Adventurings in the PsychicalBruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Science
Adventurings in the Psychical
Bruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Parapsychology
Herr Wesermann had been greatly troubled by the conduct of a friend,
a young officer in the German army, and in the hope of reforming him,
"willed" one evening that at eleven o'clock that night he should see
in a dream an apparition of a lady in whom he had once been greatly
interested, but who had been dead five years.
It chanced that at eleven o'clock, instead of being in bed and
asleep, Herr Wesermann's friend was chatting with a brother officer.
Nevertheless, the apparition came to him at the hour appointed, and
was seen, not only by him, but by his companion also.
The door of his chamber seemed to open, and the ghost of his dead
sweetheart walked in, "dressed in white, with black kerchief and bared
head." Both officers started to their feet, and watched with bulging
eyes while the ghost bowed gravely to them, turned, and without a word
disappeared.
They followed instantly, rushing into the corridor, but saw only the
sentry, who solemnly assured them that nobody but themselves had
entered or left the room.[8]
[8] Herr Wesermann's experiments were reported by him in the
_Archiv für den Thierischen Magnetismus_, vol. vi, pp. 136-139.
Facts like these naturally raised in the minds of many of the
investigators a belief that quite possibly ghosts could be explained
without resorting to the alternative of dogmatically denying their
reality or regarding them as supernatural beings. This belief was
strengthened by other facts brought to light in the course of
experiments to determine the actuality of telepathy, or thought
transference as it used to be called.
It was discovered that, under certain favoring conditions, thoughts
could indeed be transmitted from mind to mind without passing through
the ordinary known channels of communication; and furthermore that
thoughts thus transmitted were often apprehended, not as mere ideas,
but in the form of auditory or visual hallucinations.
Thus, if it were a question of "telepathing" the idea of a certain
playing card, say the three of diamonds, the recipient, instead
of simply getting the thought, "three of diamonds," might hear an
hallucinatory voice saying to him, "three of diamonds," or might see
three diamond-shaped objects floating before his eyes, the "ghosts" of
three diamonds, so to speak.
Of even greater significance was the discovery that it frequently
happened also that instead of getting the message which the experimenter
had consciously attempted to send, the recipient would get other ideas
merely latent in the experimenter's mind--ideas connected with his
environment, something he had been doing, etc. Or the recipient might
get the right message several hours after the experiment had been
made--receiving it, for example, in a dream.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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