NEW YORK GHOST STORY.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 4384, 15 June 1901, Page 2 (Supplement)

NEW YORK GHOST STORY.

Yonkers, a prosaic, albeit pretty, little town overlooking the Hudson, and adjoining the extreme northerly limits of New York, has been in a ferment of excitement. The cause of this emotion, writes the “Daily Chronicle's” New York correspondent, is an event which is of great interest to the Society for Psychical Research. A girl named Julia Murray died in her own home at Yonkers. Julia, who was a Roman Catholic, had, in her lifetime, been unusually religious. Th e bedroom in which her death occurred was part of a flat in a very uninteresting four-storey struo. ture, like hundreds of others, and connected on * either side by doors with other rooms. On tho night following tho death the body, resting, not in a coffin, but on a “cooling table” above •an ice box, and covered with a white sheet, was being watched by several girl friends of the deceased. Ten or a dozen persons seem to have been within reach and ready to reliev e each other in this pious vigil. At four a.m. the only watcher was a Miss Smith, who bad almost fallon asleep from exhaustion, when, on raising her head, she was suddenly startled by a luminous appearance on the wall—not of tho room in which the body lay, but of tho bedroom next to it—in which Julia had died. Gradually the luminous spot assumed shape, and to her amazement the shape was that of the deceased, dressed in a loose gown of vestal white, and holding her hands crossed as they hung down before her, grasping a rosary. On her head, which was uplifted as though in prayer, was a “wreath of white flowers. The cries of Miss Smith summoned several other girls, of unimpeachable veracity, all of whom declare that they saw the vision, and are positive it was the exact likeness of Julia Murray. Nor is this all. Three young men —brothers and acquaintances of tho deceased —came into the room in time to see the alleged apparition, which, after lingering for a few minutes, turned towards the witnesses of the phenomenon and gradually, faded into darkness.