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

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 two previous posts here and here.  In this post I will cite some more cases of this type. 

On pages 259-260 of Death and Its Mystery: After Death by the astronomer Camille Flammarion we have an account of a Dr. Cabral who had helped a poor, deserted patient named Deolinda who died of consumption:

"I had scarcely stretched myself out on my bed when I was pervaded by an intense feeling of well-being. I could not account for this sensation. Soon I had an impression that some object was touching my head, as though some one were wrapping me up in something. Astonished at this feeling, I called to the two ladies who were on duty in the next room. Madame Felicia Diaz said to me: 'I see a young girl, dressed in white, at the head of your bed; she's putting a wreath of roses on your forehead. She says that her name is Deolinda, and that she has come to show her gratitude for the generosity with which you cared for her.' I was greatly astonished by this statement. I recalled the fact that it was the anniversary of Deolinda's death; neither I nor any one else had thought of this. I had never spoken to any one in that house of what I had done for Deolinda."

On page 278 of Death and Its Mystery: After Death by the astronomer Camille Flammarion we have an account by an L. Devert:

"One morning, when all the sisters were leaving the chapel, Mademoiselle Adrienne was seen in the kitchen. She said that she did not wish to live in her room any longer, that a sister had frightened her. They proved to her that all the sisters — that every one except herself was at mass. 'I know that,' she said. 'It was a sister whom we don't know. She's tall, slender, and very pale. She came up to my bed, and looked at me. I spoke to her and she did not answer, but I shall never forget her gaze. She walked all around the room, slowly, then went away.' There was no sister  who corresponded to Mademoiselle Adrienne's description, and they spent the whole day discussing this phenomenon. Then one of the nuns thought of showing her a photograph of Sister Bouchez, whb had died two months before Mademoiselle Adrienne entered the school. She recognized her at once. Sister Bouchez had been accustomed to working in these small rooms, where she gathered together all sorts of things for the sick."

On page 279 of the same Flammarion book, we have an account that is doubly interesting. The first reason it is interesting is that it is yet another account of very high brain damage causing no serious damage to intellectual functioning.  You can read about similar such cases in this post.  Such accounts conflict with prevailing neuroscience dogmas that the brain is the source of the human mind, as do very many other facts gathered at this site. We read the following:

"A young girl, Marie Bottini, aged thirteen (she is a peasant from Boregio), fell over a precipice and struck her head against a stone which made a wound on her right temple. It fractured her skull and a piece of bone was driven into it. It was 6 x 7 — that is to say, 42 centimeters square. The fragment of bone, completely 
detached from the skull, buried itself in the gray matter of the brain, where it still is. A great deal of the gray matter issued from her head; in order to sew up the flesh wound I had to take out about fifty grams of it. The little girl was brought to me thirty-six hours after the accident; I found her able to give clear answers to all my questions, and up to the present time she has not been afflicted with any nervous disorder, either of her intellectual faculties, her muscular control or her sensibility. In spite of the effects of the wound on her system, she suffered no mental disturbance, and was able to give, and can still give, minute explanations of what happened to her."

Here we have a story of a girl with massive brain damage, and a loss of at least fifty grams of gray matter,  but no noticeable intellectual damage. There are many similar cases discussed in this series of posts, including many epileptics who had little loss of intellectual function or memory after they lost half of their brains in hemispherectomy operations to stop seizures. No such things should happen were it true that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories. 

The second interesting thing about the account of Marie Bottini is this part:

"Having fallen into a ravine hollowed out by water, she took refuge in it and remained there until the following day. When she was asked if she had not been afraid during the night, she answered that she had not, and stated that toward the close of the day her father had appeared to her and had given her courage, telling her to wait patiently for her relatives, who would surely come to look for her the next day and would take very good care of her. Her father had been dead for three years. I told her that a person who had been dead for so long could not come back, but she stated with conviction that her father had come, and had protected her during the whole night."

On page 304 of Death and Its Mystery: After Death by the astronomer Camille Flammarion we have an account of an apparition of someone seen three years after the person's death:

"That was how I saw Palladia for the first time, three years after her death. I have often seen her since. Sometimes she appears to me three times in a week or twice on the same day; or even a month may go by without my seeing her. Palladia always appears unexpectedly, taking me by surprise at a time when I am least anticipating it. Never do I see her in my dreams. I see her both when I am alone and with a great many people. She always appears to me with the same serene expression in her eyes; sometimes with a slight smile. I always see her in the dark dress which she wore when she died before my eyes...The apparitions of Palladia last one, two, or three minutes, then gradually vanish and dissolve."

