The poet Wilfred Owen is widely known for the irony of his death. A soldier in World War I, he died in battle only one week before the end of World War I. Below is the beginning of his antiwar poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth":
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
Another great poem of Wilfred Owen is entitled "Dulce et Decorum Est" and makes use of a Latin slogan ("Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori") claiming that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country. Below is an excerpt:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind....
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
The story of Wilfred Owen's death a week before the end of World War I has been widely told as a tale of sad irony. But there is good reason for thinking the story had a happier ending. At the page here of a book, we are told that Wilfred's father saw Wilfred appear as a shining apparition, a week before getting a telegram announcing Wilfred's death in combat. The same page tells us that a week after Wilfred's death Wilfred's brother Harold saw Wilfred before him.
Whenever I read an account like the one above in a book, and the account gives no source references, I always try to track down the original source material. There is no substitute for examining the earlier source materials describing incidents of the paranormal, and the failure of skeptics to do such a thing is an appalling failure of good scholarship. In this case I was able to find the original source account written by Harold Owen, Wilfred's brother. The account is found on page 198 of his book "Journey from obscurity : Wilfred Owen 1893-1918; memoirs of the Owen family." We read this account by Harold, of what happened while he was on some boat or ship off of Africa, far away from the European battlefield where Wilfred died:
"I had gone down to my cabin thinking to write some letters. I drew aside the door curtain and stepped inside and to my amazement I saw Wilfred sitting in my chair. I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from my face. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin -- all my limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: 'Wilfred, how did you get here?' He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt no fear -- I had not when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin. I spoke again. 'Wilfred, dear, how can you be here, it's just not possible.' But still he did not speak but only smiled his most gentle smile...He was in uniform and I remember thinking how out of place the khaki looked amongst the cabin furnishings. With this thought I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty...I felt the blood run slowly back to my face and looseness into my limbs and with these an overpowering sense of emptiness and absolute loss...The certainty of my conviction of Wilfred's death amounted I realized to absolute knowledge; I could not any longer question it. That I had not heard that he had been killed -- that weeks had now passed since the fighting had stopped -- made no difference to me at all; all that could be explained."
It was not until around Christmas of 1918 that Harold received written notification of Wilfred's death. The notification added to the irony of Wilfred's death a week before the war's end. On the very day (November 11, 1918) that the church bells were pealing because of the war's end on that day, his family had got written notification of Wilfred's death.
Wilfred Owen
We seem to have here a case that falls into both of two different categories of apparition sightings that are particularly powerful as evidence. The first category is that of apparitions seen by multiple witnesses. I give many examples of such cases in my posts below:
The case of the Wilfred Owen apparition also falls into another major category of apparition sightings: examples of what are called "crisis apparitions." Typically in such cases someone will report seeing an apparition of someone he did not know had died. The person will typically then later learn that the person did die, at about the time the apparition was seen. I describe hundreds of such cases in my series of posts below:
25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death
Some more examples of such cases are below. In the December 12,1870 edition of Harper's Weekly, we have an account by Florence Marryat involving apparition sightings. Florence describes being summoned on the 27th of July by a friend named Adelaide, who had a husband George who was far away doing military work. Upon meeting with her, Adelaide said, "George has been here; he has been sitting in that chair all night." Despite being told by Florence that her account is nonsense, Adelaide sticks to her story, saying George was wearing his uniform. She said, "I am sure something has happened to him -- that he is dead." We read this:
"We were to sleep together; but we got little rest. As soon as the lights were extinguished and I had composed myself, I was roused by her assertion that her husband had returned, and was sitting in the same chair as he done on the night before. I sat up in the bed, but I could see nothing; the whole room was dark, excepting where the moon-beams struggled through the window-blind."
The same thing happened on the next night. Later we read that the husband had taken ill on the 25th of July, and had died on the 27th of July, the same night his apparition was seen.
According to the source here, a similar case occurred in 1840:
"On January 3, 1840 Mrs. Baring-Gould sat at her dining room table reading the Bible by the light of a candle. Looking up, she reported afterward, she saw her brother Henry, sitting
at the other side of the table. The scene appeared entirely
natural -- except for the fact that Henry was at that time
serving aboard a Royal Navy ship in the South Atlantic....The woman stared steadily at her brother for several moments, until the form grew dim and faded away before her eyes. Realizing what this might mean, Mrs. Baring-Gould stated the words 'Saw Henry' and the date in the flyleaf of her Bible. A month later, word came her brother had died at sea -- his death had occurred at the very moment his sister saw his figure sitting across from her."
"In October, 1857, I visited the United States. When, at my father's residence, Camden, New Jersey, the melancholy death of my brother became the subject of conversation, my mother narrated to me that at the very time of the accident, the apparition of my brother Joseph was presented to her. This fact was corroborated by my father and four sisters. Camden, New Jersey, is distant from the scene of the accident, in a direct line, over 1,000 miles, and nearly double that distance by the mail route. My mother mentioned the fact of the apparition on the morning of the 4th of January to my father and sisters ; nor was it until the 16th, or 13 days after, that a letter was received confirming in every particular the extraordinary visitation."
In 1861 Anne E. Collyer wrote this letter to a son, a later dated March 27th, 1861, and dealing with the death of Joseph:
"My beloved Son, — On the 3rd of January, 1856, I did not feel well, and retired to bed early. Some time after, I felt uneasy and sat up in bed ; I looked round the room, and to my utter amazement, saw Joseph standing at the door, looking at me with great earnestness, his head bandaged up, a dirty night-cap on, and a dirty white garment on, something like a surplice. He was much disfigured about the eyes and face. It made me quite uncomfortable the rest of the night. The next morning, Mary came into my room early. I told her that I was sure I was going to have bad news from Joseph. I told all the family at the breakfast table ; they replied, ' It was only a dream, and all nonsense,' but that did not change my opinion. It preyed on my mind, and on the 16th of January I received the news of his death ; and singular to say, both William and his wife, who were there, say that he was exactly attired as I saw him. "
Referring to the apparition of Joseph reported by his mother as a "mental impression," Dr. Collyer adds this about Joseph's death: "My father, who was a scientific man, calculated the difference of longitude between Camden, New Jersey, and New Orleans, and found that the mental impression was at the exact time of my brother's death."
On page 3 of the document here, we have a report by Mary Dana Shindler quoting an account she received in a personal letter:
"On the 14th of May, 1861, two hours before day, the dear boy called to me, 'Oh ma my dear mamma! it is a glorious thing to be a Christian !' This awoke me, and I then saw him as plainly as 1 see this pen; his head was bleeding violently, and he seemed to lie lying on green grass. My friend, this was not imagination, for I could get no letters from home during the war, and did not suppose that one so young—only eighteen-would be in thee army. The excitement made me ill, and the day and hour of the occurrence were carefully set down. In October, five months after, we were allowed to receive an open letter of one page, containing only family news; and mine told me that on the morning of the 14th of May, my dear boy, being on picket duty in Virginia, was shot in the head and instantly killed. I have felt ever since that his spirit was allowed to come to tell me of his death."
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