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Ernesto Bozzano - Psychic phenomena at the moment of death [110 cases suggesting survival after death]

Telekinesis related to death event

2-nd and 3-rd cases. - Professor A. Alexander, a member of the "English Society of Psychological Research" and resident of Rio de Janeiro, sent to the International Spiritualist Congress held in London in June 1898, a long report containing numerous paranormal incidents examined by him. Among them, we meet four cases of the class we are dealing with. I start with the simplest two.

Mr. Alexander writes:

In the house of Señor Carlos Jansen, a small portrait of his mother was thrown on the ground the very day she died in Germany. When she was in Brazil, she had promised one of her grandsons, whom she loved very much, that in the event of her death, she would announce it to him by dropping her portrait - which indeed happened. In this situation, the portrait was not hung on the wall, but placed on a piece of furniture and inclined towards the wall, against which it was leaning.

The second case was witnessed by Lieutenant Costa, whom I quoted about another paranormal incident. He had a brother named Andronico, who died during the war with Paraguay. One evening, before his death was known in Rio de Janeiro, his mother was recounting some of the circumstances of her childhood and, wanting to begin a sentence with these words: "When Andronico was born", she made a slip-up linguae and said: "When Andronico died". Presumably she already possessed a subliminal knowledge of her son's death, and this caused her fault.

In any case, the mother was eerily impressed by this. While those present were trying to convince her of the futility of the incident, a noise was heard in the next room, like an object falling to the ground. The assistants rushed immediately and found that the portrait of Andronico had fallen to the ground. It was noted that the portrait was attached to the wall by two solid nails and that the cord supporting it was in perfect condition. Shortly after the dispatch announcing the death of the young officer arrived.

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In the first of the two cases above, I would like to point out the promise that the old lady had made to her grandson, to announce her death by dropping her portrait - an impressive circumstance, which makes it all the more unlikely that the "coincidences of chance" would be  in favour of the spiritual hypothesis. Indeed, if in this episode the named object fell in accordance with the will expressed by the lady during her lifetime, this would be another reason to believe that the will of death was not alien to the accident - in other words, that she was spiritually present. Moreover, the telepathic hypothesis could not explain the prediction that manifested itself in a physical form, whereas a physical force propagating at a distance by concentric waves could not explain how it could be exerted on a designated object. Therefore, the fact can only be explained by the intervention of a will that directed the physical force in action.

In the second case, I notice the curious incident of the lapsus linguae that happened to the deceased's mother, probably due to the subliminal knowledge she may have just acquired of her son's death, as Professor Alexander says. In this case, the incident would be telepathic in nature and would have occurred simultaneously with the other of a physical nature - simultaneous execution that would tend to prove the original identity of the two paranormal forms of death announcements. Since the telekinetic announcement was presumably due to the presence on site of the deceased's spiritual entity, it follows that the genesis of the telepathic announcement could not be different.