This is only part of a longer narrative that includes some corroboration from other people. On page 307 Flammarion states the following:

"Plainly, if we should persist in seeing here only an hallucination, we should be in error, for we should have to admit that (1) the narrator (2) his wife, who was at that time a stranger to him (3) his child, two years old, (4) his dog — we should have to admit, I say, that all these were the victims of hallucinations. We should still have to explain the first warning, regarding the cemetery. Everything, in this case, would lead us to decide in favor of real manifestations on the part of the deceased Palladia (who died at the age of fifteen) in the years 1873, 1875, 1876, 1879, 1885, and 1890— that is to say, two, three, six, twelve, and seventeen years after her death."

On page 213-214 of Death and Its Mystery: At the Moment of Death by the astronomer Camille Flammarion we have an account of someone appearing decades after her death.  A Thomas James Norbis tells us the following (the phrase "twenty-four hours before her death" refers to the mother's death): 

"Sixty years ago a Mrs. Carleton died in Leitrim County. She was my mother's intimate friend, and a few days after her death she appeared to her in a dream, and told her that she would never again see her thus, save on one occasion which would be twenty-four hours before her death...My son-in-law heard a noise, awakened his wife, and asked her to go and see what was happening. She found my mother half-way out of bed, with an expression of horror stamped upon her features. They soothed her as best they could....Having sent for her granddaughter, she told her that Mrs. Carleton had at last, after an interval of fifty-six years, come to speak to her of her death, which was imminent, and that she would die the morning of the next day, at that same hour. She added that she had, as a precaution, taken a bath to make unnecessary the washing of her dead body. She then began to sink, little by little, and died the morning of March 4th, at the time she had specified. "

On page 96 of Volume 2 of the Annals of Psychical Science (1905), we have the following account of an apparition seen several weeks after someone's death:

"Under the title Real Apparition of my Wife after her Death, Chemnitz, 1804, Dr. Woetzel published a book which produced a great sensation at the time. He narrates how one evening, some weeks after the death of his wife, being in his own room, there arose around him suddenly as it were a gust like a whirlwind, although the doors and windows were shut. The light was extinguished, and at the same time a little window in the alcove was opened. By the dim light that pervaded the room, Woetzel perceived the form of his own wife, who said to him in a feeble voice : 'Carl, I am immortal ; one day we shall see each other again.' " 

On page 238 of Death and Its Mystery: At the Moment of Death by the astronomer Camille Flammarion we have an account of C. H.  who had an apparition of her husband who died a month earlier:

"It was sixteen years ago, one month after my husband's death, which occurred in August, 1883. One night, when I had awakened, I heard the door of my room open; then I heard steps and saw my dead husband draw near my bed. He pressed my right side to him, very hard, without saying a single word. Astounded, I did not speak. Then he went away, and I leaned out of my bed to watch him go (this proves, absolutely that I was awake.) I heard steps again, and heard the door close once more. Long afterward, I still felt pain in my side."

Later on the same page we hear from another person:

"My mother and my sister — about a month after my mother's 
brother-in-law, our uncle, had died — were witnesses of an apparition of him. They saw this on different dates — my mother about a month after the death, and my sister fifteen days later still." 

WHO Finally Recants Its Ruinous Advice on Face Masks

 Mainstream biology authorities often acquire erroneous opinions on important topics.  Once they reach such erroneous opinions, mainstream biology authorities tend to stubbornly cling to their errors.  There seems to be some haughty conceit in such stubbornness.  A biology authority may regard himself and his colleagues as being some elite band of sages that the average man should not question. 

