Apparitions

    Introduction

Apparitions have been sighted both in the past and in the present. Although they are believed by many to linger only in areas known to be haunted and whose history is rich when it comes to past battles, deaths or other highly emotional events which are thought to leave their mark on the ether of a building, apparitions can also be seen in places such as homes, woods and roads. Some people believe that they are the ghosts of individuals who for some reason must roam the earth plane for all eternity - often reliving some event that occurred in their lives. This they must do until they have paid for their sins or have been released from the physical world and sent to the light by a medium or exorcist. One myth that is not true in real life is that apparitions are always transparent. But real-life reports of apparitions show that this is not the case. In this article, the world of apparitions will be explored - from examples and types of apparitions to a peek at the plethora of possibilities that might account for why people see apparitions - or claim that they do.

Apparitions vs ghosts

Some people refer to apparitions as ghosts, but it is important to note that the two types of phenomena are not necessarily the same. 'Ghosts' are thought to be spirits of dead people or animals that are supposed to roam their old haunt. Types include anniversary ghosts, which are the same ghosts seen on the same date by different people. Apparitions, whilst commonly also thought to be discarnate spirits, may not actually be the projections of deceased people or animals, but rather the projection of living people.  

Examples of apparitions

On p.34 in Is There An Afterlife? by David Fontana, an account of the apparition of Professor Arthur Ellison is given. Professor Arthur Ellsion was twice a President for the Society for Psychical Research. His apparition was seen by a sceptical member of his family and is as follows:

The sighting took place in Arthur's home, in daylight, on the evening of his death in September 2000. Daphne (psuedonym) was alone in the house at the time with Marian, Arthur's wife. Although naturally upset, she was not in tears, and nothing was impeding her vision. However, while in the hall she clearly saw, through the lightly frosted glass door of the lounge, Arthur walk across the room. She reports him as appearing as solid and objective as in real life, and she was able to describe the clothes he was wearing. The only part of her description that did not fit was Arthur  was that he was no longer limping, and appeared free of the hip problem that had affected him towards the end of his life.

Not surprisingly, Professor Ellison's wife described Daphne as "white and shaking". Another interesting example can be found on pp. 43 - 44 of Loyd Auerbach's ESP, Hauntings and Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist's Handbook:

… I was at another friend’s bachelor party, becoming very bored … while the other guys were watching a few of those colorful super-8 movies. I stood in the kitchen, fixing a drink and feeling a bit strange. Having felt the same way before when I had a few other experiences … I suddenly had thesensation of being two places at once. I was in Mike’s kitchen and I was also standing in my friend Danita’s living room. We had a short conversation, partly about the bachelor party, partly about other things, and I recall her saying she knew I was having an OBE and was only “dropping in”. I mentioned that I’d write down a few notes when I “got back” to Mike’s, and said goodbye. I found paper and pen, wrote a few notes (time, conversation details, etcs), which coincided with what Danita remembered about the situation.

Types of apparition

Auerbach cites G N M Tyrell's four categories of apparitions, which are:

• Post-mortem apparitions: these are seen after a person has died - for example, in Is There An Afterlife?, Fontana describes an experience that was reported to him, in which a lady saw the apparition of her elderly neighbour at round about the time in which that person actually died.
• Crisis apparitions: these are seen during or after the person is in the dying process. For instance, a daughter may be hundreds of miles away but see the apparition of her dying mother. When she returns home, her gut feeling that her mother had died whilst she was away turns out to be true. These are usually seen within a certain time frame of the person being dead - after a period of 12 hours since physical death, the person's apparition may not be seen anymore (although with supposed hauntings, this is clearly not the case).
• Hauntings - these are a subtype of crisis apparitions, and are when a particular location is haunted by a specific person in the form of an apparition or ghost that does the same movements or behaviour, such as being seen to continually walk along a particular part of their old house. Hauntings can also occur in association with particular objects.
• Apparitions of the living - these are apparitions that are seen of living people, like the  Auerbach's example mentioned earlier. These, according to Auerbach, are divided into two types: the "experimental" type, which is one that might be done by a living person with a deliberate attempt to appear as an apparition to perhaps a specific person in a particular location, and the 'spontaneous'  type which appears to be the sort that Auerbach described, since this happens without an intention to appear as an apparition. 

 

 Explanations

 There are numerous explanations for apparitions and these include:

