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 ?1) 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,...