, four wire recorders, an electric eye hookup and several other scientific "ghost catchers." Most of the homes which the crew "de-ghost" have been found to be haunted by pigeons, mice, tree branches, and over-active imaginations. Henty shall be forever forced to keep an open mind, however, because of an experience that occurred to him when his crew was summoned by an estate owner who could not keep servants because of the visitation of the ghost of a female Indian.

Henty interviewed the domestics, who had resigned their positions because of the ghost, and gained their descriptions of the unwelcome specter. He learned that it had been a harsh economic strain for two of the maids to quit, yet they had resigned out of fear of something which they could not understand. Henty arrived at the home to make a preliminary investigation and to plan camera and microphone positions.

Then: "There it was! What looked unmistakably like the blurred figure of a dark-skinned lady dressed in white, somewhat smallish, smiling, walking toward me. I was stunned. The very thing I had always argued against seemed to be approaching, and I could see it in fairly clear light with my own two eyes. I had no camera with me then and so all I could do was stand there, open-mouthed, until this thing went through an open door into a large bedroom and disappeared without a trace."

Later that night, one of Henty's cameramen got an image on film of a small, vaguely defined figure dressed in white. The face was darkly Indian. Each member of Henty's twelve-man crew swears that the film had not been tampered with in any way.

Shortly before Easter in 1964, several parishioners and a caretaker were cleaning St. Columbkille's Roman Catholic Church in Uptergrove, Ontario, Canada, in preparation for the holiday services. To their collective amazement, they saw a shadowy figure wearing a black choir gown glide over to the organ, sit down, and begin to play. When two members of the party approached the phantom, it entered a room leading to the belfry. A carpenter made a grab for the phantom, but his hands "just seemed to come together in thin air."

In 1882 the first major undertaking of the newly formed Society for Psychical Research was to conduct a Census of Hallucinations by means of a circulated questionnaire:

Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?

The SPR received answers from 17,000 people, 1,684 of whom answered "yes." From this, the committee which was conducting the census estimated that nearly 10 per cent of the population had experienced some kind of visual or auditory "hallucination." Those people who indicated that they had experienced some paranormal appearance or manifestation were sent forms requesting details.

The Census of Hallucinations enabled the early researchers to arrive at a number of basic premises concerning ghosts and apparitions, which were strengthened by subsequent research. The committee was able to con-elude, for example, that although apparitions are connected with other events besides death, they are more likely to be linked with death than with anything else. Visual hallucinations were the most common (1,087). (This is important to note because psychologists tell us that auditory experiences are the most common among the mentally ill.) Of the visual cases reported, 283 had been shared by more than one percipient (also of great importance because critics of psychic phenomena have always argued that the appearance of a "ghost" is an entirely subjective experience).

Those who answered the second form indicated that they had not been ill when they had seen their hallucinations and insisted that the hallucinations were quite unlike the bizarre, nightmarish creatures which might appear during high fevers or high alcoholic consumptions. Of the 493 reported auditory hallucinations, 94 had occurred when another person had been present. Therefore, about one-third of the cases were collective, that is, experienced by more than one percipient at the same time.

After the findings of the Census of Hallucinations were made public, the SPR began to be flooded by personal accounts of spontaneous cases of ghosts and apparitions. In order to aid an appointed committee in the handling of such an influx of material, the SPR worked out a series of questions that could be applied to each case that came in.

1. Is the account first hand?

2. Was it written or told before the corresponding event was known?

3. Has the principal witness been corroborated?

4. Was the percipient awake at the time?

5. Was the percipient an educated person of good character?

6. Was the apparition recognized?

7. Was it seen out of doors?

8. Was the percipient anxious or hi a state of expectancy?

9. Could relevant details have been read back into the narrative after the event?

10. Could the coincidence between the experience and the event be accounted for by chance?

Later, J. Fraser Nicol established three points of critique that could be used by the investigator of spontaneous phenomena.

