When Apparitions Seemed to Act With Persistence (Part 1)

In most accounts of apparition sightings, the apparition seems to be a one-shot affair. In a typical report a single person will report seeing an apparition that never reappears. But then there are reports of someone seeing an apparition again and again and again. 

One such report appears in the old newspaper story shown below. To read the text more clearly, click on the image or use the link below.

You can read the full story using this link:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85058179/1907-03-23/ed-1/seq-3/

We have in the story above an account of a named witness who reported seeing an apparition of his father-in-law many different times.  The witness was so spooked by these events that he apparently abandoned a "palatial palace" home he had lived in. 

In the account below a named professor claims to have seen several apparitions, and claims to have seen an apparition of a Colonel Brice that a friend of the professors saw three different times:

You can read the full account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1957-11-10/ed-1/seq-48/

At the link below we read of a librarian who reported seeing an apparition multiple times, with the apparition seeming to appear at a very section of the library with books about the supernatural:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1860-03-16/ed-1/seq-1/

The account below tells of an apparition consisting of a woman and her baby, one that was seen at three different times (click on the image to read the account more clearly):

The account can be read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85058130/1897-11-08/ed-1/seq-5/

Below is a headline from an old newspaper story:

The full account can be read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015080/1905-08-16/ed-1/seq-7/

In the account we read that a party of three went out to investigate the apparition, and reportedly observed it:

The account below seems to tell of an apparition with the spooky habit of acting like of a herald of death or an omen of doom:

You can read the full account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84022472/1917-03-16/ed-1/seq-7/

Although very interesting (with its "herald of death" theme), the account above is not first-class observational evidence. We do not get the names of witnesses who reported seeing apparitions soon after such apparitions were seen. But the account below is first-class observational evidence. We have an account in which a trustworthy-seeming named witness reports twice seeing an unexpected apparition, in a totally unexpected sighting of a type we should not expect for any kind of hallucination to have produced. The account is one of the minority of apparition sighting reports that report an apparition of the living.  Under the assumption that souls may leave the body before death (as often reported in near-death experiences), we might expect some apparition sightings of this type. 

Below is the full 1905 account (click on the image to read it better):

You can also read the account using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88065721/1905-01-26/ed-1/seq-1/

It is rather hard to imagine a less likely time for anyone to see an apparition through hallucination than the situation reported. We read that Mrs. Stewart saw the apparition at the very time that she was called to stand before parishioners to lead prayer. The apparition was of a man sentenced to die. The same apparition appeared at a second later time, also when Mrs. Stewart was leading parishioners in prayer.  Mrs. Stewart then visited a prison, finding that a man about to be executed looked exactly like the apparition seen. The account is first-hand testimony of what occurred very shortly before the testimony was given. 

The account below reports an apparition which one person claimed to have seen more than twenty times (click on the image to see it more clearly):

You can read the story on its original page using this link. 

In the account here, a writer says this: "My mother's ghost, clothed in the garb she wore in life, appeared to me twelve times, all told."  He speculates that such apparitions are merely creations of our minds, apparently the type not prone to believe the testimony of his own senses on such topics. 

There have occurred repeated reports of the apparition of Abraham Lincoln appearing in the White House in Washington, D.C.  In the article below from the Washington Times, the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of US president Franklin Roosevelt) mentions such an apparition appearance:

You can read the report on it original page using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1934-04-02/ed-1/seq-1/

According to the page here, US President Harry Truman wrote in his diary on May 27, 1945 that "the maids and butlers swear that he [Lincoln] has appeared on several occasions," and that the same claim was made by "Mrs. Coolidge," the wife of someone who was US president about 20 years earlier. 

In the bottom right corner of the same page, we get some more specifics from Eleanor Roosevelt. She says that in 1934 White House staff member Mary Eban went up to the second floor, and quickly became "wrought up," claiming that she saw Abraham Lincoln (who died in 1865) sitting on a bed and putting on his boots. 

As the newspaper story continues, we are told the poet Carl Sandburg looked out a particular window of the White House, and got a strange feeling. The story tells us that "several employees have reported seeing Lincoln's gaunt apparition standing at that very Oval Room window." The same page tells us that a janitor named Jerry Smith claimed that Lincoln haunted the White House. The next page tells us that there were "daily sightings" of the ghost of Abigail Adams, the wife of US president John Adams.  The next page has a quote by a long-time White House employee who claims that a very prestigious visitor to the White House reported seeing the ghost of Lincoln. 

