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Andrew Lang - The Making of Religion – Chapter V – Crystal Visions, Savage and Civilised

 …… experiments have proved beyond doubt that a fair percentage of people, sane and healthy, can see vivid landscapes, and figures of persons in motion, in glass balls and other vehicles.  This faculty Dr. Parish attributes to ‘dissociation,’ practically to drowsiness.  But he speaks by conjecture, and without having witnessed experiments, as will be shown later.  I now offer a series of experiments with a glass ball, coming under my own observation, …..

Early in the present year (1897) I met a young lady who told me of three or four curious hallucinatory experiences of her own, which were sufficiently corroborated.  She was innocent of psychical studies, and personally was, and is, in perfect health; the pale cast of thought being remote from her.  I got a glass ball, and was present when she first looked into it.  She saw, I remember, the interior of a house, with a full-length portrait of a person unknown.  There were, I think, one or two other fancy pictures of the familiar kind.  But she presently (living as she was, among strangers) developed a power of ‘seeing’ persons and places unknown to her, but familiar to them. 

 ….There may be abundance of better evidence, but, knowing the persons and circumstances, and being present once at what seemed to me a crucial example, I was more inclined to be convinced.