742. In the case which I shall next quote, the evidence, though coming from a young boy, is clear and good, and the incident itself is thoroughly characteristic. The decedent was satisfying both a local and a personal attraction.

We owe this case (which I quote from Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 173) to the kindness of Lady Gore Booth, from whom I first heard the account by word of mouth. Her son (then a schoolboy aged 10) was the percipient, and her youngest daughter, then aged 15, also gives a firsthand account of the incident as follows:-

Lissadell, Sligo, February 1891. On the 10th of April 1889, at about half-past nine o'clock a.m., my youngest brother and I were going down a short flight of stairs leading to the kitchen, to fetch food for my chickens, as usual. We were about half-way down, my brother a few steps in advance of me, when he suddenly said - "Why, there's John Blaney, I didn't know he was in the house!" John Blaney was a boy who lived not far from us, and he had been employed in the house as hall-boy not long before. I said that I was sure it was not he (for I knew he had left some months previously on account of ill-health), and looked down into the passage, but saw no one. The passage was a long one, with a rather sharp turn in it, so we ran quickly down the last few steps, and looked round the corner, but nobody was there, and the only door he could have gone through was shut. As we went upstairs my brother said, "How pale and ill John looked, and why did he stare so?" I asked what he was doing. My brother answered that he had his sleeves turned up, and was wearing a large green apron, such as the footmen always wear at their work.

An hour or two afterwards I asked my maid how long John Blaney had been back in the house? She seemed much surprised, and said, "Didn't you hear, miss, that he died this morning?" On inquiry we found he had died about two hours before my brother saw him. My mother did not wish that my brother should be told this, but he heard of it somehow, and at once declared that he must have seen his ghost. Mabel Olive Gore Booth.

The actual percipient's independent account is as follows:-

March 1891. We were going downstairs to get food for Mabel's fowl, when I saw John Blaney walking round the corner. I said to Mabel, "That's John Blaney!" but she could not see him. When we came up afterwards we found he was dead. He seemed to me to look rather ill. He looked yellow; his eyes looked hollow, and he had a green apron on. Mordaunt Gore Booth.

We have received the following confirmation of the date of death:-

The Presbytery, Ballingal, Sligo, 10th February 1891. I certify from the parish register of deaths that John Blaney (Dunfore) was interred on the 12th day of April 1889, having died on the 10th day of April 1889. P. J. Shemaghs, C. C.

Lady Gore Booth writes:-

May 31st, 1890.

When my little boy came upstairs and told us he had seen John Blaney, we thought nothing of it till some hours after, when we heard that he was dead. Then for fear of frightening the children, I avoided any allusion to what he had told us, and asked every one else to do the same. Probably by now he has forgotten all about it, but it certainly was very remarkable, especially as only one child saw him, and they were standing together. The place where he seems to have appeared was in the passage outside the pantry door, where John Blaney's work always took him. My boy is a very matter-of-fact sort of boy, and I never heard of his having any other hallucination.

G. Gore Booth.

Now this apparition - unless we explain it as a telepathic impression projected at' the moment of death and remaining latent for some hours before it attained externalisation - may possibly be taken as showing something of continued memory in the departed boy. Something of him or from him, it may be said, reverted to well-known haunts, and was discerned in habitual surroundings. But even of this there is no sure indication. If it be suggested that the dead boy waited to manifest until his young master reached a suitable spot, it may be replied that the living boy's presence in that spot merely enabled him to discern some influence which might have been discernible in that spot possibly at any moment during some hours, if the fitting percipient had been at hand. Or else, and perhaps more simply, we may suppose that there was a mere influence transmitted from the departed mind to the living mind, which influence the living mind discerned when in surroundings in which its own recollection of the decedent might most readily be evoked.

I add in 742 A a somewhat similar case. The figure of the grandmother looking at the clock resembles the figure of the pantry-boy seen in the offices, but was seen by both persons in a position to see it, instead of by one only. See also an account given in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 93, by the Rev. G. Lewis of his seeing an apparition of a young man who - unknown to him - had died three days before. The young man had much wished to see Mr. Lewis before he died, but Mr. Lewis, not having heard of his illness, had not been to visit him. This narrative, if interpreted in the way which the percipient suggests, might have been placed among cases where the figure communicates a message; the reproachful expression implying a recollected sense of injury. It is, at any rate, an example of the class now under discussion.

743. The case given in 743 A - which comes from excellent informants - is one of those which correspond most nearly to what one would desire in a posthumous message. I may refer also to General Campbell's case (in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 476) in which a long-continued series of unaccountable noises and an apparition twice seen by a child in the house suggested to the narrator the agency of his dead wife. The case, which depends for its evidential force on a great mass of detail, is too long for me to quote; but it is worth study, as is any case where there seems evidence of persistent effort to manifest, meeting with one knows not what difficulty. It may be that in such a story there is nothing but strange coincidence, or it may be that from records of partially successful effort, renewed often and in ambiguous ways, we shall hereafter learn something of the nature of that curtain of obstruction which now seems so arbitrary in its sudden lifting, its sudden fall.