Sometimes Dreams, Visions or Premonitions Seem to Foretell a Death

 In the series of posts below, I discussed dreams, visions or mysterious voices that seemed to foretell a death or disaster:

When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death

More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams, Visions or Voices That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Even More Dreams and Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Some More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster

When the Future Whispers to the Present

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Correctly Predict a Death

Let us look at some more examples of this type.

The account below seems like a long and complicated one, and the print of the preserved newspaper is hard to read. So I'll give only the headline:

If you can stand to read dim fine print, you can read the full story below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88063294/1942-03-08/ed-1/seq-81/

The article below tells of a dream that seemed to foretell a death:

You can read the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87076843/1909-12-03/ed-1/seq-6/

I would like to be able to give the full article below describing a dream foretelling a death. But when I go to page 23 to get the rest of the article, I don't see the rest of it. 

You can read the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn90059523/1904-08-28/ed-1/seq-11/

Below we read the story of the first American soldier to die in battle in France during World War I.  We hear vaguely of his mother being visited by "something strange," apparently near the time the soldier died, with the mother's heart kind of sinking at the time. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87093407/1917-11-12/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is a tragic account of a premonition soon fulfilled:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88077573/1910-09-15/ed-1/seq-2/#

Here is another account of a dream that seemed to foretell a death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045830/1906-09-23/ed-1/seq-9/

Typically in this series when I discuss a dream, vision or premonition, such a thing occurs to a living person. But in the case below the report is of the premonition occurring by a deceased person warning a living person:

You can read the full account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93053726/1907-12-21/ed-1/seq-6/

Below is an account of a man warned by a blind woman (a reputed psychic) that he would die an unexpected death in six weeks. Just that happened.

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn91070630/1902-01-11/ed-1/seq-1/

Here is another account of a dream that seemed to foretell a death. We read of a wife who had a dream on Thursday of "her husband's mangled body lying on a railroad track, exactly as it was found" the next Tuesday. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014248/1906-02-01/ed-1/seq-1/

Floundering Physicists and Getting-Nowhere Cosmologists Plead "Jump on Our Bandwagon!"

A while back we had an interview with physicist Leonard Susskind, appearing in the CERN Courier, a publication of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a large international group in charge of some of the world's biggest particle accelerators. Susskind spouted the same old multiverse baloney he's been pushing for decades. Susskind calls his version of the multiverse "the landscape," a term he introduced in a book with a title that made it very clear his multiverse was all about trying to escape evidence the universe was well-designed.  Susskind makes this groundless claim: "I would say the best explanation for the patterns we see in cosmology and particle physics is a very diverse landscape of possibilities and an extremely large universe – a multiverse." His "multiverse" is actually a groundless speculation about some near-infinity of different universes, each with different physics. 

Among many other cases of cosmic fine-tuning, physicists had discovered what looked like very precise fine-tuning regarding the Higgs Boson or Higgs mass, which I discuss in my post here. Physicists tried to evade this fine-tuning with a wildly speculative theory called supersymmetry, which was the "foundation of sand" for an even more wildly speculative family of theories called string theory. All of the predictions of supersymmetry failed, and the particles it predicted were never found. To try to sweep under the rug this failure, the string theorist Susskind gives us this bit of hair-splitting:

" I call that string theory with a capital 'S', and I can tell you with 100% confidence that we don’t live in that world. And then there’s string theory with a small 's' – you might call it string-inspired theory....The string landscape is one such guess. It’s not based on absolutely precise capital-S string theory, but on some conjectures about what this expanded small-s string theory might be."

You get the idea? Susskind was trying to preserve his string theory landscape multiverse fantasy by telling us that it is only string theory with a capital "S" that has been ruled out, not string theory with a small "s." This hair-splitting is like when a wife finds her husband naked in bed with his naked mistress, and the husband says, "Don't worry, darling: this merely shows that I have been unfaithful with a small 'u,' not unfaithful with a capital 'U.' " 

In a more recent interview, Susskind resorts to the dubious business of consensus-claiming, a form of bandwagon-boasting.  Nowadays, the term "consensus" is being used massively by scientists and science journalists, often in a very misleading way. 

