Place withheld · 1884-09-01 · from the PHANTASMS archive
September 18th, 1884. I perfectly well recollect, on the evening of my severe and sudden attack of illness, my wife asking me some questions about it, when, after hearing what I had to say, she told me that almost at the same instant of time (soon after 5 p.m.), when writing, she was seized with a fit of trembling and nervous depression, as if she were dying. She went to her room and remained there in the same state until the dinner hour, and as I did not arrive by that time she instinctively felt that something had happened to me, and was on the point of sending to the office to inquire when I left, when I was brought home in a cab. At the time of my seizure I was writing, and it was with much difficulty that I was enabled to finish the letter.
In the year 1870 I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston, and had an occasional correspondence with Miss S., an American, then residing in Europe. I received a letter from her, dated …
the accounts read alike, found by meaning rather than by shared details
Since reading your letter last night, I have carefully gone over the guests of that dinner party, and find them all gone but one, Frank Ashton, Esq., The Laurels, Twickenham, and he is too i…
the accounts read alike, found by meaning rather than by shared details
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…
the accounts read alike, found by meaning rather than by shared details
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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.
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