In the Mind of Marie: A Haunting Encounter in the Gardens of Versailles (1913)
publicdomainreview.org
publicdomainreview.org
I am not an authority on this subject but while reading this article I was reminded of another strange encounter documented by a well-known author.
I believe that it was John Steinbeck who described in his book of collected WWII experiences "Once There Was A War" an event which happened to him one evening during the Blitz.
From memory he recalled walking along a lane one night and passing a warmly lit cottage home with an old woman visible through a window. It was a peaceful scene. I think the story went that he didn't remember the cottage being there when he went by earlier and asked someone local about it. They told him that there had indeed been a cottage at that place but that it had been hit by a German bomb and destroyed, killing the old lady who lived there a long time before he walked by the spot.
Anyway, nice story. The world is full of things that are hard to explain.
Imagine two alternate universes:
1. A man misremembers seeing a lady in a cottage. It turns out, there never was a cottage at that place. The man forgets about it because it's not an interesting story.
2. A man misremembers seeing a lady in a cottage. It turns out, there was a cottage at that place that had been hit by a German bomb and destroyed, killing the lady who lived there. The man describes this in his book because it's an interesting story.
There are a lot of people in the world, and because they are all humans, they all have faulty memories. The few faulty memories which happen to correlate with supernatural events get shared, and the rest are forgotten.
The story itself is interesting when you consider that the author sees something completely ordinary and later finds out when they decide to return to the scene or when they mention it to locals that it couldn't have happened like that because the scene where they made their observation was destroyed before their visit.
I think supernatural events are reported because they do not fit into a normal framework of natural experiences that ordinary people have every day. Whether they are memory malfunctions in the individual who reports them is obviously debatable since for some events there are multiple participants and observers. A case where everyone present has a brain fart at the same time and experiences the same unusual event as a result is definitely worth studying.
I like the two universes breakdown that you have since it offers clear opportunities to explain what could've happened. None of us will know in the end and the only thing we have to go on, like so much of the historical record, is the author's account.
I found the epistemological paradoxes here amusing enough to write some more about: https://gwern.net/retrocognition (My contribution here is to suggest that Sabine doesn't go far enough: precognition of verification is also self-refuting, because if it's possible, why haven't we already precognitively copied the proof of precognition into the present?)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/time-or-dimens...
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/bizarre-...
It felt historically significant to me and being young and stupid, I decided it might be an interesting experiment to "open my mind" to the material. Not that I had any idea what that entailed. I just sat there and let my mind drift, while consciously disabling anything that felt like a firewall on my thoughts.
Suddenly I got jolted into the far too real experience of a mine elevator cable snapping and men screaming as it went down. In fact, I felt like I was one of them, screaming along with them, fully experiencing the sensation of immediate life threatening panic. It was completely unexpected and quite terrifying. I jumped up and ran out of that field, only calming down when I was far away from that place.
I would not qualify it as an actual trip to the past. More as an example of what kind of things the human brain can create when given free range. But I won't completely dismiss the possibility of material holding on to some form of memory, mostly because of how vivid and unexpectedly intense this experience was.