Let us look at some cases of apparitions seen by more than one witness.
Below is a report of several workers seeing an apparition of a worker who recently died at their work site:
You can read the account here:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86075298/1923-09-07/ed-1/seq-7/
Below is another report of several workers seeing an apparition of a worker who recently died at their work site:
Here is a newspaper account of an apparition seen by two different witnesses, both of which claimed to have seen the apparition of Fred F. Lange. There is a strange additional detail of 3 photos taken of Lange's corpse, which all come up blank.
Here is another newspaper account of an apparition seen by two different witnesses:
Below we read of an apparition of a Colonel Brice. In the account a professor says he saw the apparition once, and that an associate saw the apparition three times. The professor says the apparition was transparent, and walked through the professor's bed.
You can read the account here:
Below is a rather chilling story of multiple witnesses seeing an apparition, not just once but multiple times, apparently:
Below is another case of an apparition reportedly seen by multiple witnesses:
Below we have a very dramatic account of an apparition witnessed by a very sick child's father and the child's stepmother. The apparition reportedly had an appearance matching that of the child's deceased mother.
Below is a quote from a scholarly article, in which the author quotes an account he heard on TV. The witness claims that he and five other people saw an apparition corresponding to a person who was at the time close to death. It's one of the rare cases of an apparition of the living, which tend to occur when the person matching the apparition is having a close brush with death.
"In recently watching the Jonathan
Ross show again on the 29th October, quite unexpectedly, another guest and poet, Benjamin
Zephaniah, presented another experience for all to hear. Following asking about attitudes
towards Halloween, Ross, already primed with information on his guests, asks Zephaniah, 'am
I right in thinking that you had a sort of supernatural experience once?' Drifting into thought
and recollection, he replied, 'Yes, I had a very, very weird experience, and interestingly
y’know, a lot of these experiences happen in the night when there’s shadows y’know and stuff
like that, but this happened in broad daylight. Me, and five other people, were in a house in
Birmingham. We were waiting for cousin to come home. She walked in [through] the front
door, through the front room, and out the backdoor. And we went to see her, and she wasn’t
there.' The other guests on Ross’s show clearly shocked with stunned reactions at this point.
He continues, 'And we all saw her. Later on that day, we found out that she’d been hit by a
car, died for about five minutes or whatever it is, and came back to life [Ross lets out a ‘wow’
with his eye fixated on Zephaniah], and it wasn’t just me, like I said there were five others who
witnessed it… And I’m not really one of those people that believes in that stuff, I’m into science
y’know, but I also understand that there is stuff that we can’t prove.' Ross remarks that
normally he would dismiss that sort of thing, and yet, it was hard to with Zephaniah’s account
as it sounds so convincing, especially as sober and level headed gentleman."
In the 1914 news account below, we have quite a few prisoners in the same jail claiming to see the same apparition, an apparition of John F. Jones, who hanged himself in the same jail in 1896. We read of nine prisoners pleading guilty, and the article suggests that more than a dozen confessed because of the apparition, saying, "Investigations of the reasons brought out the story of the 'ghost' and also the remarkable fact that in the past ten years twenty murderers had made confessions of guilt urged on by the same cause."
You can read the account here:
The account here is quite the "haunted house" account. There are many details of people seeing spooky things in the house. We hear that a Mr. and Mrs. Siegal several times saw a ghost walk through their living room. But the second-hand nature of the account means it is not first-class evidence of an apparition.
On page 136 of the document here, we read that some paranormal investigators said they saw an apparition of a man holding a baby.
In a previous post I briefly mentioned the case of Mary Goffe, writing only this:
"The case of Mary Goffe was one of the earliest reports of an apparition of a living person. On her death bed in 1691, Mary Goffe claimed that she had seen her children who had been entrusted to the care of a nurse far away. She claimed 'I was with them last night, when I was asleep.' The nurse swore that she saw Mary Goffe appear at two o'clock, and that she visited the children. The nurse said, 'If I ever saw her in all my life, I saw her on this night.' "
My discussion was rather lacking, in that it did not refer to the original source material, which should always be cited whenever possible. I have since found the original version of this account. It is on page 147 of the book The Certainty of the World of Spirits, published in 1691. On page 147, and the next few pages, we have the original account, which occurs in the form of a letter written by Reverend Thomas Tilson, dated July 6, 1691. I would quote the whole account exactly as it appears in its original form, except that it would be hard to read in the original because of all the antiquated typography in which the letter "s" is printed as "f."