• Hallucination - Apparitions may be hallucinations (hypnogogic primarily, but also perhaps hypnopompic) caused by a brain that is partially dreaming whilst the eyes are open. In this case, the apparition is no more than dream imagery and the interaction between the person seeing the apparition and the apparition may be no more that the dreamer interacting with the characters within their dream.
• Reconstructive memory - as amazing as tales of apparitions sound, it is difficult to know how well the person is recalling the event they claimed they witnessed. The memory of it can be reconstructed for multiple reasons. Firstly, the memory may be altered in order to dramatise the account - this would be ideal if the story was publicised in the press, and perhaps published as a book. Secondly, the memory may be altered as a result of post-event information: if there were multiple witnesses to the same event, they may exchange details of what they saw, and as a result, they may change their memory of the event to fit with what the other witnesses saw. Or the memory may be altered as a result of degradation, in which the memory may change over the weeks, months etc that follow the event. As a result, information recalled in one interview may differ to information given in another interview that is conducted two weeks later. Alternatively, the memory may be altered as a consequence of the individual reading up about apparitions or a similar topic afterwards.        The event may not have even involved seeing a full-blown apparition and may have just been a trick in the light that is recalled later on as being an apparition. The problem of reconstructive memory could be addressed by interviewing multiple people about the reported apparition, as David Fontana had for Daphne's apparition report. He found that the report he obtained from Marian, the Professor's wife, about the experience matched what he  and Montague Keen was told by the witness themselves.
• Financial gain - As mentioned above, an account about witnessing an apparition may be fabricated for financial gain. Such accounts - if allowed to seep into the media - can spread like wildfire into the public domain, resulting in money-making mania on the part of the host. 
• Attention-seeking - An individual may be motivated to publicise a report of seeing an apparition in order to gain attention from others. Clearly, this will be achieved through publishing the story in newspapers, amongst other things.
• Emotional need - A common explanation for why someone might see the apparition of one of their deceased loved-ones is because they emotionally needed to make that sighting. This may be due to a desire to find out if they are OK, especially if they themselves believe there is an afterlife but require personal proof that it is true. This could be why some people see apparitions, while others don't.
•  Astral projection - As has already been mentioned, there is the possibility that the apparition is the 'astral projection' of a living person, who, whether they are conscious of doing so or not, has projected an image of themselves onto another location in which their physical body isn't. A well-know example is that of a primary school teacher, whose pupils would often complain about seeing two copies of. The "etheric double" would usually be seen in another part of the classroom, apparently acting independently of its physical counterpart.
• Telepathy - An alternative explanation for why people see apparitions is that the person who is actually witnessing the apparition is doing so as a result of telepathically receiving information about what the person in the apparition wants to look like. For example, if a young person is attempting to project themselves at a friend's house whilst they are physically in their bedroom, they may project themselves at the friend's house wearing particular striking clothes that they don't normally wear. This explanation explains why some apparitions of recognisable family members of friends are sometimes seen with the wound that they had when they were alive - so that the family member or friend to whom they appear can easily recognise them. The explanation equally fits for why other apparitions of people are not see with the wounds that they had had when they were alive - because the apparition wants their loved-ones to know that they are healed and well. 
• Group telepathy - when an apparition is seen by more than one individual, this could also be explained by telepathy: individuals who subsequently see the apparition after the original person had could be picking up on the information about the apparition from the original witness through telepathically received information.
• Psychic ability - Some individuals may simply see apparitions because they have heightened psychic abilities or sensitivity than those who do not see apparitions.
• Retrocognition - For haunting-type apparitions, the witness may see the apparition due to using their own ESP abilities to access information about the previously living person from some source of information (such as the akashic records, but it is possible the source could also be from the location concerned or another person). The information is then animated by their subconscious mind. 
• Astral projection - With regard to apparitions of the living, such apparitions might be seen because of the individuals having projected themselves astrally to be in a certain place. Exactly what the substance is that forms the apparition is not something that is readily agreed on, since on one side of the debate it is argued that it is part of the soul that is seen (this could be linked in with the 5 spiritual bodies that each comprise different layers of the aura, with the 'astral' body being the main such body believed to be responsible for astral projection), while, on the other hand, it is argued that apparitions are no more than hallucinations.

Because reports of apparitions comes from witnesses themselves, the reliability of their memory of the event itself will always be questioned. However, is such cases where such events are seen by more than one witness, the details gathered from the report of it are seen as more trustworthy if they are collaborated independently by other witnesses - with whom the original witnesses have not spoken about the event they had all witnessed. This is important in order to avoid post event information gained from post-event discussion which would lead to, as mentioned earlier, the altering of certain details in order to fit what the other witnesses saw or didn't see.
    Not all apparition reports can be explained in this way. Although a further explanation for the experience might be that the person was on certain kinds of drugs, this unlikely to be true for all witnesses. Equally, not all witnesses have an "emotional need" to know that loved-ones are safe. For Professor Ellison's apparition sighting, David Fontana explained that Daphne (whose experience of seeing Professor Ellison's apparition was described earlier) was a sceptic of the paranormal and was only related to the Professor by marriage. So her sighting couldn't be down to emotional need.
Fontana further explains that she did not want the experience to be widely publicised, and wished to remain anonymous, which discounts the financial gain and attention-seeking possibilities. It is possible that although the experience can't be explained in terms of emotional need for the experience, that perhaps at the time in which she saw the Professor she was more receptive to incoming psi information - whether that was telepathically receiving the relevant information from Arthur Ellison's discarnate mind to form the image of his apparition for her to see or clairvoyantly seeing his apparition with her extra-sensory abilities - and consequently was able to have the experience.

As intriguing as apparitions are, whether tales of them are encountered in books filled with ghost stories, or a real-life witness describes what they personally saw, given that there are so many possible explanations for apparitions and why they may be seen, it is clear that they are not as good evidence for survival as a quick on-the-surface glance would have you believe. Like with any apparently psychic or "paranormal" experience, it is quite possible that different explanations account for different cases of apparitions depending on the underlying process or processes that were at work at the time. 

   

Further reading

Auerbach, L. (1986). ESP, Hauntings & Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist's Handbook. New York: Warner Books, Inc.
Fairley, J. & Welfare, S. (1985). Arther C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers. William Collins Sons & Co Ltd.

Fontana, David (2005)  Is There An Afterlife? Hants: O-Books.

Hugh, P. (1995). Supernatural Britain. London: Judy Piatkus (Publishers)

Jackson, Robert (2003). Ghosts.  London: Quantum Publishing Ltd

Reader's Digest - The most amazing haunted & myseterious places in Britain. The Reader's Digest Association Inc.

Robertson, T. (with Murray Scougall) (2010). Ghosthunter, Adventures in the Afterlife. Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing Ltd.

Roland, P. - (2007). The Complete Book of Ghosts. London: Arcturus Publishing Limited.