On this blog and another blog of mine,  I have given countless examples of the dubious claims of mainstream biology authorities.  This year we had the most glaring example of the errant stubbornness of mainstream biology authorites.  As a global pandemic raged thoughout the world, killing about 400,000 people around the world, the World Health Organization kept teaching the ludicrous advice that ordinary people did not need to wear face masks to limit the disease from spreading.  Today the news tells us that the World Health Organization has finally recanted its absurd teaching on this topic.  We read the headline below:

In the news story, we read this:

“In light of evolving evidence, WHO advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

This "in light of evolving evidence" phrase makes it sound as if something new was recently discovered to warrant this change. That is not the case.  A meta-analysis published in the leading medical journal The Lancet on June 2, 2020 concluded that "face mask use could result in a large reduction in risk of infection."   A CNN story on this meta-analysis says, "The chance of transmission without a face mask or respirator (like an N95 mask) was 17.4%, while that fell to 3.1% when a mask was worn."  But this meta-analysis was not at all some new research result. This meta-analysis was simply an analysis of previous studies that had already been published, almost all before March 1, 2020. 

During the months of March, April and May 2020 that the World Health Organization was senselessly telling people that they did not need to wear face masks as a lethal pandemic was spreading around the world, and that only sick people and medical personnel needed to wear face masks, the evidence was right there proving the common-sense idea that having ordinary people wear face masks will do very much to help stop the growth of a pandemic.  So why on earth did the World Health Organization keep teaching during March, April and May that ordinary people did not need to wear face masks? 

Maybe during those months the WHO people were thinking something along the lines of, "We must have got it right -- after all, we are the World Health Organization." And similarly, many a neuroscientist or evolutionary biologist may think to himself something like, "No doubt we are teaching the right thing -- after all, we are professors."  

Here is a timeline on this topic:

October 1, 2013: I published a post imagining a devastating pandemic in New York City, a post that also gives advice on how to survive such a pandemic, including the advice to "wear a surgical mask or dust mask" to protect yourself. 
January 2020: The coronavirus starts spreading massively in China, causing the shutdown of big Chinese cities. 
January 30, 2020: The World Health Organization declares coronavirus to be a "global health emergency."
February 3, 2020:  Infectious disease czar Anthony Fauci strangely predicts there will be a "dampening down" of coronavirus cases in the United States. 
February 20, 2020:  In an interview with USA Today, infectious disease czar Anthony Fauci strangely says that the risk of coronavirus in the US is "minuscule," and that ordinary people should not wear face masks to protect themselves. 
March, April, May 2020: Coronavirus spreads like wildfire throughout the United States, causing more than 100,000 US deaths by June 5, and roughly 400,000 deaths worldwide. 
March 8, 2020: A news story states that the position of the CDC is that ordinary people do not need to wear face masks: "For healthy people, both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend they wear masks only when taking care of those who are sick or suspected of having the virus." 
March, 2020: Throughout most of March, infectious disease czar Anthony Fauci keeps saying that ordinary people who are not sick do not need to wear face masks. On the widely watched 60 Minutes TV show, he states, "There's no reason to be walking around with masks."
March 28, 2020: In a postscript I made to my March 22, 2020 post again urging ordinary people to wear face masks in a pandemic, I stated, "The fact that some biology experts in the US have told us we don't need to wear masks is another example of the extremely common phenomenon of biologists teaching unwise or unwarranted opinions contrary to facts or logic." 
April 3, 2020: The US Center for Disease Control recants its previous position, and starts recommending that ordinary people should be wearing face masks to prevent coronavirus.  About the same time, Anthony Fauci reverses his previous position, and tells us we should all be wearing face masks to prevent coronavirus spread. 
March, April, May 2020: As the coronavirus spreads like wildfire throughout the world, the World Health Organization teaches on its website that ordinary healthy people do not need to wear face masks (see here for a news story about that).  
June 2020: The World Health Organization finally recants its previous position on face masks, and starts teaching that "governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult."

What takeaway can we derive from this timeline? The takeaway is that mainstream biology authorities can be very wrong about very big things, and that for long lengths of time they can stubbornly cling to their erroneous opinions, ignoring evidence such opinions are wrong. We should remember this the next time we are told that we must believe this or that because it is currently being taught by a majority of biology professors. We can only wonder how many thousands of deaths would have been prevented if the World Health Organization had given us the right advice on face masks throughout 2020. 

