The Cenotaph:

Let me begin at the beginning.

A long time ago, I had a dream where I, as the invisible Dreamer/Protagonist, was in a museum in what I knew was modern South Africa. The museum was presided over by two young tour guides, male and female; both very blue-eyed, blonde; obviously of Dutch extraction. The foyer of the museum was very brightly lit, very white, with portraits hanging on the wall, red carpeting, a little lectern, or whatever for the male tour guide (who didn't look much older than eighteen) to stand at. I am not certain why I was supposed to be there, but I had the creeping, dawning realization that I was not allowed to leave Either the museum, South Africa, or this dream. But, regardless, the scene, in the way of dreams, shifted. Suddenly I seemed to be walking the cobbled streets of London; or, perhaps, some cobbled court, as I take it this was the modern world.

In the center was what looked to be a huge obelisk; a monument of marble, with steps leading up to the inscriptions on the side. It could have been Cleopatra's Needle, for all I know, but I take it it was a cenotaph, a monument to war dead; perhaps since we were just in South Africa, it was the Anglo-Boer war? (Most likely, I now think, that is correct.)

Though the court seemed deserted (it was bright daytime), there had been some sort of ceremony, and many people had obviously come forth to leave...relics, perhaps old jewelry, dresses and bits of clothing, silver brooches, and old medals and medallions; that sort of thing. Perhaps they left a few candles to burn down and blow out. But, what was astounding, were the pictures.

Old photographs, most, most likely, those of soldiers, the decorated and the fallen, the forgotten; at Flanders, in the Ardennes; most assuredly in South Africa, too. Many battlefields of yore; I don't know many of them.

One portrait stood out eerily, though, amid the rest (most of which are indistinct in my memory). I woke up with the image of a bearded, Victorian face, burned into my inner eye.

W.T. Stead

It was a few days later that I came upon the image of the man in my dreams. Or, at least, the picture of the man in my dreams. It was an image of an old-time muckraking journalist, an early proponent of socialist reform; and, a man said to have foreseen his death. It was the portrait of a man that had had a double career as a writer concerning socialist reform and the exploitation of women and children, and also as an investigator of spiritualism and psychic phenomena. It was the doomed W.T. Stead; incidentally, he died the night of April 14th, 1912, in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, a distinguished passenger aboard the RMS Titanic.

Psychic Shipwreck

There are myriad psychic occurrences reported around the sinking of the RMS Titanic, not the least of which is the fact that it sunk in mid-April, a period of the year when major events, most specifically revolutionary events or tragedies (such as Hitler's birthday, Lenin's birthday, Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine, etc.) seem to occur with startlingly regular frequency. I examined this odd "black corridor" of the year in my small article "The Black Corridor," posted here at Vocal.

The most famous example of a psychic link between the world of the sensitive or seer, and the most famous maritime disaster in all of history, is the novel Futility, by Morgan Robertson, a novel that postulates a fictional ship called the "Titan." This ship, only twenty-five meters shy of being the exact size as its real-life counterpart, is said in the novel, as its counterpart was in real life, to be "unsinkable." It then hits a fictional iceberg, going down, carrying nearly the exact number of souls to a watery grave as the real-life Titanic would fourteen years later.

Both the fictional ship and the real ship carried just the bare regulation number of lifeboats. Both went down (Robertson's only in his novel, of course), in mid-April. Believe it or not.

(Incidentally, both the literary Titan and the RMS Titanic both were struck on their starboard side. Both captains, named SMITH, went down with the ship.)

Whether or not Robertson had a psychic vision of disaster or not, he denied, ever afterward, being clairvoyant. Be that as it may, how life imitated art in this regard was beyond disturbing.

But, there are other psychic incidents reported around the sinking of the Titanic.

A letter was mailed from chief officer Henry Wilde to his sister, during the Titanic's final layover in Ireland, expressing an "uneasy feeling about this ship." He was right to have written her thusly; he became one of the victims.

Presidential advisor Archibald Butt was also feeling the psychic quivers of apprehension concerning the ill-fated voyage. He altered his Last Will and Testament just before setting sail, telling his sister it was just in case "the old ship sinks."

He, likewise, went to a watery grave.

Nearly FIFTY passengers are known to have canceled, unaccountably, their voyage aboard the ill-starred star of the White Star line. This included the fabulously wealthy Vanderbilts, who, instead, ordered an incredibly unlucky servant, last name of Wheeler, to accompany their luggage (which was already aboard) to New York. Needless to say, he never arrived.

