STRANGE STORIES OF SECOND SIGHT.

Otago Witness, Issue 1935, 26 March 1891, Page 31

STRANGE STORIES OF SECOND SIGHT.

When the definition " second-sight was first used it was meant to imply simply a power of forecasting events. But this terse significance has now been lost, and we generally use the term to include all strange and weird dreams and realisms of any sort whatsoever.

One of the most cdrioas cases of the kind which I am about to mention is one vouchsafed for by a clever novelist, who maintains that the instance is absolutely a true one.

The facts were these : A lady crossed to Ireland to spend haymaking time with two of her relations there. She was received at a cosy farm, accorded a right royal welcome, and enjoyed herself very much for some days. The lady was, however, something of a dreamer, and she had not been in the house three days ere she exhibited tiaces of fear and alarm.

The farmer and his wife asked her what the matter was ; bat she gave them evasive replies, saying only this much, " Beware of the Irishmanjnamed Pat." We will_call him Fat, though I forget what his real name was.

The farmer was much surprised at these words. He asked, " How do you know that I have a servant named Pat 7 " and she said, " I know you have, and if you take me out into the field, I will point him out to you."

An expedition was rflade accordingly to the field. The haymakers were all at work, andin the centre of one group a little, dark, feriroious-looking man was busily using his scythe. This man at onoe attracted the visitor's attention. She seemed frightened at his very aspect ; and pulling the farmer on one side, she said, " That is the man ; I hope you won't keep him long in your service."

Now, it proved most curiously that this labourer had received his discharge during the previous week, and was to leave the farmer on the next day. Of course the good husbandman scoffed at his guest's fears, and tried to laugh her out of them. But she was not so easily silenced ; and in the middle of the next night she knocked at her hostess' bedroom door to ask if all were well.

The lady left for England three days after this event, but she did not forget what had occurred in Ireland. Indeed, it remained ever present in her mind ; and she awaited letters from the farmer with great anxiety. None came from him, however; for, a few days after her return, she heard that both he and his wife had been discovered horribly murdered in their beds.

Strange to say, before crossing over to Dublin, the lady attempted to give a true account of the way in which this crime had been committed. She pointed out that the man called "Pat" had entered through the window ; that he had killed the old lady as she lay, and that the farmer awoke from his sleep only to be struck down as he endeavoured to rise in bed.

When she arrived in Ireland, and related all she knew to the police, such a narration gave them an instant clue. The man Pat was arrested and duly hanged, confessing that he had committed the dastardly deed identically in the way suggested by the farmer's guest. To show to what extent 3ome writers go in claiming marvellous powers of secondsight, I will give the outline of a story in one of our magazines some little while ago. There was a young painter in an old city in Holland, and he was sitting in his studio one night when an idea for a picture came into his head. He drew a dilapidated garret ; in the garret lay the body of a murdered woman. He was in the act of drawing in the figure of a man standing over this body when something interrupted him, and he left the \»ork.

Two days after he was in prison, someone in connection with the police office had looked at his drawing, and immediately arrested him.

It seemed that a murder really had been committed in the town. In the dead of night, an old woman had been heard screaming and calling for halp. No one had gone to her assistance, but as a tradesman entered the garret next morning he found her dead. And here truly was a most curious thing. The ; artist, who vowed that he had ,'never heard of or seen the old lady, and that he had not been in the neighbourhood of the garret in the whole course of his life, had yet managed to sketch the interior of this room, and to give a most faithful portrait of the old lady who had been done to death. "You drew the scene," said the gendarmes, " and you must have witnessed it ; we accuse you of the murder." For some weeks the man lay in prison. In vain he tried to imagine the face that was missing from his canvas and to fill it in. He knew that it was the face of the murderer, but inspiration, which had helped him so far, helped him no longer. There seemed nothing but the guillotine before him. One day, the town fair was held outside the prison walls. Hearing the joyous sounds of merriment and laughter, the condemned man stood upon his stool and looked through his iron bars. As he did so an exclamation of surprise and joy burst from his lips. He beat at' the doors for gaoler. " Eun out to the market-place, and arrest the dark man by the chestnut stall ; he is the murderer 1 " he cried ; and sure enough the man so seized confessed at once, being too amazed to think that conjecture alone accused him. The sight of his face bad recalled to the artist his forgotten picture ; in that moment he sketched in the head, but other explanation of the mystery was never had.

