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No Time and Nowhere

John Hunt Publishing Ltd

A Collective Hallucination and notes on three others

This is the most straightforward example of co-ordinated non-ocular imaging while awake that I have come across. In the course of a radio broadcast on apparitions and hauntings in 1936 Sir Ernest Bennett asked listeners to send him accounts of any experiences they had had. A Miss Anna Godley who lived in Leitrim in Ireland supplied this one. Her written report comes first, and then those of her two companions.

(Robert Bowes ψ1) One afternoon in February 1926 I went to visit a former old farm labourer of mine, Robert Bowes, who lived about a mile away but inside the place; it was about 2.30. He had been ill for some time but was not any worse. I had lately broken my leg and was in a donkey trap, the steward was leading the donkey and my masseuse walking behind. I talked to Robert through the open window and he sat up and talked quite well, and asked me to send for the doctor as he had not seen him for some time. I then came straight back. The road runs along the shores of a big lake and while the steward stopped to open a gate there, he asked me 'if I saw the man on the lake'. I looked and saw an old man with a long white beard which floated in the wind, crossing to the other side of the lake. He appeared to be moving his arms, as though working a punt, he was standing up and gliding across but I saw no boat. I said 'Where's the boat?' The steward replied 'There is no boat'. I said 'What nonsense, there must be a boat, and he is standing up in it,' but there was no boat he was just gliding along on the dark water; the masseuse also saw him. The steward asked me who I thought he was like, I said 'he is exactly like Robert Bowes, the old man.' The figure crossed the lake and disappeared among the reeds and trees on the far side, and we came home. I at once went to take off my hat and coat and to write a note for the doctor, but, before I left my room the bell rang and the doctor came in. I said I was glad to see him as I wanted him to go and see Robert Bowes; he said 'I have just been there' (he went in a car by a different road to the one I had been on) 'and the old chap is dead.'

That is all; but no living man crossed the lake, and there was no boat on it ... He (Robert) was quite plainly seen by all three of us. He was a remarkable-looking, handsome old man, full of Irish wit and humour and I must have seen him just as he was leaving this world. He has never been seen again.

The steward Robert Gallagher wrote on 3rd January, 1937:

... visiting a sick man on the estate. We had no idea that he was so near passing out of this earthly life, but on parting from him on his sick bed, and on our way home we were amazed when passing Killegar Lake, at the close of the same day, to see him walking on the surface of the water. His whiskers were floating in the breeze and when near the shore, in the shadow of the wood, he completely disappeared. We all three beheld the same sight.

(Author's note; sunset on that day was at about 1635.)

And on the same day the masseuse Miss Goldsmith wrote:

We had just left the cottage where the old man was lying in a terribly weak condition, and on walking back, we were impelled to glance towards the lake, and saw a shadowy, bent form step from the rushes, and into a boat, and after an interval, just disappear. We learnt later on that the old man had passed away at that moment. Though not in the least given to seeing visions, but being of an extremely practical nature, I certainly saw the spectre as I describe it.

Miss Godley wrote again on 11th March, 1938 to clarify a couple of points:

1. There was no boat on the lake when we saw Robert Bowes crossing. My masseuse thought he was standing up in one, but he wasn't; there was nothing except what looked like a pole being used by him to help himself across.

2. Robert Bowes had a white beard; in this country the people always call a beard 'whiskers'. Robert had both, and his beard streamed in the wind. Both beard and whiskers were white. There was no boat on the shore after we had seen the figure on the water.

In 2000, I telephoned Lord Kilbracken who was a cousin of Miss Godley and had inherited the estate on which she had lived. The Bowes episode was well known in the family. The big house looked out on the lake, the cottage was still standing as a ruin, and the gate was still there too. Lord Kilbracken said the figure must have been less than one hundred yards distant.

On the face of it the three of them were induced to create for themselves in the same general location and for the same length of time similar images of Robert Bowes crossing the lake when there was no one there, but that experience is a past event that cannot be proved by reasoned argument nor the facts confirmed by experiment. Our only option is to use personal judgement to balance probabilities.

The preliminary difficulty with all hallucinations is determining whether they are anything but observational aberrations. A real figure on the lake exactly as perceived, with a light-reflecting surface, with density and therefore with mass, is a supposition that has had its day. Physics does not allow it, it is impossible, and in any case a material entity would be much more difficult to explain than its psychological counterpart. The orthodox alternative is mistaken observation. If that is what happened a psychologist would expect to find among this muster of all the ordinary possibilities that follow one that would explain this and every other similar case.