1. That the experience be veridical, i.e., that it relate to an actual event that was occurring, had occurred, or would occur.

2. That there be an independent witness who testifies that the percipient related his experience to him before he came to know, by normal means, that the experience had been veridical, and

3. That no more than five years have passed between the experience and the written account of it

There occurs in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume vi, a case that has always struck me as being an especially good example of the sort of veridical experience that has a great deal of value for "psi" researchers.

In 1876, Mr. F.G., a traveling salesman, was sitting in a hotel room in St. Joseph, Missouri. It was high noon, and Mr. F.G. was smoking a cigar, and writing out orders. Suddenly conscious of someone sitting on his left with one arm resting on the table, the salesman was startled to look up into the face of his dead sister.

"So sure was I that it was she," he said later, "that I sprang forward in delight, calling her by name."

As he did so, the apparition vanished. (To define terms a bit: in the jargon of parapsychology, a ghost is usually a stranger to the percipient; while an apparition is well known, instantly recognizable to the percipient, usually appears at some time of crisis and usually only once; a vision is the appearance of a religious figure, such as the Virgin Mary, an angel, or one of the saints.)

Mr. F.G. resumed his seat, stunned by the experience. The cigar was still in his mouth, the pen was still in his hand, the ink was still moist on his order blank. He was satisfied that he had not been dreaming, but was wide awake.

"She appeared as if alive. Her eyes looked kindly and perfectly naturally into mine. Her skin was so lifelike that I could see the glow of moisture on its surface ..." Mr. F.G. observed. Then, so impressed was he, that he took the next train home to tell his parents about the remarkable visitation.

Mr. F.G.'s mother nearly fainted when he told them "of a bright red line or scratch on the right-hand side of my sister's face, which I distinctly had seen."

With tears streaming down her face, F.G.'s mother told him that he had indeed seen his sister, "as no living mortal but herself was aware of that scratch which she had accidentally made while doing some little act of kindness after my sister's death ... she had carefully obliterated all traces of the slight scratch with the aid of powder ... and this she had never mentioned to a human being from that day to this."

In Phantasms of the Living, Edmund Gurney relates a case that carries a similar denouement.

Gurney's narrator was sitting in his drawing-room with one of his nieces when he saw what appeared to be "dirty soapy water running in at the door." He was about to scold the maid when he realized that the supposed dirty water was the train of a lady's dress. Then, the "lady glided in backwards, as if she had been slid on a slide, each part of her dress keeping its place without disturbance.

"She glided in till I could see the whole of her, except the tip of her nose, her lips and the tip of her chin, which were hidden by the edge of the door."

The strange visitor kept her eyes upon her host and extended her arm, "which was a fine one, in a peculiar way, as if she were proud of it."

The narrator immediately recognized the lady as someone he had known twenty-five years before. They had been good friends and frequent dancing partners, and he remembered her as "a bright, dashing girl." They had not seen one another for more than a quarter of a century, yet the narrator told Gurney that "she looked much as I used to see her - with long curls and bright eyes, but perhaps something stouter and more matronly.

"I said to myself, 'This is one of those strange apparitions I have often heard of. I will watch it as carefully as I can.'"

His niece noticed his strange fascination with the area near the door and exclaimed: "Uncle A., what is the matter with you? You look as if you saw a ghost!"

He motioned her to be quiet and continued to observe the apparition of his old friend.

"I tried to find out whether there was anything in the ornaments on the walls, or anything else which could suggest the figure: but I found all the lines close to her cut the outlines of her figure at all sorts of angles, and none of these coincided with the outline of her figure, and the color of everything around her strongly contrasted with her color."

Uncle A. continued to study the apparition until his brother entered the room and walked "right through the figure," which then began to fade quite rapidly, "first losing the colors and then the form ..."

It was not until several years later that the percipient learned that his lady friend had died of cancer of the face. "She never showed me the front of her face," he remarked to Gurney. "It was always concealed by the edge of the door."

