The Pensionnat Neuwelcke.

The story of Emilie Sagee is known to us through the people who saw her.  Mr Buch’s pensionnat received only young ladies of the nobility.  Having become elderly ladies, some of them wrote their souvenirs, as was often done at the time, in this society.  And one of them, Baroness de Guldenstubbe, the little Julie that Mr Buch was so proud of having in his establishment, wrote so many things about Emilie Sagee in her souvenirs, that the English writer and philosopher, Robert Dale Owen, wanted to meet her.  The Baroness furnished many details to the writer about the duality of the French teacher.  Details that he reported in one of his books which bears the very beautiful title Sounds of Footsteps at the Frontiers of Another Life [Bruits de pas sur les frontieres d’une autre vie].

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Collective hallucination has been mentioned.  However, before entering Mr Buch’s establishment, Mlle Sagee, who had started teaching at the age of sixteen, had passed through eighteen colleges…  eighteen colleges from which she had been fired because of her phenomena of bilocation…  It appears difficult to admit that the pupils, teachers and directors of eighteen establishments had suffered the same hallucinatory influence about the same person…

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Mlle Sagee wrote nothing about her own case.  For the simple reason that she had nothing to say;  for at the moment of her divisions, she felt nothing.  She was absolutely unconscious of what was happening and – she has often repeated this – she only knew about the phenomenon because of the expression on the faces of the people who were there…  It was by seeing their frightened faces, their eyes staring at something invisible which seemed to be moving near her, that she understood…  But she had never, herself, seen her double;  neither had she noticed the stiffness and slowing down of her movements when her double appeared…

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It was noted that the phenomenon took place when Mlle Sagee was very worried or very immersed in her work.  The double could also manifest itself in a place about which she was thinking.  For example, she has recounted that, on the day when she was picking flowers in the garden, glancing at the sewing room, she had seen the empty armchair and was saying to herself:

“The supervisor has gone, I’m sure that the young ladies will take advantage of it to gossip and waste time…”

And, as a teacher worried about discipline, she had thought:

“Ah!  If only I were there!”

And she was…

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It is difficult to know whether or not Emilie Sagee’s double appeared far away from the pensionnat.  It could have, without being noticed.  At Neuwelcke, the pupils sometimes saw the double in the college itself, while Mlle Sagee – as everyone knew – had gone for a walk in the forest or in the neighbouring village…

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There are other striking examples of ubiquity.  Among others, the case of Padre Pio, the Italian monk who died in 1968 and whose phenomena of bilocation were noted by hundreds of people, notably journalists…  But there are many, many others…

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Parapsychological magazines periodically cite cases of bilocation.  And numerous researchers, among them Doctor Richet, Doctor Osty, Doctor Goodrich and above all Doctor William Barnard Johnson, who created at Reno in the United States of America, an Institute for the study of these phenomena, have published extremely troubling reports.  According to these documents, it seems that, most of the time, the double is only seen by other people;  but sometimes, it can also be seen by the subject himself (autoscopy).

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It is, in fact, a sort of “phantom of a living person”.  But parapsychologists, who detest using the word “phantom”, and don’t like the word “ubiquity” because it belongs to theological vocabulary, give these phenomena the name of “bilocation” or “bicorporeity”.

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For the moment, these wise parapsychologists emit no hypothesis to explain the facts.  They prudently content themselves with stating their existence with as much rigour as possible.  And they have already been able to obtain a few certitudes mentioned by Danielle Hemmert and Alex Roudene in their work L’Univers des fantomes.

“The positive attitude of the facts permit today to establish that the existence of the human phantom (of a living person) is objectively noted by concording witness reports, by photographs of the double accidentally obtained;  by the influence that this apparition produces simultaneously on humans and on animals;  by the effects exercised by the double on matter.”

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We are therefore able to conclude that we are in the presence of a double acting, at certain moments and for inexplicable reasons, outside its physical envelope.

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Most parapsychologists who have studied the problem think that this double is totally distinct from the soul and that it draws its substantiality from the body of which it is an emanation.  In short, as surprising and as mysterious as it might be in the present state of our knowledge, this phenomenon is probably quite natural…

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After having left Mr Buch’s pensionnat, Mlle Sagee retired to the home of her sister-in-law, the mother of several children who very quickly grew used to the phenomenon to which the young woman was subjected.  They said:

“We have two Aunt Emilies!”…

For children accept all miracles…

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