(702) "I have been requested to give an account of an odd coincidence which occurred some three years since. (I am no believer in spirits, and believe the following was the result of illness.) I was in the tropics, and, at the time I mention, laid up with fever, when one night I had a dream about an old lady friend of mine. I woke up suddenly, and thought I saw her at the foot of my bed, and the strange part was I thought I heard her speak. She seemed to be dressed in white. I told this to a friend, who only laughed at me and said I was ill, but at the same time, he put down the date and hour. A few mails after, I heard of the old lady's death, at the same date and hour. I have no belief in spirits whatever, but this was a fact".

In answer to inquiries, Mr. Griffin supplied the following fuller account.

"June 15, t886.

"At the time of the occurrence, June, 1882, I had been in Jamaica for about 18 months. I had been ill with country fever, but was convalescent, though still very weak. I was sleeping in a room next that of a friend, with the door open between. I had a dream, in which my mind went back to old times when I had seen much of the lady I mentioned; and then I became aware that she was dead, in a room which seemed to be near me, and that I wanted to get to her; and as this thought flashed across me, I seemed to see her. Then I woke with a sudden start, and distinctly saw her standing at the foot of my bed, dressed in white, and with the hands by her side. The face was extremely distinct, and quite unmistakable. Had a real person been standing in that place, I certainly could not have distinguished the features, as it was a dark night.1 The figure plainly pronounced my name, 'Marcus,' once, and then gradually disappeared as I watched it. It remained visible a sufficient number of seconds for me to be keenly aware that I was awake; I felt quite clearly, the former experience was a dream, then I woke, and now this is a waking reality. After the disappearance, I called out, and my friend came in.

I described the whole experience to him, and he was sufficiently impressed with it to notice the time - which was a few minutes past midnight, June 11th - and to note the occurrence at once in his diary. The next morning he and others laughed at the matter, but could not but be impressed by its reality to me.

"About three weeks afterwards, I received a letter from a daughter of my friend, informing me of her mother's death in England, on June nth, soon after 5 a.m. My friend and I calculated the difference of longitude, and the hours corresponded to within a few minutes. I had no idea of the lady's being ill, and had neither been anxious about her nor thinking about her. In conversation with the family, two years later, they told me that a few minutes before her death she said, ' Tell Marcus I thought of him.' I may mention that this lady had, three years before, nursed me through a dangerous illness; and I had a warm affection for her.

"I do not recollect on any other occasion in my life experiencing the continuation of a dream-image into waking moments; nor have I ever had a hallucination either of sight or hearing.

"Marcus Southwell Griffin".

Mr. Griffin kindly allowed me to copy the following sentence from the letter which announced the death: -

"Alphington.

"June 17, 1882.

"Mother died on St. Barnabas' Day [i.e., June 11], at 5.20, and was buried on the Thursday following, June 15th, 1882".

We have verified the date of death in the Register of Deaths.

The next letter that Mr. Griffin received made it quite clear that the 5.20 was a.m.; and in conversation with the family since, the death was described to him as having taken place before breakfast.

[Mr. Griffin has now no separate recollection of the date of his vision. He had an idea that the death had been on June 15, not having looked for some time at the letter in which it was announced, where it will be seen that June 15 (the day of the funeral) is the only day of the month mentioned, the day of the death being otherwise described. The "June 11" in the foregoing account was added after he had referred to this letter. But there can, I think, be no reasonable doubt that he is justified in his conviction that his vision took place on June 11. He can hardly be wrong in his recollection that he and his friend made a careful computation of the longitude, with a view to ascertaining how close the coincidence was; and that they specially noticed a slight discrepancy. (The difference of longitude being about 73½°, the time of the death would correspond with about 12.30 a.m., not 12.10 a.m.; so that if the two times are quite accurately given, Mr. Griffin's experience preceded the death by about 20 minutes.) Now persons who took this amount of trouble with regard to the hours, may fairly be assumed not to have made a gross blunder as to the identity of day; even if Mr. Griffin is mistaken (which there is no reason for supposing) in his recollection that the means for establishing the identity of day were there in black and white before them.

It is to be hoped that the diary has been preserved, and that the evidence will in time be completed by our obtaining the entry. The friend who made it is at present in America, and Mr. Griffin has written to him, but doubts whether the last address given will now find him. He is sure, he thinks, to have news of him before very long. I may mention that Mr. Griffin's mother told me that her son gave her a full description of the occurrence on his return to England, not very long after it took place].

1 See pp. 290 (note) and 359.

I naturally cannot convey to others the full effect of Mr. Griffin's viva voce description. Though he had not attributed any scientific importance to the incident, he impressed on me that his own experience, taken alone, and quite apart from the facts which he learnt afterwards, was to him absolutely unique - by far the strangest and most perplexing thing that had ever happened to him. It gave him precisely the same vivid feeling of astonishment that the sanest of my readers would receive if they looked up from this page, and saw a friend standing palpably before them, who gazed at them, addressed them, and then vanished into air. As regards the coincidence, Mr. Griffin will allow me to add that the view expressed in his first account - namely, that his own illness was a sufficient explanation of his experience, and that the coincidence therefore was accidental - is not that which he now holds. I pointed out to him (as so often in the course of these pages) that the theory of accident which would be the reasonable one if the particular experience in question stood alone or nearly alone in our generation, becomes unreasonable when the case is only one of a large class; and I can only hope that others may agree with him in finding this argument as just as it is obvious.

[Omitting cases 186 to 189.] The next and concluding case is from Mrs. Lightfoot, a lady who is none the worse witness because she takes not the slightest interest in our work. The names and dates were filled in by the present writer, immediately after a personal interview, January 30th, 1884.

"51, Shaftesbury Road, Ravenscourt Park, W.

"January nth, 1884.