Place withheld · 1885-01-01 · from the PHANTASMS archive
April, 1885. The only confirmation which is now available is that of myself. I can speak with all sincerity. I heard the sweet music identically with my wife. The music was heard on Saturday, 2nd of May, a little before 4 o'clock in the afternoon, also on the next day at about the same time, and also on the following Tuesday at about the same hour. Those who heard the music were my wife, myself, my wife's aunt, the nurse, our son E/ichard, aged 7 ; our son Thomas, aged 9 (the last four all dead), our eldest daughter, aged 11, and our servant, who shortly left us and went to Ireland to her husband, who was a soldier, and was soon lost sight of. Our eldest daughter is now in New York, and I have no doubt but that she will rem.ember the circumstance. I am quite satisfied that the music heard was not produced by someone at a distance, for our house was then situated in a long garden, some 50 yards distant from the public road, and the adjoining house to ours was unoccupied at the time. The sound was not a muffled sound at all, but the soft, wild notes of an ^olian harp, which rose and fell distinctly, and increased gradually, until the room was full of sound, as loud as the full swell of an organ, and it rolled slowly down the stairs, dying softly on the ear in weird cadences. I am certain it was not produced by human fingers.
Eton College. August 6th, 1881. I wish to write down, before there is time for confusion, the following fact, occurring on Thursday morning, July 28, 1881, when my dear mother died, whom G-o…
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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