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Mrs Florence Marryat -  The Spirit World

Also quoted in Professor Ernest Bozzano Les phénomènes de bilocation Traduit de l’italien par Gabriel Gobron and translated further into English by Serge Patlavskiy]

Among my best friends I have a young lady from the upper classes of the aristocracy who is endowed with wonderful mediumistic faculties, although this is only known to a few close friends because of the usual prejudices...

A year ago, she had the misfortune of losing her elder sister, aged 20, afflicted with pleurisy. Edith (the name of the young medium) did not want to leave her sister's bedside for a single moment, and being in a state of clairvoyance, she witnessed the process of separating the spirit from the body.

She told me that in the last days of her earthly life, the poor woman had become turbulent, overexcited, delirious, and that she kept turning around in her bed with incoherent sentences and words. It was then that Edith began to distinguish a kind of subtle cloudiness, like a light smoke, which collected above her head, and gradually spread and thickened, had finally embraced the proportions, shapes and appearance of the dying sister, to the extent that it looked like her in every respect, except for the lack of color. This form floated in the air, face down, a few feet above the sick woman.

As the day declined, the dying woman's anxiety diminished, giving way to deep exhaustion at dusk, which signalled agony. Edith looked at her sister, shaking, trembling: her face became livid, her gaze darkened, but above her, the fluidic form became filled and seemed to gradually come alive with all the life that was escaping from the body.

A moment later, the dying girl lay inert and unconscious on the pillows, but the shape floating above her had turned into a vibrant spirit. Then the strings of light, similar to electrical fluorescences, were still holding back the heart, the brain, the vital organs. The supreme moment came: the spirit swayed for a while from one side to the other and then came to place itself in a lying position beside the inanimate body. It was apparently quite mindless, barely able to become stiff, but it was the vivid reproduction of the body.

And as Edith contemplated this curious scene, two luminous forms appeared in which she recognized her own father and grandmother, both of whom died in this house. Both approached the liberated spirit, affectionately supported it, grabbed it in their arms while it itself put its head on its father's shoulder.

They remained so for some time until it seemed to catch its breath. Then they broke the light cords that still held it in the body, and still holding the form in their arms, they went to the window, flew over it, rose and disappeared.