Others, such as Eva Hart and maid Annie Ward, reportedly could not sleep easily, anticipating the sinking of the ship with a feeling of "impending doom." And then it happened. (Both of those women, of course, survived the ordeal, living to tell the tale.)

The Angel of the Titanic

One apocryphal tale concerns a woman named Renee Harris and a mysterious man that approached her just after the Titanic left port. Cryptically, he asked her, "Do you love life?"

When Harris replied in the affirmative, the strange man then said, "Then you'll get off this ship as soon as we reach Cherbourg. If we make it that far."

Then the man disappeared. Or, rather, Renee Harris didn't run into him again until the tragedy. She, of course, also survived to tell the tale.

Author Paul Amirault, who recounts the preceding accounts in his excellent article "Premonitions, Paranormal, and Psychic Phenomena Involving the Titanic", does note that both Harris and the man had just witnessed the massive Titanic in a near collision with the steamer City of New York--thus foreshadowing, in the mysterious man's mind, the disaster that was to come.

One Step Beyond

The early days of television brought us a program called "One Step Beyond," an anthology show of psychic stories that predated the somewhat similar feeling "Twilight Zone." The latter is infinitely more well-known. "One Step Beyond" was hosted, much like "Zone," by a dashing fellow, John Newland, who came on to deliver an opening and closing monologue. He had a very unearthly, almost haunted gaze in his eyes, perhaps calculated as part of the performance; but it suggested to the viewer he was almost entranced on another wavelength, really touching something invisible; setting the tone for the unbelievable. He echoed Ripley's famous "believe it or not!" tagline, by suggesting, "Those that have experienced it, they believe it. They know. They've taken that ...one step beyond."

The episode of "One Step Beyond" that has as its inspiration the psychic occurrences surrounding the sinking of Titanic is the episode "The Night of April 14th." It stars Patrick Macnee as the husband of a woman whose haunting dreams of a sinking ship do not, unfortunately, dissuade the newlyweds from taking the maiden voyage on the doomed vessel. Alas, in the end, she is the only survivor, fighting with her husband about taking her seat with the ladies on one of the few lifeboats. Other incidents in the episode include an anonymous man walking downstairs, confiding in his friend that, for the first time in his life, he feels "really afraid." He speaks of hearing in his mind a peculiar "grinding sound." Of course, it is the grinding of the ship-iron against the fatal iceberg.

Yet another scene has a painter in far away New York City producing a drawing his wife opines is "horrible," but is nevertheless his "best work." It is a scene of people drowning at sea, a ship sinking.

Finally, we are treated to a small vignette of the Titanic's minister, eerily sitting, repeating the numbers "446... 446...446..." over and over again, slowly, as if receiving them from the Great Beyond. He goes to his hymnal. The page number in the hymnal is to the hymn, "Lord we Pray You Hear Our Plea, for Those in Peril on the Sea." He informs his secretary that it's what they'll be singing at chapel tonight.

MacNee, by the end of the episode, is left to die aboard the ship, sending his wife off, against her will, in one of the lifeboats. The episode is par for the course as far as "Step," one of their solid offerings recounting the psychic lore of an even older, bygone age.

Stead's Folly

W.T. Stead was advised NOT to book passage and sail by a medium. Or, so the legend goes. He disobeyed this particular prognostication and paid with his life.

Beforehand, he completed a novel of a maritime disaster, a shipwreck much in the manner of Morgan Robertson's literary shipwreck which preceded it. Stead was a socialist reformer, a champion of his times for the plight of the poor and exploited; a crusader against child prostitution and other social ills. He was also, as noted, a confirmed believer in psychic mediumship and Spiritualism. Why he disregarded the warning of the medium (and, by some accounts, his troubled dreams, and personal misgivings), is anyone's guess. The night of April 14th, 1912 would prove to be the last night he spent incorporated in a bodily vessel upon this earth.

But the Titanic, and Stead's death aboard it, are not the chief subject of this article. The subject is what seems to be a communication of sorts, by Stead, or Spirit using the image thereof, as related to the dream described.

