On September 16, 1932, Peg left the home of her Uncle Harold where she was living, walked to the hill where the “Hollywoodland” sign was located, crawled up the hill, climbed a ladder perched against the sign’s 50-foot high “H”, and jumped to her death.
Fifty-eight years later, in 1990, a North Hollywood man and his girlfriend were walking their dog on a Beachwood Canyon Trail near the sign. Their dog began whining at the same time the couple spotted a young woman walking towards them. The young woman, dressed in 1930’s clothing, appeared to be in a dazed state. The couple thought she might be drunk or on drugs, so they decided to steer clear of her – but she just faded away. The couple didn’t know Peg’s story, nor that she was the woman they’d seen – until later.
What do we conclude about the three cases as a set?
All three of the cases we’ve just described have these points in common:
1.Each case involves a full body apparition that is clearly visible and recognizable as a specific deceased person.
2.Each case involves multiple witnesses unrelated to the deceased.
3.None of the eight “credible evidence” criteria are violated by any one of the three cases.
Given these points, we conclude that the three cases described are “credible evidence” of an afterlife.
In Chapter 5, we cover other “Apparitions” cases that are worth considering, since they satisfy the majority of our “credible evidence” criteria.
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Chapter 5. Additional Search Results for “Apparitions”
Are there other apparition cases worth discussing even though they don’t satisfy all eight of our “credible evidence” criteria?
There are many cases where a person has experienced an unexpected visit by a loved one, only to discover the loved one had died moments before the visit – and in some cases, the death had occurred a long distance away from the site of the visit. These cases – these “visits” – are known as “crisis apparitions”.
In most cases of this type, there is only one witness – the person being visited by the deceased loved one. Obviously, the lack of multiple unrelated witnesses violates two of our eight criteria: Criteria 5 and 7. One significant exception to this violation is the first apparition case we described earlier: Vice-Admiral Lord Tryon’s “visit” to Lady Tryon – and were it not for Lady Tryon’s party guests, she would have been the only witness to her husband’s “crisis apparition” in their London home.
There are literally thousands of these cases in the published afterlife material. Take a survey conducted in Iceland, for example. (16) In 1983, Erlendur Haraldsson of the University of Iceland mailed his “Survey of Claimed Encounters with the Dead”, to 902 statistically-representative people in Iceland. Of those 902 people, 181 of them returned their responses to the survey. Two years later, Haraldsson conducted follow-up interviews with 127 of the 181 respondents still available for interviews. And of those, 59 reported visual apparitions of the dead – “crisis apparitions”. In other words, 6 ½ % of the original 902 people surveyed reported seeing a “crisis apparition”. Since Iceland has a population of approximately 260,000, and since the survey by design was representative of the entire population, that implies 16,900 Icelanders may have witnessed “crisis apparitions” in 1983.
While Iceland may not be representative of other parts of the world, and while a mail-in survey is not the best way to collect representative data, these data are very interesting. Imagine for a moment, what that 6 ½% might suggest if Iceland were representative of other parts of the world: it would suggest that millions in the United States, and hundreds of millions in the world also may have witnessed “crisis apparitions” in 1983.
Earlier, we mentioned that in most cases of this type, there is only one witness to the “crisis” apparition”; and given one witness, two of our eight criteria are violated – Criteria 5 and 7.
However, there are some cases of this type where there are multiple witnesses – multiple family members who see the “crisis apparition”. In those cases, only one of our criteria is violated: Criterion 7. An example is the crisis apparition of Captain Eldred Bowyer-Bower, reported by England’s “Society for Psychical Research”: (17)
The Crisis Apparition of Captain Eldred Bowyer-Bower, 1917.
Captain Eldred Bowyer-Bower, a British Fighter Pilot in World War I, was killed on March 19, 1917, when the French Air Force shot him out of the skies over France.
At the time of Bowyer-Bower’s death, his step-sister, Mrs. Dorothy Simpson, was tending to her one-month-old baby Alexander in a Calcutta India hotel room, when she looked around and spotted the Captain looking “happy and mischievous”. She was surprised to see him, but not suspicious of his visit – she thought he might simply be “on a brief holiday”. She told Eldred she was glad to see him, and that they could talk just as soon as she put the baby down. She placed her baby in a nearby cot, and turned back to face Eldred, but he had vanished.
Meanwhile, in England, the Captain’s other sister, Mrs. Cecily Chater, was told by her two-year-old daughter Betty that “Uncle Alley Boy” (the child’s pet name for Bowyer-Bower) was “downstairs”. Mrs. Chater tried to convince her daughter that Uncle Alley Boy couldn’t be downstairs, because he was flying airplanes in France. The little girl insisted she had seen her uncle, but when the pair went “downstairs”, Bowyer-Bower was nowhere to be found.
Neither of the Captain’s sisters was notified of his death until a few days later.
So how should we interpret “crisis apparitions”?
While “crisis apparitions” are noteworthy, they are not considered “credible evidence” of an afterlife unless they satisfy all eight of our “credible evidence” criteria.
However, credible or not, there are thousands, if not millions of crisis apparitions that have presumably occurred over the years. Are we to believe they are all merely hallucinations – even when the apparitions are unexpected? And if some of them are not hallucinations, then what are they, and how should we think of them?
Before proceeding to Chapter 6, we just wanted to explain something to the reader. We know that all of the quotation marks and italics we use in this book may be somewhat distracting, but there is method to our madness. We keep terms in quotation marks that have precise meanings in this book that may not be exactly the same in other publications. And we use the italics to spotlight key words in the narrative so the reader won’t have to work so hard to see them. Finally, as to our four-step, four chapter process: it may seem redundant, but it is also consistent – and that’s why we use it. We hope the reader will continue to bear with us (and forgive our obsessive-compulsive nature).
Now, on to Chapter 6 and the second type of afterlife evidence we’re considering: “Medium Sessions.”
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Chapter 6. Definition of “Medium Sessions”
How do “medium sessions” differ from other forms of afterlife evidence?
Unlike apparitions, or past-life regressions, or bodily possessions, or audible communications from the dead, “medium sessions” assume we can communicate mentally with the deceased. “Medium sessions” require us to believe that we can establish some kind of telepathy with a deceased person. So how many of us actually believe we can mentally communicate with someone who has died?
According to a poll conducted by the Gallup Organization in Princeton, New Jersey, 21% of us believe that – at least that was true of the 1,002 adults over 18 years old who were