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Death and its Mystery – After Death – Camille Flammarian

The following account was sent me from Valparaiso on May 9, 1899. The apparition was that of a person who had been dead for more than thirty years.

I was extremely young at that time, and slept in a room with my mother. My bed was just in front of the door which gave on to a hallway. One evening I was sent to bed early, as usual. My mother went with me herself, with a candle which she put on the table, and left me, to rejoin the rest of the family; they used to stay up until ten or eleven.

I was sitting on the bed, hesitating as to whether to slip under the sheet because it was growing cold, when, lifting my eyes by chance, I saw at the end of the hall-for the door was still open-an old woman coming toward me. I thought at first that it was my grandmother. But as I perceived details better I saw that it was not she, and that I did not know her.

My astonishment changed to terror when the apparition entered the room. Although she stood fully in the light, and I could see her clearly, I perceived the furniture through her body.

The phantom approached the foot of my bed, and then I could not help uttering piercing cries.

Everyone came up; I told what I had seen ; they laughed in my face, and said that I had been dreaming. No one in my family had died at that time.

Some years later I heard my grandmother relate that, about thirty years before, my uncle had bought this house from the heirs of an old woman to whom it had belonged, and that this old woman had died in the very room in which l had seen the apparition. I should like to point out the coincidence without drawing any conclusion. I shall add only one thing: that I had never had any visions or hallucinations before this adventure, and that I have never had any since then.

L. JOURIDE.

(Letter 666.)