Best Psychic Stories

I run a small press, Zem Books, which specializes in reprints of books on esoteric and arcane topics. Some of this is philosophic literature; some of it is intentionally subversive. This is because I have a particular philosophy about publishing. In my view, only the most challenging and often incendiary texts deserve careful preservation and consideration. I've published everything from Nietzsche to Ragnar Redbeard, Emma Goldman to Aleister Crowley, Bakunin and Kropotkin, and even Mussolini and the Marquis de Sade. Of course, I've also published books by Hereward Carrington and W. Walker Atkinson; books on occult topics; fortune-telling, palm reading, psychic development, and ghosts.

One such book, Best Psychic Stories, is an old thing from the early Twentieth Century, an anthology of a mixed bag variety, featuring literary tales of the supernatural by writers such as Poe and Blackwood, alongside non-fiction articles by writers such as Jack London and W.T. Stead. These latter are concerned with true-life accounts of psychic phenomena, such as spirit materializations and ghost photography.

The latter is the specific subject of Stead's article.

Spirit Photography

Often the subject of fakery or fraud, alleged "spirit photographs" were a popular item in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Popularized by William Mumler, who was decried by none other than P.T. Barnum as a fake at a famous trial, the practice of capturing dead relatives--or, at the very least, their phantasmal images--on film, offered solace to those that had lost loved ones in devastating wars such as the Civil War and World War 1.

Of course, the vast bulk of this photographic work is nothing but obvious frauds; double-exposure techniques used by unscrupulous charlatans to prey upon the grief and gullibility of the bereaved. Mumler himself was tried for fraud and, though acquitted, found his lucrative business forever after ruined. Still, there ARE puzzling and even disquieting ghost photographs that cannot be so easily explained. Stead's article concerns a London photographer who becomes increasingly frustrated at the odd, unaccountable images that seem to creep into his photographic portraits, much to the dislike of his clientele. Or, at least, initially.

Stead's father, active and close to the events of the then-current Anglo-Boer war in South Africa, went for a sitting with the said photographer ("Mr. B"), and was amazed at the mediumistic skill proffered by the photographer, who claimed that he felt he somehow "magnetized" the plates with an energy in his own body--but that, after a while, it made his "innards feel turned upside-down."

Stead examined the weird shadows and draped features of the ghostly images that would appear near sitters. The photographer himself clairvoyantly, and even clairaudiently, "heard" the spirits, and visualized the photos as they might appear before they were even taken. Stead, while sitting with a friend, was instructed to change positions with the other man seated. This was in keeping with the desire of the spirit of a woman communicating with Mr. B--.

To everyone's amazement, the image of the woman, wearing her ghostly, shrouded garment appeared behind Stead. Everyone agreed that it was the woman herself; however, since she had sat with Mr. B for portraits before, this development hardly ruled out the possibility of fraud.

One of the second photographic plates taken that sitting DID contain the seemingly ghostly image of a woman that no one recognized. It was soon after that Mr. B began to attract sitters seeking spirit photographs of their deceased relatives, people he had never before done portraits of and had never even set eyes upon. Though not always successful, he was, more often than not, able to produce spirit photos of the friends and relatives of the living sitters, many of whom were astounded and thoroughly convinced that no fraud had ever been perpetrated. And, indeed, if it were fraudulent methods the man employed, then how, pray tell, did he do it? Stead's father confessed he had not a clue.

Rhodes

Cecil Rhodes, the wealthy adventurer and founder of Rhodesia, who, acting as an agent of Her Royal Majesty's government, helped launch the bloody Anglo-Boer war in South Africa, had been dead for nine months when he began to contact Mr. B as to appear in a photograph. Using the image of literal "roads" at one point in the photographer's mind (as a Reader, I can attest to the fact that Spirit often uses visual metaphor in a sly, ironic way), Mr. B informed Stead's father, who had been to Rhodesia and Southern Africa, and met Rhodes, that "Roads" would appear, and even gave him a description of the man. It did not, at the time, ring a bell.

However, an image that was unmistakably that of the recently deceased Cecil Rhodes DID appear, and, interestingly, one that looked the age of him fifteen years earlier. Returning to my dream I described earlier, the cenotaph, featuring the photograph of Stead and other ghostly photos, as well as photos of soldiers I assume were killed during the Anglo-Boer conflict, betokens the connection between ghost photos, South Africa, and W.T. Stead. What is the spirit, or Spirit, trying to convey here? There is a further connection when we read the rest of the account.

