The Premonitions Bureau: Ruickbie excerpt #21

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:

John Barker

In December 1966, psychiatrist John Barker contacted Peter Fairley, science editor of the London Evening Standard, with a plan to establish a clearing house for predictions, the Premonitions Bureau, using the Evening Standard to solicit premonitions from the general public in order to prevent future tragedies like Aberfan. Fairley agreed, giving Barker twelve months. The Premonitions Bureau went live in January 1967, receiving 469 premonitions in its first year. Several were deadly accurate.

The first was from Alan Hencher. He telephoned the Bureau at 6 am on March 21, 1967, telling Barker about an aeroplane crash “over mountains,” with high fatalities: “There are one hundred and twenty-three people, possibly one hundred and twenty-four.” On April 20, a Globe Air Bristol Britannia aeroplane carrying 130 people crashed into a hillside south of Nicosia Airport in Cyprus. The Evening Standard’s frontpage headline was “124 Die in Airliner” – two more subsequently died in hospital. It was Cyprus’s worst aircrash.

On April 23, 1967, Lorna Middleton contacted Barker: she had seen an astronaut looking “petrified, terrified and just frightened.” On April 24, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died when parachute failure caused his Soyuz capsule to smash into the ground at full speed. Hencher and Middleton again felt disaster loom towards the end of 1967, with Middleton describing a vision of a crowd and a railway platform, and seeing the words “Charing Cross,” a busy station in London, on November 1. On November 5, the Hastings to London Charing Cross train derailed near the Hither Green rail depot, killing 49 and injuring another 78. “Quite honestly it staggers me,” Barker told the Evening News afterwards, with the newspaper adding, dramatically, “Somehow, while dreaming or awake, they can gate-crash the time barrier.”

In Spring, 1968, messages started coming in to the Bureau of another impending tragedy. Middleton wrote “There may be another assassination. It may be in America shortly,” whilst telling a journalist that “The word assassination continues. I cannot disconnect it from Robert Kennedy.” Joan Hope in Canada wrote “Robert Kennedy to follow in his brother's footsteps.” On June 4, Middleton wrote again to the Bureau: “Another assassination and again in America.” On June 5, Miss C.E. Piddock in Kent wrote in her diary “Janitor will die today” – she later realised that “Senator” must have been meant. In the US, Alan Vaughan wrote to Dr. Stanley Krippner at the Maimonides Medical Center, with the warning that “This dream may presage the assassination of a third prominent American, one who had connections with John F. Kennedy [...] Could that other martyr be Bobby Kennedy?" Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded in a hail of bullets at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, at around midnight on June 5, 1968, dying in hospital the next day.

The Premonitions Bureau was scoring remarkable hits – its success had inspired Robert Nelson to start a similar operation in the USA, the Central Premonitions Registry – but there were dark clouds on the horizon. At the same time as the Cyprus plane crash, Hencher started to receive premonitions that Barker’s life was in danger. Hencher’s warnings persisted into 1968. Now Middleton was having troubling premonitions about Barker. On February 7, she had a vision of him – just his head and shoulders – with her deceased parents: “my parents were trying to tell me something,” she said. Barker suffered a brain haemorrhage on August 18, 1968, dying later in hospital.

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.

Multiple premonitions: Ruickbie excerpt #20

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:

 On October 14, 1966, Alexander Venn turned to his wife and said, “Something terrible is going to happen, and it won’t be far from here, either.” A sense of foreboding had oppressed him all day. An amateur artist, he turned to his sketchbook to express what he felt. He drew a human head surrounded by black, the impression of coal dust on his mind.

He was not the only one to feel that “something terrible” was imminent. On Tuesday, October 17, a man in Kent became convinced that “On Friday something terrible connected with death is going to happen.” On Thursday morning, October 20, a woman woke in panic after a nightmare of being smothered in what she called “deep blackness.” Later that morning, nine-year-old Eryl Mai Jones said to her mother, “Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night [...] I dreamed I went to school and there was no school. Something black had come down all over it!”

