Place withheld · 1885-09-01 · from the PHANTASMS archive

An account

I quite well remember my wife speaking of the figure that she had seen during the day. The next day we heard of Mr. Stephenson's death. E. J. Ellis. Mr. Herbert Swiney, writing on September 29th, 1885, from Tregarthen House, Romford Road, Forest Gate, says that he only faintly recollects the matter. If correctly reported, this case presents two of the rarer features which are common to telepathic and to purely subjective hallucinations ; the fragmentary nature of the percept — a face only, — and the repetition after an interval of some hours.^

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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.