Yesterday I recalled a CBC interview with Emily Urquart, bestselling author and journalist, and the daughter of acclaimed Canadian painter Tony Urquhart. She was interviewed by CBC on the subject of ghost sightings related to grieving death. She had this experience - seeing her brother in passing strangers after he had died.
"I don’t remember the first time I saw my brother in a passing stranger, but I do know that it went on for years."
As a journalist, she decided to investigate the area - known as post-bereavement hallucination. This area has been studied for five decades and is found across cultures. She writes that in Scandinavian folklore there is a belief hat the unsettled dead wander into the lives of the living.
Here is a compelling excerpt from her Longreads.com article which is HERE:
"The living, for their part, are more likely to experience visitations from their lost loved ones if the death was traumatic, sudden, unexpected, or untimely. This might explain why I have never seen my grandmother, who died peacefully at 96, in the faces of passing nuns or in the eyes of the blue-hairs at the bus stop. Tragedies, the personal, and in particular those on a mass scale, tend to breed ghosts, like those seen in post-tsunami Japan. A few months after the disaster, a taxi driver picked up a young woman near Ishinomaki station in Japan’s Fukushima district. She asked the driver, a man in his 50s, to take her to Minamihama district, but he protested, telling her there was nothing left in that region.
“Have I died?” The woman asked.
The driver, stricken, turned to face his passenger, but, of course, she was gone and his cab was empty. This was one of seven cases of ghost passengers documented by a sociology student, Yuka Kudo in her study.
Urquhart covers many of these stories and folklore tales in her book Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes.
Emily is Jane Urquhart's daughter. A family of writers and painters of great talent.
Here's a visual explorations of the edges of things.
