Astral projection

Astral projection is the proposed separation of a sleeping person’s astral body from the physical body, allowing the person to appear elsewhere and observe what is happening there. In the investigation involving Sonny Elmquist and Fenton Prentice, Professor Eugenia Lantine presents this as a possible explanation for a visitor who seems to enter Prentice’s apartment while Elmquist is asleep in his own. The idea turns an apparent haunting into a question about perception and bodily limits: a wanderer might see what lies beyond a locked door, but, according to the evidence discussed, cannot necessarily touch or alter anything.

The proposed phenomenon

Professor Eugenia Lantine calls a person who leaves the body in this way a wanderer. Her account is conditional rather than a definitive diagnosis: if Elmquist is a true wanderer, she explains, he may get out of his body while asleep and walk around. Bob Andrews confirms that the visitor has appeared in Prentice’s apartment when Elmquist was known to be asleep at home. The mismatch between the two locations is the central fact the theory is asked to explain.

The book presents astral projection through a specialist’s files and reported observations, but it does not make every case equally conclusive. Lantine says that only a few cases have been examined under laboratory conditions, partly because people who experience such events may keep them private or interpret them as madness or second sight. She allows that proposed experiments might establish that a person has the ability, or might prove nothing. The concept therefore enters the investigation as a plausible, testable explanation within the story, not as an unquestionable answer to every unexplained appearance.

The laboratory account

Lantine describes an experiment involving a housewife from Montrose who said that she sometimes dreamed of distant events and later learned that they had really occurred. At the university, researchers watched her sleep in a laboratory room through a one-way window. Above her bed, on a shelf too high for her to reach, they placed an envelope containing a ten-digit number. A secretary had generated the number by striking keys at random, had not looked at it, and had sealed the folded paper inside.

After the first night, the woman could describe the envelope, including a blob of blue sealing wax, but could not give the number. The researchers then had a janitor open the envelope without looking at the paper and place it face up on the shelf. On the second morning, she reported the ten digits correctly. Lantine stresses that the woman had not moved throughout either night; she describes the result as her astral body leaving her physical body to read what her sleeping body could not reach.

The sequence matters as much as the claimed success. At first, the woman could identify the sealed container but not its hidden contents; only after the paper was exposed could she report the number. In Lantine’s account, the episode supports the possibility of perception beyond ordinary physical access, while also setting a boundary around what the phenomenon can do. When Bob Andrews objects that the experiment proves nothing, Dr Barrister connects it to the immediate mystery: it might explain how a wanderer could learn that Prentice owned a mandala.

Other reported cases and limits

Lantine offers a second example, concerning a man from Orange whose dreams had repeatedly placed him in locations where events later proved to be true. Unlike the Montrose housewife, this man’s astral body was reportedly seen by another person. Lantine recounts that his friend, whom she calls Jones, heard his dog bark one night and went to investigate a possible prowler. In the entry hall, Jones saw the man from Orange clearly enough to address him by name. The figure did not answer, turned upstairs, and was gone when Jones followed. This is a reported anecdote, not the laboratory observation Lantine describes in the earlier case.

Lantine says that a wanderer may be harmless and may be unable to do anything beyond observing. When Bob asks whether such a person can touch things, she distinguishes seeing from moving: the wanderers apparently cannot move objects, and the Montrose woman needed the envelope opened before she could report the number inside. Bob carries that qualification into the investigation, concluding that if Elmquist is a wanderer, he cannot act physically while roaming. The account does not establish that every supposed wanderer has been tested or that the proposed limit is certain; Lantine frames it as what is known so far.

Use in the Elmquist investigation

Bob reports the university discussion to Jupiter Jones, who considers the practical implications. Elmquist might pass through walls or ignore locked doors, Bob suggests, but he is unsure how much control Elmquist has—or whether the ability exists in this case at all. The reported wanderers act only while sleeping, and Prentice’s visitor has appeared in his apartment when Elmquist was asleep elsewhere. This makes the concept relevant to the mystery without making it proof of Elmquist’s identity or intentions.

The distinction between seeing and handling objects helps separate the apparent haunting from physical searches of Prentice’s apartment. Prentice says that nothing has been disturbed since he took the door key away from Mrs Bortz, who had opened drawers and moved things. Jupiter can therefore entertain the possibility that Elmquist learned about Prentice’s mandala, or the Carpathian Hound, by observing him, while ruling against Elmquist as the burglar: the burglary happened when Elmquist was asleep, and a wanderer supposedly cannot move objects.

At the later confrontation, Elmquist is surprised by the offer of ten thousand dollars for the recovered dog. Prentice finds the crystal hound in the oven with the gilt string wrapped around it, and Jupiter insists that Elmquist does not know about the money and is not the burglar. Jupiter instead describes him as a wanderer who happened to see something in his sleep. Asked what he sees when he falls asleep with the television on, Elmquist turns pale and swallows. The scene leaves his particular experience to be questioned, but the concept has already changed how the clues are read: knowledge gained through apparent nocturnal observation need not mean that the observer entered, searched, or stole anything.