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T C Lethbridge – Ghost and Ghoul

Mrs. R. [Canon R’s wife] came up from X to help with the move into the new house. I was still digging at Guilden Morden and the day before the move, brought back a finger bone from a woman's hand with a ring on it, so that I could draw it for an illustration. Mrs. R. asked me what I was drawing and I showed it to her. She stepped back, horrified, remarking as she did so, 'How very unlucky.'

We moved in the next day. After the vans had left, and we were beginning to get things straightened up, she had an apoplectic fit [stroke] and died almost as soon as the doctors reached her. This was a pretty devastating thing to happen in the middle of a move.

Canon R. was rung up and told. He arrived by car next day.

Two days later, after arrangements had been made for the funeral at X, I drove him back there. On arrival, we found L.K.'s mother, the Canon's sister, already in No. 57.

After cleaning up and changing, the three of us sat down to dinner. The Canon sat at one end of the table with his sister on his right, and I was put in his dead wife's chair at the other end. In spite of everything, I was by no means in a dejected frame of mind, nor particularly tired.

We had hardly begun dinner when a perfectly horrible thing happened. I have had many shocks and unpleasant experiences of one kind or another, but this was indescribably awful.

I was suddenly sat on and enclosed by someone I could not see.

I think I must have been brought up pretty tough, one was never supposed to show one's feelings, however critical a situation might be. Canon R. never noticed anything odd at all.

But I must have looked white, or shaken, for after dinner his sister took me aside and said, 'Something happened to you at dinner, didn't it?'

 'Yes,' I said, 'it was frightful.'

 'It will be all right after the funeral,' she went on. And so it was. Fortunately there were not many more meals before that took place. When it was over, everything cleared away. There was no trace of it ever again.

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Twice, I was present when Mrs. R. was apparently given warning of her approaching death, and it fell to my lot to find her lying on the floor after she had had her stroke.

We have seen reason for thinking that to produce a ghoul, or a ghost, it is necessary to have at least two human machines tuned in together. That is the minds of two people must be linked by resonance. One is the projector and the other the receiver. But it also seems probable that some third mind can at times use the transmitting apparatus of the projector without his being aware of it.

Canon R. had had a great shock and was still rather bemused by the magnitude of the disaster which had befallen him. There he was, sitting at the end of the table, thinking consciously or unconsciously of his missing wife. He probably did not see me at all for most of the meal. He was seeing her in memory. He may have projected this unconsciously to my receiving set, thus producing a ghoul, or, and I think this may be the more probable explanation, her mind may have attempted to use his transmitter to let us know that she was still in existence. Her only link was a telepathic one with his mind. She could not see us, but she knew that he was there and she tried to use him to project her, so that he could see her. The cases of persons seeing their closest relative or friend directly after death, or within a day or two of it, are so numerous that it seems hard to doubt that this form of manifestation is frequently attempted.

If this explanation is anywhere near the truth, then Canon R. did not produce whatever it was that sat on me, he only projected it.