Supernatural by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

appeared was about to die, or had just died, and the person who saw him (or her) was a close relative.So such ‘apparitions’ could be explained either as ghosts, or—if you did not believe in ghosts—as some kind of telepathy.In a typical case, a man sitting in his room in Dublin awoke in the night and saw his father—who was on his deathbed in Wales—sitting in a chair with his face covered by his hands; a moment later, he vanished.The man was so impressed that he rushed over to Wales, and found that his father had been delirious for two days.And when he entered the room, his father remarked that he had been to see him the day before ... 1
    But the Society also received hundreds of reports of people who were not ill or in any danger being seen in other places.These they called ‘phantasms of the living”, and the case cited above is from one of its earliest and most impressive compilations.The following typical case is recounted by the poet W.B.Yeats:
    ‘One afternoon ...I was thinking very intently of a fellow student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated about writing.In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some hundreds of miles away where the student was.On the afternoon when I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a crowd of people in a hotel and seeming as solid as if in the flesh.My fellow student had seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come again when the people had gone.I had vanished, but had come again in the middle of the night and given him the message.I had myself no knowledge of either apparition.’ 1
    What seems to have happened here is that Yeats’s anxiety to deliver the message somehow caused him to ‘project’ his image several hundred miles, where it apparently behaved like a normal person.And in the case of the man who was dying in Wales, we may again surmise that the father’s anxiety (in fact, he wanted to tell his son the whereabouts of an overcoat) again caused him to ‘project’ himself to Dublin.And it is a plausible hypothesis that when people are on the point of dying, they are able to tap some unconscious power which allows them to ‘show themselves’ to some close relative about whom they are anxious.(In the same way, there is strong evidence that people who are drowning, or in some great physical danger, really do see their past lives flashing in front of their eyes within a second or two.)
    But there are other cases in which people seem to have used this power more or less deliberately.One evening in the the late 1920s, the novelist John Cowper Powys had spent the evening dining with the great American writer Theodore Dreiser.Powys suddenly looked at his watch: ‘I must hurry.’But as he left Dreiser’s New York apartment he remarked: ‘I’ll appear before you later this evening.’Then he rushed off to catch his train to upstate New York.Dreiser assumed the comment was a joke.But two hours later, as he sat reading, he looked up and found Powys standing by the door.He stood up, saying: ‘John, come in and tell me how you did it.’At that moment, Powys vanished.Dreiser rushed to the telephone and rang Powys’s home.Powys answered, and, when Dreiser told him what had happened, replied: ‘I told you I’d be there.’
    Dreiser adds that Powys later declined to discuss how he had done it.But that may not be because Powys wanted to be secretive.It may be, quite simply, that he did not know.He probably ‘felt it coming on’ during the evening, an odd state of mind which he recognised as the ability to ‘project’ himself.And it is almost certain that he did not know he had done it until Dreiser rang him up.
    Perhaps the strangest case on record is that of an attractive French schoolmistress named Emilie Sagée who lost 18 jobs in sixteen years because of her peculiar habit of being in two places at once.The way she lost her eighteenth job is typical.In 1845, she was a teacher at a school for young ladies at