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Seeing Double: Strange Cases of Bilocation
- http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/01/seeing-double-strange-cases-of-bilocation/
- January 30, 2017
- Brent Swancer
The act of what is referred to as bilocation describes a person being physically in two locations simultaneously. It differs from other similar phenomena such as astral travel, (in which a person’s consciousness travels outside of the physical body, sort of like a living ghost) or other types of out of body experiences in that the individual does not appear in this second location as a wraith or ghostly, indistinct apparition, but rather as an apparently flesh-and-blood physical body, indistinguishable from a real person and their original self. The bilocator is typically described as being totally physically present in both locations, breathing, sweating, and able to touch things, eat and drink, or otherwise interact with their surroundings in a normal fashion. Bilocation also happens instantly, whereas with other types of out of body experiences there is often a sense of taking time to travel from one location to the next.
Although bilocation has been recorded in cultures around the world since time unremembered, some of the most numerous and spectacular cases of this phenomenon are inextricably tied to saints and other religious figures throughout history. Indeed, the ability to bilocate has long been considered by the Church to be a gift from God, a power bestowed onto those who require it for the purpose of attending to important matters and acts of mercy or charity some distance away, such as tending to the sick or dying, or at times when they need to do God’s will but cannot possibly physically be in a certain location under the circumstances. In fact, bilocation is so prevalent in the history of the Catholic church in particular, where its existence is considered a fact, that the Vatican considers it one of the core miracles required for sainthood, values it as a sign of high religious precept, and has researched and investigated the phenomenon extensively. The Vatican apparently has extensive, detailed files on these cases, and many of the numerous accounts of bilocation in church history are not mere lore and legend, but rather are well-documented phenomena that have been witnessed by various reliable witnesses and corroborated by those outside of the church.
The phenomenon as it pertains to saints has been documented for centuries. One early account comes from the early 13th century, with St. Anthony of Padua, who was a Portuguese Franciscan friar and qualified medical doctor, and who was widely considered to be one of the finest physicians of the church. St. Anthony was known as a prolific worker of miracles, especially when it came to miraculous healings, and this earned him many nicknames, such as “The Wonder-Worker of Padua” and the “Evangelical Doctor.” Just as impressive was his apparent ability to be in two places at the same time. One of the most well-known and well-documented of these strange displays allegedly occurred during a service on Easter Sunday at the Cathedral of Montpellier. At the time there was a great congregation of both worshippers and other clergymen who had come to watch his sermon, but at one point Anthony realized that he had forgotten that he was to be singing on a choir at a nearby monastery at that very moment. In full view of everyone, he then calmly withdrew into the shadows of the pulpit and pulled his cowl around his face before proceeding to stand there silently and immobile. At that very instant he appeared among the choir at the other monastery singing. When the choir was finished, the still, silent body at the Easter service suddenly sprang back into action again and he continued as if nothing had happened, speaking with “incomparable eloquence.”
St. Anthony of Padua demonstrated bilocation on another occasion as he was officiating at the Church of St. Pierre in Limoges on Holy Thursday. In this instance, he again remembered he had somewhere else to be, at another service several miles away. In front of many witnesses he was claimed to have knelt to pray at the altar as the congregation waited, at which point he appeared out of the shadows at the other church some distance away to carry out his sermon there. When he was done, he purportedly walked back into the shadows just as he got to his feet from praying at his original sermon to finish as if nothing had happened. During this whole episode he was clearly seen by numerous churchgoers and reported as being physically present in both places at the same time. Indeed, such was the veracity of witness reports to these powers that one official once stated that “these miracles come to us on such high authority that it is impossible either to eliminate them or explain them away without doing violence to the facts of history.”
There are many other notable bilocating saints. In the 1500s, The Italian mendicant friar St. Francis of Paola was known for frequently exhibiting this power. Sometimes during his sermons he would be seen by his servants simultaneously tending to chores around the monastery or even cooking in the kitchen at the same time, with both bodies fully mobile and engaged in their tasks as usual, even making conversation. He would often do the same thing while engaged in prayer. On one occasion during a trip to Pterno he was seen to be praying while at the same time walking out on the street. A witness to this event described it thus:
People who wanted to see him approached the chapel and found him so deep in prayer that they decided not to disturb him. When they returned to the street, they were surprised to see him talking to some people. They hurried back into the chapel and saw him still lost in prayer.
St. Francis of Paola
Another case form the era revolves around St. Martin de Pores, who had started out training to be a physician but had ended up at the Monastery of the Holy Rosary in Lima, Peru. Born in 1579, St. Martin de Pores did not even start out as a true member of the clergy, as he had always refused to train for the priesthood in favor of a simple, humble life doing various menial tasks around the monastery in the name of God. However, as much as he sought the simple life and a low profile he quickly became known for his spectacular ability to bilocate. Although he was well-documented as spending his entire life at the monastery, never leaving its grounds, it was reported that Martin would often instantaneously appear all over Lima, as well as in distant places as far-flung as Mexico, China, Japan, Africa, Algiers, France, and the Philippines, where he would engage in activities such as preaching, working with children, tending to the infirm or handicapped, and distributing food to the poor.
One well-documented instance of Martin’s bilocation was when he made a series of visits to North Africa where his work tending to the sick and clothing the poor was admired by a man who had been held prisoner in Barbary. Martin had come to him as well to offer aid. When the man was finally released he in later years found himself in Lima visiting the monastery there, where he happened to run into Martin by chance. He immediately tried to thank him, but Martin pulled him aside to tell him not to speak of what had happened in North Africa, as he did not want his supernatural powers to be widely known.
