Observations placeholder
Reverend C W S - And the meeting with his wife in the Buffalo hotel
Identifier
011284
Type of Spiritual Experience
Inter composer communication
Hallucination
Background
The clergyman asked his wife not to repeat the experiment again because it upset him for his work!
A description of the experience
Death and its Mystery, At the Moment of Death; Manifestations and Apparitions of the Dying – Camille Flammarion
from Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research new York December 1907 This experiment took place in a Hotel in the city of Buffalo
At 1 o’clock on Sunday morning, I awakened from a deep, dreamless sleep with the feeling that there was someone in my room. When I was thoroughly awake, I saw my wife standing at the foot of the bed. She had on a dress she wore ordinarily when, in the morning, she was busy with household duties.
I sat up and cried, ‘What are you doing there?’ She answered, ‘I came to get news of you’.
She then advanced to the foot of the bed, leaned toward me, embraced me and disappeared. Immediately I sprang up; the room was absolutely dark; no one was there. I lit the gas; I was trembling, and a cold sweat bathed my whole body.
The following morning, when breakfasting with Dr K and Mr P I spoke to them of this occurrence. I was so overwhelmed, despite all the dictates of reason which I brought to bear, that I decided to send a telegram to my wife, but without daring to explain to her openly that she was my real concern. Some hours later I received her reply ‘We are all well’.
When I returned home, several days afterward, I was at once struck by the fact that my wife was particularly interested to know if I had slept well on Saturday night. After some questions and answers not to the point, I ended up asking her why she put these questions to me.
She then confided she was reading Hudson’s Psychical Phenomena in which it said that if a person, at the precise moment when he loses consciousness in falling asleep, fixes his thoughts upon another person and wishes to appear to that other person under certain conditions, the latter will experience the impressions the experimenter wishes to make him feel.
After having read this passage, she had her mind upon the desire to appear to me and to embrace me.