Strange New England

“Yesterday upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away…

When I came home last night at three

The man was waiting there for me

But when I look around the hall

I couldn’t see him there at all!

Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!

Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door…

(slam!) 

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away…”

-Hughes Mearns “Antigonish”

When I was a boy I had a friend named Petey. He went everywhere with me and I spent long hours in his company. We made forts and played army men and constructed bows and arrows out of twigs and string. He was about my age and I imagined he lived down the street and he would visit me from time to time when I was lonely. We had many adventures together.  I would even tell my mother things he had said to me and my mother would ask, “Who told you that?” and I would tell her in no uncertain terms, “Petey”. She’d smile and nod and say, “Oh, him.” 

 Years later she reminded me of him, this invisible friend of mine, and I suddenly remembered him. My recall is dim and vague, but he’s there hiding in the corner, still a child while I’m a man. Strange, because I know he wasn’t…or isn’t…real. But for a while there, back when I needed someone, a friend my own age, he appeared. And then, one day, he went away. Was he real? No, of course not. It’s a well documented phenomenon – many children have imaginary friends. No one gives it a second thought. Kind of quaint, really. Except, I remember him…and if I remember him, he must have been real, right? Sure felt real at the time…

But there are instances of people, grown adults, who in times of great trial and adversity, report that someone has appeared in the hour of their most dire need. 

Over the centuries people have often described people who might not really be there, whose existence defied logic and yet, there they were. They seem to appear just when they’re needed, when you’re all alone and in dire straits. They offer their guidance, give advice, even pull you out of the ditch and then, as inexplicably, they disappear. Guardian angels? Friendly ghosts? A manifestation of the unconscious mind?  Many people claim to have had such a visitation from such a person who, upon reflection, they realize, probably couldn’t have been there. People who have experienced them report a variety of experiences, from interacting with these people and having conversations to simply knowing that there was ‘someone else’ nearby and that they were there to help. 

If you wanted to categorize these ‘people who shouldn’t be there, but are,” you might include the concept of a ghost. I don’t mean the kind of ghost that lingers transparently and emits a faint white glow in the darkness. But some people claim to have met someone, had conversations and interactions with them only to later discover that the person they were speaking of was no longer among the living and that their encounter was paranormal. You used to hear these tales only from people who trusted you, from people who knew you wouldn’t make light of their experience. Today, Internet sites like Reddit offer safe places for people to share their stories, which almost always occur solely to one individual. Here is a prime example from the Ghosts reddit user group. It’s called, “Hard to explain – have I spoken to a ghost?” 

“I used to work as an ambulance dispatcher, and regularly dealt with some grim jobs. Rarely spoke to patients except to get their location or gain access when crews couldn’t locate or access. One night we had an elderly woman who was uninjured on the floor and it took us a couple of hours to get a crew to her. She was phoned on two or three occasions by a clinician to ensure she wasn’t worsening – she had her phone with her on the floor and answered it each time and was reported as in good spirits (the notes said she kept apologising, said she felt silly and didn’t want to make a fuss, bless her). Our crew got to her front door and predictably couldn’t get in, but there was a keysafe. I called the patient, and she answered. She was alert and sounded tired but very much ‘with it’. I asked her for the code, hung up and radioed the code to the crew. They were in and beside her within a minute, and they immediately radioed back to say the patient was dead and was stone cold – as though she had been dead for some time. It freaked me out, and I rationalised at the time that an old lady on the floor would likely be quite cold anyway and she may have just died in the minute between speaking to her and the crew getting in HOWEVER I related this to the crew in the belief that if she had only died that recently CPR should be started and could be effective. They (being the licensed healthcare professionals on scene) decided against this, but did hook up the ECG and found no trace on her at all. I even went through my due diligence to confirm we were at the right address, correct job details, patient names and everything matched. I called the phone number I spoke to the patient on and the crew confirmed it was on the dead lady.

It’s always sat oddly with me, because even if I didn’t speak to an old lady from beyond the pale I at least heard her last words and we might have saved her life being there earlier.”

This was one of thousands of interactions people on Reddit have described and, real or not, points to a common theme. People interact with someone who is no longer physically capable of interacting. Or at least they think they did. 