Not all observers of ghosts and apparitions are able to react as calmly as Uncle A. In the case of the sudden appearance of ghosts in houses that already carry with them a tradition of haunting, the "psychic residue" may provoke feelings of great unease, fear, and extreme panic. Even "psi" researchers are not impervious to such reactions when they are confronted by an especially strong case of negative permeations in a room or locale.

Hereward Carrington, an investigator who had dealt firsthand with mediums, poltergeists, and "haunted houses" on several occasions, found himself reacting to an area of an afflicted house as if he were a complete stranger to things paranormal.

It was on the night of August 13, 1937, that Carrington, his wife, and a party of five others obtained permission to spend the night in a "haunted house," located some fifty miles from New York City. As Carrington referred to the incident in his Essays in the Occult, the summer tenant "had been compelled to move back to the city in the middle of July because neither he nor his wife could secure uninterrupted nights of sleep, and ... their servants had all left in consequence of the haunting."

Carrington insisted that he be told none of the history of the house until he had first had an opportunity to explore the place from cellar to attic. The house was lighted from top to bottom, and the party began its safari into the Unknown.

On the second floor, two or three of the group commented that they had "sensed something strange in one of the middle bedrooms," especially in the area next to an old bureau. The tenant, whom Carrington identified only as "Mr. X," told the party that he and his wife had heard noises coming from that particular bedroom.

They proceeded down a hallway until they came to the door that led to the servant's quarters. Carrington opened the door, glanced up, and saw that the top floor was brightly illuminated and that a steep flight of stairs lay just ahead of the investigators. With Carrington in the lead, the party ascended the stairs until they found themselves confronted by a series of small rooms. Carrington made a sharp turn to the right.

"The instant I did so, I felt as though a vital blow had been delivered to my solar plexus. My forehead broke out into profuse perspiration, my head swam, and I had difficulty in swallowing. It was a most extraordinary sensation, definitely physiological, and unlike anything I had ever experienced before."

The veteran investigator was gripped by terror and panic and only through firm exercise of will was he able to stop himself from fleeing in horror. His wife, who was only a step or two behind him, had just finished commenting on the "cute little rooms," when she suddenly uttered a frightened cry, turned, and ran down the stairs.

Two unemotional, hard-nosed investigators, completely accustomed to psychic manifestations of all kinds, had experienced "distinctly a bodily and emotional reaction - accompanied ... by a momentary mental panic and sensation of terror" such as neither of them had ever before known.

Carrington saw to his wife, whom he found outside on the porch, breathing deeply of the fresh air, then he returned to the remainder of the party. Each of them had experienced identical sensations and had retreated to the lower floor where they sat sprawled in chairs or leaned against walls, tears streaming down their cheeks. Carrington made special note of the fact that two cynics, friends of the tenant, had accompanied the group out of boredom with their usual entertainments and had brought along a copious supply of Scotch and gin in case they were not confronted with "spirits" of a different nature. Both of these skeptics experienced the same sensations as the other members of the party - a difficulty in swallowing, tears stinging from the eyes, and cold perspiration on the forehead.

A dog, belonging to a member of the party, resisted all manner of coaxing designed to lure it upstairs. It growled, planted its feet stubbornly, and the hair raised on its back. In short, "he behaved very much as dogs are supposed to behave in the presence of ghostly phenomena."

Much later, Carrington led another expedition up the stairs to the servants' quarters. This tune, the atmosphere seemed to have purged itself of the poisonous influence, and no member of the party experienced any sensations similar to the previous excursion. The dog bounded up the stairs, poked its nose into all the corners, and behaved as if prowling around such a house were the most natural thing in the world.

Carrington later sought to return to the house with a medium and apparatus for recording and testing sounds and atmosphere. He was denied permission to continue his investigation, because one of the friends of the tenant had given the story to the papers, and the owner of the house did not desire additional publicity about his "haunted house."

