Multiple apparition witnesses: Rawlette excerpt #3

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "More evidence that apparitions cannot all be explained merely as hallucinations induced by grief or wishful thinking comes from cases where the apparition appears to multiple people, as in the Captain Wheatcroft example cited above. In the 89 apparition cases that Erlendur Haraldsson collected in his book The Departed Among the Living, in which an additional living person was in a physical position from which they should have been able to see it, 41 of them did—almost half. Also, when multiple people see an apparition, they report perceiving it from varying angles, as though the apparition were a true three-dimensional object. This suggests that at least some apparitions may be objectively located in space but that not all people are equally capable of detecting them.

Apparitions to Bystanders, Including Animals

"In fact, while some people have never experienced an apparition, others report seeing them frequently, even when the people appearing have little or no connection to them. Haraldsson quotes a man who says he frequently sees the deceased and mentions one time waking up in the night to see his wife’s mother’s stepfather standing by his wife’s side of the bed. His wife’s mother’s stepfather had been dead many years, and they’d never met in life. It seems he was probably present out of some concern or attachment to the wife, and the husband just happened to perceive him. Such apparitions to bystanders are another strike against the wishful thinking hypothesis, as a “bystander” in this case is someone with no real emotional connection to the deceased and presumably no particular desire to encounter them.

"Consider another case from Haraldsson’s book. A young man named Gisli Frimannsson was staying at Hjorsey in Iceland when one night he woke up to see “an elderly man from the district...standing on the middle of the floor.” The apparition stayed for some time before “disintegrating” and disappearing. The next evening, Frimannsson got word this man had died. When he spoke to the man’s widow, she said she had a dream right after her husband’s death where he said to her, “I have already been to Hjorsey, but no one was aware of me there except Gisli.”

"Sometimes the bystanders who experience an apparition are animals. In another case of Haraldsson’s, a woman was trying to herd her sheep into a particular pen, but they refused to go in. “They just shied away,” she says, “so I went to find out what was wrong. And there he [her brother Erik, who had died at 16] stood in the doorway of the sheep shed. I told him sharply to go to God and stop wandering about here on earth. Then he left and the sheep entered the pen.”

"Anecdotes about cats and dogs reacting to apparitions abound. Bill and Judy Guggenheim’s 1995 book Hello from Heaven! contains the account of a woman named Tina whose brother Rudy had died a year previously. Tina recounted, “I was in the kitchen doing my housecleaning. All of a sudden, our cat shot out of the family room! Her hair was standing on end and she was hissing. ... At the same time, our little dog was backing out of the family room, barking and growling with his hair standing up! They prompted me to look, and when I did, I saw my brother, Rudy, sitting in the rocking chair!” Tina notes that she would have thought she was hallucinating if she hadn’t also seen the reactions of the animals.

Apparitions to Multiple People in Different Locations Unaware of Each Other’s Experience

"Although we do have to consider the possibility of collective hallucination, this explanation seems particularly unlikely in cases where an apparition is perceived by multiple people who are in different physical locations and unaware of each other’s experiences as they are happening. The Captain Wheatcroft case gives us one example of this, and we find another such case in Joyce and Barry Vissell’s book Meant to Be, where Myrna L. Smith gives a detailed account of the way in which her deceased husband appeared separately to her and each of her two sons on the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Smith saw her husband by the Christmas tree in the living room, and each of her boys saw their father in their own bedroom. Each boy mentioned the event before they knew of anyone else’s experience, and two of the apparitions were noted as happening around 3am.

"In another case, the “apparition” was olfactory rather than visual. Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach was one of three men who at the same time all inexplicably smelled cigar smoke and connected it to their mutual friend Martin Caidin, recently deceased and a big smoker of cigars. At the time of the anomalous smell, Auerbach was in his car, his friend Bob was flying in a Cessna three time zones away in New Jersey, and the third man was flying in a plane over Florida."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.