There’s another kind of ghost who can appear when needed. Sometimes, when the life of a person is in extreme danger, someone appears who assists them and helps them make it through. One of the most interesting historical examples of this kind of helper is from Joshua Slocum’s account of the first solo circumnavigation of the globe in his sloop, The Spray. His journey took three years and covered 46,000 miles, all of it alone. Well, almost all of it. In his book, he writes about being sick with food poisoning after a stay at the Azores.  He writes,

“The wind, which was already a smart breeze, was increasing somewhat, with a heavy sky to the sou’west. Reefs had been turned out, and I must turn them in again somehow. Between cramps I got the mainsail down, hauled out the earings as best I could, and tied away point by point, in the double reef. There being sea-room, I should, in strict prudence, have made all snug and gone down at once to my cabin. I am a careful man at sea, but this night, in the coming storm, I swayed up my sails, which, reefed though they were, were still too much in such heavy weather; and I saw to it that the sheets were securely belayed. In a word, I should have laid to, but did not. I gave her the double-reefed mainsail and whole jib instead, and set her on her course. Then I went below, and threw myself upon the cabin floor in great pain. How long I lay there I could not tell, for I became delirious. When I came to, as I thought, from my swoon, I realized that the sloop was plunging into a heavy sea, and looking out of the companionway, to my amazement I saw a tall man at the helm. His rigid hand, grasping the spokes of the wheel, held them as in a vise. One may imagine my astonishment. His rig was that of a foreign sailor, and the large red cap he wore was cockbilled over his left ear, and all was set off with shaggy black whiskers. He would have been taken for a pirate in any part of the world. While I gazed upon his threatening aspect I forgot the storm, and wondered if he had come to cut my throat. This he seemed to divine. “Senor,” said he, doffing his cap, “I have come to do you no harm.” And a smile, the faintest in the world, but still a smile, played on his face, which seemed not unkind when he spoke. “I have come to do you no harm. I have sailed free,” he said, “but was never worse than a contrabandista. I am one of Columbus’s crew,” he continued. “I am the pilot of the Pinta come to aid you. Lie quiet, senor captain,” he added, “and I will guide your ship to-night. You have a calentura, but you will be all right tomorrow.” I thought what a very devil he was to carry sail. Again, as if he read my mind, he exclaimed: “Yonder is the Pinta ahead; we must overtake her. Give her sail; give her sail! Vale, vale, muy vale!” Biting off a large quid of black twist, he said: “You did wrong, captain, to mix cheese with plums. White cheese is never safe unless you know whence it comes. Quien sabe, it may have been from leche de Capra and becoming capricious—”

Having passed out from his pains, Slocum slept while the Spray continued on without a living man at the tiller for 48 hours. The winds blew fiercely and the Spray must have been tossed about like a toy in the water. However, when he awoke, he went above deck and saw that all was well. He writes, 

“I found, when my pains had gone, that the deck, now as white as a shark’s tooth from seas washing over it, had been swept of everything movable. To my astonishment, I saw now at broad day that the Spray was still heading as I had left her, and was going like a racehorse. Columbus himself could not have held her more exactly on her course. The sloop had made ninety miles in the night through a rough sea. I felt grateful to the old pilot, but I marveled some that he had not taken in the jib. The gale was moderating, and by noon the sun was shining. A meridian altitude and the distance on the patent log, which I always kept towing, told me that she had made a true course throughout the twenty-four hours. I was getting much better now, but was very weak, and did not turn out reefs that day or the night following, although the wind fell light; but I just put my wet clothes out in the sun when it was shining, and lying down there myself, fell asleep. Then who should visit me again but my old friend of the night before, this time, of course, in a dream. “You did well last night to take my advice,” said he, “and if you would, I should like to be with you often on the voyage, for the love of adventure alone.” Finishing what he had to say, he again doffed his cap and disappeared as mysteriously as he came, returning, I suppose, to the phantom Pinta. I awoke much refreshed, and with the feeling that I had been in the presence of a friend and a seaman of vast experience. I gathered up my clothes, which by this time were dry, then, by inspiration, I threw overboard all the plums in the vessel.”

Many people over the years indicate that Slocum knew he had made up this character as a way to deal with desperate situations. Before his sickness he had been reading a biography of Columbus and it is not a stretch of the imagination to think that he might have simply imagined this whole incident. In his writing, he treats the incident humorously, as a way to deal with the real danger that might have been his last night on earth. However, it is interesting to note that when he meets the ghost again he makes sure to explain that this time, of course, he meets him in a dream. Why write that? Perhaps Slocum felt a need to share his experience with the world in his book because he felt a real sense of gratitude for real help received when no real help was available. 

In a similar incident in 1954, two deserters from the French Foreign Legion jumped ship and found themselves adrift on a small raft in the Strait of Malacca. Being a busy shipping lane, they had supposed they would be rescued within hours by a commercial vessel but that did not happen. The currents took them into the Indian Ocean without food or water, pursued by sharks and the capricious nature of the waters and waves. During the 32 day ordeal, one of the men died, but the other, a Finn named Ensio Tiira, managed to stay alive. He later wrote, “For the whole voyage I’d had the strange feeling that someone else was with me, watching over me, and keeping me safe from harm.” (Tiira, 1954, p.151.)He does not describe the person, has no conversations with this person. He simply indicates that he wasn’t truly alone at a time when he desperately needed someone.