The first thing that should be discussed is: what is meant by the term "consensus"? To get a proper sense of the denotation and connotation of that word, we should look at how "consensus" is defined by various dictionaries. Below is how "consensus" is defined by various dictionaries and authorities:

• A Google search for "consensus definition" gives "a general agreement" as the first result.
• The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us two definitions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first definition is "general agreement; unanimity." The second definition is "the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned." The first definition specifies 100%, and the second definition merely means 51% or more. 
• Dictionary.com also gives us two defintions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first is "majority of opinion." The second is "general agreement or concord; harmony." The second definition implies near-unanimity; the first does not. 
• The Collins dictionary defines "consensus" as "general agreement among a group of people."
• The Britannica dictionary defines "consensus" as "a general agreement about something : an idea or opinion that is shared by all the people in a group."
• Vocabulary.com defines "consensus" as "agreement in the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole," and at the very beginning of the page with this definition, we are told that  "when there's a consensus, everyone agrees on something."
• The Cambridge Dictionary defines "consensus" in two ways: (1) "a generally accepted opinion among a group of people"; (2) "agreement among a group of people."
• The Macmillan dictionary defines "consensus" as "agreement among all the people involved."

From the definitions above, you can make the following conclusions:

(1) "Consensus" is a word that is often defined as if it meant a unanimous opinion on some topic, but also often defined as if it meant a mere majority opinion on some topic.

(2) Because it is often defined as if it meant a unanimous opinion on some topic, "consensus" is undeniably a word with at least a strong connotation of meaning a unanimous opinion on some topic, with everyone agreeing about it.  The connotation of a word is the kind of impression or feeling that the word creates, regardless of how the word is literally defined. 

Because it is defined in ways that conflict with each other, "consensus" is a slippery and ambiguous word to be using. You might call it a very treacherous term, a term very prone to mislead or confuse. Since it has two very different definitions, using the word "consensus" is as potentially misleading as using the word "gay" soon after people first started to use that term to mean "homosexual," at a time when it was hard to tell whether "gay" meant "homosexual" or simply "merry."  

One of many deceptive speech habits occurring in science literature is that misleading claims are being made of a "scientific consensus" about opinions which do not at all involve any unanimity of opinion among scientists. Because of how often "consensus" is defined to mean "unanimity of opinion," such claims are designed to create an impression that scientists agree about something. But typically there is no evidence that anything close to 100% of scientists agree on such an opinion, and in very many cases there is not even good evidence that a strong majority of scientists believe in the opinion. 

Because of the almost total non-existence of secret ballot polls of scientists, there are almost no claims about scientist opinions that are well supported by evidence. We know that certain opinions are what we may call reputed majority opinions of certain types of scientists. For example, it is repeatedly alleged that most cosmologists believe in dark matter and that most biologists believe in the doctrine of common descent, that all species are descended from a common ancestor. But what percentage of cosmologists believe in dark matter, and what percent of biologists believe in the doctrine of common descent? 

You cannot tell such a thing by asking for a show of hands at a meeting of cosmologists or a show of hands at a meeting of biologists. When there is a reputed majority of opinion about something in some scientific field, a scientist in that field may think that he will get in trouble by publicly stating an opinion contrary to the majority in his field.  So such a scientist may fail to honestly state his opinion whenever he can be publicly identified as someone holding a contrarian opinion. 

You can try to figure out what scientists think about a hypothesis by going through their public statements, but that would be a not-very-reliable approach.  Publicly scientists will often make statements that do not show a definite belief about something.  For example, having read innumerable scientific papers on memory, I know that an extremely common type of statement in such papers is for a neuroscientist to say something like this: "It is commonly maintained that memories are stored in synapses." But what does that tell us about what the author of the paper believes? You cannot tell. 

The only way to get a reliable measure of the opinion of a scientist is to do a secret ballot poll, one that includes a variety of belief options including "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." However, such polls are virtually never done. When opinion polls of scientists are done, they typically fail to be secret ballots, and also fail to offer a full spectrum of answers including options such as  "I don't know" or "I'm not sure."  