" Beware the Ides of March." Not a year ago there was a curious and inexplicable illustration of my subject in a little village

near Fontainebleau. An old man, a dreamer" all his life, had an only son in America. He rf had a great love for the lad, and he declared that he knew at all times when danger threatened him.

One day the neighbours perceived that this 'veteran was greatly alarmed. "My son stood by my bedside last night," he said ; " that portends ill, mark the time."

A week past, and the old man awaited news from his son but none came. On the first day of the new week, the old man had another tale to tell. "My Bon is threatened with danger," said he ; " he visited me last night and held out his hand ; I felt it and it was as cold as death." Next morning his manner was pitiful ; he wept like a child. " My son is dead," he said.

The neighbours endeavoured to chaff him out of his presentiments. Bat nothing would comfort him, and a month later there came a letter saying that the boy had been murdered in the Argentine Bepublic. The story seemed to tally most curiously with the old man's dream.

On the day of the first appearance of the vision, the boy had quarrelled in camp. On his second appearance he had fled the settlement, but had been pursued by one of the men with whom he had disagreed. On the third occasion, he had been Bhot by this man as he lay asleep on a bench in a drinking bar.

Whether it is possible for people with great strength of will to appear to those they love at the hour of death is a question upon which human thought will never be in concord. The Society for Psychical Kesearch brings forward many well authenticated cases that are very difficult to explain away. Some cases brought to my own knowledge are puzzling and astounding. Let us take such a case as this. A man has a son a sea. He is devoted to his son, and overjoyed when he hears that he is returning home. The day when the boy should arrive draws Dear, and the man grows very anxious.

One night this man is in bed. The hoar is late ; all the servants in the house have retired. A ring comes at the front door, and as, divining disaster, the father hurries downstairs to answer - the ring, he is astonished and stopified to discover that his boy waits on the doorstep, having just returned from sea. He greets the lad with fond affection, but the boy's answers are delivered in a melancholy tone ; the father sees that he is wet through, and he hurries him to a bedroom, where a warm fire is lighted and blankets are produced to warm the cold limbs of the traveller.

The latter tells a curious story. He haa been wrecked on the way home, and he alone of the passengers has been saved : he begs to be allowed to sleep, and when he has been made thoroughly comfortable he is left.

The father comes down next morning, and knocks at the door of his son's bedroom ; there is no one in it ; no sign that it had been inhabited during the previous night. It had all been a dream, but yet a false dream. Before the end of the month it was known that the ship in which this young man travelled had .been wrecked in midocean and that all on board her had been drowned.

But I will give yon another instance. I knew a family in Scotland who had a tradition that a ,'wandering pedlar 'would ,'call at their house immediately prior to a death in the family.

It is held that some sort of a pedlar has called upon one of the members of this house before every death that has occurred amongst its members during the present century.

Now, in the early days of the year 1879, the younger son of the people who owned the big estates in Scotland was staying in rooms near my house in London. He was a lively, careless boy, studying for the bar, and troubled neither by superstitious fear nor by melancholy. Great was my surprise, then, when one day he called on me, and I saw that he was greatly agitated. " What is the matter 1 " I asked, and he replied, " I must return to Scotland ; my father is dead."

In answer to my further questions, he said that he had been studying in his rooms, which were on the ground floor of a suburban house, when an old pedlar had deliberately looked into the window and asked him to buy. He was sure that the matter portended disaster, for, as he said, the old man was dressed in brown, and was the very type of the pedlar about which the family have that awful tradition.

Persuasion in such a case was sheer nonsense. The boy went to Scotland, but when he arrived there he found that his father had died on the previous day, whether at the hour when the pedlar had appeared to the young man I never learnt.

We may laugh and disbelieve all these stories, but we must remember that big people have not hesitated to believe in some of them. Does not the " white lady " appear to every Hohenzollern that is to die, and did not the late Emperor William have every detail in his great career foretold by a gipsy woman 1

In hundreds of our own families there are traditions and superstitions of the kind we have noticed. The sound of wheels on deserted gravel paths, the screaming of the night-owl, the Banshee in Ireland, the death watch — all these, say the believers, are solemn warnings, illustrating the old line, " there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy."