During the First World War, perhaps more than in any other war, paranormal experiences related to the deaths of individual soldiers became part of the documentary record. Many of these accounts were collected into various journals in England and France, such as the Occult Review (London), the Revue spirite (Paris), the Journal for the Society of Psychical Research (London) and in books such as Hereward Carrington’s Psychical Phenomena and the War (1918) and Rosa Stuart’s Dreams and Visions of the War (1917).
First-hand vs. second-hand accounts
First-hand accounts, where the witness describes his or her direct encounter with a spirit, should be distinguished from similar accounts of events involving séances and mediums where the spirits are encountered at second-hand (through a medium) and the likelihood of fraud is therefore greater. First-hand accounts, however, are open to a different type of criticism: that the witness of a spirit, often traumatized by grief and bereavement, may see nothing more than a projection of his or her own highly-wrought subjective state,
Nonetheless, a number of such encounters are not so easily dismissed. These would include instances where specific information, otherwise unavailable to the recipient, is accurately communicated by the spirit, or instances where the spirit is seen by more than one witness.
Psychical research a serious pursuit among many leading figures in the years preceding WWI
It should be borne in mind when surveying the large number and variety of such accounts-- often recorded in scrupulous detail-- that psychical research was undertaken quite seriously in the decades leading up to the First World War. Among those who pursued sober investigations into spiritualist phenomena -- often resulting in published studies -- were the physicists Sir Oliver Lodge and Nobel Prize winner Lord Rayleigh, the philosophers Henri Bergson and William James of Harvard, the musicians Scriabin, Stranvinsky and Schoenberg, the artists Mondrian, Klee, Kandinsky and Marc, the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray, and the writers Hugo, Ruskin, Tennyson, Doyle and Yeats. And this is by no means an exhaustive list. Societies of psychical research were not confined to the larger cities, but were found in numerous smaller towns throughout England and France. Serious interest in psychical phenomena was found in all strata of European society.
Spiritualism an alternative to conventional religion
Because interest in spiritualist matters was found to some extent among all classes in the years preceding the war, once the casualty rates began to soar, spiritualist beliefs, for many bereaved families, presented a viable alternative to conventional religion. Despite explicit warnings against spiritualism by church leaders, the possibility of communicating with a lost son, husband, or father, for many, outweighed the fear of violating church strictures. Organized religion -- especially Protestantism -- was largely silent on the subject of the dead, and so was powerless to offer the kind of consolation that many sought.
Psychical phenomena part of the cultural history of WWI
Whether what they describe is illusory or not, accounts of soldier apparitions constitute part of the cultural history of the First World War. Jay Winter, in his Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, considers such accounts key evidence in understanding the ways in which European society coped with the unprecedented scale of death in the First World War, a scale which left scarcely a town, village or family unscarred throughout the major warring nations.
The theme of “the return of the dead”, as Winter points out, was not confined to private paranormal experiences but, taking many forms, appeared publicly in the visual arts, film and literature, in public commemorations of war cemeteries and memorials, in anniversary observances, and in countless instances of the re-interment of the war dead. There were numerous ways in which the war dead, literally and figuratively, returned to their families and communities after the war. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of European society, above a certain age, was profoundly haunted by the dead for years after the war.
The apparition of Lt. Wilfred Owen MC, 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment
The English war poet Wilfred Owen was killed on November 4, 1918 while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal. One week later the war ended and on that same day, Wilfred’s brother, Harold, a naval officer, was on board the HMS Astreae off the coast of Africa, not yet having received word of his brother’s death in France. He was returning to his cabin to write some letters and, on opening his cabin door, was astonished to find his brother, Wilfred, in uniform, sitting at his desk. Harold asked Wilfred what he was doing there, and how it was even possible, since he should have been with his unit in France. Wilfred just smiled at him and didn’t answer, and after a while Harold understood that it was not possible for Wilfred to move or speak, though his eyes were intensely expressive. This experience continued for some time until, finally, Harold felt himself overcome with weariness and lay down on his cot, with Wilfred still sitting at his desk, and fell into a deep sleep. When finally Harold awoke he found his brother gone and he knew with certainty that Wilfred had been killed.
The apparition of Lt. E. G. M. Thornycroft, King’s African Rifles
On September 13, 1914, Lady Lilith Saville was attending morning services in the Scaleby parish church in Cumbria, England. She was standing beside an open window during the singing of a hymn and, chancing to look out, she saw her fiancé, Lt. Gerald Thornycroft, standing on the grass just a few yards away. This left her stunned, as she knew with certainty that he was over four thousand miles away with his unit, the 4th King’s African Rifles, in Kenya. Lt. Thornycroft, in fact, had been killed just the day before in action at Kisii, a small town near the frontier, east of Lake Victoria. News of Lt. Thornycroft would not reach England for another four days. A curious detail is that while Lady Saville had many snapshots from Africa of her fiancé in his casual khakis, she had never seen him in his uniform. Yet on the day his apparition appeared at the church in Cumbria, she saw him in his uniform -- which is what he was wearing when he was killed in Kenya.
Sources
- Carrington, Hereward. Psychical Phenomena and the War (NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1918).
- Owen, Harold. Journey from Obscurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
- Stuart, Rosa. Dreams and Visions of the War (London: C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., 1917).
- “The spirit of Lt. G.E.M. Thornycroft, 4th King’s African Rifles, seen standing outside Scaleby Parish Church in Cumbria, England, the day after he is killed in Kenya”. History and Lore of the Old World War (blog).
- Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Bradley Omanson - BJ Omanson
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