Postscript: An article in The Atlantic details some other blunders of the WHO regarding coronavirus:

"The WHO should not have waited until January 22 to confirm human-to-human transmission, after China finally did. By that point, a deadly horse had mostly left the barn. The WHO should not have waited until the end of January to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern—a move that recognizes the severity of the crisis and calls for' 'a coordinated international response.' The WHO should not have let February and nearly half of March pass before finally declaring a pandemic. By that point, a staggering 114 countries had already reported cases, and more than 4,000 known deaths had occurred. By then, the declaration did not matter in the same way an earlier one would have."

Several days after my post on the WHO's coronavirus blunder on face masks, we have an article in the New York Times entitled, "In the W.H.O.’s Coronavirus Stumbles, Some Scientists See a Pattern." 

Dirty DUNE Is a Billion-Buck Boondoggle

The New York Times recently had a long story with this misleading headline: "Why the Big Bang Produced Something Rather Than Nothing."  The headline is baloney, because the story suggests no answer to this long-standing scientific problem. Nowadays bunk  clickbait headlines are frequently found in science news media, even in top-tier sources that we expect to be following better journalistic practices.

The story mentions some research on neutrinos, and tries to make it sound like maybe the research has some relevance to the long standing problem called the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such a belief is based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons lead to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. For example, a collision of high energy particles with sufficient energy creates a matter proton and an antimatter particle called an antiproton. So the amount of antimatter shortly after the Big Bang should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But only trace amounts of antimatter are observed in the universe. A universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been uninhabitable, because of the vast amount of lethal energy released when even a tiny bit of matter comes in contact with a tiny bit of antimatter.

Nothing in the New York Times story mentions anything like a possible answer to this matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. There is merely a mention of some T2K experiment that suggests only very weakly that maybe there's a tiny bit of asymmetry involving the all-but-massless "ghost particles" called neutrinos. This isn't anything like a resolution of the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem.   The anomaly detected by the T2K experiment is only a three-sigma observation, which could easily be the result of mere chance.  A three-sigma event occurs by chance about 1 in 625 times. The rule-of-thumb in physics is that you don't call something a discovery unless it is a five-sigma event, which occurs by chance only about 1 in 3.5 million times. A five-sigma result is roughly 5000 times harder-to-get than a three sigma result.

Neutrinos are "bit players" in the physical drama of the universe, and make up very much less of the universe's mass than protons. That means it is extremely unlikely that the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem will be solved by studying neutrinos. 

But now scientists are proposing that we spend more than 1 billion dollars on a project called the DUNE project, to study asymmetry or oscillation issues in neutrinos. DUNE stands for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The cost of this project (which will be operational in 2027) will be between 1.2 billion dollars and 1.8 billion dollars, according to this document.  

They didn't get a convincing result from the massively expensive T2K experiment, so now our scientists want to spend more than a billion dollars on a whole other neutrino experiment.  The chance that anything terribly important will come from such an effort is very low. On its "Frequently Asked Questions" page, the web site of the DUNE project tries to answer the question, "Why is DUNE scientifically important?" It fails to answer that question in any remotely persuasive way.  It says, "DUNE aims to find out, for example, whether neutrinos are the key to solving the mystery of how the universe came to consist of matter rather than antimatter," but it gives no rationale for thinking that such a thing is true, and no explanation of how it might be discovered that such a thing is true.  There's a link to a video which also fails to explain any rationale for thinking that neutrinos could possibly be the explanation for the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. 

Trying to play up the importance of neutrinos (which make up a vastly smaller fraction of the universe's mass than protons), the video makes the claim (at the 54 second mark) that neutrinos are "the most abundant matter particles in the universe."  Scientists actually believe that the amount of matter in protons is many times greater than the amount of matter in neutrinos, and that the most abundant matter substance in the universe is some other undiscovered type of matter called dark matter, which is believed to exist in vastly greater mass amounts than either protons or neutrinos. At an expert answers site, we read the following:

"The problem with neutrinos is that they are very light. There is no conceivable mechanism that would produce enough of them to make up a significant percentage of the total mass of the universe."

The DUNE project will probably end up being like the LIGO project, another billion-dollar boondoggle which has produced almost no astronomical results of any importance.  It has been claimed that by now the LIGO project has detected something like 50 examples of gravitational waves.   Some are not even sure that LIGO has actually detected gravitational waves.  Last year a physicist stated the following:

"The signals that LIGO and Virgo see are well explained by gravitational wave events. But we cannot be sure that these are actually signals coming from outer space and not some unknown terrestrial effect."

