Place withheld · 1886-01-01 · from the PHANTASMS archive
When all was over and Christmas Day had arrived, I ventured to ask my brother the exact moment of our mother's death. ' Well, father was out,' he said, ' at the school-room, and I did not see her alive. Julia was just in time to see her breathe her last. It was, as nearly as I can recollect, 10 minutes to 8 o'clock.' I looked at my wife for a moment, and then said : ' Then I saw her in Southport, and can now account, unaccountably, for my impressions.' Before the said 1 9th of December I was utterly careless of these things ; I had given little or no attention to spiritual apparitions or impressions.
I had spent the evening of December 5th in close study at Greek grammar. About 11 o'clock I stopped, and sat down by the fire to read Manon Lescaut. Some time afterwards I fell asleep, and i…
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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.
Anomaly