In his recent interview  fantasy-physics salesman Leonard Susskind gives us this little bit of "go with the herd" talk using the word "consensus":

" Think about the consensus of the largest fraction of physicists working on these things, and you’ll probably be right. The overall consensus of the field tends to be right. Peculiar individuals, no matter how famous they are, no matter how brilliant they are, if they’re off that consensus, and they’ve been off that consensus for a long time, they’re probably wrong. That doesn’t mean for sure that they’re wrong. Don’t look for the weirdos. Look for what the consensus of the majority of well-respected, highly accomplished physicists believe. And you’ll probably be right. "

This is bad advice, because in the fifty years there have been claims of a physicist or cosmologist c0nsensus on ideas that have failed very badly. Specifically:

• Physicists got all excited about a wildly speculative theory called supersymmetry, which has failed all observational tests.
• Not waiting for supersymmetry to be confirmed, physicists built upon it an even more speculative mountain of speculations called string theory, which has never been supported by any evidence. 
• Physicists kept telling us most of the universe's mass energy is dark energy, but no one has ever directly observed dark energy, and no has ever been able to connect it to the Standard Model of physics. 
• Physicists kept telling most of the universe's matter is dark matter, but no one has ever directly observed dark matter, and no has ever been able to connect it to the Standard Model of physics. 
• Physicists and cosmologists got super-excited about something called primordial cosmic inflation theory,  a theory that has not been confirmed by any evidence. 

So Susskind is way wrong in trying to suggest that it is a sound principle that you should follow what is claimed as a  consensus or majority opinion of theoretical physicists.  He fails to have any sociological insight about how often stupid herd effects and baseless bandwagons arise in the little belief communities that are the small tribes of theoretical physicists and cosmologists. 

What often goes on in the world of science is that misleading claims are made about a consensus when there is no actual agreement among some group of experts.  We saw a recent example in an article by cosmologist Ethan Siegel, who has spent decades being a tireless pitchman for the empirically groundless theory of primordial cosmic inflation, invented to try and explain away very precise fine-tuning in the earliest part of the Big Bang. Siegel claimed that "almost everyone" believed in such a theory.  95% of scientists have no opinion on such a theory. And even among the tiny little tribe called cosmologists, it is not true that almost all of them believe in such a theory. 

To prove that, you have to do the very hard work of looking for an opinion poll of cosmologists. Scientists are extremely bad about running polls about their own opinions, and it is all but impossible to find a poll of cosmologists. But I found such a poll at the end of a 2016 paper, the one here. 

In Question 11 of the poll, on page 77, cosmologists were asked to complete a sentence beginning with "Our understanding of inflation  will..."  The results were these:

• Only 44% predicted success for the main effort of cosmologists to get evidence for the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, predicting that there would be  "primordial B-mode detection" occurring.
• 7%  predicted that inflation would be "ruled out."
• 5% predicted there would be a detection of "non-zero spatial curvature," something that would rule out the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. 

Clearly at this time there was no unanimity-type consensus in favor of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, with a significant fraction of cosmologists rejecting it.  In the eight years since the poll, there have been big expensive projects trying to get "primordial B-mode detection," but all have failed. If the poll were to be taken today, it would probably show an even larger fraction of cosmologists rejecting the theory of primordial cosmic inflation.  

Moreover, the poll discussed above was not a secret ballot poll. The poll makes no claim to have followed a secret ballot  methodology. Whenever scientists are given an opportunity to confess to some belief regarded as heresy, you will always get a much higher rate of people confessing to such a heresy if you do a secret ballot poll. 

So Siegel's claim that "almost everyone" supports the theory of primordial cosmic inflation was false.  The same writer sometimes claims that almost all cosmologists believe in dark matter. But on page 78 of the 2016 paper, 10% of the polled cosmologists predicted that the theory of dark matter would be "overturned."  And in Question 14 of the poll (page 77),  18% of cosmologists predicted that the future would show that dark matter "is modified gravity," a statement equivalent to the belief that dark matter does not really exist.  And since this 2016 paper, all searches for dark matter have failed. If you were to do a secret ballot poll of cosmologists today, you may easily find 25% or more rejecting the doctrine of dark matter. 

Most claims by scientists about a consensus in some scientist group should be rejected unless they are supported by a well-designed secret ballot poll or are claims about some topic utterly uncontroversial.   Since scientists are almost never polled about whether they believe in controversial scientific theories (in well-designed secret ballot polls), almost all claims made about the popularity of such theories are unreliable. 