"Piet"

A spirit with the unmistakably South African sobriquet of "Piet Botha" contacted the photographer. Appearing as he claimed he would, photographed in a sitting, Stead's father planned to wait until the South African delegation came to London to make inquires as to the image and "Piet Botha." One delegate, of whom Stead's father was in contact, confessed himself at a loss as to who this Botha might be, although Mr. B had it from the spirit that he had been a fellow of some repute.

By happenstance, a man who saw the photograph recognized this Piet Botha, however. Coming into the photographic shop and confronting Stead's father, he demanded to know how the men had managed to secure a portrait of his dead brother-in-law, who had been killed at the battle of Kimberley. Stead's father said they never used such an image, and the man himself left, troubled.

Reading this account, the various tendrils of my dream seemed to be invested with significance; the location and imagery were a kind of coded speech, a message to me. But, conveying what, I still wonder.

Thoughtography

Ted Serios was an alcoholic, unemployed bellhop in the mid-1960s, but he had a rare gift, what Charles Fort might have termed a "Wild Talent." Ted could hold a little tube he called a "gizmo" up to a camera, and produce "thoughtographs"; i.e., psychic images of distant objects. These images were often indistinct, surrounded by black; however, in some instances, they were unmistakable as the locations themselves.

There were, of course, often distortions, even misspellings of signs in the photographs. Very strange. Serios (described by Dr. Jule Eisenbud, who wrote the book The World of Ted Serios, as "an extremely mentally unstable character," one who would "blubber, wail, and beat his head against the floor" when things weren't going well) was an uneducated man, also an alcoholic; these images seemed to reflect the shortcomings in his knowledge and education. Did he simply imprint images from his imaginings, somehow, on the film? Was it thought transference, clairvoyance? Or was it some combination, colored by his own subconscious mind until the signal evinced the minor discrepancies, errata, and distortions? Predictably, debunkers such as the late James Randi had a more prosaic explanation of Serios's seeming remarkable abilities: he was a fraud.

They maintained that the image was hidden in the tube-like "gizmo" Serios held up to the cameras (many of which had been secured against the possibility of tampering). Dr. Eisenbud believed in Serios until he died in 1999, pointing out the rigorous fashion in which he and other investigators secured the photographic equipment against fraud. (Indeed, it IS hard to account for ALL of Serios' psychic feats as mere trickery, as when he managed to make a mental imprint by simply grabbing a dead television studio camera.)

Could "Mr. B" have simply been imprinting images on his photographic plates using thought transference? Did spirit communication actually take place, or was it simply images born in the mind, the psychic or subconscious impressions transferred, in some fashion, we cannot yet understand, onto photographic film?

The Message and the Meaning

I do not know if W.T. Stead was trying through dreams of his photographic image, through the image of the cenotaph and the weird, unaccountable story of his father and a spirit photographer that I happened to publish, to communicate some message to me. I know that, since childhood, I have felt displaced in time, as if I belonged in the sitting room of a Victorian home.

When I was a little boy, unlike the other children, I wanted to be dressed in a miniature suit. And my mother bought me one, too.

I loved the world of Sherlock Holmes, and knew that to be, somehow, "my world." The true world, for me at least; the one I "belonged" in.

I also knew, the first time I set eyes upon the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, South Africa, that I had been there...before.

To quote Lovecraft: "For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century..."

The "Outsider" in Lovecraft's story stretches out his hand to touch a surface of polished glass. His reflection on the surface of the mirror reveals to him the truth of his being. We are all simply illusions, reflections of our own perceptions; outgrowths of the Universal Mind, Universal Conscious Awareness.

The photographic image, the film image, are both nothing more than illusions of light. In the case of an old photograph, pressed upon the emulsion and captured on a piece of film, to crumble behind glass.

We live in a digital age, but the echoes, the illusions of our perceptions, and what lie beyond those perceptions, undetectable by the naked eye or ear, are still manifesting as audio-visual evidence from another state of being, a higher frequency or plane.

In Bernard Pomerance's play The Elephant Man, John Merrick tells Dr. Treves that he creates models to "create forms of things that exist only in Heaven." (Not a direct quote.)

Our spirit photographs and disembodied, paranormal voices, are such forms.

Our dreaming minds visualize the illusion. Communication between Higher Source and YOU occurs; As Above, So Below.

But in this case, the question is: Why?

And I have yet to definitively find an answer.