The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [67]
Blazing with intensity, those thoughts might reach the minds of people normally impervious to telepathic energy. And in the mind of the receiver, that personal contact might be also be altered, transformed by memory and emotion into a voice in the night, an image, the touch of a hand. His theory, thus, might well provide the answer to Nora Sidgwick’s earlier objection to “the ghosts of clothes.”
Why do we see apparitions as clothed, when cloth is clearly inanimate, a material without any chance of an afterlife? The most likely answer, Gurney thought, is that our own mind puts clothes on the ghost. We receive an impression of our dying mother; that image becomes wrapped in memories, tangled in them, dressed by them. She appears in her favorite Sunday outfit, feathered bonnet and all. Or our father appears clothed as he always was, on the way to the office; watch chain gleaming across the gray wool of his waistcoat.
Gurney’s favorite of many examples that he saw favoring this interpretation came from a London woman recalling a vision in August 1884.
The lady was out for a drive in an open landau when she saw an old friend walking down the street. She was startled because she had thought her friend was vacationing by the seashore. She was further surprised that her friend wore a favorite sealskin jacket. She knew the warm jacket well, but it seemed odd attire in the hazy warmth of a summer day.
She called out a greeting to her friend. To her additional surprise, the woman did not answer; indeed, her head stayed slightly turned away. “For the next 10 minutes or so, I was puzzling to think what could have brought her back to London,” and why she had behaved so. The woman wished she had asked her coachman to turn around so that she could have caught up with her friend. When she got home, she called the butler to inquire if she had a visitor and was told no. She wondered if her friend had gone to her sister’s home instead and sent a servant to find out—but she was not there either. Three days later, she saw in the London paper that her friend had died at the seashore, on the day that she saw her in the street.
The story had the same elements of so many other crisis apparitions, but, for purpose of the argument, Gurney wanted to focus on that unlikely sealskin coat. He suspected the detail had come right out of his correspondent’s mind, that she had received a “telepathic impression” of her friend and filled it out, adorning her friend with that familiar fur. In other words, he said, it is our own mind that creates the look of the apparition, adds to it out of our own experience: “One percipient may hear his parent’s voice; another may imagine the touch of his hand upon his head; a third may see him in his wonted dress and aspect; a fourth may see him as he might appear when dying ... others may invest the disturbing idea with every sort of visible symbolism, derived from their mind’s habitual furniture and their wonted trains of thought.”
The traditional scientist would counter, Gurney knew, that every apparition could be explained as coincidence. Dreams and daydreams, images of a friend or relative, frequently flitted through everyone’s consciousness. Such images might randomly occur at the time of a crisis, and if so, they would be far better remembered than those lacking such dramatic narrative. The dreams and the voices would take on an undeserved sense of mystery and power, as one might argue about Twain’s dream of his dead brother.
“The question for us now,” Gurney said, “is whether these coincidences can, or cannot, be explained as accidental. If they can, then the theory of telepathy—so far as applied to apparitions—falls to the ground.” But if he could prove, with statistics for instance, that “the same