Supernatural by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

Neuwelcke, near Wolmar, on the shores of the Baltic.One day as she was writing on the blackboard, a second Emilie appeared standing beside her.As she turned to see what the pupils were murmuring about, her ‘double’ vanished.On another occasion, she was on her knees beside a girl called Antoinette von Wrangel, pinning her dress, and as the girl looked in the wardrobe mirror, she saw two Emilies, and fainted.
    The last straw was when another teacher had left her pupils alone for five minutes.Suddenly, they were astonished to see Emilie seated in the teacher’s chair.Stranger still, there was another Emilie out in the garden.Two of the bolder pupils tried to touch the apparition, and said it felt like muslin.One of them even walked through her.Then the apparition vanished, although the other Emilie could still be seen in the garden.Later, a friendly pupil asked Emilie what had happened.She explained that she had looked into the classroom through the garden window, seen that the teacher was absent, and felt worried that the girls would misbehave.It seems that, in some strange way, her worry had projected her ‘double’ into the room.
    When parents heard these stories they began withdrawing their children from the school, and Emilie was sacked.She then went to live with her sister-in-law, and everyone in the family got used to seeing her double wandering around the house.But the strain seems to have been too much for her; one day she left the house and vanished, never to be seen again.The likeliest explanation is that she drowned herself.
    One of the most famous cases recorded by the Society for Psychical Research concerns a young student named S.H.Beard, who was engaged to a girl named Miss Verity.In November 1881, Beard was sitting in his room in London reading a book about the power of the will.It suddenly entered his head that he would like to ‘appear’ to Miss Verity, who lived at 22 Hogarth Road, Kensington.He concentrated his mind and tried to visualise the house, and the bedroom on the second floor where his fiancée slept.Suddenly he became aware that he could not move his limbs; he felt ‘frozen’.And at that moment, in Hogarth Road, Miss Verity woke up and found him standing by her bed.She screamed, and it awoke her 11-year-old sister.As the two girls stared at the apparition, it vanished.Beard himself did not know he had succeeded until Miss Verity told him about it next time he saw her.
    A month later he decided to try it again.By now Miss Verity and her sister had moved to Kew.Once again he made the attempt, writing later: ‘I also put forth an effort which I cannot find words to describe.I was conscious of a mysterious influence of some sort permeating my body, and had a distinct impression that I was exercising some force with which I had been hitherto unacquainted, but which I can now at certain times set in motion at will.’Half an hour later he ‘came to’ and realised he had been asleep—or in a trance.The next day he discovered once again that he had been successful.But it was not Miss Verity who had seen him this time, but her married sister.She had seen him walking from one room to another, and later he had walked into her bedroom, touched her hair, taken her hand in his own and stared intently at the palm before he vanished.The sister woke Miss Verity, who was in the same bed, to tell her what had happened.
    All these stories seem to make the same point made by Richard Church.We take it for granted that we live in a ‘solid’ world of space and time, advancing from moment to moment according to unchangeable laws, and that we are stuck in the place where we happen to be at the moment.We are, in a sense, ‘trapped’.We feel this particularly strongly when we are bored or miserable—that we are helplessly at the mercy of this physical world into which we happen to have been born.Yet these odd experiences all seem to show that this is untrue.The ‘real you’ is not trapped in space and