At 9 p.m. that evening, Mrs. C. Milden was attending a Spiritualist meeting in Plymouth: “a vision appeared before her as if on film, showing an old schoolhouse in a valley and an avalanche of coal rushing down a mountainside.” She saw a small boy with a long fringe of hair surrounded by rescue workers, one of whom was wearing a peaked cap that she found odd. At around 4 a.m. on the morning of Friday, October 21, Sybil Brown in Brighton was terrified by a nightmare of a child screaming in a telephone booth, with another child walking towards her followed by a “black, billowing mass.”

At about the same time, another woman in North London, Lorna Middleton, “awoke choking and gasping and with the sense of the walls caving in.” Far to the northwest of England, an elderly man dreamt of a series of brilliantly illuminated letters spelling out “A B E R F A N.” He had no idea what it meant. At 9.14 a.m., Monica McBean, then at work as a secretary at an aircraft factory, had a vision of a “black mountain moving and children buried under it.”

By 9.14, Eryl Mai was already at Pantglas Junior School in Aberfan, Wales, for the last day before the mid-term holidays. At 9.15, far above the coal-mining village, a mass of water-saturated colliery spoil started sliding down tip 7 and it did not stop till 140,000 cubic yards (110,000 m3) of black slurry was moving down the mountain. People recalled hearing a sound like thunder or a low- flying jet as an avalanche like a “dark glistening wave” swept away two cottages in its path and engulfed the school and surrounding houses. The result was heart-breaking: 116 children and 28 adults, 144 in all, had been killed. Watching events unfold on the television news on Sunday, Mrs. Milden saw a small boy with a long fringe of hair and nearby a worker wearing an odd-looking peaked cap.

The psychiatrist Dr. John Barker took an interest in the disaster after he heard that a survivor had later died of fright. A member of the Society for Psychical Research, he was writing a book on what he called “psychic death” – when people die from non-physical causes, such as fright. Arriving in Aberfan, he heard stories of the premonitions people had had. Contacting Peter Fairley, science editor of the London Evening Standard, he convinced him to publish an appeal for such premonitions. In the course of the next two week, he received 76 replies.

Another public appeal for premonitions made through The Sun and Thompson’s Weekly newspapers by the Oxford Institute for Psychophysical Research was launched three days after Barker’s appeal, garnering information from another 72 correspondents. The News of the World also investigated the question of premonitions. The three surveys brought in a total of 200 replies.

Barker discarded sixteen of the replies and followed-up the others in more detail. In twenty-two cases the person claiming to have had a premonition told at least one other person, and sometimes as many as four, about it before the event, and in another two cases made a written record of their premonition beforehand. All of these replies came from people with no connection to the area and living some distance from Aberfan, mostly in and around London. Thirty-six took place as dreams, whilst the rest included waking visions and feelings of foreboding, mental distress and even physical sensations of choking or suffocation. The dream premonitions were distinctive by giving literal details of the disaster, of having a vivid quality and by representing the impending disaster as happening in the dreamer’s present. Then it dawned on Dr. Barker:

While analyzing the letters, I realized that the time had surely come to call a halt to attempts to prove or disprove precognition. We should instead set about trying to harness and utilize it with a view to preventing future disasters. 

 

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.

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.

Deathbed Visions: Ruickbie excerpt #18

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:  “The dying person, precisely at the moment of death, and when the power of speech was lost, or nearly lost, seemed to see something; or rather, to speak more exactly, to become conscious of something present (for actual sight is out of question) of a very striking kind, which remained invisible to and unperceived by the assistants.”  

Frances Cobbe likened this experience to that “peak in Darien” (Panama) whereon Cortez and his men, expecting to see a continent, beheld instead the vast Pacific ocean stretching to the horizon. Writing in 1882, Cobbe found that almost every family could recall such a deathbed incident, the vision being of someone known to the dying who had pre-deceased them. 

