Mrs. Claughton is a clairvoyant, of whom there are several in her family, but she had never tried to develop her gifts. She was a widow, having two children, accustomed to good society and known to every one as a vivacious, intelligent, and active woman, too much occupied with her own affairs to concern herself with those of others.

In 1893 she lived at No. 6 Blake Street, in a house belonging to Mrs. Appleby, daughter of Mrs. Blackburn, who had died there after three days of residence. The house was haunted. Mrs. Claughton had been there three days when she saw a ghost which she described as answering to the appearance of Mrs. Blackburn, who had died in the house and who was absolutely unknown to Mrs. Claughton. There are material proofs that she twice saw this ghost, who spoke at length about facts unknown to Mrs. Claughton. Some facts were immediately verified and were recognized as exact. The other details furnished her concerned a delicate mission which Mrs. Claughton was ordered to undertake. She was given the description of a village of which she had never heard (Myers designates the name as Meresby). She was also given the names and descriptions of several people whom she was to visit there: and the various incidents of the journey she was to take were accurately foretold.

1 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. XI, p. 547.

Mrs. Claughton then went to Meresby, where she found everything conforming to the information which had been furnished her. She was told that she would receive supplementary instructions, and she received them. She was instructed to make certain communications to the survivors, which she did: and if the intimate revelations could not be verified, at least material proofs were produced that she had effectively made the journey and the visits conforming to her recital of them. She had no other motive in going to Meresby than to perform the mission which had been confided to her by the apparition in the middle of the night. She, moreover, had no other motive than this in visiting people who were total strangers to her.

She was to accomplish we know not what secret ceremony in a church of the place, and that in the middle of the night. She took the necessary steps to obtain authority for this visit (Myers knew the motives of the secrets guarded by the interested survivors and feels that their silence is fully justified). There is no plausible hypothesis to explain why this woman undertook this voyage and made these efforts under the domination of an insane suggestion, since the visit was for her only a source of trouble and weariness. Moreover, in order to obey the injunction of the ghost she had left a sick child at home.

It should be noted that at the first word spoken by Mrs. Blackburn's ghost Mrs. Claughton had answered, asking her:

"Am I dreaming or is this a reality?" and that Mrs. Blackburn had replied:

"If you doubt, look up the date of my marriage."

And she gave the exact date of her marriage, which had been celebrated in India.

The next night the ghost of Mrs. Blackburn appeared a second time, accompanied by a man who, declaring that he was buried in the cemetery of Meresby, gave the name of George Howard. Since Mrs. Claughton did not know him at all, he indicated the dates of his marriage and of his death, asking her to verify them in the parish register. He begged her, after this verification, to come to the church during the night, to lock herself in there alone, and to wait near the tomb of Richard Hart, in the southeast corner of the lower side. He also gave the latter's age and the date of his decease, which could be verified by the registers. He asked her to go to his grave and pick some white roses which she would find there and to send them to Dr. Ferrier with her railroad ticket. In order that she might do this she was told, her railroad ticket would not be requested upon her arrival. She was to receive the assistance of a dark man named Joseph Wright; and his wife, in whose home she would stay, would tell her she had a child buried in the same cemetery. It was only later that she was to learn the end of the story whose secret was guarded. These revelations were made while two ghosts were present, but a third personage appeared whose name Mrs. Claughton cannot reveal. He was standing at the right of Mrs. Blackburn and seemed greatly troubled, hiding his face in his hands. At the end Mrs. Claughton fainted, but not before she had recourse to a signal for help which after the first apparition had been placed under her pillow. Dr. Ferrier, the administrator of the haunted house, verified the date of Mrs. Blackburn's marriage, and discovered at the Post Office that Meresby was really a little town in Suffolk County. Mrs. Claughton then left Blake Street and came to London on Friday, where she dreamed that she had come to the village on a holiday and was wandering from place to place looking for a lodging. Saturday she went to the depot and entered the lunch room asking the employee there to call her some time before the departure of the train: but the latter, by mistake, looked for her in the waiting room, so that she missed her train. She visited the British Museum about 3:50 in the afternoon.1 At Meresby she had great difficulty in finding lodgings and finally sought refuge in the home of Joseph Wright, who was found to be the sacristan. On Sunday Mrs. Wright told her of her darling little girl buried in the cemetery. Mrs. Claughton attended the Sunday services, going immediately afterwards to the sacristy in order to verify the dates on the registers. Joseph Wright had known George Howard and recognized her description of the apparition. He then conducted Mrs. Claughton to the tombs of Richard Hart and George Howard, on the latter of which there was no grave stone but three mounds surrounded by a grating, twined with white roses. There she picked a white rose for Dr. Ferrier as she had been asked and visited the vicar, who showed himself quite unsympathetic to her undertaking. After luncheon she visited, in company with Mrs. Wright, a park which surrounded the country house of George Howard. She then awaited the coming of night, wondering whether she would have the courage to fulfill her mission to the end. Joseph Wright took her to the church about one o'clock in the morning: they examined the nave to make sure there was no one there. Finally alone and without a light, at twenty minutes after one, she kept vigil over the tomb of Richard Hart, and without experiencing any fear. Here she received a communication, of which she is forbidden to speak. It was the continuation of the story previously given to her on Blake Street. She was asked to take a second white rose from the tomb of Richard Hart and to give it to his daughter, whose home at Hart Hall was indicated to her. She was further asked to notice how charming was this daughter and how much she resembled her father.

1 The importance of these minute details is that they were verified in every particular. This is a method of the Society for Psychical Research from which it never deviates.

At a quarter of two in the morning Joseph Wright released Mrs. Claughton from the church. She gathered a rose for Miss Howard and returned to the house and went to bed, where she slept very well - for the first time since Mrs. Blackburn had appeared to her.

These are the facts. It is useless to try to attribute the phenomenon to an overexcited imagination or to clairvoyancy; and it is equally impossible to explain by imposture a drama so complex, and one which required the collaboration of so many honest people all unknown to one another.

Mrs. Claughton was not the only one who saw the phantom. Before Mrs. Claughton's arrival Mrs. Blackburn's own daughter had seen her, but up to this point it would have been possible to doubt. The unique fact in this story is that all its elements have been verified and the witnesses are irrefutable. Yet, even so, there are people who reject a fact for the simple reason that it is unbelievable. Aside from the consideration that experience shows us every day that it is absurd to reject a fact upon that ground alone, the absence of critical sense is to be deplored. The intellectual laziness of the majority of people who reject phenomena because they do not care to take the trouble to understand them, is equally to be regretted. The voluntary incredulity of skeptics is much more reprehensible than credulity.