When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 4)

Apparitions of the dead seem to occur most commonly close to the death of the person corresponding to the apparition. But it is not all that rare for someone to see an apparition of someone who died long ago. I discussed some cases of this type in three previous posts:

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 1)

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 2)

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 3)

Let us look at some more cases of this type, cases I did not discuss in the previous posts. On page 416 of Volume V of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (March 25, 1889), we read this account dated September 15, 1886, from John E. Husbands:

"The facts are simply these. I was sleeping in a hotel in Madeirs in January, 1885. It was a bright moonlight night. The windows were open and the blinds up. I felt some one was in my room. On opening my eyes, I saw a young fellow about 25, dressed in flannels, standing at the side of my bed and pointing with the first finger of his right hand to the place I was lying. I lay for some seconds to convince myself of some one being really there. I then sat up and looked at him. I saw his features so plainly that I recognized them in a photograph which was shown me some days after. I asked him what he wanted ; he did not speak, but his eyes and hand seemed to tell me I was in his place. As he did not answer, I struck out at him with my fist & I sat up, but did not reach him, and was as I going to spring out of bed he slowly vanished through the door, which was shut, keeping his eyes upon me all the time."

In a letter dated October 8th, 1886, K. Falkner stated this:

"The figure that Mr. Husbands saw while in Madeirs was that of a young fellow who died unexpectedly months previously, in the room which Mr. Husbands was occupying. Curiously enough, Mr. H. had never heard of him or his death. He told me the story the morning after he had seen the figure, and I recognized the young fellow from the description."

Falkner showed Husbands a photo of the person who died, and Husbands identified the person as the apparition he had seen, saying, "That is the young fellow who appeared to me the other night."

In the article in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in which this account appears, on page 427, we have the interesting diagram below, one suggesting apparition sightings occur most frequently about the time of someone's death, but with quite a few sightings occuring well after someone dies:

In the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume 6, July 8, 1889 there is an article entitled "On Recognized Apparitions Occurring More Than a Year After Death."  On pages 26-28 we read an account by a Mrs. P, who tells of both herself and her husband seeing an apparition:

"Sitting upon the bedside, he put his arm about me and said, 'Do you know what we have seen ?' And I said, 'Yes, it was a spirit. I am afraid it was Arthur, but could not see his face' - and he exclaimed, 'Oh ! no, it was my father ! ' My husband's father had been dead fourteen years... My husband and I related the occurrence to my uncle and aunt, and we all noticed that my husband's agitation and anxiety were very great: whereas his usual manner was calm and reserved in the extreme, and he was a thorough and avowed sceptic in all so-called-supernatural events."

On pages 162-166 of his book Man's Survival After Death, Charles Tweedale tells a remarkable tale of personal experience that includes apparitions of his mother appearing long after her death. The story includes Tweedale putting an acorn under the head of his dead mother just before her coffin was sealed, and also claims that messages believed to be from his dead mother included references to oak trees (which grow from acorns). On pages 154-157 he describes repeated sightings of an Aunt Leah appearing long after her death, with the apparition speaking. 

On page 161 of the book Love Beyond Life, we read of a case of an elderly woman who went to the hospital because of a sharp leg pain, seeing an apparition of her father decades after he died:

"Fran was waiting in the emergency room for a nurse to return with the injection. Suddenly the curtains around the examining table parted and Fran's late father emerged. William Butterfield, who had been dead more than forty years, appeared not as the elderly man he was when he died but as he had been when Fran was a young girl: tall, slender and handsome...'Fannie,' he said addressing her by her childhood name, 'why don't you come with me? Why don't you come home with me?' "

A month later, the woman died of a heart attack. The reference to an afterlife realm as "home" is one that often occurs in near-death experiences and dreams suggesting life after death, as I discuss here. 

On page 64 of the interesting Time-Life book Phantom Encounters we read of an apparition appearing  long after someone's death:

"Looking around, Stirland saw a vision of his father who died more than twenty years earlier, standing only six feet away. 'In appearance,' Stirland related, 'he was filmy or misty, insubstantial, yet of natural color and stature, observable in clear detail...This apparition, if that is the word, was surrounded by an aura of gold, silver, and bright blue rings, approximately three feet in diameters...radiating a white silvery light into the surround." 

