SOMETHING LIKE KIDNAPPING.

Evening Star, Issue 7450, 20 February 1888, Page 3

SOMETHING LIKE KIDNAPPING.

A .STRANGE DREAM

CHRISTCHURCH, February 20.

A boy named Parker, two years old, was lost and found at New Brighton under peculiar circumstances. His parents and a woman named Anne Burt took a house at New Brighton for a few weeks. Last Thursday Mrs Burt told his mother she had dreamed that the child had been lost and found by a butcher. On Saturday she returned to town, but before leaving pointed out a butcher named Patrick as the man she had dreamed had found the child. That afternoon the child was missed. Over 100 people turned out to look for it. Search was prosecuted unsuccessfully till two o’clock next morning and resumed at daybreak. At about eleven Patrick said he would have a look on his own account. He left the others at about 2.30 p.m., rode in with the child, saying that he had found it in a ditch among the sandhills. The child was not hungry, had apparently not been crying, and was not wet, though rain had fallen the previous night. Some of the party, distrusting Patrick’s statement, followed his tracks, but could find no ditch where he said he had found the child, and no traces as if a child had been wandering about.