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Death and its Mystery – After Death – Camille Flammarian

General Dryson told of the following experience:

It happened many years ago. One morning I received a telegram announcing the death of an excellent friend of mine, a clergyman from the North of England. On that same day I made a visit to a lady who claimed to possess the faculty of seeing spirits and talking with them!

When I reached her home I was given over to thoughts of my reverend friend. After some moments of conversation with the lady, I asked her if she did not see a spirit near me who had just left this world. She answered that she did see one, who had died very recently. I thought it must be the clergyman. But the lady told me that the apparition was in military uniform, and had told her that he had died a violent death. She gave me his Christian name and his family name, and, besides these, a nickname by which not I alone, but also several other of his brothers in arms, had been accustomed to call him.

 I questioned her, wishing for fuller details as to his death. She replied that his head had been cut off, and his body thrown into a canal; that this had happened in the Orient, but not in India.

Now, I had not seen this officer for three years, and the last news that I had had of him was that he was in Hindustan. After this visit I went to Woolwich for information. I learned, in this way, that the officer in question had really been in India, but that he had left for China. Some weeks later the news arrived that he had been taken prisoner by the Chinese.

A large sum was offered as a ransom; but he was never found.

Long years afterward I met, in India, this officer’s brother. I asked him if anything had ever been learned as to his brother's death. He told me that his father had gone to China, and that he had, in that country, come upon proof that a Tartar chief, furious at the loss of one of his friends, had ordered the officer's head cut off, on the banks of a canal into which his body had been thrown.