 Even if the LIGO detections are real gravitional waves from distant sources, they are of no great importance. None of these observations has done anything to change our understanding of the universe, or clarify any of the central problems of cosmology or astronomy.  The gravitational waves come only from rare freak events lasting only for the shortest times, events such as colliding black holes and colliding neutron stars. So LIGO has been a kind of sideshow of no great importance.  We might compare it to a billion-dollar project searching the world trying to track down all the cases of head-on collisions of tractor trailers, although such a project would probably be more useful than anything we learned from LIGO. 

LIGO cost American taxpayers more than a billion dollars. There was also a quite substantial environmental cost for constructing something like the two LIGO observatories, each an L-shaped unit stretching for 4000 meters.  All such massive construction projects contribute to global warming. Our scientists frequently lecture us about the importance of reducing global warming emissions. But when it comes to constructing gigantic boondoggle projects that contribute substantially to global warming, and produce only meager results,  our scientists raise no objections.

Like LIGO, the DUNE project will be very expensive in terms of its global warming cost. One of its detectors will be constructed more than a kilometer underground. That kind of deep digging has a high cost in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, and tends to create pollution in a variety of ways.  But you would never know that from a very misleading document that was filed, one claiming that this massive construction project will have "no significant impact," by which it means environmental impact.

Entitled "Finding of No Significant Impact and Floodplain Statement of Findings," the document tells us the following:

"Construction of the underground detector—necessary to eliminate cosmic radiation that could interfere with the detector—would require excavation and transportation of a large volume of rock. The rock would be transferred to either the Gilt Edge Superfund site, or to the Open Cut in Lead, a former surface mining pit that was part of the former Homestake Mine. Truck, conveyor and/or a rail system would be used. The Gilt Edge Superfund site is a highly disturbed former gold mine in Deadwood....Up to 950,000 cubic yards (yd³) of soils would be removed and re-used or stored on site. Up to 45,000 yd³ of rock would be excavated, but important geological resources would not be affected."

The document tells us that up to a million cubic yards of soil and rock would be excavated by the DUNE project, and much of it  transported and dumped at some pit or mine. This project has very obviously a very large environmental cost, including a very large global warming footprint. But contrary to all the facts it is stating, the document claims there will be "no significant impact" on the environment. It states that the DUNE construction project "would not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the quality of the human environment."  You might as well claim that leveling fifty city blocks in Manhattan would have no significant effect on the environment. 

The government web page below reminds us of one of the countless reasons why massive hard-rock removal projects and massive soil removal projects can have very big environmental impacts.  At the end of the yellow line shown below is where DUNE will be massively involved. 

The DUNE project is an environmentally reckless boondoggle "white elephant" project. Neutrinos are mere bit players in the physical makeup of the universe. There is no reason to think that the DUNE neutrino project will do anything to solve the great mystery of why the Big Bang did not yield a universe with equal amounts of matter protons and antimatter antiprotons, or nothing but photons arising from the combination of such antimatter and matter. And in the unlikely event that the scientists who work on the DUNE project ever happen to report some five-sigma event relating to neutrinos, we should be suspicious about  their reports.  Once a project has been born with the very misleading claim that digging a million cubic yards of soil and rock will have no significant environmental impact, then we should be suspicious about the accuracy of all further statements related to such a project. 

Let us imagine the best result that might happen from the DUNE project. There might be discovered some reason why the Big Bang should have produced more neutrinos (made of matter) than anti-neutrinos (made of antimatter). But it would be worth very little to know such a thing. What we are interested in knowing is not why the Big Bang might have produced some universe with only ghostly neutrinos as matter, but why the Big Bang left us with so many protons that are vastly more massive than neutrinos. The precise name for this problem is the baryon asymmetry problem.  It is the problem of why the observed number of baryons (protons and neutrons) in the universe is more than trillions of times greater than the number of antibaryons (antiprotons and antineutrons), contrary to what the Big Bang theory predicts. There is no hope that the baryon asymmetry problem can be solved by doing experiments with neutrinos, because neutrinos are not baryons.  There is no point at all in spending a billion dollars trying to establish why there might exist a universe with only neutrinos, because we don't live in such a universe.  There is a point in trying to figure out why we live in a universe with so many baryons.  But the DUNE project would do nothing to solve that problem. 

