Mere chance cannot explain: Ruickbie excerpt #11

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

Æta Highett had lost her fiancé, Eldred Wolferstan Bowyer-Bower, killed in action on the Western Front in March 1917. In December 1917 she had this experience:

I heard a number of raps when I was in bed and I began to talk to Eldred and asked him to rap twice if he was ever going to show himself to me. Almost immediately two raps came; I waited a long time but saw nothing. Then I went to sleep. Afterwards I woke up and looked round and saw Eldred on the bed beside me, he was wearing his blue suit. I sat up and started talking to him, [Miss Highett records what she said, and that “his lips started to move” and made a reply “just above a whisper”]. I then tried to touch him, but my hand went through him, and like a fool I started to cry, and he disappeared.

This single case contains almost everything we need by way of evidence for the afterlife: two apparitions at the approximate time of death before the fact is known, or even guessed at; two apparitions after death has been established; a premonition; and two evidential mediumistic communications. Each experience on its own is vulnerable to being casually dismissed – coincidence, indigestion, etc.—but together, experienced by people separated by continents, but all bearing on the same person, they are nigh unassailable. What reason could anyone have to doubt any of the principal witnesses?

The Bowyer-Bowers were an upper-class family in England at a time when honour and reputation were still important, with a tradition of military service: Eldred, his brother, father and grandfather were, or had been, soldiers. Both Dorothy and Cecily had already decided not to mention what had happened to them: the full details only came to light after Æta talked about her visit to Mrs. Brittain, otherwise they would have remained silent. Æta herself was reticent in mentioning her own apparitional experience. Both Dorothy and Margaret initially sought non-paranormal explanations. There was no attempt to gain publicity or any secondary gain out of their experiences.

It was only the work of Hubert Wales (1870–1943) in gathering the letters and statements together that brought the case to wider notice in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which was only circulated among members and not on general sale, so the publication of the case was anything but sensationalistic. In the report, Wales is described as having been a member of the SPR “for several years.” His interest seems only to have been to gather and make available to the SPR the facts of the case: he was not credited as the author of the report.

This type of phenomenon has come to be called a “crisis apparition” after the work of the early SPR researchers. In the introduction to the SPR’s monumental two-volume work on the subject of Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore, Myers wrote:

Testimony proves that phantasms (impressions, voices, or figures) of persons undergoing some crisis—especially death—are perceived by their friends and relatives with a frequency which mere chance cannot explain.

The testimony referred to involved “over two thousand depositions” of which more than half described crisis-type apparitions. According to a study by Hornell Hart, almost everyone who experiences this class of phenomenon—apparitions of people who were dead or close to death at the time of the appearance—recognizes them (85%). Sometimes the apparition was seen more than once (26%), or by two or more people at the same time. Other than signaling their own death, some cases also revealed additional information that was also later found to be true (8%). The crisis apparition occurs close to the time of crisis, but, as in the Bowyer-Bower case, related experiences can occur quite some time after it, and, as we shall see, involve a number of different elements. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.