On the next page we read this account about Julian Burton seeing an apparition in 1980:

"He confronted the phantom of his mother, who had died seven years earlier. 'She was fully visible,' he wrote later, 'looking years younger than at the time of her death. She was wearing a diaphanous pale-blue gown trimmed in marabou, which I had never seen before.' Before Burton could even call out, the figure of his mother disappeared, leaving him deeply unsettled. The next morning he called his sister, who added a strange detail. Two weeks before her death, Mrs. Burton had gone shopping with her daughter and admired a pale-blue gown whose description perfectly matched that of the gown warn by the apparition."

The book Seen and Unseen by Emily Katherine Bates is a very interesting account of paranormal phenomena observed by one woman in the late nineteenth century.  On page 11 Bates recalls having a severe feeling of dread at the exact time that her brother was struck by a long-lasting paralysis far away:

"It was an overwhelming conviction of some great and definite disaster to him, and my friends in vain tried to argue me out of such an unreasonable terror by pointing out, truly enough, that he could not possibly be within the zone of danger at that time. I could only repeat : 'I know that something terrible has happened to him, wherever he is. It may not be death, but it is some terrible calamity.' I spent the day in tears and in absolute despair, and wrote to tell him of my conviction. Allowing for difference of time between Quetta and Oxford, my mental telegram reached me in the same hour that my brother, whilst on the march, and only thirty miles beyond Quetta, was suddenly struck down in his tent by the paralysis which kept him confined to his chair — a helpless sufferer — for twenty-eight years."

On page 15 Bates begins to describe witnessing many "materialized apparitions" appearing during seances.  Her account takes up about the next twenty pages and also some pages after page 208. Her accounts on this topic will be shocking to the modern ear, but they  match many similar accounts that appeared in the nineteenth century, often written by very respectable witnesses such as Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the theory of evolution. What would be reported occurring very frequently by many different witnesses is a situation where some corner of a room would be cordoned off by something like a curtain, with such a small area called "the cabinet." A medium would typically sit in such a small area. This is just the situation Bates described on page 20. Witnesses would report seeing again and again mysterious figures arising from such a small area of the room, coming from behind such a curtain, and later seeming to disappear after returning to the area behind the curtain.  Skeptics would try to explain such wonders by a hypothesis of trapdoors in the floor, but the witnesses would typically report the small area being inspected without any such thing being found. 

That such very frequent reports of utterly paranormal materializations of human forms have been hidden from the eyes of the modern reader is astounding. I can never recall seeing a depiction of such reports in any TV show or movie, and modern mentions of such reports virtually never occur, even though the reports of such things were abundant in the nineteenth century.  The figures appearing in such materialization seances were often described as being recognized by attendees as having forms matching those of their deceased relatives.  Any attempt to explain such reports by fraud will seem to quickly become untenable, requiring a skeptic to postulate (1) a trap door not seen by the witnesses who typically closely inspected the small "cabinet" area; (2) a band of conspirator helpers assisting the medium by rising up through a trapdoor; (3) the conspirator helpers somehow so closely matching deceased relatives that they would be frequently identified as deceased relatives. Rather than trying to advance so far-fetched a conspiracy theory, skeptics of the paranormal simply deal with the problem of such reports by avoiding all mention of them.  

We do know that a world-class scientist (Sir William Crookes) reported repeatedly observing such materialization phenomena in his own home (as described here); that another world-class scientist (Alfred Russel Wallace) gave abundant testimony of seeing such materialization phenomena (as discussed here), and that under very tight scientific conditions, another investigator (Shrenk-Notzing) did seem to replicate a less dramatic form of such materialization phenomena, and was able to photograph quite a few examples of it. 

Bates says this about her experiences witnessing materialization phenomena:

"No one hitherto has been able to suggest any intelligent explanation of my personal experiences on these occasions. Conjuring tricks and trap doors are, of course, ' trotted out ' by the unintelligent sceptic, but these do not meet the difficulty of an accurate knowledge of names and of family matters of comparatively small importance."

Later Bates discusses evidence she got for clairvoyance, stating the following, apparently about visits to more than six claimed clairvoyants:

"I was told some six or seven times that my mother (who died during my infancy) was my guardian spirit, and six times her name was given to me, with some difficulty in one or two cases, but invariably without the smallest guessing on the part of the clairvoyant or any hint from me." 

Later she says, "Whilst consulting these clairvoyants, in widely different parts of America, two very near relatives of mine were almost invariably described, and the names — one male and one female — were generally given." 

