The Strange Tale Of The SS Serendipity

 Reading the latest issue of Reader's Digest last night as I awaited drowsiness to overtake me, I landed on one of Your True Stories that captured my attention. It was sent in by Vernon Magnesen, Elmhurst, Illinois. You can read that story online here.

The now mostly forgotten capsizing of the passenger cruise ship SS Eastland in 1915 provides the backdrop. 

It seems Vernon's grandparents were slated to take a cruise on the Eastland, when on the evening of their trip, Henry, his grandfather, got into a ferocious argument with his landlord. This made him ill enough to cancel the trip and save his and his family's lives. Vernon Magnesen refers to this as a "miracle" argument that allowed 22 descendants a shot at life.

Upon further research I found that a young George Halas, had he not missed boarding due to a delay as recounted in this video about the disaster, would not have become Papa Bear of Chicago Bear's fame. Halas, who was twenty years of age at the time of the Eastland tragedy, lived on for another sixty-eight years, establishing himself as a legend in professional football.

Serendipity? I've noticed that disasters are often sources of stories of such "miraculous" tales. And often premonitions are involved.

Novelist Marian Manseau Cheatham parlayed her family lore of her grandparents' premonition about danger for those who boarded the Eastland in the novel Merely Dee.

Cheatham explained it this way:

I discovered that my paternal grandmother had a ticket to that 1915 Western Electric picnic, but the night before the big event, my great-grandmother had a premonition of danger and begged my grandmother not to go. Grandma listened to her mother's pleas and remained safely at home. That weird twist of fate changed our family's destiny, and mine.

In Merely Dee the titular character ignores her mother's premonition and sets off anyway for more of an adventure than she could have imagined.

Finally I want to reference Jay Bonansinga's nonfiction book The Sinking Of The Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy in this connection. Having access to firsthand and eye-witness accounts, as well as archival material, Bonansinga is able to flesh out several premonition stories.

In chapter 2 he relates the story of newlyweds Paul and Louise Jahnke. Louise had a sudden premonition that "Something would happen to the boat." They went anyway, but not before leaving instructions with their landlord about what to do with personal belongings and such in case they didn't return. They didn't.

Also related is the story of a Mrs. J. B. Burroughs, who had a visit from a friend who had a horrible dream of a "ship turned over on its side, and hundreds of corpses lying in a row." The dream was laughed off at first but Mrs. Burroughs later came to recognize it as a divine warning. The details of the dream were uncannily accurate.

Bonansinga's Chapter 2 ends with an account of Western Electric employee Josie Markowski, who endured a week of feelings of dread about her company's picnic trip on the Eastland to the point of having second thoughts about going.

On the morning of departure her mother ironed the dress Josie was to wear, and Josie was struck with the thought that she would never wear it again. Her mother urged her to go anyway and put the bad thought out of her mind lest she "bring it on the boat."

Like many disasters the SS Eastland disaster seems to have left a legacy of warnings heeded and unheeded and quirky twists of fate - all part of the strange world in which we live.

Why Study The Paranormal?

After confessing a fascination with "the soft edges of science" biologist Lyall Watson wrote in the introduction to his book Beyond Supernature:

I am not wedded to the proposition that the supernatural must exist. If one defines supernatural experience as - the experience of something unusual, something which exceeds the limits of what is deemed possible - then there is clearly a vast field of experience, of repeated experience, from all over the world, just waiting to be explored. The fact that such reports are, by their very nature, largely anecdotal, has led to their being discarded as unacceptable to science. Which is a pity and a waste, because I suspect that answers to some of the riddles of the paranormal might well lie in the pattern and contents of such reports.

Words such as supernatural and paranormal trouble me somewhat because they often become mingled with an unfortunate superstition to the point of ridiculousness. Perhaps nature and normal are so incompletely and poorly understood that we are drawing false lines.

For my part I collect personal anecdotes of unusual experiences - what some call "glitches in the matrix" - and study them. As suggested by Watson, I look for patterns. Premonitions, near-death experiences, visions, etc., all interest me because they are so common. Drawing too hasty a line between what is natural and what is supernatural doesn't help here.

I have come to accept that mind is primary in the universe. In my thinking it is impossible to start with matter and make sense of the universe and life without acknowledging the primary role of mind and intelligence. Nothing makes sense without sense in the first place. Or else all is a very long string of meaningless coincidences beyond human comprehension.

Closing thought: The unusual really is usual if we are paying attention. 

Déjà vu: A Strange World Experience

A strange world experience I am very familiar with - and I believe most everyone else is as well - is what the twentieth century parapsychologist Emile Boirac termed Déjà vu. That is, the weird feeling that one has previously experienced the present moment or memory before. In French Déjà vu means "already seen."

Most of us feel there is something mystic, or at least uncanny, about the experience. Materialists, who have no room in their worldview for mysticism, tend to dismiss this phenomenon as "reintegration." Psychology professor and professional skeptic Ray Hyman explains reintegration as the memory of an event or place resurfacing upon the appearance of part of the stimulus that formerly aroused the memory.

Among the more mysterious-inclined explanations for Déjà vu are legitimate memories available through reincarnation, or perhaps precognition.

I lean towards the latter. Inasmuch as down through the years I have had flashes of insight (not always experienced as Déjà vu) that illuminated my future, I tend to find precognition more in line with my experience. I have had many premonition as precognitive dreams.

Coming as I do from a Christian background, the concept of reincarnation is unfamiliar and strange - although I am fascinated by and open to it.

Then again, for those who are familiar with the Matrix movie franchise, Déjà vu could be something akin to what Neo called a glitch in the Matrix.

My personal Déjà vu experiences have tended to be about situations that I suddenly find myself in and knowing what is about to happen just before it happens. I don't dismiss Hyman's explanation out of hand, but sometimes it just doesn't seem to fit - at least not for me.

I have often pondered if time is not an illusion. Is it possible that the past, present and future somehow all exist simultaneously?

In all this I have to say that the one suspicion that Déjà vu arouses in me is that reality is not exactly what it appears to be. Perhaps reality is a many-layered thing and the mind has to be prepared to look more carefully at these various layers.