THE DEPARTED AMONG THE LIVING

This author, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Iceland, is no armchair academic, but one of the leading collectors of spontaneous cases of his time, notably of those suggestive of reincarnation collected on his many field trips to Sri Lanka and Lebanon. As his new book indicates, he has not overlooked the abundance of psychic phenomena to be found in his own country, where a recent survey revealed that nearly two thirds of Icelanders accept the reality of survival of physical death, one in three of these claiming to have had personal experience of some kind of contact with a deceased person, as described by one of the 449 respondents to his public appeals:

'I sat in a chair in my room and was reading. Then I looked up

and saw my deceased grandmother standing in front of me, as fully

as when she was alive. I told my mother about this the following day. She said 'That is nice. It was her birthday yesterday.' I had not

remembered it.' The deceased are experienced in several ways, it seems, not only by sight but also by sound, smell or touch or just the sense of presence. Evidence also comes from animal behavior, and from some of Iceland's celebrated mediums, notably Hafsteinn Björnsson, yet the most persuasive cases of all are those in which there was a witness whom Haraldsson was able to interview. In one of these, a man recalled being woken up by his wife after she had had a disturbing vision of a patient at the sanatorium where she worked, whom she had invited to visit her later that day. She told him she had seen the man open her bedroom door, noticing that his face was covered in blood, and adding 'I swear that something has happened at the sanatorium'. She duly rang there in the morning and was told that her patient had committed suicide during the night by jumping from a bridge. According to the post mortem report, there were large cuts on his head. It is cases of this quality, of which there are several, that make alternatives to the survival hypothesis seem implausible. Some of Haraldsson's findings confirm those reported by Edmund Gurney and his colleagues from the Society for Psychical Research in their classic Phantasms of the Living (1886). For example, the percentage of apparitions whose death had been a violent one (28) was more than three times the national percentage (eight), exactly the same ratio as that reported by Gurney. Apparitions tended to be seen within 24 hours of death, and in many cases they were of persons either not known to the percipient or known but not known to have died. One can hardly disagree with Haraldsson's modest conclusion that 'When all the accounts we have collected are considered, it seems impossible to reject all of them as deceptions and mistaken perceptions. Something real is there, at least in some of the accounts.' It is good to be reminded how much original evidence would be lost were it not for researchers such as the 19th century pioneers of the Society for Psychical Research and their successors such as this 21st century author, who have been prepared to go and look for it and preserve it for posterity. This is an important collection of well documented evidence for a post-mortem existence.