Telepathy is the apparent ability to "read a person's mind" or to pick up on the emotions and thoughts of others by mind-to-mind transfer. It is categorized as a part of ESP. Identifying telepathic ability can be somewhat difficult due to the brain's unconscious responses to physical expressions.
Early one morning in 1980, a very frightened old lady walked feebly into a Barcelona police station. Senora Isabel Casas, an 81-year-old widow, had been so scared by a terrible dream that, despite her age and infirmity, she had managed to walk to the local police station to raise the alarm. Almost incoherent with fear, she told the officer on duty that she had seen the face of her friend and neighbour, Rafael Perez, "twisted in terror" - and heard a voice say, "They are going to kill us."
The Spanish police were inclined to dismiss Senora Casas’s experience as a mere nightmare. But they became curious when they learned that she had not seen Perez, the only other resident in the block of flats where she lived, for 10 days. Normally the 56-year-old chef called to see her every day, but he had written her a note saying that he was going away for several weeks. It was odd, the police thought, that this note had not been delivered until three days after she had last seen her neighbour. And why had Perez not called to see her personally?
They decided to investigate and eventually found Perez tied up in a shed on the roof of the block of flats. He told them two men had broken into his apartment, made him sign 28 cheques so that they could draw his $30,000 life savings a little at a time, then forced him to write the letter to Mrs Casas so that her suspicions would not be aroused. Then they tied him up and said they would be back, once they had all the money, to kill him and his neighbour.
Canon Warburton typifies spontaneous cases of telepathy, which early researchers investigated. In 1883, the Canon sat in an armchair in his brother’s flat and began to doze. Suddenly, he woke up with a start exclaiming, "By Jove! He’s down!" The canon had just had a vivid dream in which he had seen his brother come out of a drawing room onto a brightly illuminated landing, catch his foot on the edge of the top stair and fall headlong down the stairs. He just managing to save himself from serious injury by using his hands and elbows. The house in the dream was not the one he recognised. All the canon knew, having arrived in London from Oxford, was that his brother had left him a note explaining that he had gone to a dance in the West End and would be back about 1 a.m.
Recovering from the experience, Canon Warburton dozed off again for half an hour until his brother came in and woke him up. "I have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck as I have ever had in my life!" he exclaimed. "Coming out of the ballroom, I caught my foot, and tumbled full length down the stairs."
The canon’s uncanny dream experience is one of many hundreds of equally impressive cases of "spontaneous telepathy" collected by the Society for Psychical Research in Britain and America.
