Note: I've been doing some preliminary work on a possible book about the afterlife. The book would involve an overview of the dying process, interspersed with case histories supporting various points. What follows is the first case history I've written for this project. Because it is aimed at a general audience, I explain certain details that are probably already familiar to most readers of this blog.
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Perhaps the most famous case of the "drop-in communicator" type took place in Iceland more than eighty years ago. It was extensively researched by Erlendur Haraldsson and Ian Stevenson, who wrote it up in an article called “A Communicator of the ‘Drop In’ Type in Iceland: The Case of Runolfur Runolfsson,” published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (Volume 69, January 1975, pages 35 – 39).
The case involves Icelandic trance medium Hafsteinn Bjornsson, who held regular séances as a sideline from his full-time job at a radio station in Reykjavík. In 1937 a new communicator intruded on one of Hafsteinn’s séances, stating, “I am looking for my leg. I want to have my leg … It is in the sea.”
For months, this stranger continued to make regular appearances, continually demanding his leg while refusing to give his name. His personality was distinct – and distinctly unpleasant. He was rude, sensual, and addicted to physical pleasures like snuff, coffee, and alcohol. Roughly a year and a half after his debut, he finally identified himself as Runolfur Runolfsson, who died at age 52 half a century earlier. “I lived with my wife at Kolga or Klappakot, near Sandgerdi. I was on a journey from Keflavik in the latter part of the day and I was drunk.” He stopped at a house, had more to drink, and departed for home in a very inebriated state. On the way, he made the mistake of resting on a rocky outcrop on the shoreline, where he consumed still more alcohol from a bottle and then fell asleep. “The tide came in and carried me away. This happened in October, 1879. I was not found until January, 1880. I was carried in by the tide, but then dogs and ravens came and tore me to pieces.” His scattered bones were gathered up and buried, but his thigh bone (the femur) was missing. “It was carried out again to see, but was later washed up at Sandgerdi. There it was passed around and now it is in Ludvik’s house.”
Ludvik was Ludvik Gudmundsson, who had joined the séances a short time earlier. Upon Ludvik's arrival, the excited communicator, still maintaining his anonymity, had said that the new sitter knew about his leg and that the leg was now in his house.
The newly identified Runolfur, who became known more familiarly as Runki, added that confirmation of his story could be found “in the church book of Utskalar Church.” Some of the sitters found Runki’s name, date of birth, and age at death given in that book – all just as he’d stated.
As for the missing femur, it proved to have been placed inside the wall of a room in Ludvik’s house when the building was remodeled, sometime before Ludvik took possession of it. The recovered bone was buried in a religious service. After this, Runki became more cooperative; he even went on to serve as Hafsteinn’s main spirit control.
What of the other claims made by the communicator? Runki said he lived with his wife at Klappakot; records showed that he lived with a woman who bore him three children (though she may not have been his legal spouse). Shortly before his death, he was living in Klappakot. A clergyman’s record book summarized the presumed details of his death – he went missing “on his way home from Keflavik during a storm [and] is believed to have been carried along by the storm down to the beach … where the sea carried him away.” This accords with Runki’s account, except that in his telling he went to the beach by choice. Of course, the clergyman could only speculate about the precise sequence of events. The same records indicated that Runki was 52 when he died, and that his dismembered remains were buried in January, 1880. All of this matches Runki’s postmortem testimony.
Yet another local document, discovered years after the séances, noted that, “People guessed that the sea had taken him when he sat down exhausted,” which was what the communicator himself had said.
The case isn’t perfect. A determined skeptic would point out that contemporaneous notes on Hafsteinn’s séances often were not made or were later lost. There was a question as to whether Hafsteinn could have learned some (though not all) of the details of Runki’s death by visiting the National Archive; records show that he visited the archives after Runki had identified himself and supplied his history. Hafsteinn said he simply wanted to see for himself the documents that some of his sitters had located, which seems perfectly reasonable. There’s no indication that he had earlier located these documents on his own, but it is a hypothetical possibility. The femur, though generally assumed to belong to Runki, was never definitively linked to him; a plan to exhume Runki’s remains for testing had to be abandoned when his precise burial spot could not be located in the crowded, poorly marked churchyard.
But while some holes can be punched in the case – or in virtually any case – by someone absolutely determined to debunk it, it seems unlikely in the extreme that Hafsteinn, who engaged in mediumship only as a sideline, would have gone to the great lengths necessary to track down several obscure documents archived in different locations, or that he would have known anything about the femur concealed inside the wall of an old house in a town he’d never visited. Nor could he have known in advance that Ludvik, the house’s owner, would join the circle. Nor would he have had any reason to maintain the fiction of a querulous, hostile, anonymous communicator breaking in on séances for more than a year before providing any identifying information. The idea that fraud can adequately explain this case is far-fetched at best.
But what about super-ESP? To believe that Runki’s story was pieced together via super-ESP in the medium’s mind, we have to assume that his subconscious had clairvoyantly accessed those same obscure documents, as well as clairvoyantly viewing the hidden femur – or perhaps reading the mind of the carpenter (still living) who’d placed the bone inside the wall. All of this would have been done to support the fiction of a communicator who had died more than fifty years earlier and who was unknown and unrelated to anyone in the group. It is hard to see any motivation, even on a subconscious level, to carry out this elaborate deception, nor is it likely that ESP, even in its most robust form, would be this efficient and creative.
Moreover, as Haraldsson and Stevenson point out, the Runki case “cannot be satisfactorily interpreted on the basis of the cognitive [i.e., strictly factual] details alone … Advocates of the hypothesis of telepathy between the medium and living persons must also account, in our opinion, for the vivid impersonation by the medium of a character quite different from his own.”
Perhaps most important, Runki displayed an unwavering commitment to retrieving the lost bone – a highly purposeful mindset consistent with the psychology of a man who, although deceased, retained a rather crude attachment to physical pleasures and to his own physical body.
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