A friend of mine told me that his mother saw his father sitting in a chair in the living room. The problem was, he had been dead about a year or two. She said that it wasn’t anything she could see through, or anything spooky, or he didn’t do anything creepy, she just said that she saw him quite distinctly, as if he were right there with her.
Of course, he vanished, so, and the mother didn’t say anything like his ghost visiting her regularly, or anything mystical, so IIRC, she just shrugged it off. I didn’t want to say she was nuts, or hallucinating, or anything, in case I said the wrong thing. Also, AFIK, it was a one-time occurence.
OK, if she’s happy with that, that’s fine…but, my question is, is this a normal widowhood experience? If not, what is the medical/psychological explanation for it? Or, what percentage of widows/widowers report this?
BTW, they had been married for a little over 50 years, if that ties in.
I’m guessing she saw his residual self-image. Whether or not that is a ghost, specter, bullsh*t, hallucination, or what I don’t know. But we have no way to verify ghosts exist, unless, you see one with your own two eyes and can come how convince others you actually saw it.
Personally, I see no reason to not believe people who see them…unless there is some harm involved, it’s all pretty innocuous if you ask me.
You were of course right not to say anything, but it was a hallucination. There’s no other possible explanation. Well, I won’t entertain any other possible explanation.
Did he sit there a lot? If they were married 50 years, and he sat there a lot, she could just be used to seeing him there. The human brain is always adjusting our vision because of things like blind spots, it isn’t a huge leap to it filling things that are expected, and have been seen for a majority of a person’s life.
The big problem in trying to claim it’s a ghost is evidence. Yes, she saw something. That’s all we have to go on. The brain does lots of things that can trick us, our senses are not perfectly reliable. This has been studied a lot, and we’re always finding more. We have evidence for this. Whereas, the evidence for ghosts is in the ‘none’ range. Concluding that something odd happened with her senses is a much sounder conclusion than ‘it was a ghost’.
Oh, there are plenty of other explanations. She might have dreamed the incident. She might have mis-filed an old memory of actually seeing him in the chair from back when he was still alive (it seems like it was only yesterday!). She might have seen a blanket or something draped over the back of the chair which, combined with lighting conditions and the way the shadows fell, looked sort of like him. She might be lying, or at least exaggerating. It could have been any number of combinations of these possibilities.
You don’t have to be mentally ill to have a hallucination, and there is such a thing as a “waking dream” as well. Or maybe it was a ghost. Whatever, as long as it gives her pleasure and she doesn’t want to spend her pension check on Sylvia Browne I say don’t argue it.
I like to call these sorts of events “rounding”. Someone sees or hears something, it suggests X, so they declare it to be X. It happens with fish tales, where the big one gets away. They say they “amost had him” when it actually just poked the hook with his nose. Then there’s people who see grandpa’s nose in a potato chip, so they’re like “Hey, I ate this chip that looked just like grandpa.”
I think your OP lady saw a shadow/blanket/reflection that reminded her of her husband so she’s like “Hey, I saw my dead husband today.” If you pressed her (rudely), I wonder if she’d go “Well, OK, I guess I didn’t.”
Probably not, in my experience. People get some notion into their heads, and reality isn’t going to interfere. Even if someone else was there, and could definitively say, “No, it was the shadow on the blanket,” she’s already made up her mind what she saw. And she’s told people about it. She’s convinced of what she saw.
Think of all the UFOers, faced with evidence that they saw a low-flying Cessna, still insist it was Martians. The human mind is indeed a strange thing.
Not necessarily. I wouldn’t classify something like “blanket draped over the chair and a trick of the lighting” as a hallucination, since (unlike a hallucination) she could in principle have taken a photo of it, and other people might look at it and see the same thing. A true hallucination couldn’t be photographed at all.
I’m also not sure I would classify a mis-filed memory as a hallucination, since at the time the event supposedly occurred, she wouldn’t necessarily have been experiencing anything.
Chessic, would you call hotflungwok’s ‘filling in’ a case of ‘rounding’? Would the rest of you call it a hallucination? I think of hallucinations as things that the brain is calling up wholesale, rather than just filling in. I’m willing to be corrected if hallucination covers that, though.
As an example: I once saw an insurance sign what wasn’t there. I was driving down the street in Davis with my parents in the car. They were looking for an Independent Insurance agency. They had the address. I could not remember ever seeing one on that street, but we were following the numbers.
My Mom said that the numbers said we had passed it, and I said, yeah, it was right before the old theater. It’s a little bitty thing. Both my parents asked if I was sure and as I turned to go around the block I said, yeah, I saw the sign in the window, it was a big neon I.
Well, we park and walk back and there’s the agency, but no sign in the window. Just a little white building front with overhanging foliage and very small address numbers. They conduct their business and I ask about the sign. Seems that they do have the sign I saw, but it’s out for repairs.
Now, I did not remember the sign before I ‘saw’ it. If you had asked me where the agency was, I would have sworn that there wasn’t one on that street. But I had driven down the street many times. Some part of my mind noticed and filled it in. And it was helpful that it did that. I’m guessing that if I had been less distracted by driving, the fill-in wouldn’t have happened. But maybe not.
Would you call that a hallucination? I’m guessing that no one would say that I saw the ghost of the sign. It was out for repairs, not dead.
Another thing no one has mentioned yet is this phenomenon I read about in an OTC medical book. Apparently if you lose someone very close to you, your psychological need is so great, your mind will actually sometimes make you see them. According to the book, it is a very common occurrence. I don’t have the book, and I can’t provide a link naturally.
It usu. isn’t so dramatic though. Often, you just “see” them in other people around you. This happened to my mother when she lost her favorite aunt. Shortly after she died, my mother kept remarking that strangers looked like her. It is apparently only a problem if it persists.
It might have been something along these lines; I believe the phenomenon is known as ‘priming’, and essentially describes how our expectation of what is there to see actually shapes our sensory experience. The gist of it is, our visual apparatus doesn’t work by assembling the ‘image’ out of all the data points it receives (that’d be much too computationally demanding), but rather forms certain hypotheses about what the image contains, which are then tested for falsification. That way, relevant information can be acquired much faster, and we can react to our surroundings more immediately – just think of the early man in the jungle with the tiger: if he had to ‘construct’ the tiger out of the data – there’s a thing, it’s a certain size, it’s yellow, wait there’s also black, there’s some movement etc. --, the time it takes to get to ‘holy shit it’s a tiger! Run!’ might well be fatal; plus, any error in this system may lead to missing the tiger altogether.
If now seeing a tiger was part of his expectations, and the visual apparatus were instead tasked with dispelling that hypothesis, it only needs to find out that it can’t – which can be done very quickly – before the appropriate reaction can be initiated. Any mistake in this process might lead to failing to falsify the hypothesis, but of course, false positives – seeing a tiger were there is none – are far less dangerous than false negatives – missing the tiger.
So, all it takes is a small glitch in the system that’s supposed to dispel the hypothesis, created through years of experience, that the husband is sitting in his chair, for there to actually be a visual experience of the husband sitting in his chair.