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"I Described Her—And It Was His Dead Gran!"

catseye

Old lady trouser-smell with yesterday's knickers
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I've read a few of these lately (not actually on here, but on a few other fora, where they've been asking for 'your most 'woo' experience', etc). Lots of 'I woke up in the night and an old lady was bending over me and when I woke up I described her to my husband and he said she sounded just like his dead gran' type stories. Or 'my daughter had an imaginary friend, and when she described her I knew it was my dead aunt!'

Just wondering how well someone can describe someone else that they can actually identify a person from it. All right if they have a distinguishing characteristic (one eye/huge scar) but when I try to describe even someone I know very very well, the listener would be hard pressed to pick them out of a line up. 'A tall bloke with fairish hair and a round face with a bit of a beard'. Well that's my younger son, but could pretty much be ANYONE, well, anyone capable of growing a bit of a beard anyway.

So, does anyone have any experience of this? Any opinions as to accuracy? I'm inclined to think that the listener may be putting their desire for their deceased relative still to be around ahead of actual physical accuracy. An old lady with grey hair could be me or it could be the Queen...
 
One problem is that the level of detail in describing the original observation is limited by circumstances - e.g., darkness / ghostliness and the sophistication of a particular girl's visual imagination in your two examples. Most such descriptions I've seen over the years rarely go beyond some basics (size; relative age; gender).

Cases involving a unique or distinguishing feature are fairly rare. Even in these cases, one must wonder to what extent the describer has already convinced him- / herself the figure was similar to, or had to be, a known person or type of character.

Another problem is that the context of observation might well bias a listener into focusing on paranormal candidate figures (e.g., ghosts or aliens) rather than other entities the observed figure might be or represent. To use your examples for illustration again ... One is introduced as a mysterious / spectral night visitor, and the other is a vision only the daughter has ever seen. The nature of their introductions practically forces a listener to consider "unreal" possibilities.
 
Haven't had it myself but two of my male cousins on my father's side have said that when they were small and unwell that they woke to see a lady bending over them.
Of course they yelled out in fright and when their father came in he asked what was wrong.
He asked what the woman looked like and then told them that it was his Mother coming to check on them.
This happened in two separate occasions, not together.
They each had told me separately and at different times so would not have collaborated .
One lives in WA and the other here.
 
What kind of description did they give, though, Iris?

If one of my children told me that an elderly lady with grey hair, quite plump, with not much of a chin and a round face had bent over them in the night, I would immediately jump to the conclusion that my mother had been visiting her grandchildren. But, unpicking the story, it could be any of my deceased female relatives or, indeed, a random spirit completely unconnected to my family at all. The desire to leap to the conclusion that a brief description can firmly identify someone (particularly when only seen quickly, often on waking, in the middle of the night) seems suspect.

See also identification of wrong-doers or criminal suspects...
 
Something similar happened in my own family a couple of years ago. I have already posted about it, but here goes again -
(Hoping I remember the details.)

A relation was rushed into hospital seriously ill. At some point she saw a bright light with a man standing in front of it.

She felt she was being invited to go with him into the light where she would feel no more pain...
Tempting. However, she told him politely but firmly that she couldn't go with him and needed to stay 'here', at which point the vision disappeared. The man may have turned and walked away, I'm not sure.

When she recovered enough to talk with her husband, she told him about it and described the man. She hadn't been able to closely examine him but her impression was that he looked very like her husband's father, similar build, but much younger and with grey hair and a beard.

Husband was a bit stunned because his cousin had coincidentally also been rushed into the same hospital around the same time (possibly the night before) but had died.
It had happened so quickly that nobody but Cousin's wife knew. The word hadn't gone round about it and Relation and Husband certainly didn't know at the time, being busy with their own family emergency. Husband was only told about the death when his own wife was recovering.

The cousin who'd died fitted his wife's description - strong resemblance to bald Father in Law but younger with grey hair and a beard. She didn't know Cousin'd been ill or died until a few days into her recovery, after she'd told several people about her vision.
 
What kind of description did they give, though, Iris?

If one of my children told me that an elderly lady with grey hair, quite plump, with not much of a chin and a round face had bent over them in the night, I would immediately jump to the conclusion that my mother had been visiting her grandchildren. But, unpicking the story, it could be any of my deceased female relatives or, indeed, a random spirit completely unconnected to my family at all. The desire to leap to the conclusion that a brief description can firmly identify someone (particularly when only seen quickly, often on waking, in the middle of the night) seems suspect.

See also identification of wrong-doers or criminal suspects...

