732. In the case of Mrs. Green, already quoted in Chapter IV (Sleep)., 429 D, we come across an interesting problem. Two women are drowned under very peculiar circumstances. A friend has apparently a clairvoyant vision of the scene, yet not at the moment when it occurred, but many hours afterwards, and about the time when another person, deeply interested, heard of the death. It is therefore possible to suppose that the apparently clairvoyant scene was in reality impressed telepathically on the percipient by another living mind. I think, however, that both the nature of the vision and certain analogies, which will appear later in our argument, point to a different view, involving an agency both of the dead and of the living. I conjecture that a current of influence may be started by a deceased person, which, however, only becomes strong enough to be perceptible to its object when reinforced by some vivid current of emotion arising in living minds. I do not say that this is yet provable; yet the hint may be of value when the far-reaching interdependencies of telepathy between the two worlds come to be better understood.

733. Two singular cases in this group remain, where the departed spirit, long after death, seems pre-occupied with the spot where his bones are laid. The first of these cases (see 733 A) approaches farce; the second (in which the skeleton of a man who had probably been murdered about forty years before was discovered by means of a dream; see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 35) stands alone among our narratives in the tragedy which follows on the communication. Mr. Podmore in an article in the same volume (p. 303) suggests other theories to account for this case without invoking the agency of the dead; but to me the least impossible explanation is still the notion that the murdered man's dreams harked back after all those years to his remote unconsecrated grave. I may refer further to another case (in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 155, footnote) where feelings of horror and depression were constantly experienced in a room over which a baby's body was afterwards found. This case makes, perhaps, for another explanation - depending not so much on any continued influence of the departed spirit as on some persistent influence inhering in the bones themselves - deposited under circumstances of terror or anguish, and possibly in some way still radiating a malignant memory.

Bizarre as this interpretation looks, we shall find some confirmation of such a possibility in our chapter on Possession. Yet another case belonging to the same group, and given in 733 B, supplies a variant on this view; suggesting, as Edward Gurney has remarked, the local imprintation of a tragic picture, by whom and upon what we cannot tell.

I think it well to suggest even these wild conjectures; so long as they are understood to be conjectures and nothing more. I hold it probable that those communications, of which telepathy from one spirit to another forms the most easily traceable variety, are in reality infinitely varied and complex, and show themselves from time to time in forms which must for long remain quite beyond our comprehension.