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Death and its Mystery – After Death – Camille Flammarian

Castel di Sangro, Italy, May, 1905.

In the pretty little town of Castel di Sangro-lost in the midst of the high Abruzze-Aquilen Mountains and until a few days ago almost buried under the snow-something happened which has excited and held the attention, these last few days, of the local authorities and the whole population.

On the night of the third of last March, Signore Pascal Cocozza a worthy man-Baron Raphael Corrado's game-warden-saw, in a dream, his father, who had been dead for ten years.

His father reproached him, as well as his brothers, for having forgotten him and-something still more serious-for having left his poor bones unearthed by grave-diggers, behind the tower in the cemetery, in the snow, the prey of wolves!

Signore Cocozza, greatly affected by this gruesome dream, related it to his sister the next day. To his great surprise, his sister declared that she had had precisely the same dream. Then the worthy warden, without further delay, and in spite of a snow-storm, took his rifle and went to the cemetery, situated on a hill above the town. There, behind the tower, among the brambles and on the snow, on which there were wolves footprints, he saw human bones! The dream had, therefore, been veridical.

Naturally, Signore Cocozza sent an accusation of the superintendent of the cemetery, Francois Mannarelli, to the town hall. It was transmitted to Signore Casoria, the Justice of the Peace, who ordered the arrest of Mannarelli and three other grave-diggers. The accused men said, in self-justification, that since the time set for the exhumation of the bodies and their transportation to the charnel-house-ten years after burial-had just come, they were moving the bones at nightfall, had been overtaken by the snow and the cold, and had not been able to transfer some of the skeletons.

At first the grave-diggers, in their own defense, tried to deny that the bones found were those of Signore Cocozza's father; in this way they could plead that the game-warden had not been wronged by their negligence. But it appeared, through confidential information and from other investigations made in the cemetery, that the bones were really those of Signore Cocozza, senior, who had been dead for ten years. The dream was veridical from every point of view. If, on the one hand, we cannot exclude the possibility of the grave-diggers having influenced the percipients telepathically, there remains, however, an implication that some more than human agency intervened, some agency which alone knew that wolves had gnawed the bones.

 The grave-diggers, moreover, could not, when they exhumed the bodies, have known to whom the skeletons belonged. And lastly- and this is remarkable-two percipients, the only persons directly concerned, had this dream simultaneously.

GUIDO FIOCCA-NOVI.