![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Crisis Apparitions
Mar. 1st, 2023 10:55 am
Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.
Today: Crisis Apparitions: Spectral Visions of the Living
February 9th, 1884.
In the higher part of the door was a glass window, and I all at once, in the darkness, saw a face looking through that window. The face was very well known to me, though for the instant I did not associate it with the original, as she was 300 miles away. I instantly opened the door, found nobody there, and then searched the ivy with which the porch and house are covered. Finding nothing, and knowing it was impossible anyone could have got away. … I at once knew the face was that of a married sister-in-law of my wife’s. I told all our family of the circumstance directly I got home, and judge of our dismay when we had a letter to say she died at the very hour I saw her. Monday was the evening I saw the face, and on Wednesday, when we were at dinner, the letter came.
W. Goodyear.
—Apparitions of the Living Vol 1 p. 523
The story goes like this: when someone is in a moment of crisis, whether it be death, near-death, or just a time of great anxiety, they can project an image of themselves to a loved one. The image can speak or be silent. It can look ghostly— someone floating above the floor, shining with radiance, or resting in a coffin— or it can seem exactly like a real person visiting. Many times crisis apparitions are comforting: a beloved family member coming to say a last goodbye.
Check out the blog post for the whole story, and some spectral writing prompts, such as:
Raise your hand if you’re not here. Some crisis apparitions appear to whole groups of people at once. What’s creepier than that, to my mind, are the cases where everyone in a group sees or hears the apparition— except one. Various explanations are possible: the group could be pranking the poor holdout. The person might be less susceptible to either mass hallucinations or actual psychic phenomena. Perhaps they’re the only person there who doesn’t know the dying person. Or maybe the dying person just really hates that one guy and is giving him the deathly-cold-shoulder.
Ao3 ~ DannyeChase.com ~ Linktree ~ Serial romance ~ Ko-fi ~ Newsletter