Later Bates describes seeing at about the end of 1887 what seemed to be an apparition of George Elliot, who died in 1880 (she was a female writer who took a male pen name). Bates states this:

"To my infinite amazement there stood between the wall and my bed, a diaphanous figure of a woman, quite life size or rather more, with one arm held out in a protecting fashion towards me, and some drapery about he head. The features were, moreover, quite distinct, and, as I afterwards realised, the counterpart of George Elliot's curious and Savonarola-like countenance.  But at the moment, oddly enough, I only thought of two things — first, how extraordinary that what had appeared to me such a silly waste of time overnight should have had any element of reality about it ! Then swiftly came the second idea : ' And how in the world does it happen that I don't feel a bit frightened ? '

I lay there absolutely content and peaceful, with a feeling of blissful satisfaction which I have never exactly realised either before or since that one occasion. 'Everything is all right — nothing can really ever go wrong — nothing at least that matters at all. All the real things are all right.' I can never doubt the truth  of these things after this experience. It was promised and the promise has been redeemed.  These were the thoughts that passed idly through my brain as I lay — fully awake — and looked up at the comforting woman's figure. For it seemed more — much more — than a mere vision. I have spoken of the figure as diaphanous because it was not as solid as an ordinary human being, but, on the other hand, I could not see the wall through it : it was too solid for that....And as this consciousness held me in its loving grasp, to my infinite sorrow the kind, protecting figure disappeared, gently and very slowly, sinking into the ground on the spot where I had first seen her ; and once more all was dark in the room."

On page 312 of the book Hot Chocolate for the Mystical Soul, we have an account by a man who reports seeing an apparition of his grandfather who died more than twenty years ago. 

The case of the apparition of James L. Chaffin is one of the best documented cases of an apparition appearing long after death. The case was first documented on page 517 in Part 103 of Volume 36 of the Proceeedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1928, in the November 1927 article "CASE OF THE WILL OF MR. JAMES L. CHAFFIN," which can be read here.  The facts and narratives were all entered as testimony in a legal case. 

James L. Chaffin had four sons, and on November 16, 1905 made a will in front of two witnesses, giving his farm to his third son, Marshall, with his widow and other three sons getting nothing. On the 16th of January, 1919 James L. Chaffin made a new will, dividing his property up equally to his four sons, with instructions that his widow be taken care of.  The new will said that it was written "after reading the 27th chapter of Genesis."  James L. Chaffin told no one about the second will, which was placed in an old Bible of his father's. But James did put instructions sewed up in the lining of an overcoat, instructions telling where the second will could be found. James L. Chaffin died on September 7, 1921.  His son Marshall was granted possession of the farm on the basis of the first will, the second will being unknown to the wife or children.

One of the sons of James L. Chaffin (a son named James Pinkney Chaffin) gave this testimony in court about seeing an apparition of his father about four years after the father's death:

"Some time later, I think it was the latter part of June, 1925, he appeared at my bedside again, dressed as I had often seen him dressed in life, wearing a black overcoat which I knew to be his own coat. This time my father's spirit spoke to me, he took hold of his overcoat this way and pulled it back and said, ' You will find my will m my overcoat pocket,' and then disappeared."

James Pinkney Chaffin retrieved the coat from a brother twenty miles away, to whom the coat had been given. Inside the coat (sewed up in its lining) was a piece of paper in the handwriting of James L. Chaffin stating, "Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddie's old Bible."  Accompanied by some witnesses, James Pinkney Chaffin retrieved the old Bible, in which was found (in a spot matching the 27th Chapter of Genesis) the second will of James L. Chaffin. James Pinkney Chaffin filed a court case, giving the testimony above, and demanding that the second will be declared as the valid will. In the middle of the case the opposition to this claim was dropped, and a jury found that the second will (the one found in the Bible, apparently found with the help of an apparition) was the valid will of James L. Chaffin.  The case stands as one of the best-documented cases of an apparition appearing long after someone died. 

Postscript: On page 167 of his book A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life After Death, C. J. Ducasse (a professor of philosophy at Brown University) told this astonishing account:

"The prima facie most impressive evidence there could be of the survival of a deceased friend or relative would be to see and touch his materialized, recognizable bodily form, which then speaks in his or her characteristic manner. This is what appeared to occur in my presence on an occasion three or four years ago when, during some two hours and in very good red light through out, some eighteen fully material forms—some male, some female, some tall and some short, and sometimes two together—came out of and returned to the curtained cabinet I had inspected before hand, in which a medium sat, and to which I had found no avenue of surreptitious access.

These material forms were apparently recognized as those of a deceased father, mother, or other relative by one or another of the fourteen or fifteen persons present; and some touching scenes occurred, in which the form of the deceased spoke with and caressed the living."