It Was Like Wireless Instant Messaging Before That Was Invented

Nowadays life is very convenient in regard to instant messaging. People tend to have forgot how different it was before 1850. If you were someone living around then, and your relative died far away, you might not hear about it for many days. At best, you might get a letter that might arrive within a few weeks. In the 1830's the telegraph was invented, but it was a while before the invention had much impact on the average person's notifications. By the 1860's there arose telegram services such as Western Union.  The idea was that in any city connected by telegraph wires, you could go to a Western Union office, and "send a telegram."  Your message would be transmitted by telegraph wires to a distant city. Then someone at that city's Western Union office would deliver your message to someone living in that city, like a mailman delivering a letter.  Telegrams were very expensive to send, so people would be very concise in what they said. A death notification might read like this:

SARAH WILLINGTON DIED ON AUGUST 23, 1851 IN PHILADELPHIA -- STOP -- FUNERAL TO BE HELD ON AUGUST 28 -- STOP -- WILL TELL YOU OF INHERITANCE

In the 1870's the telephone was invented, which led to possibilities of a more convenient notification of deaths.  About two decades later  there was invented radio communications. With radio, very many people might be notified at the same time when some famous person died. 

But it seems that preceding such inventions, there was a type of wireless instant messaging that would sometimes notify of deaths.  This occurred through telepathy and the appearance of apparitions. For example, in an 1872 newspaper account in the Providence Herald we read of how a woman in Providence, Rhode Island was notified of the death of her sister in New York City, many miles away:

"A young lady from New York has been visiting relatives in this city, living on the west side, during the past two weeks. Sunday morning, after a quiet night’s rest, she was suddenly awakened between three and four o'clock, and distinctly saw a figure standing in her room near the door, looking toward her. This figure bore an exact resemblance to a sister that she left at home in New York, in her usual health. The young lady was not alarmed by the vision, but got up and went toward it, when it disappeared. She then opened a window and looked all about, but saw nothing unusual. She then retired and fell asleep again. In a short time she was awakened and saw the apparition of her sister again, in the same position as before. She got up again. As she advanced toward it, it receded and disappeared. Again she looked about from room to room and out of the window, but saw nothing more. She then dressed herself and remained sitting up in her chamber until daylight. Sunday noon the young lady received a dispatch from New York, informing her that her sister, whose presence she thought she saw twice in her chamber, at 4 o’clock in the morning, had died at home quite suddenly at that hour."

Presumably the "dispatch" referred to was a Western Union telegram. In this account the woman sees an apparition that in effect serves as an "instant message" telling her of her sister's death, long before any instant messaging services existed. A 1921 newspaper account tells a rather similar story:

"Here is a peculiar case vouched for by an Alberta (Canada) reader. A lady of about fifty was walking in an open space when she met an old friend whom she thought was at sea. The man did not turn to look at her, hut walked straight ahead. Returning home she told her friends of the Incident only to learn that the seaman had returned home and had dropped dead at about the very time the lady thought she saw him."

The account below is a very interesting one. We hear of a mother who was separated from her son by the very bad earthquake in San Francisco in 1906. The mother and son spent years looking for each other, without success. Ironically the son took up residence only a few blocks from the mother, without the two ever discovering each other.  The son eventually became a soldier and died in World War I. The mother says that two days before finding out about the son's death from a phone call, she saw an apparition of her son.

You can read the full account here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=FHD19181113.2.44&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------

The account above dates from November, 1918. The date of the apparition sighting is not given, but from a historical fact (the fact that US soldiers only started fighting in World War I in October, 1917) we can deduce that the mother's account must have been told within about a year of the claimed apparition. We have the full name and address of the witness, and her own first-hand testimony of an event occurring with about a year. The account has several of the hallmarks of good observational evidence.  

A similar account is given in the newspaper account you can read below (from the source here): 

The weight of the story is increased by the apparent existence of two witnesses of the apparition. 

On page 135 of the February 28, 1930 edition of the periodical The Two Worlds, which you can read here, we read the following:

"The Manchester Keening Chronicle tells the remarkable story concerned with three premonitions a Bath woman has just experienced. In each case motor vehicles have played an important part. The first premonition occurred in October of last year, when the woman was reading a book. 'All at once,' she told a reporter, ' I sensed a  presence in the room with me.'  She kept her eyes on the book a little longer, and then, suddenly looking up, was startled to see a figure walk slowly across the end of the room. It turned and faced her, saying 'Uncle William.'  Though the form soon vanished, news was received next morning that this relative had been killed in a bus smash. On the next occasion, about two months ago, the woman again became conscious of some discarnate presence. She saw a dark form float across her room, and later recognised the features to be those of her dead mother. This time she beard the words, repeated three times, ' Aunt Emily.'  Later she learned that her aunt had been killed by a motor lorry on the preceding evening."

In the 1898 newspaper article below, which you can read here, we read of a Mrs. Kate Le Brun who was visiting a sick friend of hers (Mary Penfold) in Chicago in 1896. According to the account, Mary recognized she was dying, and promised to visit Mrs. Le Brun after Mary died, saying, "When I am out, Kate, I will visit you first of all to say 'Good-by' forever!" We then read this account of Mary's apparition appearing to Kate, as promised:

In a 1903 edition of the Daily Mirror, we have this account:

"I and my brother were twins. He died in China, and at the hour of his death I saw his apparition in America. Afterwards time and incidents were corroborated. I am convinced it was a realistic mental photograph of two unusual beings in intense sympathy at the hour of death." -- J. Evans, Piercefield-terrace, Bristol.

In The Electric Magazine of Foreign Literature 1883 Vol 37 Issue 5, page 680 we have the following account presented by the very distinguished researchers Edmund Gurney and F. W. H. Myers. Part of a larger paper you can read here, a paper with other just as interesting cases, it tells of a man (J. G. Keulemans) seemingly "ghost-told" of the death of his child:

In the modern account here, celebrity Khloe Kardashian claims or suggests her daughter saw an apparition of a deceased person, "the morning before" the notification of the death of that person arrived. Given all the glitzy razzle-dazzle surrounding the Kardashian family, it is an account that would tend to be dismissed by many. But the reported pattern matches one I have documented in many old reports, so someone familiar with such reports may tend to take the account quite seriously. 

Many accounts similar to these can be read by reading my series of posts here, and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right. 

This morning I had a dream in which someone was mentioning the song "If You Could Read My Mind" by Gordon Lightfoot. It's a song referring to telepathy, and also a ghost. It includes the line "a ghost you can see." Just after recording the content of the dream in a notepad I keep near my bed, I went into the bathroom, where I saw a small green light mysteriously turn off and then turn back on. This is an anomaly I have recorded about 70 times since 2022, as you can read in my post here. Almost all of those 70 times occurred on different days.