One of my favorite "haunted houses" is that manse in Bognor, England, wherein dwelt the shade of the Dark Lady and her indefatigable investigator, Miss Morton. "Miss Morton" was the pseudonym for a young medical student who, when her family moved into the house in April, 1862, discovered that they had acquired a ghost along with the old mansion in Bognor. With a cool emotional detachment, and scientific objectivity, which would be envied by any "psi" researcher, Miss Morton kept following the ghost about, taking notes, conducting tests, and, it seemed, occasionally even frightening the ghost itself.

Miss Morion's family had lived in the house for about two months before the domestics began to complain of footsteps in the hallway at night. Miss Morton described her own first sighting of the Dark Lady, thus: "I had gone to my room but was not yet in bed when I heard someone at the door and went to it, thinking it was my mother. On opening it I saw no one, but going a few steps along the passage I saw the figure of a tall lady, dressed in black, standing at the head of the stairs. After a few moments, she descended the stairs, and I followed for a short distance, curious to see who it was, but I had only a small piece of candle, and it suddenly went out."

Being alone in the dark with a mysterious figure descending the staircase, did not disturb Miss Morton. A maid creaked open a door and told the young mistress that she had seen the Dark Lady on several occasions. Intrigued by the possibilities of having her own ghost, Miss Morton at once decided to study the specter as closely as possible.

"I saw her pass through wires [which she had stretched across the hallway] at least twice," she wrote in her report for the Society for Psychical Research. "I tried to touch her but she always eluded me ... if I followed her into a corner, she simply disappeared. During the two years, 1882-1884, the only noises I heard were of slight pushes against my bedroom door accompanied by footsteps, and if I looked out, I invariably saw the figure. The footsteps were light. I could hardly hear them except when on linoleum, and then only like someone walking with thin boots on."

The first time that Miss Morton tried to speak to the Dark Lady, she "gave a slight gasp" and moved quickly away from her. The persistent young medical student continued her attempts to engage the ghost in conversation. Once, while passing on the stairs, "she stopped and seemed as if she were about to speak."

Every member of the family and the domestic staff were able to see the Dark Lady except Mr. Morton. On a number of occasions, the father would be led to the spot where the phantom stood, and his impatient family would insist that he should surely be able to see her as well as they. With a gesture of defeat, the father would steadfastly maintain that he could not see their spectral guest. The explanation for Mr. Morton's strange deficiency may have been that the man was simply not sensitive enough or of the proper telepathic affinity to gain a visual image of the Dark Lady.

"Psi" researchers have long recognized four main classes of ghosts and apparitions.

1. Experimental cases in which an agent has deliberately attempted to make his apparitions appear to a particular percipient.

2. "Crisis-apparitions" in which a recognized apparition is seen, heard, or felt when the individual represented by the image is undergoing a crisis, especially death.

3. "Post-mortem apparitions" in which a recognized apparition is seen or heard long after the person represented by the phantom has died.

4. Ghosts or apparitions which habitually appear in a room, house, or locale.

The crisis-apparition of Captain Eldred Bowyer-Bowyer is remarkable because his apparition occurred to more than one person and in widely separated parts of the world.

Captain Bowyer-Bowyer was shot down in his plane in France on March 19, 1917, the same day that he was to named the godfather of his half-sister's baby. Mrs. Spearman, who was staying in a hotel in Calcutta, India, was fussing with her baby when she suddenly turned around and saw her half-brother standing behind her. Delighted to think that Captain Bowyer-Bowyer had been transferred to India - and just in time to attend the baptismal service - Mrs. Spearman turned back to the bed so that she might set the baby down and embrace her brother. When she once again faced the spot where her brother had stood, she found that he had vanished. Captain Bowyer-Bowyer had appeared so natural and so lifelike that Mrs. Spearman thought at first that he must be playing a trick on her. She called for him and searched everywhere, then, puzzled, continued on her way to the church. It was not until two weeks later that she read in a newspaper that her half-brother had been shot down on the very day that "he" had appeared in her hotel room.

