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B J Laubscher – Where Mystery dwells

A few months after his discharge Jamie came back for an artificial limb but he complained of a phantom leg and foot. He could feel pain in this non-existent leg and the pressure of the bed clothes on the invisible toes. He said that the phantom leg was a nuisance for sometimes he would forget his crutch and step off the chair on the phantom leg and land on the floor. The surgeons considered operating on the nerve endings in the stump. They thought the phantom was a mental production set up by sensations coming from these nerve endings and ascending to his brain.

In the end Jamie refused an operation; he would rather have a phantom leg than face another anaesthetic.

….Now at that time as I have mentioned I had no knowledge of the astral body nor of the literature on the subject. Jamie however put a suggestion into my mind. He said that he had given this invisible limb a great deal of thought while spending his days at his mother's cottage somewhere in Lanarkshire. He reasoned that when he found himself out of his body in the operating theatre he was sure that he had a body and limbs and when we carried the unconscious student out of the theatre his phantom body was walking alongside and it had limbs although it glided rather than walked. Therefore if there were this phantom body, which no one could persuade him was not so, then this phantom body could quite easily continue to have a limb even after the physical leg had been removed, and he thought that what he felt was the leg of this phantom body.

…….I found it very difficult to dismiss as unworthy of consideration Jamie's theory about his Phantom leg.