Again and again, solo sailors encounter these strange companions at sea who did not originally set out on their voyage with them. A German doctor, Hanne Lindemann, sailed alone across the Atlantic in 1956 and was convinced he was accompanied by an African companion who cheered him on and gave him reassurance. It happened often during his journey. He writes, “Often, as I awoke, I looked around for my companion, not realizing at once that there was nobody else with me.” (Lindemann, 1958, p. 144)

Some of these visitations at sea occur with survivors of shipwrecks or sinkings. During World War II, 12 merchant marines whose ship, the Lulworth Hill  had been torpedoed by an Italian submarine, drifted on the Atlantic for fifty days. Two people survived the fifty day ordeal, Shipwright Kenneth Cooke and able-bodied seaman Colin Armitage. Cook wrote a book about his experience. He reported that a young crew-mate who had died on the 25th day of the ordeal repeatedly spoke to him and told him that some of the men would live to tell their story. Cook contemplated throwing himself overboard to end his suffering, but the voice of his crew mate stopped him. He lived to tell their story.

There is a name to this phenomenon. It is called the Third Man Effect and the title comes from a line in T.S.Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land published in 1922. Eliot wrote, 

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?”

Elliot claimed he was inspired by a story told by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. In 1916 Shackleton was traversing South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic with two other men. They had travelled through some of the most violent weather and angry seas on earth in a small boat called the James Caird. Shackleton’s entire Antarctic Expedition force was marooned on an island hundreds of miles away and no one on earth knew they were there. They had already been given up for dead. So there was an urgency for Shackleton and his two companions to safely make it across that mountainous, glaciated island to a whaling station on the opposite side. They had no real cold or snow gear, just some rope and  an axe. They trudged over land that no one had ever traversed, something not repeated for nearly a century. By all accounts, they shouldn’t have made it. But somehow, they did. Miraculously, they did. Later, upon quiet reflection, each of the three men who crossed South Georgia commented in their writing that they each had felt there was a ‘fourth presence’ walking alongside them, sharing their treacherous journey, helping them along the way. Shackleton later wrote about it in his book South. This passage in the book has a spooky effect on many who read it, including T.S. Eliot. These three men had no reason to confabulate an extra person on their journey, but they each swore that there had been four crossing that impossible terrain, not three. 

Again and again, people in dire straits have discussed this same effect, this shadow companion. They often do not describe ‘seeing’ this other person, only ‘feeling’ their presence. Pilots experiencing  health emergencies in midair have described a calming influence who helped them make their way to a safe landing. A man named Ron DiFrancesco was one of the last people to escape the South Tower of the World Trade Center during 9/11 and he describes being trapped in the smoke and fire only to have a presence appear urging him to get up and follow him through the darkness to safety. Peter Hillary, the son of Sir Edmund Hillary, was climbing Everest when he became separated from his party, a deadly circumstance. A companion was perceived nearby and he gave him words of encouragement to keep going, to push through exhaustion and fear, all the way to safety. 

Perhaps each one of us has the ability to create this unseen (and sometimes seen) presence, that it is possible we create these beings so we will not be alone in times of trial and uncertainty. Over and over again, people who have survived desperate situations have described listening to these beings, following unspoken guidance. 

The father of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, believed that the mind could create its own ghosts, its own invented people, in desperate times. The mind sees a need, an emptiness that needs fulfilling and then, if no actual person can fill that emptiness, the mind makes a person, a phantom, a ghost, an angel. When something is missing or desperately needed, something arises, not from an external place, but from within. We all have plenty of voids in our lives, but on a rare occasion, the void is an abyss and we can conjure what we need to see us through. 

Does that make these ‘third men’ imaginary? Possibly. But if something that we are unaware of imagining helps us through, it might as well be real. And we might as well call them ghosts or angels or tulpas. Because whatever they are and wherever they come from, they seem to arrive when we need them the most and accompany us through to the light and safety. Guardian angels? Helpful spirits? Our own personality bifurcating into another person to make it easier for us to understand what do to next? Who knows? But one thing is for certain, dear listener. If you find yourself in an impossible situation and a strange, calming presence makes itself known, know that it is there to help you. You would be wise to follow its advice.  

LINKS

Reddit Post: “Hard to Explain – have I spoken to a ghost?”

Raft of Despair by Ensio Tiira

Alone at Sea by Hannes Lindemann

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot