Place withheld · 1885-03-01 · from the PHANTASMS archive

An account

March 18th, 1885. I clearly remember on or about the 10th of January, 1885, early morning, suddenly awaking, and finding my wife leaning forward in bed. I asked her, ' What was the matter 1 ' She seemed agitated, and replied to the following effect : ' Oh, I have had such a horrid dream ! Fanny Goodall was standing here at my side, quite close, holding out the child in such distress, but I could not tell what she wanted ; it was so real, I could have touched her, but you awoke me.' Before rising, my wife repeated the incident in detail. Late on March 1 2th, she told me the sequel. Fortunately, I can safely fix the date as being the morning of either the 9th, 10th, or 11th of January, as during that month these were, owing to circumstances, the only possible occasions on which the incident, as related, could have occurred, while my mental impression, independently arrived at, strongly points to the 10th as the day.

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This is a witness statement collected in the 1880s by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore of the Society for Psychical Research, and published in Phantasms of the Living (1886), the first large scientific collection of such testimony. Witnesses signed their statements and were often corroborated by others, whose statements appear as their own accounts. The book is in the public domain; the text is verbatim save for scanning artifacts, and the full volumes are at archive.org.