Belgian essays (French) -- Translations into English; Death
That same night, as there were said to be “uncanny happenings” in some
rooms near the London Law Courts, the watchers arranged to sit through
the night in the empty chambers. Precautions were taken to prevent
intrusion and powdered chalk was spread on the floor of the two smaller
rooms, “to trace anybody or anything that might come or go.” Mrs.
Verrall knew nothing of the matter. The phenomena began at 12.43 A.M.
and ended at 2.9 A.M. The watchers noticed marks on the powdered chalk.
On examination it was seen that the marks were “clearly defined bird’s
footprints in the middle of the floor, three in the left-hand room and
five in the right-hand room.” The marks were identical and exactly 2¾
inches in width; they might be compared to the footprints of a bird about
the size of a turkey. The footprints were observed at 2.30 A.M.; the
unexplained phenomena had begun at 12.43 that same morning. The words
about “chalk sticking to the feet” are a singularly appropriate comment
on the events; but the remarkable point is that Mrs. Verrall wrote what
we have said one hour and thirty-three minutes before the events took
place.
The persons who watched in the two rooms were questioned by Mr. J. G.
Piddington, a member of the council of the S. P. R., and declared that
they had not any expectation of what they discovered. I need hardly add
that Mrs. Verrall had never heard anything about the happenings in the
haunted house and that the watchers were completely ignorant of Mrs.
Verrall’s existence.
Here then is a very curious prediction of an event, insignificant in
itself, which is to happen, in a house unknown to the one who foretells
it, to people whom she does not know either. The spiritualists, who score
in this case, not without some reason, will have it that a spirit, in
order to prove its existence and its intelligence, organized this little
scene in which the future, the present and the past are all mixed up
together. Are they right? Or is Mrs. Verrall’s subconsciousness roaming
like this, at random, in the future? It is certain that the problem has
seldom appeared under a more baffling aspect.
6
We will now take another premonitory dream, strictly controlled by the
committee of the S. P. R.[12] Early in September 1893, Annette, wife
of Walter Jones, tobacconist, of Old Gravel Lane, East London, had her
little boy ill. One night she dreamt that she saw a cart drive up and
stop near where she was. It contained three coffins, “two white and one
blue. One white coffin was bigger than the other; and the blue was the
biggest of the three.” The driver took out the bigger white coffin and
left it at the mother’s feet, driving off with the others. Mrs. Jones
told her dream to her husband and to a neighbour, laying particular
stress on the curious circumstance that one of the coffins was blue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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