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By Glynis Amy Allen & Graham Adrian
“Wait a little,” said Frank Iriam to his mate. “Let’s sit on that old log for a few minutes and have a smoke.”
After the war, he wrote about what happened next. ‘When we were a hundred and fifty yards from the cover of some trees, I’d had a feeling of impending evil. I felt a premonition something was about to happen.’ Sure enough, a moment later a five point nine inch shell came over, hitting directly on their path. Had they carried on walking they would have been killed.
Back in London, England, towards the end of WWII the city was under attack from V1 and V2 rockets. Mr J O’Carroll was returning home on a Tube train when, out of nowhere, he had a sudden vivid mental vision. He saw himself standing in King’s Cross station, his destination, and heard a terrific explosion. This had such an impact on him that when he arrived at King’s Cross he waited for several minutes by the bookstall.
‘If there’s anything in it,’ he said to himself, ‘it should happen now.’ It did. A rocket fell on the Presbyterian Church in Regents Square and blew Mr O’Carroll’s flat to bits.
Even a certain Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler seemed to lead a charmed life, emerging unscathed from several battles during WWI. Later, he wrote about an occasion when his life had been ‘miraculously saved’.
‘I was eating my dinner in a trench with several comrades. Suddenly a voice seemed to be saying to me, “Get up and go over there.” It was so clear and insistent that I obeyed mechanically, as if it had been a military order. I rose at once to my feet and walked twenty yards along the trench, carrying my dinner in its tin can with me.
‘Then I sat down to go on eating, my mind being once more at rest. Hardly had I done so when a flash and a deafening report came from the part of the trench I had just left. A stray shell had burst over the group in which I had been sitting.’ Sadly, of course, millions of soldiers were not so fortunate and many of them had premonitions of their own deaths. ‘We have to look death in the face,’ wrote Canadian soldier, Angus Martin.
An English newspaper published a letter from a lady who said that her neighbour, a reservist, had been called up in 1914. Privately, he had given her his wedding ring and said that he knew he wouldn’t be coming home. She was to give it to his wife when she got the telegram saying that he was missing.
For months he wrote letters home regularly. Then one day, his ten year-old son came crying into the lady’s house and said, “I saw my father’s ghost at the end of my bed. He spoke to me but he had a wound in his chest and he said, ‘I am not coming home, son.’”
The neighbour took the wedding ring to the man’s wife and told her what the boy had said. She replied that she already ‘knew somehow’…
As well as the many such accounts by soldiers, there are thousands of similar stories told by everyday folk of receiving important information without having any idea where it comes from.
Alice was driving steadily along a deserted highway at night and approaching green signals at an intersection. “Something told me to slow right down. There didn’t seem to be any reason for it. But moments after I reached the junction a speeding car ran the red light to the right. It would have hit me if I hadn’t stopped.”
Bill worked the production line of a steelworks. “I had a sudden feeling that something wasn’t right and backed off.” Moments later, a section of pipe slipped and molten hot iron at 1500 degrees poured out where he’d been standing.
From life-saving instincts to simple premonitions – a friend’s name comes to mind and a few minutes later they phone us, or in conversation with a stranger we know exactly what they’re about to say – it is surely perfectly clear that our minds have senses far beyond the physical. There are moments when nearly all of us have slipped into an alternative state of consciousness where time and distance seem to be irrelevant.
The mind has extraordinary powers. Telepathy has been demonstrated with odds of billions to one against chance, even when the subjects were shielded from electromagnetic energy in Faraday cages or separated by thousands of miles. The US and Soviet governments have actively, and successfully, engaged in remote viewing. Such experiences are usually denied by science or by those in high office simply because, of course, we have no idea how they can happen, we don’t yet understand the energies involved.
But with so much evidence, should we not take the unconscious mind more seriously? The English psychic Chris Robinson has been in regular contact with the police and intelligence agencies due to having precognitive dreams about several IRA bomb attacks in London in the 1990s. In 2001 he had two extraordinarily accurate dreams about the World Trade Centre attacks. In one of them, a plane was hijacked and flown into a large building in New York City, whilst the other showed a plane crashing into two tall New York tower blocks. Chris sent detailed notes and drawings to the US embassy in London but was not heeded.
