It may be imagined that experiments of this sort, in which there
is no crack, no leak on the side of the living, are anything but
easy to carry through. In the case of a murder, for instance, it
can always be maintained that the medium discovers the body and
the circumstances of the tragedy through the involuntary and
unconscious intermediary of the murderer, even when the latter
escapes prosecution and suspicion altogether. But a recent
incident, related by Dr. Osty with the utmost precision of detail
and the most scrupulous verification in the Annales des Sciences
Psychiques of April, 1914, perhaps supplies us with one of those
experiments which we have not been able to achieve until this
day. I give the facts in a few words.
On the 2nd of March of this year, M. Etienne Lerasle, an old man
of eighty-two, left his son's house at Cours-les-Barres (Cher)
for his daily walk and was not seen again. The house stands in
the middle of a forest on Baron Jaubert's estate. Vain searches
were made in every direction for the missing man's traces; the
ponds and pools were dragged to no purpose; and on the 8th of
March a careful and systematical exploration of the wood, in
which no fewer than twenty-four people took part, led to no
result. At last, on the 18th of March, M. Louis Mirault, Baron
Jaubert's agent, thought of applying to Dr. Osty, and supplied
him with a scarf which the old man had worn. Dr. Osty went to his
favourite medium, Mme. M--. He knew only one thing, that the
matter concerned an old man of eighty-two, who walked with a
slight stoop; and that was all.
As soon as Mme. M-- had taken the scarf in her hands, she saw the
dead body of an old man lying on the damp ground, in a wood, in
the middle of a coppice, beside a horse-shoe pond, near a sort of
rock. She traced the road taken by the victim, depicted the
buildings which he had passed, his mental condition impaired by
age, his fixed intention of dying, his physical appearance, his
habitual and characteristic way of carrying his stick, his soft
striped shirt, and so on.
The accuracy of the description caused the greatest astonishment
among the missing man's friends. There was one detail that
puzzled them a little: the mention of a rock in a part of the
country that possessed none. The search was resumed on the
strength of the data supplied by the clairvoyant. But all the
rocks in a forest are more or less alike; the indications were
not enough; and nothing was found.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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