The Missing Link in Modern SpiritualismUnderhill, A. Leah (Ann Leah)
Religion
The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism
Underhill, A. Leah (Ann Leah)
Fox family; Spiritualism
Another remarkable feature used to attend these nocturnal excursions of
my great-grandmother, in the somnambulic condition, when she would thus
witness the celebration of funerals of persons who were at the time
still alive and well. She would see and recognize all the persons in
attendance on the funeral, from the officiating minister down, and
afterward remember and relate their names, which used always to
correspond with the fact as it afterward came about. She would even tell
by whose horses the body was brought to the grave (in the country at
that time there were no regular hearses, and this service was performed
by some friend or neighbor). When the crowded phantom funeral was over
she would awake to find herself alone in the graveyard; sometimes with
my grandfather (her son-in-law) awaiting at a little distance to
accompany her return home. But frequently she had no such watching
attendant, and I remember to have heard it said how distressing it would
be for her to awake entirely alone and make her solitary way homeward,
from what she knew to be the foreshadowed interment of some one near and
dear.
MY AUNT ELIZABETH'S VISION OF HER OWN TOMBSTONE.
My mother's sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Higgins, had much the same faculty.
She never left her bed at night to visit scenes about to transpire, but
nearly everything of importance was foreshadowed in her dreams. She
would frequently relate them on the morning following. One morning, she
gave us a relation of her dream. She said, laughingly, to her brother:
"I dreamed I had a fall, last night. You and I were riding on horseback,
when suddenly my horse stumbled and fell in front of Judge Perry's door.
I rolled down the little embankment, and Tom Foot came and helped me
up." Grandmother said, "That can't come true, for Tom is, by this time,
far away." They thought no more of it.
Some time after, her brother said to her, "Bessie, would you like to
take a ride with me this morning?" She replied that she would, and they
soon started off, each on a spirited horse, never thinking of her dream,
until the horse stumbled and she fell and rolled down the bank, exactly
in front of Judge Perry's door. _Tom_ came out and helped her up. He had
not gone away, as he had contemplated doing.
Mr. Robert Dale Owen, in his "Foot-falls on the Boundary of Another
World," has given a more detailed account of her remarkable dreams. I
will only add the last sad fulfilment of a dream which she had some
years previously to its fulfilment. She was then in her nineteenth year.
She said, "I dreamed I was in a new country, walking alone, when
suddenly I came to a small cemetery, and, walking up to one of the most
prominent head-stones, read the inscription, which was this:
IN MEMORY
OF
ELIZABETH SMITH,
Wife of H----,
Who departed this life
In the year of our Lord 18--,
Aged 27 years, 8 months and 26 days."[6]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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