This is how Spiritualist Church mediums describe the deceased relations of congregation members. Everyone has had an elderly lady in their family who liked to bake, wore an apron, polished their specs on their blouse, etc... Cold reading.
Little kids don't do that though!
 
The cousin who lives here seldom gets a word in edgewise now that his wife has retired and she always answers the phone so I can't ask him at the moment.
The one in WA uses the computer in the library and that is closed at the moment.
He no longer has a phone for some reason so I can't ask him either.
 
Surely,as with everything its all about context.

I live alone. My mother died in this house. If a guest were to casually mention the lady he passed in the corridor, and I ask what lady and he replied the old woman, she was in a wheelchair..well its true that the world is not short of old ladies, and not a few of them are in wheelchairs. There is an absence of useful detail about facial features or eye colour. But its surely offset by the fact that (in the imagined scenario) there was no other actual person in the house, no one of that description, and the door was locked - all pointing to an encounter with the uncanny - together with the fact that my mother was a wheelchair user who had died in the house, and no one else has, it would seem almost wilful to NOT identify the presumed ghost or vision as being of her. The bare details may as well be precise ones in the circumstances.
 
If there are precise (or reasonably precise) details available, like gattino's wheelchair or Scargy's close cropped grey beard, I think then it is a much more natural supposition to conclude that it is a relative or one known (or related) to the witness.

It's the vague ones that I have trouble with, or where the sighting has taken place in a random location. You're camping and you wake up to see a figure that your other half 'is convinced' is his deceased sister because it had long blonde hair... that kind of thing.

I'm just positing things really because I'm a bit bored. Just a talking point. I don't think there's any definitive answer, other than that the human mind is bent to wish fulfilment and easily deceived.
 
If there are precise (or reasonably precise) details available, like gattino's wheelchair or Scargy's close cropped grey beard, I think then it is a much more natural supposition to conclude that it is a relative or one known (or related) to the witness.

... Or something specifically related to the specific location / event / legend with which one might want to correlate the observation.


It's the vague ones that I have trouble with, or where the sighting has taken place in a random location. You're camping and you wake up to see a figure that your other half 'is convinced' is his deceased sister because it had long blonde hair... that kind of thing.
... I don't think there's any definitive answer, other than that the human mind is bent to wish fulfilment and easily deceived.

Agreed ... It has more to do with interpretation and belief in the interpretation than the observation per se. To the extent there are details that connect the observation to a given narrative the observation obtains leverage toward supporting belief in that particular narrative.
 
It's more convincing when they later see a picture and say "Oh, that's the visiting spirit!"
 
On that point i think we can push a more vague version of my (invented) scenario. Suppose my imaginary guest had said merely the old woman..or even just the woman..and there was no mention of such stand out feature as a wheelchair. After all aren't we frequently told that apparitions of the dead are often seen as being in the prime of their life or good health ? (I guess that tends to be more in the dream or foot of the bed visitations rather than hauntings, but still.)

I still suspect that it would be reasonable (once we had assumed it was an apparition at all and not an intruder!) to assume it might first and foremost be my mother as the most likely candidate in this particular house, and to ask the witness what she looked like. If he replied tall and black, then obviously our prime candidate would go out of the window. If he said a short, older, white woman it would be strongly confirmatory, no matter how vague and general that description might seem. I think at that point, as bugmum suggests, in most cases a photograph would be brought out to either ask "was that her?" or better still "was it anyone in this group photo?" In many of these stories that does seem to be what happens.
 
Something similar happened in my own family a couple of years ago. I have already posted about it, but here goes again -
(Hoping I remember the details.)

A relation was rushed into hospital seriously ill. At some point she saw a bright light with a man standing in front of it.

She felt she was being invited to go with him into the light where she would feel no more pain...
Tempting. However, she told him politely but firmly that she couldn't go with him and needed to stay 'here', at which point the vision disappeared. The man may have turned and walked away, I'm not sure.

When she recovered enough to talk with her husband, she told him about it and described the man. She hadn't been able to closely examine him but her impression was that he looked very like her husband's father, similar build, but much younger and with grey hair and a beard.

Husband was a bit stunned because his cousin had coincidentally also been rushed into the same hospital around the same time (possibly the night before) but had died.
It had happened so quickly that nobody but Cousin's wife knew. The word hadn't gone round about it and Relation and Husband certainly didn't know at the time, being busy with their own family emergency. Husband was only told about the death when his own wife was recovering.

The cousin who'd died fitted his wife's description - strong resemblance to bald Father in Law but younger with grey hair and a beard. She didn't know Cousin'd been ill or died until a few days into her recovery, after she'd told several people about her vision.

Sounds very much like the accounts given on the QED episode; Glimpses of Death.
 
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