Wartime Occult Phenomena (World War I)

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Wartime Occult Phenomena (World War I)

The emergence of Spiritualism heightened interest in the separations and deaths caused by war. Thus it was not surprising that a number of stories of supernatural events should have crystallized around the international circumstances of World War I. Perhaps the most striking of these was the alleged vision of the Angels of Mons. The first account was the story in the London Evening News of September 14, 1915, by writer Arthur Machen describing a statement by an officer who had been in the retreat from Mons. This officer saw a large body of horse-men who later vanished. Machen suggested that they were the spirits of the English bowmen who had fought at Agincourt.

Although this story was fiction, it stimulated corroborative reports of phantom armies. The most significant of these were repeated by a Red Cross nurse, Phylis Campbell, who claimed to have heard several different stories of phantom soldiers. In his book On the Side of the Angels (1915), Harold Begbie repeated the claims that soldiers saw a vision of angels during the retreat from Mons and gives the narrative of a soldier, who states that an officer came up to him "in a state of great anxiety" and pointed out to him a "… strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon, nor were there any clouds in the neighbourhood. The light became brighter and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the centre having what looked like outspread wings. The other two were not so large, but were quite plainly distinct from the centre one. They appeared to have a long, loose-hanging garment of a golden tint and they were above the German line facing us. We stood watching them for about three-quarters of an hour."

All the men in the battalion who saw this, with the exception of five, were killed. Begbie went on to say that a nurse told him that a dying soldier spoke to her of the reluctance of the Germans to attack the British line, "because of the thousands of troops behind us." It is believed this man had heard these claims from German prisoners and believed in the ghostly nature of those supporting hosts.

Ralph Shirley published a pamphlet titled Prophecies and Omens of the Great War (1914; 1915) dealing with various oracular utterances on the struggle.

Stories were also common in the early period of the war regarding the appearance of saintly and protective figures resembling the patrons of the several allied countries. Thus the English were convinced that in certain engagements they had seen the figure of Saint George mounted on a white charger and the French were equally sure that the figure in question was either Saint Denis or Joan of Arc. Wounded men in base hospitals asked for medallions or coins on which the likenesses of these saints were impressed in order to verify the statements they made.