The very idea of using an alleged popularity of some theory as an argument for the theory is a misguided idea. Theories should be defended by facts and arguments, not dubious claims about their popularity. There are all kinds of sociological and economic and psychological and "gone viral"  reasons why some theory may become popular in some group of scientists, despite a lack of a sound rationale for the theory.  In the case of Susskind's multiverse,  it is pretty clear what was  the main reason why he conceived the idea. It was mostly analgesic, a very clumsy attempt at irritation relief. 

The idea of a multiverse does absolutely nothing to diminish the evidence value of cosmic fine-tuning, for the elementary reason that you do not increase the chance of success of any one trial by increasing the number of random trials.  The odds of you throwing a deck of cards into the air and getting a triangular house of cards out of the thrown deck is basically zero. You do not increase by even .000000000001 percent the chance of you ever getting that result by imagining an infinity of card deck throwers.  Ditto for universes. Imagining some infinity of them does nothing to increase the chance of getting a habitable universe on any one try. 

For a discussion of the reasons why imagining a multiverse does nothing to explain cosmic fine-tuning in our universe, see my posts here and here. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin confessed the willingness of materialists to believe in absurd explanations, a willingness stemming from their zeal to exclude purposeful divine agency. He stated this:

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

The quote above by Lewontin is found on page 27 of the paper "Balloons on a String: A Critique of Multiverse Cosmology" by Bruce L. Gordon, an excellent expose of multiverse nonsense, which can be read here. On page 28 he states this:

"So with all due respect to Leonard Susskind and his coterie of devout string landscape naturalists, there is no landscape of mathematical possibilities that gives rise to a megaverse of actualities and provides a mindless solution to the problem of cosmological fine-tuning, for even an infinite arena of mathematical possibilities lacks the power to generate one solitary universe. The mindless multiverse 'solution' to the problem of fine-tuning is, quite literally, a metaphysical non-starter."

That would actually be a futile maneuver

Postscript: A recent news article states this:

"The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming the popular hypothesis that invisible dark matter helped the earliest stars and galaxies clump together. Instead, the oldest galaxies are large and bright, in agreement with an alternate theory of gravity, according to new research from Case Western Reserve University published November 12 in The Astrophysical Journal."

Did Their Trances Give Them Trips to Heaven?

Very many people are familiar with the typical account of a near-death experience. A person may have some close brush with death.  The person may report that he floated out of his body, or passed through some mysterious tunnel, or encountered a Being of Light. The person may report visiting some mystical or transcendent realm in which he saw a deceased relative or some religious figure. 

There are some old newspaper accounts suggesting that something similar may happen not during a close brush with death, but in a trance.  For example, there is the account below from 1897:

The account is from the old newspaper page below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86086632/1897-06-05/ed-1/seq-3/

There is also the account below from 1903 (click on the image to read it more clearly):

You can read the account on the newspaper page here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042224/1903-11-27/ed-1/seq-9/

An account of the same person is told below. We get more details about how she reported learning things on her trance trips that she had not previously learned while awake, details that were later confirmed:

You can read the full newspaper account below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86069313/1903-12-04/ed-1/seq-6/

Below is another newspaper account of someone claiming to have visited heaven while in a trance:

The link below shows the original page on which this account was published:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/1912-08-06/ed-1/seq-1/

The image below gives part of a 1907 news story describing a teenager's accounts of visiting heaven during trances:

You can read the full story using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82016014/1907-03-28/ed-1/seq-8/

An 1868 newspaper account of a trip to heaven in a trance is below. We should keep in mind that we have no direct quotes from the young teenager, so when the author uses phrases such as "heaven," "hell" and "the Savior" we don't know whether such phrases were used by the woman herself. 

"The people living in the vicinity of Whiteland, Johnson county, have recently been very much excited over a matter which, to say the

least, is very strange. Several weeks since, Miss Van Arsdale, a young woman about seventeen years old, living at the house of a family near Whiteland, in the capacity of servant, was taken sick with something like hysterics. She had been confined to her bed a little over a week, when, to all appearances, she died. The body, however, did not entirely lose its warmth, and a very slight pulse remained. The people with whom she was living supposed that she was dead, and were making preparations to bury her, when the physician interfered, forbidding any such step. After remaining in this state twelve hours, consciousness returned, and the girl pronounced herself much better.