Almost 150 years later, Dr. Christopher Kerr studied end-of-life experiences involving 1,400 interviews with dying patients. He found that “over 80% reported at least one pre-death dream or vision described as more real than real and distinct from normal dreaming,” and for 72% this was a dream/vision of the deceased (friends, family, and pets). He found a correlation between the frequency of dreaming of the deceased and the nearness of death that had predictive value. Although Kerr did not consider evidential aspects, his study proves that the experience itself is common and widespread.*

The typical case involves the familiar “receptio ad mortem,” to coin a phrase, a welcoming party composed of one or more deceased family members and sometimes friends. This in itself gives heart, that we should see in our final moments those most loved by us and that they are there to welcome us to the other side, even if only a delusion it is a comforting end; however, the delusional explanation is overthrown by the reporting of information that the dying should not ordinarily possess.

The most Scrooge-defying accounts of deathbed visions involve seeing people who are unknown to the dying person to have died. Cobbe recounted one such case, but since then many more have come to light. When A.T. Baird collected a hundred of the best cases, he concluded that deathbed visions of this sort gave “the strongest support to the theory of the survival of human personality after bodily death.”**

* Christopher Kerr, Death is But a Dream: Finding Meaning and Hope at Life's End (Avery, 2020 ) https://www.amazon.com/Death-But-Dream-Finding-Meaning/dp/0525542841. 

** A. T. Baird, One Hundred Cases for Survival After Death, (White Crow, 2018), https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/one-hundred-cases-for-survival-after-death-alexander-t-baird/1120039023.

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.

Actual-death experiences: Ruickbie excerpt #17

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 about the case of a singer, Pam Reynolds (1956-2010). She writes of her experience during surgery:

 

The next thing I recall was the sound: It was a Natural ‘D.’ As I listened to the sound, I felt it was pulling me out of the top of my head. The further out of my body I got, the more clear the tone became. I had the impression it was like a road, a frequency that you go on [...] I remember seeing several things in the operating room when I was looking down. It was the most aware that I think that I have ever been in my entire life [...] I was metaphorically sitting on [the doctor’s] shoulder. It was not like normal vision. It was brighter and more focused and clearer than normal vision [...] There was so much in the operating room that I didn’t recognize, and so many people.

Her surgery is one of the most detailed and best authenticated examples of what is usually called a near-death experience; however, Reynolds was not near death, she was categorically dead.

In order to remove an intracranial aneurysm in the basilar artery – weakness in the arterial wall had caused a huge, life-threatening bubble to develop – that was of a size and position to make other procedures too risky, neurosurgeon Dr. Robert F. Spetzler was called in to use the pioneering method of deep hypothermic cardiac arrest. After being rendered unconscious with anaesthetics, she was cooled to around 20oC (68oF), her heart stopped beating, her lungs stopped breathing, her brain stopped functioning (electro-cerebral silence), the blood was drained from inside her skull. All her vital signs were flatlined. She was clinically dead. There were no signs of life, yet she saw and heard things. There was no brain activity, yet she was conscious.

The sound that seemed to prompt her leaving her body was that of the surgical saw Spetzler was about to use to cut open her skull. She thought the saw looked like an electric toothbrush and noted a dent in it, and its interchangeable blades in a “socket wrench case.” She had expected that the doctors would shave her whole head, but saw instead that only a patch had been shaved. She heard a female voice – she thought it may have been a Dr. Murray – talking about her veins and arteries: they were “very small,” apparently. Most of the tools and instruments she did not recognize, but she saw a heart-lung machine and “didn’t like the respirator.”

Reynolds went on to have a very vivid experience in which she met deceased relatives, but the only testable pieces of information relate to her description of the operating theatre – a description she should not have been able to make under the circumstance. They were all confirmed.

