Place withheld · 1883-01-01 · from the PHANTASMS archive

An account

In reply to your letter I have to state : — 1. Vivid impressions of the kind I have related are utterly unknown to me ; the one related is unique in my experience. 2. There was not the least cause for anxiety owing to the absence of my father. It only seemed a short time since he had gone out of the room, and on this account my urgency was deemed unreasonable. 3. The date was January 9th, 1883. We have confirmed this date by the obituary notice in the Preston Chronicle. Mr. Banister's wife and sister supply the following corroboration : — We have seen the statement which Mr. Banister has forwarded to the Psychical Research Society, relating to the strong impression by which he was irresistibly urged in search of his father on the afternoon of January 9th, 1883, and we are able to confirm all details given in that statement.

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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.