She then went on to describe her sensations and experiences during the trance, averring that she had visited heaven and hell, and had
conversed with the Savior, and many persons whom she had known on earth. She spoke of seeing persons in both places who had recently died; in heaven a young man named Quinn, who, although at one time a professor of religion, had, in the last year or two of his his, led a bad life; in hell the two men, Hatchell and Patterson, who were lynched at Franklin on the night of Oct. 31st, for the murder of
Lyons at Greenwood. Miss Van Arsdale sent for a number of persons in the neighborhood, and not only imparted to them news of lost
friends, but told of sins committed by them, supposed to be unknown by any one. 

Among others, was a man who had participated in the execution of the men named above. She told him that he had been there that night (which he acknowledged), and had in the sight of God committed murder. Previous to this, the names of the band had been kept a profound secret, and this man had not even been suspected. She narrated a good many tragic things, relating mainly to individuals both in this world and the other, many of which would have been almost impossible for her to have invented.

But the strangest part of the story is yet to come. A few hours after the expiration of the first trance, she predicted that she would have
another, and told to a minute the time at which it would commence and at which it would end. Everything turned out as she had
said; at the exact time she fell into the same state. In an ordinary trance, or cataleptic state, respiration is not suspended, but in this
case breathing could not be observed. She was, to all appearances, dead; but the pulse beat faintly, and the body was not cold. All
sensation was gone. The physician made numerous experiments, pricking the body, opening veins, and so forth, to discover if there
could be any deception. In the end he was perfectly convinced that there was none. At the expiration of the time set by herself, she
came to, and in a few hours was well enough to leave her bed and go about the house. The story of her experience, in the second trance,
was similar to the first one, and was confined almost wholly to individuals. She seemed unable to describe the places she had been in, but gave histories of events and persons with remarkable minuteness. She also said that she would never have a recurrence of the trance unless she should commit some flagrant sin;
her authority for this prediction was that the Lord himself had told her so. 

This is certainly a strange thing. The girl is uneducated, and has lived about as a servant ever since she was able to work. She has always borne a good character for truthfulness, and is a member of a church. She is almost the last person in the world to have manufactured such stories, and one thing especially noticeable is the fact of her sending for persons to whom, before her illness, she would have been afraid to have spoken, and conversing with them without the least restraint, and telling them stories and facts not the most palatable to worldly people. She was visited by a great many people, some of them eminently respectable, who vouch for many of the statements of her illness. The physician in attendance is positive as to her condition during the whole time ; and had it not been for him, she would have been buried alive."

The full account can be read using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85026214/1868-01-05/ed-1/seq-3/

The report below is from 1906:

The account can be read on the newspaper page below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84037890/1906-02-28/ed-1/seq-4/

Elections Would Work Much Better If Things Worked Like This

We are near the end of another cycle in the very diseased system known as the American political system. Most of the winners in tomorrow's election will be those with the most money, the most insider cronies, and the most corporate connections. One can have little hope that this sick system will get better anytime soon. But perhaps one can have a little fun imagining this: how might elections work in some future republic (here or in another continent) with a much fairer political system? Below are some characteristics that such elections might have.

Characteristic 1: seats in Congress would be exactly proportional to population, so that any two areas of the republic with the same population would have the same degree of representation in the government.

The United States government does not have this characteristic. There are two houses of Congress, and in one of those houses (the Senate), each of the 50 U.S states elects two senators. But the tiny states of Rhode Island and Delaware each get to elect the same number of senators (two) as the huge states of California and Texas. And Wyoming (with a population of only about 584,000) has the same number of US senators (two) as each of the states of New York, Florida, California and Texas, which each has tens of millions of residents (using a rounded-up figure for New York).  

What this means is that under the US constitution, residents of California, New York, Florida and Texas are basically second-class citizens with a much lower degree of representation, and the residents of the low-population states Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska are specially privileged citizens with a higher degree of representation. Under the current US voting system, residents of the District of Columbia (the city of Washington D.C.) are effectively third-class citizens, because they do not get to vote for any US senator. Given the high black population in Washington D.C., this amounts to structural racism in the US voting system. 

