§ 5. The types that next claim notice are peculiar in that they involve no coincidence with any ostensibly abnormal condition of the agent. Evidence that certain hallucinations are telepathic, and not purely subjective, in origin may be afforded by coincidences of a different sort. Thus, a person may have a hallucination representing a friend in some costume in which he has never seen him or imagined him, but which proves to have been actually worn by him at the time. Or again, several persons, at different times, may have had a hallucination representing the same person, though that person was apparently experiencing nothing unusual on any of the occasions when his form was thus seen. Clearly it would be difficult to regard a repetition of this sort as accidental. It being comparatively a rare event for a sane and healthy person to see the form of an absent person at all, that two or more sane and healthy persons at different times should see the form of the same absent person, is, on the theory of chances, so unlikely as to suggest a specific faculty on the absent person's part for promulgating telepathic impulses.

This latter type is important from its bearing on the question whether the peculiarity of organisation which conduces to telepathic transferences belongs rather to the percipient or to the agent, or (as experiment would lead us to suppose) in some measure to both. To decide this question we should naturally ask which happens the more frequently - that the same percipient, or that the same agent, is concerned in several telepathic incidents. Now of repetitions to the same percipient we have several examples;1 but that the same agent should figure repeatedly is made unlikely by the very nature of the ordinary type of case, which implies (over and above any natural peculiarity of organisation) an exceptional crisis - indeed, more often than not the crisis of death, through which no one can pass more than once. The only chance for a dying agent to show a special faculty for originating telepathic impressions is by impressing several persons; and cases of simultaneous or collective percipience, which may possibly be so explicable, will be considered later (in Chapter XVIII (Collective Telepathy Cases)). Meanwhile the cases where telepathic impressions seem now and again to be thrown off at haphazard, and independently of death or any other crisis, are theoretically of at least equal interest.

For they tend to confirm what experiment would lead us to suppose, that agency as well as percipience depends on specific conditions as yet unknown; and this dependence on peculiarity of constitution in two people would go far to account for an otherwise puzzling fact - the rarity, in comparison with the number of deaths and crises that take place, of spontaneous telepathic incidents connected with them.

1 The evidence for one instance may of course be better than for another or others which may have fallen to the experience of the same percipient; but the following cases [included in this volume] seem at any rate worth considering in respect of this feature of repetition: Nos. 21, 38, 56, and 184; 44 and 116; 77 and 263; 126 and 201; 191 and 280; and perhaps Nos. 99, 692. See also the account which Thomas Wright, of Birkenshaw (the champion of the Wesleyans in the North of England), gives of his aunt's experiences (Autobiography, pp. 5-7). Mrs. Newnham affords another instance, but with her the agent has always been her husband (pp. 50-57, and cases 18 and 35). Compare in this respect cases 90 and 700. [The percipients in cases 73, 74, 80, 86, 161, 274, 311 had other experiences included in the original edition but not here; and there are percipients mentioned by Gurney in this connection none of whose experiences are included in the present volume. - Ed].

Of the class of repeated hallucinations representing the same person, we have about five presentable records. [Three of them are given here; 255 and 258 being omitted. - Ed.] Most of the incidents therein described seem to illustrate what may be called purely casual agency; but in a few of them the agent's state was more or less abnormal - which is so far of course in favour of a telepathic explanation of the phenomena. The first account is from Mrs. Hawkins, of Beyton Rectory, Bury St. Edmunds.

"March 25th, 1885.

(254) "I send you my cousins' accounts of my apparition.

"I have also sent you the account of my next appearance, which unfortunately cannot now be related by the eye-witness.

"Again, a third time one of my little sisters reported that she had seen me on the stairs, when I was seven miles off - but she might so easily have been mistaken that I have never put any faith in that appearance. Then I was about 20.

"For many years after that these appearances seem to have entirely ceased, but in the autumn of 1877 I was seen in this house by my eldest son, then aged 27, who may, I hope, give you his own account of it.

"Lucy Hawkins." Mrs. Hawkins prefaces her cousins' accounts thus: -

"The event described in the enclosed accounts took place at Cherington near Shipston-on-Stour, in Warwickshire, the residence of my uncle, Mr. William Dickins, who was for many years chairman of Quarter Sessions in the county. The ladies who saw the appearance are two of his daughters, one of them a little older than myself, the other 3 or 4 years younger. I was then just 17.

"The only mistake that I can discover in either of the accounts is that Mrs. Malcolm says I had been hiding with her 'brother,' whereas I had really been all the time with her sister, Miss Lucy Dickins - a fact of no importance except that she (Miss D.) might (if necessary) bear witness that I had really been with her all the time in the washhouse, and so could not have been near where I was seen.

"I remember we were all somewhat awed by what had happened, and that it broke up our game. I myself quite thought it was a warning of speedy death; but as I was not a nervous or excitable girl, it did not make me anxious or unhappy, and in course of time the impression passed off.

Writing to Mrs. Hawkins in September, 1884, Miss Dickins said: -

"Georgie [Mrs. Malcolm] is coming here on Friday, and I propose then to show her your letters, and Mr. Gurney's, and that we should each write our impressions of what we saw independently, and see how far they agree, and we will send the result to you. It is all very fresh in my memory, and I can at this moment conjure you up in my mind's eye, as you appeared under that tree and disappeared in the yard. I even recollect distinctly the dress you wore, a sort of brown and white, rather large check, such as was in fashion then, and is now, but was in abeyance in the intermediate years".

Shortly afterwards Miss Dickins wrote: -

"Cherington, Shipston-on-Stour.

"September 29th, 1884.

"I send the two accounts which Georgie and I wrote about your apparition. We wrote them independently, and so I think they are wonderfully good evidence, as they tally to almost every particular, except the little fact that I thought she joined me in searching the yard for you, and she thinks not - but that has nothing to do with the main fact of the story, our entire belief that we saw you in the body".

"In the autumn of 1845, we were a large party of young ones staying in the house, and on one occasion were playing at a species of hide-and-seek, in which we were allowed to move from one hiding-place to another, until caught by the opposite side. At the back of the house there was a small fold-yard opening on one side into the orchard, on the other into the stableyard, and there were other buildings to the left. I came round the corner of these buildings, and saw my cousin standing under some trees about 20 yards from me, and I distinctly saw her face; my sister, who at the moment appeared on the other side, also saw her and shouted to me to give chase. My cousin ran between us in the direction of the fold-yard, and when she reached the door we were both close behind her and followed instantly, but she had entirely disappeared, though scarcely a second had elapsed. We looked at one another in amazement, and searched every corner of the yard in vain; and when found some little time afterwards, she assured us that she had never been on that side of the house at all, or anywhere near the spot, but had remained hidden in the same place until discovered by one of the enemy. "S. F. D".

" I well remember the incident of your ' fetch' appearing to us. I believe I wrote down the details at the time, but do not know what has become of that record, so must trust to my memory to recall the circumstances, and do not fear its [not] being faithful though nearly 40 years have passed.