On the same 1907 page there is a story that is now ironic, for it boasts about how the Luisitania has set a speed record. The same ship was sunk during World War I.
Below is an account of someone having a dream of someone's death at the same time that person was dying far away. It is from page 579 of the September 5, 1935 edition of the periodical Light, which can be read here. The "he went over the top" reference refers to leaving a trench to make an attack during World War I, something that often resulted in the death of the attacker.
Here is a similar account, from page 331 of the May 23, 1935 edition of the periodical Light, which can be read here:
"Amalia Burzio, a peasant woman of Passignana
(Valenza) dreamed of the death of her mother who
lived near Novara. On awaking she told her husband
of the dream, and he tried in vain to calm her distress.
The following afternoon she received a telegram informing her that her mother had died suddenly in the
night, exactly at the hour of her dream."
The accounts below are mentioned on page 771 of the December 1, 1933 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:
Below is another account of someone dreaming of someone's death on the night of that person's death:
Given the reported chronology here, the dream of a son drowning at a distant location seems to have occurred about when the drowning occurred. We read that the body was returned a few hours after the death, and also that this was a few hours after the father had a dream of the son's death.
On page 311 of the September 23, 1916 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we read the following:
"Another lady, Marguerite Ober, of the Metropolitan Opera
Company, writes :
At the beginning of this awful war I had a friend who volunteered his services to the French. One night, in the midst of a dead sleep, a vision of him came to me suddenly, as distinct as if the scene were photographed and flung on the wall . I saw him wounded, lying in a trench, his life flowing
away. The vision lasted for perhaps a minute and then faced out. I rose, turned on the light, and immediately wrote to a
friend in France. ' I know that Bruno Seyler is dead ,' I wrote ; tell me the
details .' My letter passed, in mid-ocean, a letter from a friend telling me of Bruno's death, and every detail was precisely as
I had dreamed it."
Below is an account found on page 203 of the June 24, 1916 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:
Below is an account found on page 166 of the May 20, 1916 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:
The newspaper report below from 1887 (which you can read here) describes a son who had a dream that seemed to depict his father dying at sea in a ship. The father was captain of a ship named the Muskoka. We read at the end of the account, "The Muskoka is missing and given up as lost."
The account below is from the year 1900, and can be read here. We read of a brother who had a dream of his sister's death far away, about the same time it happened.
Below is a newspaper account from 1913 you can read here:
Below is a 1909 newspaper account you can read here. Although it does not have the simultaneity mentioned in my title, it is close enough to deserve inclusion in this post.
"An instance of what seems to be a remarkable proof of unusual psychic phenomena has occurred in this city in connection with the death of Chester N. Jessie, a 19 year old lad who was accidentally killed in a landslide at Eugene, Ore,, last Thursday. Mrs. Carlton N. Davis of 1050 Stanyan street, wife of a local businessman, and a sister of the decedent, had a mental vision of her brother's death the day following the accident, and before news of the tragic occurrence reached her."
The account below appeared in a newspaper, and can be read on page 188 of the document here:
"A few nights ago a little boy of rare intelligence, named Fillmore, son
of G. Fisher, residing in Reistertown, Baltimore county, about the midnight hour, awoke his mother and informed her that he was going to die.
He told his father the same thing, and when told he was dreaming,
replied that he was awake and knew that he was going to die. The
parents thought nothing more about it, and the child slept comfortably
until morning. When he awoke in the morning, he repeated his presentiment to his parents; and as soon as breakfast was over he insisted on
being allowed to go and tell Mrs. Walters, a neighbor, that be was going
to die.
His mother told him that he had better go and see his grandmother, if
he was going to die. He made his visit to his grandmother, and also to
Mrs. Walters, after which he returned to his home. During the afternoon of the same day, his mother was called out of the house for a few
minutes, and when she returned she found the little fellow awfully burned
by his clothes having taken fire. As soon as the fire was extinguished
he said to his mother, 'I told you I was going to die.' A physician was
called in who dressed his injuries, telling him that he would soon be well.
He said, 'No, Fillmore is going to die;' and during the night the little
fellow breathed his last. This was a most extraordinary presentiment,
and during the whole day he spoke of dying, though he enjoyed excellent
health.-Baltimore Republican, Feb. 2."
Below is a newspaper account of a woman (Mary Scott Turner) who seemed to have a vivid dream of being warned by her late son, with the dream occurring the day before she died in a fire.
Below is a newspaper account you can read here, one which attracts our lurid interest. And things become even more fascinating when we check out what is referred to in the little box at the bottom right, saying Mrs. White says she was warned in a dream.
