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

An account

I have taken all the steps I feel I can justifiably take with regard to securing for you the testimony of the Princess D. [name given]. It has already given me a great deal of awkward unpleasantness when inquiring at the Russian Embassy, &c, as the Prince and Princess are much mixed up in politics, and Russians are, as perhaps you know, not a little suspicious of the inquiries of strangers. The most remarkable feature in this case is the light. The appearance of a dark room as being filled with light is a form of hallucination (or of hyperesthesia) which is occasionally experienced on waking, apart from any further abnormality. I have received at least five well marked instances of the sort, not including those where there has been a further development of the hallucination — a luminous figure, or a figure in addition to the light.1 The full interest of this point will appear later. (See Chap. XII., §7.)

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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.