1. The uniformity of the hallucination between observers can be attributed to chance.

2. The image could have been an illusion, a real external but indistinct object being misconstrued due to poor light, mist, rain, fogged spectacles, even bad eyesight, any of them perhaps coupled sometimes with exhaustion, fear, or anxiety; the image would be internally created and correctly reported but a mistaken interpretation of the inputs that had triggered it. As Shakespeare puts it in A Midsummer Night's Dream 'how easy is a bush supposed a bear'. The spurious image has to be close to a real one and not too implausible – a bush at night may be supposed a bear but not a cottage or a waterfall; nor may a static bush become a moving bear. If the illusory image moves any distance its physical trigger must move too. And if the experience is to be accepted afterwards there must also be some interruption to prevent the mistaken image being resolved in an ordinary way, such as the observer approaching the object more closely or studying it more attentively.

3. There was no external object but the observer imaged his or her expectations without any ocular input.

4. The reported image never existed at all. There are four possibilities:

(a) The observer was lying.

(b) Unprompted spontaneous self-deception, perhaps founded on generalized superstitions or beliefs unrelated to any specific expectations in the actual circumstances, might sometimes be sufficient cause.

(c) The reported image was not seen but the substance of it was induced unintentionally in the minds of suggestible observers by other people's comments at the time or later.

(d) A different image was observed but significantly misremembered later, or hugely modified by repeated discussion.

5. The cause of the images was pathological – mental derangement, alcohol, or drugs.

This is a review of the trio's experience against that list:

Chance

The lady of the estate writes as though this was her first experience of a hallucination and the masseuse specifically says that it was. That these two women should be supposed to have undergone a rare class of experience at the same moment by accident is incredible, as is their being simultaneously subjected to what was for each of them a unique lifetime experience for no reason; nor can I imagine a connection by chance to the third person present. Three people without prompting thinking exactly the same thought at the same time is improbable enough, but that they should all simultaneously image without optical stimulation the same improbable figure strains credulity past its limits.

Expectation

None of the observers could have had any expectation of seeing Bowes walking on water and created an image of him for that reason – this was the twentieth century. Neither the lady nor the steward supposed him near to dying – she saw him 'ill but not worse' and he 'had no idea' that Bowes was nearing his death. The masseuse saw him as 'terribly weak', but she was dismissive of fanciful imagery. Nor do the two women sound in the least prone to baseless superstitions. On the other hand the possibility of a subliminal indication of death is undeniable. Perhaps Bowes' wish to see a doctor could have suggested it; the image's 'crossing over' – the Styx, the Jordan, to the 'other side' – as a cultural metaphor for dying may suggest that the idea was in their minds already, but were all three toying with the same idea it still gives no reason to create any visual image of anything, much less that particular one simultaneously.

Illusion

Might there have been some real object on the lake each one of the three could each have misconstrued in the same way? As a general proposition there might, but the likelihood of each possibility diminishes on examining its details. If this supposed object were where it appeared to be, its general appearance must have been a man-sized vertical rectangle roughly 1.7 metres by 50 centimetres with a low sub-surface centre of gravity or a substantial submerged volume to keep it upright. There was no gale sufficient to move such a thing at perhaps a metre per second. May be the distance to some much smaller object was over-estimated, and therefore it appeared as larger and faster than it was? Lord Kilbracken put it about one hundred yards away, and the figure stepped into a particular stand of trees at a location that was for two of the observers part of their everyday surroundings. (The steward called them 'the' wood.) It is difficult to countenance errors of scale.

If there was no floating object could the observers have misconstrued something meteorological? Perhaps a patch of mist? That would not have had the necessary shape and density to resemble a man, nor subtended horizontally less than the quarter of a degree which Lord Kilbracken's range requires; and mist would have obscured much else besides. The same goes for a squall of rain which would for practical reasons have been immediately recognized for what it was by a temporally handicapped woman in an open donkey trap. No one reported mist or rain remaining when the hallucination ended.

What about the reflection of a cloud? Or a very localized patch of ripples? Either might have moved or disappeared suddenly, but both are commonplace sights to people who live by water, and in trying to interpret a puzzling image both these possibilities would have occurred to those viewers almost at once in the process of elimination. The same two of the trio who were familiar with that lake had known it for years under all meteorological conditions. And familiarity with the lake generally would allow them to resolve any other uncertain natural sight – as an example a skein of alighting ducks momentarily presenting a narrow vertical outline.

But none of it contributes to Bowes in particular.

