Phantom arrivals

I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed.

-- Whitley Strieber addressing fellow close-enounter witnesses in Communion

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The proprietor of the Junior Ganymede, who wishes to be known only as "G," reports the following eerie occurrence:

I ordered a large expensive rechargeable battery last week.  It cost several hundred dollars.  Monday it came, I found it left outside on our door step.  The box was a little crumpled, was an unusual size, and had a sticker on the side proclaiming that it was a battery.  I remember looking at the sticker and thinking, huh, I didn’t think they let you ship batteries through the mail, I thought the sellers would have claimed it as ‘parts’ or something.

I came inside and put the box down on a side table without opening it.  I didn’t need it right away.  Then it slipped my mind.

Yesterday morning I did need it.  But it was not on the side table.

We convened as a family, prayed, and then looked everywhere.  I even went outside to the garbage bin in case it had been thrown away by one of the kids during their clean-ups.  After all, the box was a bit crumpled, though the battery had enough heft that I didn’t think any one could carelessly think the box was empty.

No luck.

We prayed again, and looked again.

No luck.  I left to work.

When I came home the battery was sitting on my desk charging.

You found it, I said.  The wife and kids were sitting nearby.

Instant chorus in reply–No, no, no, it was delivered.

An hour or two before I came home the doorbell rang.  My wife opened it to find a delivery man out there with a box.  He said it was a battery and she needed to sign for it since it was an expensive, fragile part; they had to be extra particular.  He advised her to handle with care.

She opened it and put it on to charge.

I went and looked at the box.  It was the exact same box I saw on Monday, complete with the slight crumpling and the battery sticker on the outside.  I hefted the battery.  It was the same heft as I recalled.

A commenter, who uses the handle Handle, adds his own, similar experience:

Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago, in my case, it was a book. I held the book in my hand and put it on the counter. I came back and in was gone. I asked my family about it, if they had moved it, but they hadn’t seen it. I described it in detail, pointed to where I put it, said, “I was holding it in my hand right here,” mentioned the unfortunate position of the barcode sticker on the cover, and they witnessed me spending half an hour searching for it in the usual, and some unusual places. No luck. I figured it would turn up eventually, and anyway, I’ve always got a big backlog stack to work through. The next day, I get a stuffed-to-bursting padded envelope in the mail, take it to the same counter, open it, and glitch-in-the-matrix level deja by, it was exactly the scene I remembered. Freaked out, I dropped the book on the counter and took a step back, and that was exactly the scene I remembered too. Barcode sticker in the unfortunate place and everything. I yell, “it’s the book!” Wife dismisses this entirely, “you’re crazy”, son takes my side, “it’s exactly like he said, and he asked us for it, and was looking for it.” He is freaked out too, but also Bill and Ted style, “whoaaa, duuude.” Wife presents a thorough and comprehensive counterargument, with facts, evidence, and logic, just kidding, she just repeats, “you’re crazy”. Eerie is right.

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This reminded me of something I had read. It took me a while to track down, since I had mis-remembered it as coming from a book by Stan Gooch. I finally found it in Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At. Having previously written about Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake turns to examples of similar abilities in human beings.

In some cases the person's arrival was preceded by a kind of apparition, or phantasm, as the Victorian psychic researchers would have called it. For example, Ann Greenberg, of Silton, Saskatchewan, Canada, was on holiday with her husband in the family cabin by a lake. One night her husband went out in the boat, but a storm blew up and he did not return.

I was alone in the cabin and very worried so I stayed awake until about 2:00 A.M., when I fell asleep on the couch. Some time later I heard my husband walk up from the dock and cross the deck to the front door. He opened the door, walked over to the couch, leaned over, and put both hands on my shoulders. Then I woke up. It was daylight, but my husband wasn't there. I looked at the clock, which read 5:00 A.M. An hour later he pulled into our bay, safe and sound. He described how he had anchored in a sheltered bay and slept in the boat. He had woken up to a calm lake and decided he could make it back. Before setting out, he'd checked his watch, which read 5:00 A.M. The bay where he'd sheltered is about an hour away by boat from our cabin.

This hearing of sounds in advance is well know in northern Scandinavia, as I discussed in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. In Norway there is even a special name for the phenomenon, vardøger, which literally means "warning soul." Typically, someone at home hears a person walking or driving up to the house, coming in, and hanging up his coat. Yet nobody is there. Some ten to thirty minutes later the person really arrives to similar sounds. People get used to it. Housewives put the kettle on as the vardøger arrives, knowing that their husbands will arrive soon.

Professor Georg Hygen, of Oslo University, investigated dozens of recent cases, and published an entire book on this subject. He concluded that the phenomenon is essentially telepathic rather than precognitive. In other words, the vardøger is not so much a pre-echo of what will happen in the future, but is related to a person's intentions. For one thing, the sounds are not always identical to those heard in advance. A person might be heard going up to the bedroom, whereas when he arrives he goes into the kitchen. Moreover, the vardøger phenomenon can still occur when a person does not in fact arrive, having changed his mind.

The Hygen book referred to is Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalfenomen (1987); no English translation appears to be available.

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The vardøger experiences recounted by Sheldrake involve the return of a person, and the premonitory hallucination is primarily aural -- although there may be a tactile component; Mrs. Greenberg felt her husband put his hands on her shoulders. (The name Ann Greenberg is a bit of a coincidence, since... uh, it begins with the letter G.) In contrast, G and Handle report visual (and presumably tactile) hallucinations prefiguring the arrival of an inanimate object. The delay between the phantasm and the actual arrival is also longer in the Junior Ganymede cases -- a day or several, as opposed to 10 minutes to an hour in Sheldrake's examples.

Despite these dissimilarities, could we be dealing with essentially the same sort of phenomenon here? Is Hygen's conclusion -- that it is not a true precognitive phenomenon but a telepathic one, related to intentions -- applicable to the experiences of G and Handle?

One reason given for Hygen's conclusion is that the vardøger sounds are not always identical to the sounds heard when the person really arrives. In G's case, too, the vardøger-like experience (let's go ahead and use that word) was not identical to what it foreshadowed. In the vardøger, he saw the battery box on the front step, took it inside, and put it on a side table without opening it. When the battery really arrived, none of that happened; it was given to his wife while he was out, she opened it, and he found it charging on his desk when he came home.

Could the battery vardøger have been triggered by the sender's intention? G wrote on October 2 that he had ordered the battery "last week" (i.e., September 21-26) and that the vardøger arrived "Monday" (September 28). In a comment to his own post, G mentions that "the vendor sent me a personal email on Sep. 18 saying they were planning on shipping that day." Since September 18 would have been before he ordered the battery, this must be a typo for September 28 -- the day of the vardøger.

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I suspect that experiences like those recounted by G and Handle are more common than we tend to assume. We filter them out with a simple "I must have been mistaken," move on, and forget that they ever happened. Or, in less dramatic cases, we never even perceive the anomalous thing at all because our brain does not consider it sufficiently probable (the Horseshoe Crab Effect). Making an effort to notice and remember such things, even if no explanation immediately suggests itself, is a worthwhile endeavor.