This kind of experience — the sense of a presence, often a deceased or absent loved one, in extreme solo isolation — has been documented across a range of survival accounts and high-altitude mountaineering narratives. It is sometimes described as the “third man factor,” a term drawn from Ernest Shackleton’s account of a presence that accompanied him and his companions on their crossing of South Georgia Island in 1916, and subsequently studied by researcher John Geiger. The phenomenon is most commonly reported in conditions of extreme physical stress, isolation, and life threat, and its causes are not definitively established — it may involve altered states of consciousness produced by hypoxia, dehydration, blood loss, or neurological disruption, or it may be a psychological mechanism that the brain produces in extreme stress.
Ashcraft does not diagnose her own experience. She describes it as it felt to her: that Richard was there, in some form, and that his presence was sustaining. The head injury she sustained — significant enough to cause 27 hours of unconsciousness and, in the long term, to affect her ability to read for years — may have been a contributing factor. So may the blood loss, the fever she ran after waking, and the sustained stress of the survival period. What she describes is not presented in her accounts as supernatural in a formal sense; it is presented as an experience she had that she values and has not found it necessary to explain away.
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## The Moment She Nearly Stopped
Around day 39 — the specific date is not given with certainty in Ashcraft’s accounts — she reached the lowest point of the survival period.