It should only take one case like that of Pam Reynolds for us to rethink the mind–brain problem, if not immediately abandon the current orthodox position that states that the brain produces the mind, but there has been more than one.

Although the term “near-death experience” was only coined in 1975 by Raymond Moody, people had certainly been reporting such experiences for a long time. Moody’s own interest in the subject began in 1965 when he heard a clinical professor of psychiatry (surely a credible witness) relate his own experience. By the time Moody came to write his groundbreaking book, Life After Life, he had about 150 NDE cases, and that was only the start.

The term is not accurate: although some cases do indeed involve experiences when the body is near death, others involve experiences when the body is actually dead; and when we say ‘experiences’ we mean consciousness because only something conscious can have experiences. It is not a near-death experience but post-mortem consciousness. If we more accurately reframe the terms like this, then it becomes immediately apparent that evidence of consciousness after clinical death is evidence of the survival of consciousness after the death of the physical body.

What constitutes ‘best’ is precisely that they had actually died, and through the wonders of modern medicine were resuscitated, and then recalled memories from a period when their bodies, including their brains, were not functioning – that is, ordinarily unable to produce memories, the unique ability of consciousness, if consciousness is created by the brain. And then not only that, astonishing as it is, but described events that were independently confirmed – events that they should not have been aware of if consciousness is created by the brain. We have to take these experiences seriously because they are consistent across time and culture: they are not fantasy constructs that somehow get lucky, they are real.

The number of ‘best’ NDE cases is staggering. In addition to Reynolds other cases often cited include that of Al Sullivan. A fifty-five year-old truck driver, Sullivan was undergoing triple-bypass surgery when his consciousness separated from his body. Sullivan saw the surgeon perform an unusual arm flapping motion with his hands tucked into his armpits and encountered his mother and brother-in-law, both deceased, who told him to tell his neighbours that their son, suffering from lymphoma, would recover – all subsequently confirmed.

Kenneth Ring gathered thirty-one cases of blind people reporting seeing things during an NDE that were later verified as true. Current medical science says that this is impossible, yet it happened thirty-one times, at least.

Although NDEs have been reported for centuries, modern medicine is constantly pushing back the irreversibility threshold of death. If Reynolds had lived and been diagnosed some years earlier, there would have been no treatment for her and hence no account of post-mortem consciousness. We are travelling further into death than any civilization has been able to do before. And the information people are bringing back is of a quality and depth never before achievable. 

 

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.

The subtle body: Ruickbie excerpt #16

Robert Monroe

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: Ideas of a second, or ‘subtle’ body can be traced back to Antiquity, and are found in the remote past of other cultures. Much research was done on “travelling clairvoyance,” “doubles” astral bodies, “extracorporeal action,” and “astral projection,” but it was not until 1943 that such phenomena were classified as the now more familiar “out-of-body experience” (OBE) by G.N.M. Tyrrell – a term adopted and popularized by Celia Green and Robert Monroe, among others.

Sylvan Muldoon described passing through physical things and beings during his “astral projections,” and a later study of 1,007 OBErs found that 38% experienced “self-permeability,” i.e., the ability to pass through physical objects. In addition, 40% reported seeing themselves (autoscopy) whilst having an OBE – other studies have reported 56–82% for this experience. An online survey of 16,185 OBErs found that 62% were associated with lucid dreams, and 49% involved “seeing through closed eyelids.” Almost half had some sort of encounter, either “seeing or feeling the presence of an unknown physical being” (22%), or “seeing, hearing or speaking to a deceased loved one” (24%) – Monroe described several encounters with the deceased. One study included cases of OBErs reporting events from past lives (15%), potentially linking the experience with reincarnation.

Over the years many people have attempted to test whether OBEs are really out of the body. H. Durville described holding a piece of paper with large letters printed on it in front of the half-open eyes of a hypnotized subject, Marthe – she claimed she could see nothing, but when the paper was placed before her “double,” specifically at the nape of the neck, she then proceeded to read it without difficulty. Charles Tart conducted experiments with “Miss Z,” placing a random five-digit number on a shelf above her bed whilst she slept and attempted to leave her body. On the final night of the trial she read the number correctly. K. Osis and D. McCormick apparently successfully tested Dr. Alex Tanous’s ability to leave his body.