Geographical Unit	Population (2023)	US Senators	Effective Status of Citizens, Given Their Influence on US Senate
California	38,965,193	2	3rd-class or 2nd-class citizens
Texas	30,503,301	2	3rd-class or 2nd-class citizens
Florida	22,610,073	2	2nd-class citizens
New York	19,571,216	2	2nd-class citizens
Wyoming	584,057	2	1st-class citizens
Vermont	647,464	2	1st-class citizens
Alaska	733,406	2	1st-class citizens
Washington, D.C.	678,972	0	3rd-class citizens

So let us imagine that in our future republic, there is only one house of Congress, and that congressional election districts are divided in such a way so that each has roughly the same population. This means that geographically speaking, each citizen of the republic gets equal representation in Congress.

Characteristic 2: Congressional representatives would serve a single term of 4 years, with 50% of their terms expiring every two years.

The designers of the US constitution imagined that if congressional representatives in the House of Representatives did not look out for the average man, they would soon be tossed out by the voters. The founding fathers failed to anticipate our current political landscape, in which it typically happens that representatives who do not well serve the common man continue to be re-elected year after year, because they have spent much of their time in office courting crony connections and raising money from the rich and corporations.

The best way for a future republic to avoid this problem would be to limit every congressional representative to a single term. The whole concept of re-election would be abolished. Congressional representatives would focus on passing good laws, rather than spending half of their time doing things related to their re-election, such as seeking political donations from fat cats.

It might be argued that you need congressional representatives who have been around a long time, to help handle all the intricacies of legislation. But the fine details of government could be delegated to bureaucracies to keep things simple enough so that people recruited from other occupations could serve as congressional representatives. There is no reason why a Congress needs to be passing bills with thousands of pages, when most of these details can be decided by appointed bureaucrats. With a system under which half of Congress was replaced every two years, there would always be “old timers” around with two years experience, who could “show the ropes” to new representatives.

Characteristic 3: A system would exist making sure that Congress consisted of persons from each major occupation, with the makeup of Congress mirroring the number of people in those occupations. Such a system would issue people invitations to make a fully funded run for office for a single term, with the invitations being randomly generated by lottery from particular occupational classes.

The United States Congress has way too many lawyers and professional politicians. When almost all of its members are used to earning large incomes each year, one can hardly expect Congress to look after average people very well. One way to remedy that would be to have a system that guarantees that Congress consists of people drawn from the general public, with each major occupational class getting equal representation.

This could be accomplished by a system in which a lottery is used to issue invitations to make a fully funded run for Congress. The invitations would be issued in such a way so that major occupational classes got an equal number of invitations. For example, if 10% of the people in the republic were information workers, then 10% of the invitations issued would go to information workers; and if 5% of the people in the republic were farmers, then 5% of the invitations would go to farmers. The invitation system and funding would be paid for by taxes.

Under this invitation system, you might, for example, be working as a restaurant chef, and you might one day be surprised to get an official government invitation inviting you to make a fully funded run for Congress. You would be told that your name had been randomly selected from a list of those in your occupation. You would know that there would be only a few other competitors for the congressional seat you could run for, because only a few other people would get such an invitation to run for that particular congressional seat.

The invitations issued would be adjusted so that the population of Congress always mirrored the occupational background of the general republic. So, for example, if 5% of the population were farmers, and farmers tended to lose elections or decline an invitation to make a fully funded run for Congress, then there would be a temporary increase in the number of invitations to farmers to make a fully funded run for Congress (so in one year the number of invitations might exceed their percentage in the population). Eventually things would balance out, and Congress would well reflect the occupational percentages of the general public.

The best result of this system would be that Congress would be made up almost entirely of the common people, and would be far more likely to pass laws favoring the common people. This would be a great improvement over our current system of government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

Some will say: come on, you couldn't have a system in which crucial decisions on people's futures are made by randomly selected citizens from all walks of life. But we already have one such system which works well: the jury system.

Characteristic 4: Instead of the current system where there is rarely more than 2 viable candidates for an office, there would be 5 fully-funded randomly selected candidates for each congressional seat.

How many times have you anticipated voting, and thought to yourself: none of the above. This problem could be partially eliminated by a system like the one described previously, a system that would guarantee that there would be five fully funded candidates for each Congressional seat.

