Observations placeholder
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research - Volume vi - A shared hallucination
Identifier
016220
Type of Spiritual Experience
Dying
Inter composer communication
Hallucination
Background
In this example not just one but multiple participants experience the same hallucination, but yet again the family ties are strong and only one participant is doing the sending.
I think the hallucination stemmed from Aunt Harriet.
She was dying and she and Aunt Ann were, as sisters, very close. I think her composer constructed a hallucination for her that would have been comforting to her on her death bed, and that the emotion attached to it was so strong that the others, all tired and in a state of grief, simply detected the same hallucination.
This is unconscious broadcasting but was still accompanied by considerable emotion.
The alternative is that they all saw her spirit helper.
A description of the experience
From Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research volume vi
[from Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death – F W H Myers]
The house, 19 St James Place, Green park had been taken on a very long lease by my grandfather, a solicitor, in a large country practice, having his offices in Essex Street, Strand. There my father was born and his two sisters, Ann and Harriet. Aunt Ann died in 1858, leaving all she possessed to Aunt Harriet, who remained in the house. They had been devotedly attached to each other. In November, 1864 I was summoned …. My Aunt Harriet was then very ill there…
About 1 or 2 am on the morning of December 23rd, both Mrs Coppinger {Miss Emma Pearson’s cousin, Emma wrote the case history] and myself started up in bed; we were neither of us sleeping, as we were watching every sound from the next room.
We saw some one pass the door, short, wrapped up in an old shawl, a wig with three curls each side and an old black cap. Mrs Coppinger called out ‘Emma, get up, it is old Aunt Ann…. We jumped up and Mrs John Pearson the wife of a nephew came rushing out of the room and said ‘That was old Aunt Ann, where is she gone to?’
No explanation has ever been given of this appearance, except that it was old Aunt Ann come to call her sister, and she died at 6pm that day