During these mysterious travels, Martin was said to be able to communicate fluently with people in any language, despite the fact that he had never studied a foreign language. He was also claimed to be able to appear even within locked rooms and prisons, where he would help those within. On at least one occasion he was claimed to have appeared on numerous occasions within a prison in North Africa in order to bring food and money to a man who had been wrongly imprisoned in Algiers by the Turks. The man eventually received enough money from the bilocating saint to pay his own ransom for his release.
Martin was often known to impress visitors to the monastery with his detailed, intimate knowledge of the customs and cultures of these faraway lands, far more than he ever could have learned from books, even though he was known to have never left the confines of the monastery. Indeed, during these adventures in distant lands, which would have taken hours, days, or weeks to travel to physically, Martin was always among other monks and priests at the monastery, going about life and his chores as usual. He was never seen to leave, or to show any signs of slowing down, even as he was popping up in places all over Peru and the world, and by all accounts Martin truly seems to have been living two lives simultaneously. St. Martin’s numerous demonstrations of bilocation are extensively archived at the Vatican and were well documented and observed by a wide range of reliable witnesses from all over the world, further adding to his mystique. When asked how he was able to do it, Martin once said: “If God can multiply the loaves and fishes, why couldn’t he duplicate me?”
Another very famous bilocating saint was Alfonso de Liguori, or St. Alphonsus Liguori, of Italy, who was a bishop of St. Agata dei Goti in 1774. Alphonsus was once seen simultaneously both preaching a sermon at the pulpit and hearing confessions in another area. On another occasion St. Alphonsus was preaching to university students when a poor woman came to his usual church to receive her regular alms from him. She was told that Alphonsus was away at a sermon at that time and turned away. As she was leaving, he was said to appear before her to give her the alms only to disappear once again.
The most famous story involving St. Alphonsus’ bilocation powers supposedly occurred on the morning of September 21, 1774, when after giving mass in Arrezo he suddenly fell into his chair and went into a deep trance in which he seemed to be hopelessly lost deep in thought, in a state that one witness described as a “prolonged ecstasy.” In this trance he did not move or say a word, would not accept food, and gave no indication that he was aware of anyone around him. No one could snap him out of it, and he remained in this dazed state the entire day and night. The following morning he had not changed, remaining still frozen with that far-off, eery stare, his body still set in the same position, with only his breathing and sporadically blinking eyes providing evidence that he was even still alive at all.
St Alphonsus Liguori
There are countless other stories of saints and the highly religious who have allegedly had the ability to bilocate, far too many to go over all of them here, but saints are certainly not the only ones who have exhibited this strange phenomenon. In 1844, a schoolteacher by the name of Teresa Higginson claimed that she had experienced bilocation from her native England to a remote African village in order to teach the children there. While she was there in this faraway land she claimed that she was able to somehow communicate with the villagers even though she had never studied or even heard their language before. She would say of this, “This has astonished me a little, that I perfectly understand all that they wish to communicate to me and they comprehend all that I say to them.” During these stints in Africa Higginson was reported as being very much in her own school or home, and school personnel from the village adamantly insisted that this was indeed the woman who had been coming to teach for them.
A very famous historical figure, none other than USSR leader Vladimir Lenin, was also said to have bilocated. On October 19, 1923, just three months before his death, Lenin was having a tough time of things. He had just survived an assassination attempt in 1922 and had suffered a series of strokes in the intervening months that had left him incapacitated in bed. On this particular day, a Kremlin guard overheard a rather odd phone conversation between a duty officer and one of Lenin’s administrators. The duty officer wanted to know why Lenin was in his office at the Kremlin energetically rummaging around and rifling through papers as if looking for something, made all the more bizarre by the fact that he was totally alone and without his usual entourage of guards. The response from the administrator was that it was impossible for Lenin to be there, as he was at home, mute, partially paralyzed, and quite ill indeed.
Nevertheless, many people at the Kremlin clearly saw him there, and when he was finished he allegedly had gone out for a stroll in the Kremlin courtyard. Two surprised guards who saw him walking around claimed that he had greeted them, and thought it odd that he was not using a walking stick as he usually did. Officials were so concerned by this apparent supernatural event that they made up a story about how Lenin had indeed visited the Kremlin on official business on that day, but this did not explain the lack of bodyguards, his apparent vigor in the face of his months in bed recovering from his strokes, or the fact that his own aides and family firmly insisted that he had made no such trip to Moscow but rather had been bedridden the whole time. In the wake of Lenin’s death some months later, this strange incident of bilocation was seen as the once vigorous leader trying to tend to some unfinished business even in his poor health, and would be seen by many as a sort of portent or harbinger of his doom.
Vladimir Lenin
Bilocation is a bizarre ability which has manifested itself for centuries and been witnesses by numerous people, with many, many other cases which I have left out here. Is there anything to all of this? Can this all be merely written off as impossible and fanciful tales, the testimony of those involved brushed away in favor of the paradigm we know? If it is real, what lies behind this phenomenon? While the idea that someone could simultaneously physically inhabit two disparate locations hundreds or even thousands of miles away may seem to defy every law of physics and matter that we know of, perhaps we are getting into new territory here of forces that we have not even begun to comprehend. Maybe there are vast mysteries of the universe that have only sparingly poked through the veil of our known reality, just enough to make themselves known yet remaining so cloaked in the unknown as to evade us. Bilocation continues to protrude from this veil of mystery from time to time, and will likely remain a conundrum for some time to come. For now, if someone tells you they can’t be two places at once, just remember that perhaps they can and just don’t know it yet.
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