"That same evening, by the last post, I received a hastily-written note
from Mr. Mansfield, bearing the Oxford postmark, dated Oriel College, 5
p.m., and relating the facts of an exactly similar apparition which had
manifested itself to him, with absolute simultaneity of occurrence. On
the very day and hour when I had seen Mr. Mansfield's wraith in
Piccadilly, Mr. Mansfield himself was walking down the Corn Market in
Oxford, in the direction of the Taylor Institute. As he approached the
corner, he saw what he took to be a vision or image of myself, his
tutor, moving towards him in my usual leisurely manner. Suddenly, as he
was on the point of addressing me with regard to my Aristotle lecture
the next morning, the image glided up to him in a rapid and evasive
manner, shook a green silk umbrella with a rhinoceros-horn handle three
times around his head, and then disappeared incomprehensibly through the
door of the Randolph Hotel. Returning to college in a state of
breathless alarm and surprise, at what he took to be an act of incipient
insanity or extreme inebriation on my part, Mr. Mansfield learnt from
the porter, to his intense astonishment, that I was at that moment
actually in London. Unable to conceal his amazement at this strange
event, he wrote me a full account of the facts while they were still
fresh in his memory: and as I preserve his note to this day, I append a
copy of it to my present communication, for publication in the Society's
Transactions.
"There is one small point in the above narrative to which I would wish
to call special attention, and that is the accurate description given by
Mr. Mansfield of the umbrella carried by the apparition he observed in
Oxford. This umbrella exactly coincided in every particular with the one
I was then actually carrying in Piccadilly. But what is truly
remarkable, and what stamps the occurrence as a genuine case of
supernatural intervention, is the fact that _Mr. Mansfield could not
possibly ever have seen that umbrella in my hands, because I had only
just that afternoon purchased it at a shop in Bond Street_. This, to my
mind, conclusively proves that no mere effort of fancy or visual
delusion based upon previous memories, vague or conscious, could have
had anything whatsoever to do with Mr. Mansfield's observation at least.
It was, in short, distinctly an objective apparition, as distinguished
from a mere subjective reminiscence or hallucination."
As I laid down the Proceedings on the breakfast table with a sigh, I
said to my wife (who had been looking over my shoulder while I read):
"Now, Nora, we're really in for it. What on earth do you suppose I'd
better do?"
Nora looked at me with her laughing eyes laughing harder and brighter
than ever. "My dear Owen," she said, putting the Proceedings promptly
into the waste paper basket, "there's really nothing on earth possible
now, except to make a clean breast of it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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