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

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 my previous post.  In this post I will cite some more cases of this type. 

On page 234 of Volume 10 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, we have this account:

"My mother died in February, 1882, and for three months after her death she used to come to me almost nightly, after I had retired to my bed-room. Sometimes she would come up to the bed and bend over me; at other times she would stand at the door and beckon to me."

On page 285 of Volume 19 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, we have this account of an apparition of a mother who died 16 years ago:

" On June 5th, 1887, a Sunday evening between 11 and 12 at night, being awake, my name was called three times. I answered twice, thinking it was my uncle, ' Come in, Uncle George, I am awake,' but the third time I recognised the voice as that of my mother, who had been dead 16 years. I said, 'Mamma!' She then came round a screen near my bedside with two children in her arms, and placed them in my arms and put the bedclothes over them and said, ' Lucy, promise me to take care of them, for their mother is just dead.' I said, 'Yes, Mamma.' She repeated, ' Promise me to take care of them.' I replied, ' Yes, I promise you,' and I added, 'Oh, Mamma, stay and speak to me, I am so wretched.' She replied, 'Not yet, my child,' then she seemed to go round the screen again, and I remained, feeling the children to be still in my arms, and fell asleep. When I awoke there was nothing. Tuesday morning, June 7th, I received the news of my sister-in-law's death. She had given birth to a child three weeks before, which I did not know till after her death."

On the next page we are told this about the children in the vision or apparition: "The children were of ages corresponding to those of her sister-in-law's children : i.e., they seemed to be a little girl and a baby newly born." 

On page 213 of Volume 16 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, we read of a mother who saw an apparition of her child long after the child died:

"It was almost the first anniversary of my beloved daughter’s going from us, and my heart was very sad because a deep sense of my loss seemed to weigh upon me. I awoke, rather indolently, this April morning, about six o’clock, with my faculties particularly clear and acute. On looking up, my beloved child was looking down on me, and smiling. Her face was perfectly distinct, and radiant with life and love, and so beautiful! The word that always applied to her was vivid, and so she was as she looked down on me. Such perfect beauty and happiness I had never seen, and it was her dear self without a doubt. On her face was transcendent joy, and I knew she was alive and well and happy."

On page 390-391 of Volume 15 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, we have an account of someone seeing an apparition of someone who died long ago:

"As she sat there at work looking down, she saw a shadow of some thing that attracted her attention, and she thought someone had come in. She looked up and there, at a distance of about four feet, stood Mary Willard, her former classmate and friend. She was about four feet distant from Miss -----; was dressed in a cream white or light salmon-colored, soft, beautiful dress. She was dressed just as she was when Miss ----- knew her, as to style and general appearance, her hair combed low on her forehead as the custom was.... She remained about ten minutes, and Miss ----- said she smiled and looked exceedingly pleasant; that they communicated, but not by thought,....So she watched carefully and Mary 'dimmed out' while she looked — faded from sight without moving from where she stood."

We are then told the following about this account:

"Curiously, Miss Frances E. Willard did not think to set down the fact that Mary, whose apparition was seen by Miss Milner, was dead. She had in fact died in 1862, about nineteen years before."

On page 274-275 of Volume 14 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, we have an account of Annie Halderman, who wrote repeatedly to a wounded soldier in Europe she had never seen. On the night she learned of the soldier's death, a month after it had occurred, she tried sending out "thought waves" to contact the soldier. She reported that on the same night she saw an apparition of a face, one that lasted for several minutes.  She then states this:

"Unsolicited by me, came a month later a letter from his widow, saying she knew her husband would like for me to have a photograph of himself, might she send one ? Another month elapsed before my eager answer in the affirmative brought the much wished-for post-card photo. It was the face of the man I had seen!"

On page 47 of Volume 1 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, we have an account of a dying boy who reported seeing the apparitions of his sister (who had died four years before his birth), his grandmother (who he had never seen), a Mrs. C. (who had died two years before), and someone named Roy who had died a year earlier.  On page 168-169 of Death and Its Mystery: After Death by the astronomer Camille Flammarion we have an account of a very young child who reported seeing his dead grandfather eight months after his death.  

