Observations placeholder

Extract from Phantasms of the Living volume i

[from Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death – F W H Myers]

 Mr Alexander Skirving writes that he always took his lunch to work as it was too far to go home.  But on a certain day he suddenly had an intense desire to go home.  It was ten in the morning and he hated to leave but as he writes

“I got fidgety and uneasy, and felt as if I must go, even at the risk of being ridiculed by my wife, as I could give no reason why I should leave my work and lose 6d an hour for nonsense.  However, I could not stay, and I set off for home under an impulse which I could not resist.

When I reached my own door and knocked, the door was opened by my wife’s sister, a married woman, who lived a few streets off.  She looked surprised and said

‘Why Skirving, how did you know?’

‘Know what?’  I said.

‘Why about Mary Ann’ (my wife).

I said ‘I don’t know anything about Mary Ann’

‘Then what brought you home at present?’

I said ‘I can hardly tell you.  I seemed to want to come home.  But what is wrong?'

She told me that my wife had been run over by a cab and been most seriously injured about an hour ago, and she had called for me ever since, but was now in fits, and had several in succession.  I went upstairs, and though very ill she recognised me, and stretched forth her arms and took me round the neck and pulled my head down into her bosom.

The fits passed away directly, and my presence seemed to tranquillise her, so that she got into sleep, and did well.  Her sister told me that she had uttered the most piteous cries for me to come to her, although there was not the least likelihood of my coming.  This short narrative has only one merit; it is strictly true

Signed Alexander Skirving”