The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [62]
“I cannot see anyone looking up here,” said his friend, peering over the railing. But the merchant was so excited that he rushed down into the pit, calling for his brother. There was no one standing, no one looking up, no one resembling his brother in the crowd around him. “I am not superstitious, nor a spiritualist, but could not get over the startling circumstances for some time.”
When he returned to England, he learned that his brother had died at the French Hospital in Shanghai on October 6, 1867. It was the night the merchant had been at the theater in Toronto.
The woman was sitting in her mother’s bedroom when her seven-year-old nephew came running, tumbling, into the room.
The boy was pale and breathless: “Oh, Auntie, I have just seen my father walking around my bed.”
She replied, “Nonsense, you must have been dreaming.” The child’s father was traveling in another country, she reminded him, on business far from home.
But the child would not be comforted. He refused to return to his room. So his aunt tucked him into the bed with her. An hour or so later, she rolled over, glanced idly toward the fireplace, and saw her brother sitting in a chair by the fire.
“What particularly struck me was the pallor of his face.” Her nephew was asleep. “I was so frightened, knowing that at this time my brother was in Hong Kong, that I put my head under the bedclothes.” But she heard his voice, calling her name. Once, twice, three times, and then it faded away.
In the morning, she told her mother, who advised her to make a note of it. She carefully wrote it down, 10:00 p.m. on August 21, 1869.
When the next mail arrived from China, there was the letter telling of her brother’s death from heatstroke on August 21, 1869.
A British clergyman was taking a summer evening walk over the downs near Marlcombe Hill. He was composing in his head a congratulatory letter to a good friend whose birthday would be two days later, on August 20, 1874.
He had barely begun when a voice spoke sharply in his ear: “What, write to a dead man; write to a dead man?”
The clergyman turned hastily around, expecting to see someone behind him. There was only the fading light glazing the grasses with gold. “Treating the matter as an illusion, I went on with my composition.” The same voice spoke again, this time louder and with some impatience: “What, write to a dead man; write to a dead man?”
Again, he turned around. Again, there was no one there. But now he was afraid that it wasn’t an illusion.
After hurrying home, he wrote the letter and sent it anyway. “In reply [I] received from Mrs. W the sad, but to me not unexpected, intelligence that her husband was dead.”
The man jolted upright in bed. It was four o’clock in the morning. Someone had just gripped his hand. The touch was as cold and thin as water.
He exclaimed to his wife, startled by the feel of those chilly fingers. He caught a glimpse of a woman leaving; there’d been something about the way she moved, the set of her dark head, that had reminded him of his aunt.
But the man and his wife were in Nottingham, and on this early June morning in 1880, the aunt was supposed to be on a steamer heading for the United States.
He leapt up to check the front door of the house. It was on the chain. He returned, saying to his wife that he feared his aunt was dead.
“You’re dreaming,” she replied. Her diagnosis was that he’d eaten too large a supper before going to bed.
Two weeks later, they received a letter from his aunt’s solicitor. She had died at sea on the day that he’d felt that ice-water hand in the middle of a summer night.
Gurney called the stories “crisis apparitions” because of their critical timing—the voice, the touch, the shape, all seemed to appear close to a moment of extreme injury or death. Out of thousands of responses, he’d kept only seven hundred for the book, only those with some tangible evidence behind them—diary notations, conversations