Voices

The house is quite an isolated one, standing in gardens away from a road, and about half-a-mile from the town. The doors and windows were closed. The voice was evidently within the house ; and could not have come from anyone in the house. Our children's ages were respectively 9 years, 7 years, 5 years and 7 months. We were sure they were all asleep at the time, as we went up at once to see. I asked them the next day ; besides, it was not the voice of the children, but seemed a low plaintive voice. Notwithstanding, my wife and the two servants thought it must have been myself calling from the next room, I being the only other being about. I have examined the localities, and saw how natural it was that Mrs. Saxon should imagine her husband to be calling from the nearer room. She describes the voice as very distinct and startling. She has occasionally had the hallucination of hearing her own name called, when overtired ; but never of anything else. Here, as m the last example, we have to note a slight tendency to subjective hallucination, which in the servant's case may have been intensified by recent trouble; and, without absolutely excluding the hypothesis of telepathic influence from her daughter-in-law,^ I still think it more probable that a purely subjective hallucination on her part, easily referable to her anxiety about her daughter-inlaw's condition, was psychically transferred to her two companions. The next example is from the Eev. W. Rajrmond, Rector of Ballyheigue, Co. Kerry. I need not repeat with regard to it the comments made on cases 330 and 331. Whatever view be taken as to the origin of the sound, it is impossible to suppose that it was by accident that the two identical impressions so exactly coincided, 1 The repetition of the experience somewhat favours this hypothesis (see p. 105). December 18th, 1884. (336) About 30 years ago, Miss Mildred Nash, my mother's aunt, died |! in my mother's house, at the advanced age of 82 years. She had been blind for some years, and an orphan cousin of mine had been much in attendance on her. My aunt lived and died in a room on the ground floor in the front of our house, which was situated in a retired street of Tralee. A few days after her death, my cousin and I were sitting, on a summer evening, at the window of the room over the room in which my aunt had died. I heard distinctly the words ' Rosy, Rosy ' (my cousin's name), apparently from the room beneath, and in my aunt's voice ; then I heard my cousin answer to the call ; she also heard the voice. I, struck with the strangeness of the circumstance, at once threw up the window to see if it were a voice from the street, but there was no one visible, and there could be no one there without being seen. I then searched the house all around, but there was nobody near except ourselves — my cousin and myself. The tale ends there ; nothing afterwards happened in connection ; — merely the unaccountable fact that two persons did independently hear such a voice as I have mentioned. I heard both the name called and the answer.