Scrolling down in the story to get details, we find a startling result. Apparently it was not just one person who had a dream warning of Eddie White's murder, but two different people: Eddie's wife and Eddie's brother. Eddie's wife dreamed Eddie was found dead in his car, murdered; and the headline above says he was murdered in a taxi. We read this:
Below is a newspaper account of a boy (Ellis Rogers) who had a dream foretelling his drowning death:
On the same page we have the dream account below. If we interpret the part about the brother rising out of the ocean as being a reference to rising up to an afterlife, the dream may seem one that accurately foretold a death:
In the 1901 news account below, which you can read here, we read of a woman who had three dreams predicting her death, shortly before she died:
Woman's Death Foretold by Dreams
New York Sun Special Service
"Middletawn, N. Y.. April 22.—Mrs. Maria Conkllng, wife of David Conkling. living near Rockhill. who died suddenly Thursday, had been warned in dreams three successive nights that her end was near. The story told by members of her family and by neighbors to whom she related her dreams while making preparations for death is
as follows:
She was 49 years old and apparently in perfect health. Monday night she dreamed that her daughter, who died twelve years ago, appeared to her and beckoned to her; Tuesday night her mother, who died about twenty-five years ago. appeared to her while she slept and beckoned to her; Wednesday night she dreamed that a black-robed figure of death stood by her bedside holding a taper, and while it beckoned, the taper suddenly went out.
Thursday afternoon, while engaged in household duties, the final summons came in the form of a stroke of apoplexy."
The account below is taken from page 41 of the document here, a document with many interesting accounts of the paranormal. The narrator is Philip Masey, the husband of Mrs. Masey:
"Mrs. Mary Masey, who resided on Redcliffe Hill, Bristol,
at the beginning at this century, was a member of the Society of Friends, and was held in high esteem for piety. A memorable incident in her life was that one night she dreamt that a Mr. John Henderson, a noted man of the same community, had gone to Oxford, and that he had died there. In the course of the next day, Mr. Henderson called to take leave of her, saying he was going to Oxford to study a subject concerning which he could not obtain the information he·wanted in Bristol. Mrs. Masey said to him, 'John Henderson, thou wilt die there.' Some time afterwards, Mrs. Masey
woke her husband one night, saying, 'Remember, John
Henderson died at Oxford at two o'clock this morning, and
it is now three.' Her husband, Philip Masey, made light of
it ; but she told him that while asleep, she had been transported to Oxford, where she had never been before, and that she had entered a room there, in which she saw Mr. John Henderson in bed, the landlady supporting his head, and the landlord with several other persons standing around. While gazing at him some one gave him medicine, and the patient, turning round, perceived her, and exclaimed, 'Oh, Mrs. Masey, I am going to die ; I am so glad you are come, for I want to tell you that my father is going to be very ill,
and you must go and see him.' He then proceeded to
describe a room in his father's house and a bureau in it,
'in which is a box containing a remedy; give it him, and he
will recover.' Her impression and recollection of all the persons in the room at Oxford was most vivid, and she even described the appearance of the house on the opposite side
of the street. Tbe only person she appeared not to have seen in the room was a clergyman who was present. The
husband of Mrs. Masey accompanied Mr. Henderson's father
to the funeral, and on their journey from Bristol to Oxford
by coach (the period being before railways and telegraphs
existed), Mr. Philip Masey related to him the particulars of
his son's death, as described by his wife, which on arrival
they found to have been exactly as told by Mrs. Masey.
Mrs. Masey was so much concerned about the death of
Mr. Henderson, jun., that she forgot all about the directions
he had given her respecting the approaching illness of his
father, but some time afterwards she was sent for by the
father, who was very ill. She then remembered the directions given her by the son on his deathbed at Oxford. She immediately proceeded to the residence of Mr. Henderson, and on arrival at the house she found the room, the bureau, the box, and the medicine exactly as had been foretold to her. She administered the remedy as directed, and had the pleasure of witnessing the beneficial effect by the complete
recovery of Mr. Henderson from a serious illness."
On page 32 of the book here, we read the following very interesting claim:
"Most people that have reached middle age have generally experienced some strange phenomena before a death has taken place. Some have heard noises like
a cannon going off ; others have heard sounds like the
ticking of a watch; or loud knocks at the door; birds
singing; loud knocks about the room or on the table;
candle lights that have gradually dissolved; cups and
saucers shaking, and various articles of crockery moving and breaking; sounds of music in the distance; also dreaming about some friend or relation that has passed on to the higher life ; pictures falling, and heavy articles of furniture, such as pianofortes, being moved out of their place; the falling of stars and meteoric
bodies from the sky; ravens taking rest on the tops
of houses; birds and animals making strange and unusual noises; dogs howling in front of a house; and a number of other things. Some people can tell almost to a day when there is going to be a death, because they have experienced the same phenomena
before. In some cases there will be a sign of death
about a week before it takes place; others will perceive the sign a few clays before or on the same day.