In his report to the US Army Operational Group in 1983 concerning the “Gateway Experience” (a Monroe Institute programme), Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnel, Commander Det. O, wrote that “human consciousness can, with enough practice, move beyond the dimension of time- space and interface with other energy systems in other dimensions.” McDonnel reported that the technique could also be used to “travel” into the past and future. During his training at the Monroe Institute one of the trainers told him that “numerous experiments have been conducted involving persons moving from one coast [of the USA] to the other in the out-of-body state to read a series of ten computer generated numbers in a university laboratory [...] most have acquired enough of the digits to make clear that their consciousness was present.” Experiments such as these were part of the US government’s long-running research into remote viewing, Project Star Gate.

More recently, Patrizio Tressoldi and colleagues conducted experiments with a group of five OBErs, with the group scoring considerably above chance in correctly identifying the target images at a location approximately 190 km away. They stated that “All participants reported a phenomenological experience of a disembodied personal selfhood able to perceive simply by an act of will without the physical limitation of eyesight, to move in the environment instantaneously and exist in a sort of three dimensional world with no awareness of time.” Tressoldi’s paper was rejected by the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience because, among other things, the findings violated “the basic laws of physics as they are currently understood,” which was surely the point.

In addition to a hundred years’ worth of successful experiments, supporting evidence comes from other avenues. According to Jeffrey Long’s NDERF survey, an out-of-body experience was the most common feature of an NDE, being reported in three-quarters (75.4%) of all cases – Greyson and Stevenson had earlier found 70%. Other studies have shown that as many as a quarter (22– 25%) of people have spontaneous out-of-body experiences, that is, without having to be “near death” at the time.

 

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.

 

Out-of-body experiances: Ruickbie excerpt #14

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:

As well as self-projectionists, others had discovered that they could send their subjects out of their bodies. In the 1840s, the British physician Joseph Haddock (1800–1861) discovered what he called “distant clairvoyance” during investigations into hypnotism (then generally considered under the heading of Mesmerism). Working with a subject called Emma L., a domestic servant in her twenties, he asked her to describe one of Haddock’s female relatives in London whilst she was mesmerized in Bolton, 174 miles (279 km) away as the crow flies. She was apparently successful in this, but puzzled Haddock by going on to describe a lady in a grand building, which to him sounded like Buckingham Palace (he tested this by asking if she saw any soldiers, to which she replied that she did). He later discovered that his relative – the target of the experiment – had been thinking of the Queen at the time. Emma’s distant clairvoyance had seemingly followed the target’s line of thought. “It appeared,” wrote Haddock, “as if her mind partially left her body, to go to the place sought.” There are many more such accounts in the Mesmerist literature from this period.

I discovered a similar case in the British Library that had escaped being published or discussed in the hundred plus years since being documented in 1915. It involved Francis Gilbert Scott (1868–1933), a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and of the Society for Psychical Research, who had conducted a series of experiments in hypnotism on his maid in an effort to improve her work. He accidentally discovered that, whilst in trance, she could apparently leave her body and visit her sweetheart Edgar, who was serving on the Western Front, approximately 200 miles away. Further experiments included visiting the maid’s cousin Bruce, also at the front. Her observations, always involving incidents that could not have been realistically guessed beforehand, were later confirmed by post.

In both cases, reputable medical men conducted the experiments, which, although informal in character, showed no indication of being deceptive or mercenary. The level of unexpected detail makes sensory cueing or subjective validation unlikely explanations. That these details were independently confirmed also demonstrates that the experiences were not hallucinatory. Emma and Scott’s maid really did seem to be out of their bodies. 

 

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.