709. There are some other circumstances also in which, in spite of the fact that the death is already known, a hallucination occurring shortly afterwards may have some slight evidential value. Thus we have a case where a lady who knew that her sister had died a few hours previously, but who was not herself in any morbidly excited condition, seemed to see some one enter her own dining-room, opening and shutting the door. The percipient (who had never had any other hallucination) was much astonished when she found no one in the dining-room; but it did not till some time afterwards occur to her that the incident could be in any way connected with her recent loss. This reminds us of a case (ii. p. 6942) where the Rev. R. M. Hill sees a tall figure rush into the room, which alarms and surprises him, then vanishes before he has time to recognise it.

1 The Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (vol. i. p. 405) contain a case where a physician and his wife, sleeping in separate but adjoining rooms, are both of them awakened by a bright light. The physician sees a figure standing in the light; his wife, who gets up to see what the light in her husband's room may be, does not reach that room till the figure has disappeared. The figure is not clearly identified, but has some resemblance to a patient of the physician's, who has died suddenly (from hemorrhage) about three hours before, calling for her doctor, who did not anticipate this sudden end. Even this resemblance did not strike the percipient until after he knew of the death, and the defect in recognition has prevented me from quoting this case at length.

2 The references in this and the two following sections are to Phantasms of the Living.

An uncle, a tall man, dies about that moment, and it is remarked that although Mr. Hill knew his uncle to be ill, the anxiety which he may have felt would hardly have given rise to an unrecognised and formidable apparition.

There are cases also where a percipient who has had an apparition of a friend shortly after that friend's known death has had veridical hallucinations at other times, and has never had any hallucination of purely subjective origin. Such a percipient may naturally suppose that his apparition of the departed friend possessed the same veridical character which was common to the rest, although it was not per se evidential, since the fact of the death was already known.

For the present, however, it will be better to return to the cases which are free from this important prima facie drawback - cases where the percipient was, at any rate, unaware that the death, which the phantasm seemed to indicate, had in fact taken place.