On pages 429-430 of Volume XI of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, we have an account by a mother who had two sons, one a baby and the the other a toddler of two years and seven months.  The baby died. The mother said that the toddler kept saying for months after the baby's death that he could see the baby, and that the baby was calling him, and that the baby wanted him to join him.  The toddler died two months after the baby. The diligent Society for Psychical Research obtained statements from witnesses corroborating the mother's claims. 

On page 238 of Death and Its Mystery: After Death by the astronomer Camille Flammarion we have this account of a wife who saw an apparition of her husband who had died a month ago: 

"It was sixteen years ago, one month after my husband's death, which occurred in August, 1883. One night, when I had awakened, I heard the door of my room open; then I heard steps and saw my dead husband draw near my bed. He pressed my right side to him, very hard, without saying a single word. Astounded, I did not speak. Then he went away, and I leaned out of my bed to watch him go (this proves, absolutely that I was awake). I heard steps again, and heard the door close once more. Long afterward, I still felt pain in my side."

On page 247 of Death and Its Mystery: After Death by the famous astronomer Camille Flammarion, we have an account of an apparition of someone that appeared three months after his death. 

"Three months after my husband's death I had returned from the country, where I had spent a day; there I had hardly thought of my husband at all. I went to bed; it was dark in the room. With my eyes open, I saw my husband before me, in a suit of clothes which he had worn out a long time before. His expression was mild and calm; it was as though his face were lighted up. His features were not bright, but were clear and distinct and seemed unsubstantial. I asked myself if it were really he. He bent over and kissed me. 'This is an illusion,' I told myself. I also perceived an odor of menthol (when he was alive, he always had a stick of it with him, because he suffered from headaches). Again I thought that this could not be possible. Mechanically I passed my tongue over my lips and tasted something slightly bitter; I did not know whether or not it was the taste of the menthol. 'Is that really you?' I asked. Slowly he vanished."

On pages 239-240 of Death and Its Mystery: At the Moment of Death by the astronomer Camille Flammarion we have an account of a Fernand who saw an apparition of his wife, about a month after her death:

"I saw my wife enter, pass rapidly between the bed and the mattress, cross the room, and kneel down before a little altar in a comer. She rose almost immediately and retraced her steps, going in the direction of the stairway. As she was passing near me I stretched out my arms toward her instinctively, as if to catch her dress, and cried out, 'Louloute!' the given name by which I usually called her. But, passing me rapidly, she avoided me. 'Peace, Fernand!' she said, in imperative tones, and at once she reached the stairs, where she disappeared."

In pages on pages 358-359 of  Volume 1, Number 4 of the Psychical Review (May 1893), we have an account by Martha T. Hamilton who saw an apparition of her mother who died twelve years earlier:

"I saw standing beside my bed, near the foot, a shadowy form so like my mother, who had died about twelve years before, that I recognized it immediately, and yet with a young, beautiful, spiritualized face fairly beatific in expression — a remarkable contrast to the sad, worn, suffering look I had last seen her wear in life. The figure was clothed in flowing, filmy draperies, the neck and arms uncovered. The angelic beauty of the vision was beyond anything my imagination had ever been able to picture. While I perceived this form near me, I also noticed that it was transparent, that I could see directly through it articles of furniture just behind it, and the peculiarity of the matter excited my wonder even then. I called out, 'Mother, mother!' and extended my arms. The nurse answered, 'Your mother is not here; why do you call her? I am the only woman here.' I replied, 'No, no! my mother is here.' Then it seemed that I communicated with the vision without spoken words, and that it replied in the same mysterious way. I felt that I asked, though I did not speak the words, 'Mother, why are you here?' It replied: 'You have been very near death. I am your guardian, and have been watching over you, so that in case you passed on to the new life I would be here to guide you on the journey.' I said, “I want to go with you now.' It answered, 'No, you are still to live on earth for a time.' Then the figure raised itself from the floor and floated towards the room door, which was closed. I felt it was leaving me, and cried out in agonizing tones, this time aloud,  'Mother, mother! take me with you!' Then the form turned its head over its shoulder, and, looking back at me with a gaze of intense longing and love, answered, 'Not yet, my child, not yet,' and, gently floating out and away through the door, disappeared from view, with the head still turned over the shoulder, and the same longing, loving expression on the face."