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Science and the Spook – George Owen and Victor Sims

On the telepathic theory we need suppose only that the person in crisis, either consciously or unconsciously, transmits what, for want of a better word, we may call a thought or idea of himself.

When this reaches the percipient it is probably registered on some subconscious level of the mind, and then is translated by some means or other into a picture of the person concerned. Does the message ever fail to be successfully translated?

I received an extremely interesting account from a lady in Thornton, Lancashire, of an experience which seems very probably to be a telepathic message at a time of death crisis which failed to get completely translated into a crisis apparition. The lady writes:

One night at 9 p.m., I went into the kitchen to make my supper cocoa. The dining-room I had left was well lit and there was a good fire. On coming back into the room I was amazed to see a large grey mass of something I can only describe as being like a mixing of cement, with vapour rising from it. As I came near to the red American rocking-chair (new), the seat on which this thing was, it simply slithered into the floor.

The lady was of a practical bent and looked for natural causes of the mystery.

I moved the chair and took up the hearthrug, but there was no sign of anything. I had no cat that could have jumped off the chair. However a month later a friend's husband wrote to say that his wife had passed away on 28th November [1966]. That was the date of my Experience.

I naturally asked if my correspondent had been in touch with her friend and had any reason at that time to be thinking of her. But she replied that there had been no contact for a couple of years and she did not even know where her friend was living. The interest of this case, however, lies in the fact that while a percipient might by coincidence happen to have a vivid hallucination of her friend, and by coincidence it might happen at the time of the friend's death, no percipient will, coincidentally or otherwise, consciously think of a friend as a mass of wet cement. The distorted message is, in fact, a type of case which is evidently extremely convincing.