647. In the following case the apparition was seen by its original and by others at the same time. The account (taken from Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 217) came from Mrs. Hall, of The Yews, Gretton, near Kettering, and was received in December 1883.

In the autumn of 1863, I was living with my husband and first baby, a child of eight months, in a lone house, called Sibberton, near Wansford, Northamptonshire, which in bygone days had been a church. As the weather became more wintry, a married cousin and her husband came on a visit. One night, when we were having supper, an apparition stood at the end of the sideboard. We four sat at the dining-table; and yet, with great inconsistency, 1 stood as this ghostly visitor again, in a spotted, light muslin summer dress, and without any terrible peculiarities of air or manner. We all four saw it, my husband having attracted our attention to it, saying, "It is Sarah," in a tone of recognition, meaning me. It at once disappeared. None of us felt any fear, it seemed too natural and familiar.

The apparition seemed utterly apart from myself and my feelings, as a picture or statue. My three relatives, who, with me, saw the apparition, are all dead; they died in about the years 1868-69. Sarah Jane Hall.

[The dress in which the figure appeared was not like any that Mrs. Hall had at the time, though she wore one like it nearly two years afterwards. Mrs. Hall has had other visual hallucinations, which were all connected with illhealth or nervous shock; one which occurred a few months before that here described had represented herself as if "laid out."]

648. The question of the true import of collectivity of percipience renews in another form that problem of invasion to which our evidence so often brings us back. When two or three persons see what seems to be the same phantom in the same place and at the same time, does that mean that that special part of space is somehow modified ? or does it mean that a mental impression, conveyed by the distant agent - the phantom-begetter - to one of the percipients is reflected telepathically from that percipient's mind to the minds of the other - as it were secondary - percipients? The reader already knows that I prefer the former of these views. And I observe - as telling against that other view, of pyschical contagion - that in certain collective cases we discern no probable link between any one of the percipient minds and the distant agent.

In some of that group of collective cases which we are at this moment considering, this absence of link is noticeable in a special way. The agent may indeed be acquainted with the percipients, - as Mrs. Beaumont (645 C) was acquainted with the various persons who saw her. But there is nothing to show that any thought or emotion was passing from agent to percipients at the moment of the apparition. On the contrary, the indication is that there is no necessary connection whatever between the agent's condition of mind at the moment and the fact that such and such persons observed his phantasm. The projection of the phantasm, if I may so term it, seems a matter wholly automatic on the agent's part, as automatic and meaningless as a dream.

Assuming, then, that this is so - that these bilocations do occur without any appreciable stimulus from without, and in moments of apparent calm and indifference - in what way will this fact tend to modify previous conceptions?

It suggests that the continuous dream-life which we must suppose to run concurrently with our waking life is potent enough to effect from time to time enough of dissociation to enable some element of the personality to be perceived at a distance from the organism. How much of consciousness, if any, may be felt at the point where the excursive phantasm is seen, we cannot say. But the notion that a mere incoherent quasi-dream should thus become perceptible to others is fully in accordance with the theories suggested in this work. For I regard subliminal operation as continuously going on, and I hold that the degree of dissociation which can generate a perceptible phantasm is not necessarily a profound change, since that perceptibility depends so largely upon idiosyncrasies of agent and percipient as yet wholly unexplained.

That special idiosyncrasy on the part of the agent which tends to make his phantasm easily visible has never yet, so far as I know, received a name, although for convenience' sake it certainly needs one. I propose to use the Greek word ψuχoρραγώ, which means strictly "to let the soul break loose," and from which I form the words psychorrhagy and psychorrhagic, on obvious analogies. When I say that Mrs. Beaumont or Mr. Williams, agents in the cases cited in 645 A and C, were born with the psychor-rhagic diathesis, I express what I believe to be an important fact, physiological as well as psychological, in terms which seem pedantic, but which are the only ones which mean exactly what the facts oblige me to say. That which "breaks loose " on my hypothesis is not (as in the Greek use of the word) the whole principle of life in the organism; rather it is some psychical element probably of very varying character, and definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion or other of space.

I hold that this phantasmogenetic effect may be produced either on the mind, and consequently on the brain of another person - in which case he may discern the phantasm somewhere in his vicinity, according to his own mental habit or prepossession - or else directly on a portion of space, "out in the open," in which case several persons may simultaneously discern the phantasm in that actual spot.