On the same day, March 19th, Captain Bowyer-Bowyer was also seen by a young niece back in England. At about 9:15 A.M., the girl ran excitedly up to her mother, who was still in bed, and informed her that "Uncle Alley Boy is downstairs!" Her mother smiled and reminded the girl that her uncle was in France, but the excited girl insisted that she had seen "Alley Boy" downstairs.

A third impression of Captain Bowyer-Bowyer was received by a Mrs. Watson, an elderly friend of the airman's mother. On March 19th, she wrote Mrs. Bowyer-Bowyer - to whom she had not written for eighteen months - that she had great feelings of anxiety about Eldred.

A downed aircraft in France, a hotel room in Calcutta, a favorite niece in England, a family friend hi yet another locale - time and space mean nothing to the phenomenon of the crisis apparition. Two common features of the crisis apparition are apparent in the case of Captain Eldred Bowyer-Bowyer. One is that the apparition appears so lifelike and so much like the human being it represents that it is almost always mistaken for the actual living person. The other is that crisis-apparitions occur when people least expect them. They suddenly pop up completely unannounced by prior feelings of distress or anxiety about the person whom they represent, and they usually materialize while the percipients are engaged in their normal duties or while they are preparing for sleep.

The Reverend Arthur Bellamy told "psi" researcher F.W.H. Myers about the "lady" he saw one night sitting by the side of the bed where his wife was sound asleep. He stared at the strange woman for several minutes, noting especially the elegant styling of her hair, before the lady vanished.

When Mrs. Bellamy awakened, the reverend described her mysterious caller. He was startled to learn that the description fit that of a schoolgirl friend of his wife's with whom she had once made a pact that the one of them who died first should appear after her death to the survivor.

"But," stammered the astonished Reverend Bellamy, "was there anything outstanding about your friend so that we might be certain?"

"Her hair," his wife replied without hesitation. "We girls used to tease her at school for devoting so much time to the arrangement of her hair."

Later, the clergyman identified a photograph of his wife's friend as being the likeness of the specter that had appeared at her bedside.

G.N.M. Tyrrell saw the ghost or apparition as a "psychological marionette" which is projected by an agent in a time of crisis or great emotion. To Tyrrell, the mechanism of a haunting was similar to an idea, and, at the same time, very much like a pattern. This "idea-pattern" finds sensory expression in the apparition, which has been produced by the dramatic idea of an agent. Tyrrell's "idea-pattern" is distinguished by three general characteristics: "It is dynamic, for it is usually associated with an initiating drive; it is creative, for it manifests an urge towards expression and completeness; and it is teleological, for it is marvellously resourceful in adaptation and in adjusting means to ends."

Edmund Gurney theorized that the collective sighting of a ghost is due to a sort of telepathic "infection." One person sees the phantom and in turn telepathically influences another percipient, and so on.

Harry Price developed the "psychic ether" theory of hauntings. In his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research in 1939, Price hypothesized that a certain level of mind may create a mental image which has a degree of persistence in the psychic ether. This mental image may also contain a telepathic ability by which it can affect other minds. The collective emotions and thought images of a person who has lived in a house for some tune may have intensely "charged" the psychic ether of the place - especially if these were powerful emotions such as those of intense hatred or sorrow, or if they had been supercharged by an act of violence. In Price's theory, the original agent has no direct part in the haunting. It is the charged psychic ether which, when presented with a suitable percipient mind of the proper telepathic affinity, co-operates in the production of the idea-pattern of a ghost.

It can be said that every old house, courtroom, hospital, castle, railroad depot is "haunted." Any long-inhabited place, which has served as a container for human activity, almost certainly bears existing memory traces; but a multitude of mental images may over-saturate the majority of homes and public places and leave only a mass of impressions which create the peculiar "atmosphere" so many rooms and locales have. It is only when an idea-pattern that has been charged with enormous psychic intensity finds the mental level of a percipient who has the proper quality of telepathic affinity that a "ghost" can appear.