Precognition: Ruickbie excerpt #19

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: 

In December 1925, the journalist Irene Corbally Kuhn (1898–1995) was walking down Michigan Boulevard (now Michigan Avenue) in Chicago. Just weeks before, the twenty-seven-year-old had been in Shanghai working with her husband Bert Kuhn for the China Press, but after Sikh police had fired on a Chinese student protest, killing six, anti-foreign feeling was running high. There were strikes and riots as what became known as the May Thirtieth Movement led to a state of martial law. The Kuhns were in immediate danger. Both hard-nosed journalists, they might have stayed, but, with a two-year-old daughter to look after, it was decided that Irene should return to the USA with their child – Bert would remain (he was also secretly working for US Naval Intelligence).

Chicago in 1925 was mobster Al Capone’s city, but a walk down Michigan Boulevard was still a safer bet than Shanghai. What happened next stopped Kuhn in her tracks:

Suddenly and without warning, sky, boulevard, people, lake, everything vanished, wiping from my vision as completely and quickly as if I had been struck blind. Before me, as on a motion picture screen in a dark theatre, unrolled a strip of green grass within a fence of iron palings. Three young trees, in spring verdure, stood at one side; beyond the trees and the fence, in the far distance, factory smoke-stacks trailed sooty plumes across the sky. Across from the trees stood a small circle of people, men and women, a mere handful, in black clothes. And coming to a halt on a graveled road by the grass was a limousine from which alighted two men who turned to offer their hands to a woman in black, emerging now from the car. The woman was me.

I watched myself being escorted against my will to the group which now parted to receive me. [...] at last I was among the others, and looked at the small hole cut in the grass – a hole not more than two feet square. [...] There was a small box which someone, bending over now, was placing in the earth with infinite tenderness – a box so small and light that I could hold it in my hand and hardly feel it. What was I doing here? Where was I? Why was I letting someone put this box in the ground – this little box which held something very precious to me? I couldn’t speak or move. These people – who were they to me? Then I recognized only the faces of my husband’s family, tear-stained and sad. The silence screamed and tore at me. I looked about. All the clan were there. Only he was missing. Then I knew what was in the box, and I crumpled on the grass without a sound.

The vision lifted as suddenly as it had appeared and Kuhn found herself clutching a lamppost for support. She later brushed off the incident as an over-active imagination triggered by her loneliness in the city.

Things had settled down in Shanghai, so she planned to return, boarding the Empress of Canada at Vancouver in February. Onboard she received a telegram: “Husband dangerously ill, best not sail.” The next telegram brought worse news: her husband had died on February 21, 1926, from “unknown causes.”

The funeral was on May 30th. Kuhn travelled by limousine with her two brothers-in-law to Rosehill Cemetery, “which I had never seen before,” she said. When they arrived:

The men got out first and waited to help me. I put my foot on the ground, and something held me back. For a second I couldn’t raise my eyes because I knew what I would see. At last I looked. There was the spring grass underfoot. There were the three young trees in fresh leaf; there the fence of iron palings, and the smoke-stacks of the city’s industries far beyond in the distance. [...] Bert’s brothers urged me forward gently. I saw the ring of black-clad mourners over to one side, waiting. I stopped.

“You didn’t have to open a full grave, did you?” I asked. “How do you know?” asked Paul with astonishment.

“There’s just a little square hole big enough to take the box with Bert’s ashes, isn’t there?” I pressed on.

Paul’s face was white beneath his natural tan. “Yes, that’s right. They said it would be foolish to open a full grave for a small box of ashes. But how did you know?” he persisted.

I didn’t answer. I was thinking of that December day on Michigan Boulevard when I had seen into the future, over the bridge of time.

As a pioneering female journalist, with an established, if not enviable reputation, Kuhn risked more than she could hope to gain in telling this story, and it is unlikely that she invented it. It also seems to have been her only experience of this kind, so we can rule out any undiagnosed psychopathological condition. Before any court, Kuhn would be seen as a singularly credible and reliable witness.

A remarkable feature of this vision is that, although she was in it, Kuhn did not view the event from her future viewpoint, but stood outside it. One thinks of the viewpoint reported during OBEs (including NDEs) of a conscious observer looking at their own body from an external, independent position. Can we call what she saw ghosts? Surely we must, because, from her physical position in the present, the people she saw were not yet where she saw them, and did not yet do what she saw them do, yet she saw them.

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.