Then there are appearances of the dead to the living in which the person who sees the departed is not yet aware that he or she is dead. Jaffé gives two cases in detail. In the first, a man walking in the street sees his ex-colonel whom he is fond of, but the colonel turns away and does not acknowledge him, hurting his feelings. Soon after he learns that the colonel had died two days before. In a similar case, a woman walking along the street sees her father. She calls out a greeting, but he disappears. Then she learns he had died during the previous night. In both cases the recipients of these visions believe the person to be alive, but learn that they were already dead, and Jaffé comments that it was not possible to establish “a real and living contact with the “ghost”.”26

Sometimes the dead announced their departure by outer physical events. A woman’s mother always used to call her to wake up. Some days after the mother’s death the daughter heard her coming up the stairs and calling her. In another case one winter when a farming family was gathered at the table, they heard the sound of their well-loved farmhand thumping up the stairs in his wooden clogs, and then the door opened, but there was no one there, and no tracks in the snow. Two days later the family

learned the farmhand had died at precisely that time. These kinds of stories are told the world over, and while some of them might be questioned, in the main they have the ring of authenticity, and they possess Jung’s “twilight atmosphere,” an archetypal dimension lacking in made-up stories.