It all depends upon the development of the recipient."
We then hear the author tell some eerie stories of howling dogs that seemed to foretell a death.She says in the days just before her father died a howling dog appeared on her doorstop.
I recalled reading vague claims that sometimes clocks mysteriously stop at the hour of someone's death. I decided to look for old newspaper accounts that might verify this claim. I found quite a few cases.
Below is an account of a grandfather clock that worked fine for 30 years before mysteriously stopping and catastrophically failing at the hour of its owner's death.
Below is an account of a clock that seemed to foretell or announce deaths of members of the Danbury Hat Makers Association (presumably having few members):
On the page here, we read, "The New York papers also give a good deal of space to the fact that John Judge, a New York saloon keeper,
died in his saloon and at the very moment of his death the
saloon clock stopped."
Below is a newspaper account of a clock that stopped once at the hour of a family member's death, and also stopped at a very different hour when another member of the same family died.
On the page here we have an account saying that Lynda Barton's father died at 9:30 PM on a Sunday, and that all of the clocks in the house stopped at 9:30 PM. We are also told that on the following Sunday all of the clocks again stopped at 9:30 PM.
Below we have an account of a clock which makes strange noises at the time of a family member's death, not just once but twice. It is followed by an account of a long-broken clock which mysteriously starts running shortly after a family member's death
On the same page we have the account below, which has nothing to do with clocks, but may offer better evidence for life after death than any of the accounts above. Click to read the account better. In the account Sir Edward Marshall Hall says he took a recent letter from his brother, folded it, and sealed it in an envelope with no outside indication of the letter's author. He gave the sealed envelope to his sister, requesting her to take it to the medium Miss Wingfield, to see whether she could determine the author of the letter. An answer comes back from the medium that the author is dead. When then asked where and when the death occurred, an answer comes back from the medium in early March that the author of the letter died yesterday in South Africa. Soon Sir Edward learns by letter that his brother did die in South Africa, in early March.
A matching account occurs in a biography of Sir Edward Marshall Hall. We have a reference to automatic writing, a technique in which a medium may go into a light trance, and produce writings, which seem to come from her subconscious or from some external source, perhaps some deceased spirit. On pages 111-112 we read this about Sir Edward Marshall Hall:
"On March 10th, 1894, he was staying with his sister at Hampton. Mrs. Labouchere had been for some time an intimate friend of Miss Wingfield. On this occasion the latter was answering, by automatic writing, questions put to her. Marshall was sceptical, and it occurred to him that he had the means of testing her powers. He had in his pocket a most unpleasant letter, received a day or two before from his elder brother. John Cressy Hall was much older than Marshall, and had long since fallen, from high prosperity as a merchant, into poverty; in 1894, he was living in South Africa on remittances sent him by Marshall. For his own protection, the money was sent through a certain Archdeacon Gaul: this was strongly resented, and the letter in Marshall’s pocket was the culmination of a very offensive correspondence on the subject, and was dated February 1894. Marshall had said nothing about this unpleasant letter to his sister, and decided to ask Miss Wingfield as to the authorship of it; he sealed it in a blank envelope, and handed it to Miss Wingfield. After some delay a message was spelt out: 'The writer of this letter is dead.' To the question, ' When and where did the writer die? ' the answer came, ' He died yesterday in South Africa.'
The seance made only a temporary impression on Marshall’s mind....On April 2nd, 1891, he received a second letter from Gaul, bearing a Kimberley postmark of March 8th, to the following effect: 'Dear Sir, — I little thought when I wrote last week that I should have this week the melancholy duty laid on me of informing you of the death of your brother, which occurred yesterday.' Poor Cressy Hall had, indeed, been found on March 8th dead in his bed. The message received through Miss Wingfield on March 10th had stated that the writer of the letter had died in South Africa ' yesterday ' — that is, March 9th. But, even with this slight discrepancy, it was a very strange experience."
"The distinguished Parisian Professor of Medicine, Rostan, gave at the time his corroborative testimony to the existence of this power in the article ' Magnetisme,' in the ' Dictionnaire de Medecine,' wherein he remarked : 'There are few facts better demonstrated than clairvoyance' ....Innumerable instances are recorded of the possession of the faculty of clairvoyance by persons in the normal state, in sleep [hypnotism], and in some abnormal conditions of the system." -- Edwin Lee, MD, "Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism" page 103 and page 133.
Although very abundantly reported in books and journals such as The Zoist (as you can read about in my set of 14 posts here), reports of clairvoyance are rather hard-to-find in old newspapers. But some accounts can be found. For example, the following account appeared in 1905:
"MUSICAL CLAIRVOYANCE PUZZLES PARIS PEOPLE.