But luckily the 1691 letter from Thomas Tilson is quoted exactly in a 1929 facsimile in the January 12, 1929 edition of the journal Light. Here is the account as quoted in that edition, which matches the original text:
"Mary, the wife of John Goffe, of Rochester, being
afflicted with a long illness, removed to her father’s
house, at West Mulling, which is about nine miles
distant from her own; there she died, June 4th, 1691.
The day before her departure, she grew impatiently
desirous to see her two children, whom she had left at
home, to the care of a nurse. She prayed her husband
to hire a horse, for she must go home, and die with
her children. When they persuaded her to the contrary, telling her she was not fit to be taken out of
her bed, nor able to sit on horseback, she entreated
them however to try....The next day this dying woman told her mother,
that she had been at home with her children. 'That
is impossible' said the mother, ' for you have been
here in bed all the while.' 'Yes' replied the other, 'but I was with them last night when I was asleep.'
The nurse at Rochester, Widow Alexander by
name, affirms and says, she will take her oath of it
before a magistrate, and receive the sacrament upon
it, that a little before two o’clock that morning, she
saw the likeness of the said Mary Goffe come out of
the next chamber (where the elder child lay in a bed
by itself, the door being left open) and stood by her
bed-side for about a quarter of an hour : the younger
child was there lying by her; her eyes moved
and her mouth went, but she said nothing. The
nurse, moreover, says that she was perfectly awake;
it was then day-light, being one of the longest
days in the year. She sat up in her bed, and looked
steadfastly upon the apparition; at that time she heard
the bridge clock strike two, and awhile after said, 'In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
what art thou?' Thereupon the appearance removed,
and went away; she slipped on her clothes and
followed, but what became of it she cannot tell. Then,
and not before, she began to be grievously affrighted,
and went out of doors and walked upon the wharf
(the house is just by the riverside) for some hours,
only going in now and then to look at the children.
At five o’clock she went to a neighbour’s house, and
knocked at the door, but they would not rise; at six
she went again, then they arose and let her in. She
related to them all that had passed; they would
persuade her she was mistaken, or dreamt: but she confidently affirmed, ' If ever I saw her in all my life,
I saw her this night.' One of those to whom she made the relation (Mary,
the wife of J. Sweet) had a messenger who came from
Mulling that forenoon, to let her know her neighbour
Groffe was dying,-and desired to speak with her; she went over the same day, and found her just departing.
The mother, amongst other discourse, related to her
how much her daughter had longed to see her children and said she had seen them. This brought to Mrs.
Sweet’s mind, what the nurse had told her that morning, for till then, she had not thought fit to mention it,
but disguised it, rather as the woman’s disturbed
imagination.
The substance of this, I had related to me by John
Carpenter, the father of the deceased, next day after
the burial. July 2nd, I fully discoursed the matter
with the nurse, and two neighbours, to whose house
she went that morning.
Two days after, 1 had it from the mother, the
minister that was with her in the even, and the
woman who sat up with her last that night: they all
agree in the same story, and every one helps to
strengthen the other’s testimony.
They all appear to be sober intelligent persons,
far enough off from designing to impose a cheat upon
the world, or to manage a lie, and what temptation
they should lie under for so doing, I cannot conceive." --
Thomas Tilson.
Minister of Aylesworth, near Maidstone in Kent, Aylesford, July 6, 1691
We have here high-quality evidence for the reality of this astonishing appearance of an apparition of a dying person. A very important fact is that the testimony has been written down within about a month after the claimed events, with the writer being someone who interviewed most of the relevant witnesses, including the nurse who claimed to see the apparition. According to the account, both the nurse and one of Mary Goffe's children saw the apparition, so we may classify this case as one of the cases of an apparition seen by more than one.
A Google search for "Soyuz 7 angels" produces quite a few web pages claiming that astronauts on the Soyuz 7 mission of the Soviet Union in 1969 saw apparitions of angels or mysterious beings outside of their space station. I have been unable to yet track down the original source of this account, or any firsthand testimony from any of these astronauts. So I don't know whether this claim is reliable.
For other cases of apparitions seen by multiple witnesses, see my posts below:
