The case of Iris Farczady-A stolen life

The case of Iris Farczady-A stolen life

Rivas, Mulacz

In 1933 a 15 [online correction of: 16]-year-old well-educated Hungarian girl, Iris Farczády, who had dabbled extensively in mediumship, suddenly underwent a drastic personality change, claiming to be reborn Lucía, a 41-year-old Spanish working woman said by her to have died earlier that year. Transformed into 'Lucía', Iris spoke thereafter in fluent Spanish, a language she had apparently never learnt or had the opportunity to acquire, and could not understand any other language. Lucía has remained in control ever since and, now aged 86, she still considers Iris to have been a different person, who ceased to exist in 1933. The three authors of this paper met Lucía in 1998, and a camcorder cassette of interviews with her are lodged with the SPR. Attempts have been made to locate Lucía's claimed Spanish family, but these have not been successful. While the reincarnation aspect of the case has not been supported, there remains the puzzle of how Iris acquired her knowledge of the Spanish language, customs and popular culture, and why Iris should have willed or submitted to her 'replacement' by Lucía.

A processing error in the afterlife bureaucracy?

I read this with interest, the story, the research, the possible conclusions.
The questions it raised in my mind were not so much on the explanation of the individual case here, but a broader one. What does a typical case of possession of a living body by a previously deceased person look like? What are the usual characteristics? My point is that we don't have thousands of cases to analyse, in order to list the typical characteristics. Instead we have a scattering of probable cases. A tiny sampling. What we should be looking for seems to me to be unknown.

For example, how much detail or accuracy in recalling a previous life should we expect? We know from at least some NDE accounts that on leaving the body, a person may rapidly lose interest in their previous (that is, current) life, their family, their employment and so on. In that NDE state it is sometimes described like shedding some old clothes, the past is something no longer of interest or importance. Yet here we are, looking at something resembling a possible return to a different body of such an entity (maybe) and there are all sorts of expectations of what sort of recall there should be (maybe).

There are lots of unknowns and I'm not drawing any conclusions, except to suggest that we need to be cautious in presuming to know what such a case is 'supposed' to look like.