Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum

Author:Deborah Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

“BETWEEN THE DEATHS and apparitions of the dying person and the living a connexion exists which is not due to chance alone. This we hold as a proved fact. The discussion of its full implications cannot be attempted in this paper; nor, perhaps, exhausted in this age.”

Writing late and early, on gorgeous June mornings and damp July afternoons, Nora had finished the report of the Census of Hallucinations. Sidgwick planned to give a preliminary presentation at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology in August 1892.

Six countries had participated—England, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and the United States—and each group’s findings had confirmed the others’ work. The British census was the largest—17,000 surveyed—and the American study, coordinated by James and Hodgson, was second, with 7,123. All concluded that death-day apparitions occurred in startling numbers. The American survey found that these “ghosts” occurred at 487 times the rate predicted by chance. The British calculation was 442.6 times chance.

Both groups used a statistical formula worked out by Nora. Employing the British figures from the Registrar-General, she calculated that the chances of any one person dying on a given day were 1 in 19,000. The possibility of a given single event, such as a recognizable “hallucination” of a certain person, occurring on that same day was also one in 19,000. So for every 19,000 deaths, there should be only one such occurrence.

Out of their 17,000 respondents, 2,272 had claimed to have seen such an apparition near the time of death. The British SPR had winnowed this down to 1,300 by removing all reports in which dreams or delirium were noted. They then winnowed further to a narrow window of time. Only eighty of these sightings had occurred within twelve hours of death. They winnowed again, throwing out all cases in which there was chance of prior knowledge of when the death was expected, such as that of an elderly or ailing relative. They then removed from their list any ghost story that relied on only one person’s claim.

Thirty-two cases were left, and by Nora’s calculation, that was a big number. At a rate of 1 out of 19,000, they should have seen .0723 instances among the 17,000 surveyed. Instead, they had 32 cases with solid evidence behind them, which was 442.6 times the chance rate of .0723. Hodgson had used the same statistical process to arrive at the American numbers.

Despite that consistency, James worried that the numbers remained unconvincing. He felt dissatisfied with the U.S. census. It lacked the numerical weight of the British one; as he wrote to Nora, “our census has been a terribly slouchy piece of work and comparing it with yours makes me blush throughout.” He blamed himself; he’d paid scant attention to the weight of the stories until late in the research. Only while reading and verifying the reports had he discovered—as Edmund Gurney had done during the work on Phantasms—the compelling pattern they contained. By that time, he confessed to Nora, he had let the correspondence fall in arrears and run out of time to corroborate many of the cases.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.