PREMONITIONS OF DEATH

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8294, 24 September 1903, Page 4

PREMONITIONS OF DEATH

I . Whilst, : mdoubtedly; superstitious beliefs are becoming rarer under the materialising effect of modern discovery and invention, they will probably never entirely disappear, at any rate until that intellectual niillenium is reached -when human knowledge is complete in every department. For some weeks correspondents of the London Spectator have been sending to that paper accounts of their experiences in respect to signals —noises and hammrings for the most part—premonitory of impending death. The letters of these correspondents, of course, inevitably occasioned another batch from other more matter of fact exponents of the "mere coincidence" doctriner One correspondent states that on the night before his father died, which, by the way, was the night- before the writer's thirteenth birthday—mark the number!—his mother was awakened from her sleep by a violent crash in the dining-room below, which sounded to her as though the table had been overturned. But examination showed that there was nothing in the room to account for the noise. Another correspondent states that in her family extraordinary noises are invariably heard just before the death of one of its members. One night she and her husband were awakened by a noise as though the window shutters' below had been opened. The noises continued, and it was thought burglars had forced an entrance. Investigation proved the windows and shutters were not open, and that all was quiet and undisturbed. A relative of the family, living elsewhere, heard similar noises. A day or two after the family were summoned to the death-bed of their father. On the other hand, the "coincidence" supporters quote many cases of pure coincidence. A correspondent, whose brother was an officer in the Irish Brigade, and was engaged in the Colenso River fight, stated that one night in December, 1899, he and his family were started by the sound of a gunshot. Simultaneously his brother's photograph on the mantelpiece fell face downwards to the ground. Next day the disaster of Colenso was published in the papers: However, he concludes, "the photoframe was old, and of the cheap foreign "dump" order, and my rheumatic but un- ( scarred brother is now in the Army Pay De-j partment." '!