The examples described so far have all occurred spontaneously, yet perhaps there are ways of deliberately downloading information from ‘the higher mind’. The ancient Chinese certainly thought so and developed the oracle I Ching, or Book of Changes, some three thousand years ago, to interpret the subtle energies in our lives and predict how they’re likely to turn out. It’s surprisingly easy to use. A random act such as tossing coins suggests a particular chapter in the book and some specific paragraphs.
The British author Nigel Peace tells of his first experience with the book. He was applying for a new job, a promotion, and wanted to know if the prospects were good. The interview had gone well and everything seemed promising. But the reading was shocking, clearly referring to ‘misfortune’, ‘a danger of injury’, and a need for ‘great determination’. Not very encouraging!
Well, he wasn’t sure he could trust a book’s advice, and really needed the extra money, so he took the job anyway – and entered a two-year nightmare. His car was vandalised, he was personally assaulted and he struggled to keep on top of the job with no support from management. None of these things could have been known in advance by any normal means. Nigel writes that he soon learned to respect the book…
Many accounts of paranormal knowledge are dismissed simply because those involved have no ‘status’. How do we know they can be trusted? Well, in fact there have been many in high office and of undoubted reputation, from President Abraham Lincoln to Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, who have spoken publicly about consulting psychics or having personal precognitive experiences.
Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) was a scientist who made his name by discoveries and inventions in electrolysis and electromagnetism, including the first moving coil loudspeaker and the first Morse Code transmission. He also carried out extensive investigations of radiation. He lost his son in the First World War; Second Lieutenant Raymond Lodge, twenty-six years-old, had been fighting with the Second South Lancashire Regiment.
Lodge was persuaded by his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to sit with the well-known trance mediums Alfred Vout Peters and Gladys Osborne Leonard, and he documented these meetings in detail, publishing his account in 1916.
Raymond did indeed communicate through each medium separately and at different times. For example, he gave a detailed description of a regimental photograph in which he appeared shortly before his death. The Lodges were not aware of this photograph, but two months later the mother of one of Raymond’s fellow officers sent them a copy of it. It was exactly as Raymond had described it. Another time, when Sir Oliver was testing the medium, Raymond referred to one of his brothers by a nickname known only among the siblings.
Sir Oliver, an eminent scientist and physicalist, was deeply impressed by the accuracy of these communications and became convinced that Raymond’s surviving spirit was in genuine contact.
Some three decades later, Air Chief Marshall Hugh Dowding was invited to a sitting with the renowned direct voice medium Estelle Roberts. Dowding had been Commander-in-Chief of RAF Fighter Command, overseeing the Battle of Britain that defeated the Nazi invasion of England in 1940. Nicknamed Stuffy because of his mannerisms, he did not make friends easily, yet he was known for his humility and sincerity. He was a no-nonsense, clear-thinking military man and a committed Christian, but had been very saddened by the loss of so many young pilots.
During this meeting, some eight fallen servicemen, both pilots and sailors, communicated. They provided clear evidence of their identities and of the fact that they were perfectly aware of events on Earth. Several of them also spoke directly to Dowding with great respect, thanking him for his caring leadership. This and other similar experiences affected him deeply to the point that he pursued an interest in Spiritualism and later became involved in the Theosophical Society. He wrote of his belief in an afterlife and in reincarnation, and soon afterwards became a vegetarian and an anti-vivisectionist.
Such total changes of belief and lifestyle by men of the highest reputation and undoubted integrity speaks volumes about the powerful impact of their spiritual experiences. There will always be those, of course, who doubt the real origin of spirit communication and there are alternative theories, such as C G Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’.
Yet the sheer detail of all the accounts given here
surely suggests one thing beyond doubt:
that every one of us has an extraordinary mind
that can reach far into alternative worlds of consciousness.
Our new book, Ghosts of War, has well over two hundred such spiritual stories told by honest men and women from America, Britain, across the world and throughout history. It is written as a tribute to the many who have given their lives so that we may be free.
Glynis Amy Allen & Graham Adrian are co-authors of the new book Ghosts of War, with more than 200 true accounts of communication with the spirits of those who have fallen in battle, published worldwide by Local Legend.