Assuming that half of the people are conservative, and half are liberal, a random lottery invitation system would have only about 1 chance in 32 of producing a slate of all liberals or all conservatives in a particular voting district. This would probably be better than under the current system, where your odds of having no real choice in a particular congressional district is probably greater than 1 in 32 (since so many Democrats are barely distinguishable from Republicans, and many seats are uncontested).

Characteristic 5: Only those who had received the randomly generated invitations could run for Congress.

Under such a rule, it would not be possible for a rich ambitious person to appear on the ballot for Congress because he had used his own funds to gather a sufficient number of signatures supporting his candidacy. There would be no way for the rich to buy their way into Congress.

Characteristic 6: There would be an “instant runoff” system of voting wherein you list a first, second, and third choice.

Our current system of voting creates many strange paradoxes, and the evil of “strategic voting,” in which you often end up voting for someone other than the person you prefer most. In a race with three contestants, when going to vote, you may favor candidate X; but you may worry that if you vote for candidate X you will help throw the election to candidate Y (who is in a tight battle with candidate Z, who you like a little more than Candidate Y). So you end up voting for candidate Z, who is not really the person you want to win. Such strange effects can be eliminated by an “instant runoff” system in which you specify a first choice, a second choice, and a third choice. In this case you would specify candidate X as your first choice, and candidate Z as your second choice. You would not worry that your vote would have the effect of being a vote for candidate Y, because under the instant runoff system if candidate X loses, you have not enhanced the chances of candidate Y winning.

An "instant runoff" ballot for voting

Characteristic 7: A president of the republic would be directly elected, without anything like the electoral college.

The “instant runoff” system would be used to elect a president of the republic, with the winner being whoever got the most total points. By avoiding any electoral college system, there would be no possibility of any candidate losing the election to another candidate who got more popular support, due to some electoral fluke such as occurred in 2000 when Gore lost to Bush even though Gore got more votes nationwide.

The same thing happened in the year 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes, but lost to Donald Trump, who got fewer votes. 

Characteristic 8: Anyone would be able to vote without any prior registration.

It is absurd that under our current system people are barred from voting because they didn't remember to register weeks earlier. Such a system effectively rules out significant fractions of the populations from voting. There will always be maybe 10% of the population that will be procrastinators who will tend to put off doing things until "the last minute," and such people should not be disqualified from voting. 

It is easy to imagine advanced technology that could make this possible. There could, for example, be a retina scanner or fingerprint scanner that would upload to a national database. If anyone tried to vote twice on the same day, a computerized system would immediately prevent the second attempt to vote. Simple systems are used in other countries to prevent anyone from voting twice, such as applying a thumb dye on each voter's thumb, one that wears off after a few days.  

Characteristic 9: The voting age would be lowered to age 16.

We currently put our lives (and the lives of our children) in the hands of teenagers of age 16, by allowing them to get driver's licenses. But we do not allow the same people to merely vote. Anyone old enough to drive is old enough to vote.

Characteristic 10: Political contributions by corporations would be forbidden, and contributions by individuals would be limited to a small amount.

To prevent corporations from having influence over elections to favor their selfish ends, in our fairer future republic it would be illegal for a corporation to make contributions to anyone's election campaign. There would also be a limit on how much any individual could contribute during a particular election, a limit such as 500 dollars. This would prevent rich people from heavily influencing elections for the sake of their own selfish ends.

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Some of the characteristics described above could be achieved by simple amendments to the US constitution. Changing things so that there is only one house in Congress rather than two would  require a major rewrite of the US constitution. An alternative to such a large change would be a simple constitutional amendment having changes such as these:

• Reduce by 1 the number of US senators in each state with fewer than 1.5 million residents, so that  Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska,  North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire and Hawaii each has only 1 US senator.
• Give a single senator to the District of Columbia (Washington D.C.).
• Change the constitution so that California has 6 senators, Texas has 5 senators, and New York and Florida each has 4 senators.  

This would leave you with a US senate with 101 senators, only one more than the current total.  With such a change states such as California, Texas and New York would still have smaller senate representation per 5 million citizens than in quite a few other US states. But at least you would greatly reduce the "2nd class citizen" effect in which you have ridiculous injustices such as we now have, where a state with 39 million people (California) sends to the US senate only the same number of senators (2) as states with a population of less than 700,000 (Wyoming and Vermont).