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Maggie Plugh – A Prophetic vision of the death of Abraham Lincoln
Identifier
024908
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Premonitions: A leap in to the future – Herbert Greenhouse [1971]
A HEARSE FOLLOWED BY SOLDIERS
In the town of Catskill, N, Y., a seventeen-year-old girl was asleep. In the middle of the night she heard noises and lights flashed in her closed eyes. She got out of bed and went to the window, but the scene below was an unfamiliar one. She saw a strange street in a strange city and a large, excited crowd gathered in front of her house. Now the body of a tall man was brought upstairs and laid upon the bed in her room. He was unconscious, and a stream of blood flowed from a bullet wound in his head.
Was she still asleep? Or was this an uncanny vision of something happening elsewhere, in another time and place?
She had seen this man before, but she couldn't remember where. Doctors were standing around, probing the body with instruments, examining the wound. Many persons were crying, and she heard one of them ask in a trembling voice, "Is there no hope?" The doctors shook their heads. A lady who appeared to be the wife of the wounded man was weeping.
The girl fell asleep again, then awakened later in another city. She was standing on the pavement as a hearse went by, followed by a procession of soldiers. There were crowds of people around, watching silently, sadly. Once more the girl fell asleep. At breakfast the next morning she told her family about the strange double vision.
The girl, Maggie Plugh, had her vision in April, 1865.
The following week news came that Abraham Lincoln had been shot. As she had foreseen, he was brought into a room in a private house, bleeding from a bullet wound in the head. On the weekend there was a funeral in Washington, with a hearse followed by soldiers.
Maggie's story appeared in The Progressive Thinker, a magazine of the early twentieth century. It was told by a lady for whom she had worked as a nurse. The writer described the mature Maggie Plugh as a woman of excellent and sober character and was sure that she told the truth about her two visions.