DEATH TTHEHE FFINALINAL MMYSTERYYSTERY LIONEL & PATRICIA FANTHORPE DEATH THE FINAL MYSTERY This page intentionally left blank. DEATH THE FINAL MYSTERY LIONEL & PATRICIA FANTHORPE A Hounslow Book a Member of the Dundurn group Toronto • Oxford Copyright © Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, 2000 Unless otherwise stated, all copyrights for photos and illustrations belong to the authors. The sketches are by Theo Fanthorpe. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency. Publisher: Anthony Hawke Editor: Don McLeod Design: Jennifer Scott Printer: Webcom Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Fanthorpe, R. Lionel Death: the final mystery ISBN 0-88882-221-9 1. Death. 2. Near-death experiences. 3. Astral projection. 4. Reincarnation. I. Fanthorpe, Patricia. II. Title. BF1275.D2F36 2000 I33.9’0I3 C00-931771-6 1 2 3 4 5 04 03 02 01 00 THE CANADA COUNCIL LE CONSEIL DES ARTS FOR THE ARTS DU CANADA SINCE 1957 DEPUIS 1957 We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program. Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions. J. Kirk Howard, President Printed and bound in Canada.e Printed on recycled paper. www.dundurn.com Dundurn Press Dundurn Press Dundurn Press 8 Market Street 73 Lime Walk 2250 Military Road Suite 200 Headington, Oxford, Tonawanda NY Toronto, Ontario, Canada England U.S.A. 14150 M5E 1M6 OX3 7AD This book is dedicated to the memory of our parents, Robert and Greta Fanthorpe, Arthur and Rosa Tooke, and all those other friends and relatives who have solved the Final Mystery and gone on to God’s Realm of Everlasting Light and Joy. This page intentionally left blank. CONTENTS FOREWORD BY CANON STANLEY MOGFORD 9 INTRODUCTION 13 PROLOGUE 15 WHAT IS PERSONALITY?21 WHAT IS A GHOST?27 EXAMPLES OF HAUNTINGS 31 NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 83 OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES 93 HYPNO-REGRESSION AND REINCARNATION 103 AUTOMATIC WRITING 117 SÉANCE PHENOMENA 131 POLTERGEISTS 151 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND BELIEFS ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE 171 INTERVIEWS WITH PSYCHICS, MEDIUMS, AND INVESTIGATORS 179 EPILOGUE 243 BIBLIOGRAPHY 245 FOREWORD BY CANON STANLEY MOGFORD, MA Over the last ten years or more, Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe have written a series of books, all of which deal with some of the great mysteries that have continued to perplex people down the centuries. They have often followed their patient research with their own interpretation of some of these mysterious happenings and unusual people. I have read all of these books. I own copies of them. They have introduced me to that most unusual of priests, Father Bérenger Saunière of Rennes-le-Château, who spent money as if there were no end to it, but took to the grave the secret of where he got it. I first encountered from one of their books the strange tale of the Money Pit of Canada, and am grateful never to have been tempted to throw away any of my money in the search for the treasure that may or may not lie at the foot of that pit! The Mary Celeste and its missing crew and passengers remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the sea but, if you chance on the Fanthorpes’ account of it, you will be intrigued by their explanation for the abandonment of that ship. These are but a few of the mysteries that have haunted them all their working lives. The stranger they are, the greater the Fanthorpes’ fascination. It may have started as a hobby for them but has now become a passion. In this book Lionel and Patricia go a step further. They face up to the greatest mystery of all – the mystery we call death. Death, which lays its icy hands on Kings . And in the dust be equal made with the poor. — James Shirley, seventeenth-century poet. Some people fear death. Some long for it years before it comes. Others find its grip, on old and young alike, both unequal and unjust. Death for some is the end of everything. For others it is the means to a new and fuller life to come. The humanist takes his stance and brooks no argument. Death is no mystery. It is just part and parcel of the natural order of things. Everything that lives dies. Nothing sets man apart from the other beasts of the field. Supreme in intelligence he may be, dominating the rest of the natural world as if it were created solely to serve his life, he will yet surrender, as all else must, to slow decay and ultimately death. From dust he came, to dust he will return. Shakespeare in Macbeth speaks for all who take this stand: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Many other people, of course, think differently. Humanity dares to believe itself to be immortal. The mystery of death for them is not that it happens, or when it happens, or how it happens, but what comes afterwards. As St. John puts it in the first of his Letters: “Now are we the children of God but it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” Some need no evidence, no proof of it. They have the Promise of Christ and their Faith holds firm. There is evidence of immortality, however, to be found, and many of us lesser mortals need all the reassurance we can find. In this book Lionel and Patricia are trying to help us. The search for understanding begins within the Human Being. We are, surely, something greater than mere flesh and bone, fat, blood, and water. Our component parts don’t make us what we are. We simply use those components. Personality is greater than the sum of all our natural endowments. If, as the authors put it, “personality or consciousness has a real and discrete existence apart from the physical self, both brain and body,” then the question of its survival after death becomes much more convincing. The authors have written about “out-of-body experiences.” People, near death, have found themselves detached from both body and brain and, out of the body, seem able to look down on their physical selves. If, in any sense, these experiences are valid, then consciousness seems capable of an existence apart from the natural self — and this reinforces the belief that the human spirit, soul, or personality can and does survive physical death. Such belief is strengthened by the longing of the human personality or spirit for natural justice. The human being shows potential for goodness, some more than others it has to be admitted, but even with the finest their potential is seldom fully realised. Surely this incomplete longing for goodness, and regret at failure to achieve it, deserves not be swallowed up in a final act of dying. Such unfulfilled longings, allied to the injustice of early, undeserved death, seem to point not to death as a final end to the human struggle but as the gateway to new opportunities and life. If, then, death is not an end of everything but leads to a new life in an eternal existence, surely there must be evidence to be gleaned from this new world. Where men and women have been united closely in life, and over long years have borne and raised children and, in love for each other, have shared both joys and pains, death cannot be allowed to break the bonds of such devotion. Can one life reveal itself to another? What evidence can be plucked from the eternal world? What is to be found and can it be trusted? How can truth and the fake be separated? The authors of this book have researched widely and carefully and what they have found they have set out clearly for us to accept or reject. They are not pleading a case. Nearly half a century of investigations has gone into this book. We are introduced to ghosts and haunted houses, automatic writing, trance experiences, hypnotic regressions, poltergeists, out-of-body experiences, and much else. Psychics plead their cases and mediums relay their spirit messages. The authors have questioned the false, exposed the bogus, and challenged the absurd. They have sifted the real from the unreal, and conclude in their own words: “There is enough strong evidence from genuine contact with departed human beings to make survival not only reasonable but probable.” When you have read this book what conclusions, I wonder, will you reach? I have, of course, read it in manuscript before it ever reached the printers. The authors are Christian believers, as I am. We need no one to prove to us the glorious fact of Eternal Life. It is the Promised Gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Many have not been so blessed.