And then there is plausibility. The image of Bowes must have endured for fifteen to twenty seconds to allow two of the witnesses in sequence to verify for themselves that they really were seeing so improbable a sight, and then to accommodate the remarks they made about it. A man standing on a lake, in a boat or out of one, is inherently implausible. However indistinct the ocular input, calm, alert, unhurried people mistaking an ordinary sight for an absurdity for that long is improbable to the point of preposterous; and why should the inputs be indistinct on a dry February afternoon about an hour before sunset? For this to be a mistaken visual image of a real object that thing must have been man-sized, vertical, moving, able to vanish without trace, and like enough to Bowes to make each of them create an image of him in particular. There is also the fact that the location of the image seems to have differed between observers. The steward saw a 'man on the lake' who 'near the shore in the shadow of the wood disappeared completely', apparently being on the water when first seen. The lady saw a man 'crossing the lake' to disappear 'among the reeds and trees on the far side' – on his way when first seen because she asks 'where's the boat?' The masseuse saw him 'step from the rushes and into a boat' and 'after an interval just disappear' – starting from the near shore but not apparently completing the crossing. If this was an illusion its physical prompt can only have occupied a single position.

No External Object

(a) If no image of any kind was experienced Miss Godley must have written two pointless lying letters to Sir Ernest Bennett, and then induced her steward and former masseuse to do the same. Why should they? Any one of them, never mind all three. Lord Kilbracken knew his cousin personally and repeated her story without hesitation. They do not sound like liars. Unless there is some category of habitually exuberant raconteurs who join together to spin outrageous yarns, mendacity seems to me straying from the possibilities in this case into new ideas on a different one.

(b) Might it have been a mistaken observation from the start? Not an illusion, a faulty image of some real sight, but the supposition of one based on nothing at all? There have been experiments showing that some witnesses to a contrived commotion grossly mis-report it, even immediately afterwards, creating or adding details from other contexts for which there was no basis in reality. However, they also show three other features. First, the process needs an actual event to initiate it, a real scene is the essence of all illusions; second that the majority get it right; and third, the errors are idiosyncratic and personal, each wrong in its own way, the only uniformity being in the reports that are correct. If the observers by the lake were wrong they were all wrong in the same way. These experiments do not account for that.

(c) If we suppose any one of the trio induced his or her companions by spoken words to create a spurious image at the time, it would have to be the steward asking whether the lady 'saw the man on the lake' because he spoke first. The ordinary meaning of those words is 'a man sitting in a boat', but that is not what the lady said she saw, nor what the masseuse saw either; for her it was not only Bowes that had to vanish but a boat also; besides, people do not ordinarily image anything on a suggestion from someone else. If you spent time among the tourists waiting on Westminster Bridge for Big Ben to strike the hour, asking them afterwards whether they had seen the dead dolphin on the low tide banks below them a few might say 'Is that what it was', and one or two might even say 'Yes I did'; but if you said to them at the time 'Look at the dead dolphin' – when they could make a contemporary check for themselves – they would all see nothing. The human visualising faculty is ordinarily proof against enduring disruption in broad daylight. And no words influenced the steward. The two women may have been subconsciously anxious about the old man's health and imaged the steward's 'the man' as Bowes 'passing over to the other side' for that reason. Perhaps so, but neither woman had ever experienced a visual hallucination before and it still leaves the steward seeing unprompted a non-existent man standing on the water.

(d) Possibly the trio did share some unusual visual experience by the lake but materially misremembered it? No doubt each person would have talked of it in their own circle from time to time (and Miss Godley must have done since her family knew about it), but that would not make their individual mistaken recollections converge on a single account. Rather the reverse, if the original observers are to amalgamate their various versions they must discuss it together. We cannot tell now whether that was likely to have happened – the steward and the lady having a cup of tea together now and again, or he later the masseuse's patient? However that might have been, Miss Goldsmith did not fall in with her employer's views on the absence of a boat. (Slight discrepancies are usual in shared hallucinations; there are other instances.) Then again, two facts underlying all misremembering scenarios are first that there must have been something to misremember, and then that the earlier interpretations should be entirely forgotten. If in this case the misrecollection was the simultaneous appearance to three people of something they took to be Robert Bowes on the lake, what was this thing that they all forgot? Another fact concerning memories is that although there are instances of spectacular mistaken recollections there are also instances of correctly recalling events in spectacular detail if they were as remarkable as this one was. My interviews with surviving merchant navy deck officers about the sinking of their ships in wartime taught me that memories of unusual events may not be comprehensive but what survives is usually accurate. I do not think uniform mis-recollection of so extraordinary a sight to be likely.

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Excerpted from No Time and Nowhere by Fergus Hinds. Copyright © 2015 Fergus Hinds. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
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