Observations placeholder
The apparition appeared on the same night, to two persons sleeping, one of them on the ground floor, the other on the second floor
Identifier
025132
Type of Spiritual Experience
Inter composer communication
Hallucination
Background
A description of the experience
Death and its Mystery – After Death – Camille Flammarian
The following account is from a letter sent me from Nantes on March 31, 1921.
There were two witnesses of the case which I am about to submit to you. One of them is now living in Nantes, in the same building and on the same floor with my aunt.
When this witness was a young girl, she had a position as nurse, in Paris, with a family which owned a little shop. At the table, when the conversation drifted to the general subject of the soul and immortality, the husband said to his wife, “If I die first, and. can come back, I will come and see you.”
Years went by; the husband fell ill, and died.
Sometime afterward the nurse was sleeping in the kitchen on the ground floor, behind the shop. She heard a noise in the cupboard, as if dishes were breaking. She got up, thinking that the cat had caused this noise, but she could not find the reason for it. Moreover, not a plate or a glass had been broken. Astonished, she went back to bed.
The noise began again. She had put out the light. She perceived at the foot of her bed a whitish form, which grew clearer in outline. In this apparition she recognized perfectly her former master. Terrified, she did not go to sleep again.
When morning came she went up to the first floor, to her mistress's apartment, taking her her breakfast, as she did every morning. She was struck by her mistress's paleness. She questioned her, and got this reply:
“Marie, just imagine-last night my husband appeared to me. I recognized him perfectly. He spoke to me, and said, ‘You see, we don’t die; I’m in need of prayers."'
The mistress said to the nurse, “Go and see if the children saw anything, for I’m uneasy.”
In an adjoining room the two little girls were resting quietly. Then the nurse told her mistress what she herself had seen. This case seems an interesting one to me, for the apparition appeared a rather long time after death, and on the same night, to two persons sleeping, one of them on the ground floor, the other on the second floor.
These persons had not told each other of their experiences. In this case, what becomes of the hypothesis of a collective hallucination ?
G.NEBERRY
(Letter 4407.)