Paris is very much concerned at present over a new phenomenon, which is called, for lack of a better name, musical mediumship, says Public Opinion. In the same way that a few years ago the attention of French scientists was largely occupied with thought transference, now many investigators in the French capital are carefully following the experiments which are being conducted with the musical mediums. In the last number of the Journal des Debats. M. Henri de Parvllle carefully goes over the whole ground, and the facts presented are well worth considering. M. de Parvllle first takes up the case of a subject by the name of Aubert. 'This man, although he had but a rudimentary knowledge of music, performs on the piano, in a semi-hypnotic state, compositions which recall the musical style of Moxart, Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert and others. A second and far more remarkable case, however, is that of Mlle. Nydia. This woman, in a hypnotic state and with her eyes carefully bandaged, is able to play on the piano any piece of music which may be given her. Thus at a sitting recently held at the Theater de la Monnaie, in Brussels, Mlle. Nydia was led to M. Slyvayn Dupuy, chief of the orchestra of the theater, who gave her a piece of music composed by himself, which had never been published. M. Dupuy saw that the bandage had been tightly placed over the girl’s eyes. Mlle. Nydia then sat down, held the paper in her hands for a few moments, and then, to the great astonishment of everyone, played the piece without hesitation.
Two physicians examined the young woman, and found her to be in a real hypnotic state and absolutely insensible to the exterior world. There were then placed over her eyes a succession of bandages, alternating black and white, and she was led to the piano. One of the spectators offered a new opera, which was placed on the piano. The hypnotizer looked at his subject, and immediately the girl played the piece with the greatest cleverness. Another spectator, who had just arrived from New Zealand, offered a piece of music which had never been performed in Europe. Mlle. Nydia, however, executed it at once, and she played with the same skill a piece which had just been composed by M. G. Germain. At public request she played a piece of Paderewski, which was unknown to her, and, finally, a lady wrote the title of a piece of music on a slip of paper, put it into an envelope, which was afterward sealed, and gave it to the girl. She placed it on her forehead for a moment, and the next instant was playing Beethoven’s ‘Clair du Lune’ sonata."
The writer is presumably referring to Debussy's "Clair de Lune," misidentifying the composer. You can read the account here:
The terms "artificial somnambulism" and "mesmerism" were used for hypnosis before the word "hypnosis" became popular. An 1891 newspaper article states this: "The testimony in favor of subjects in this artificial somnambulism being able—some of them—to see what is going on at a distance, to read sealed letters, and to hear a conversation taking place several miles away, seems to be so conclusive that many distinguished scholars, physicians and philosophers are firm believers in clairvoyance and clairaudience."
Below is the first part of a news article from 1931:
In the newspaper account below, we read of a Mr. Tyndall who is able to perform a "carriage test" of mind-reading or clairvoyance:
"Alexander J. Mclver Tyndall, the mind-reader, yesterday morning performed the carriage feat in the same manner in which it was performed by the late Mr. Bishop. On Saturday afternoon W. A. Spalding and W. O. Miller, two members of the committee appointed to superintend the experiment, hid a small silver match-safe in an oyster-stall of the Broadway market. Yesterday morning at 11 o'clock the committee, including Messrs. Spalding, Bennett, Miller, Dr. Bryant and two others, repaired to the Hollenbeck hotel. For a preliminary sample of Mr. Tyndall's peculiar power, a knife was hid in a crack of the brick wall surrounding the court back of the hotel, and the mind-reader, taking Mr. Spalding's hand, found the article without difficulty, although he bad been most carefully blindfolded. The committee, together with Mr. Tyndall, then descended to the street, where a carriage was in waiting. The mind-reader had again been securely blindfolded, and with Mr. Spalding mounted the driver's seat, while the rest of the committee occupied the body of the vehicle. Spalding placed his hand on Tyndall's forehead, concentrated his thoughts upon the article which had been hidden in the market, and the drive began. Tyndall had taken the reins and the whip, and as soon as he had thoroughly established communication between himself and his subject, he struck the horse a sharp blow and started down Spring Street at a sharp trot. At Fourth street be got off his course and turned down to Main at a gallop. Narrowly missing the curb at the corner, he turned down Main, and, with the horse still on the jump and the occupants of the carriage extremely nervous, he drove up Fifth Street to Broadway, down Broadway to Sixth, up Sixth to Hill, and down Hill street around old St. Vincent's college to the rear of the market. A door had been left open to admit the party. The mind-reader stopped the team, and, almost dragging Mr. Spalding by the hand, rushed by three or four doors, entered the one that was open, ran up to an ice-box, reached to the top of it behind a lot of rubbish, and placed his hand on a pasteboard box, which he lifted down. The match-box had been hidden in this box. The whole length of time occupied from the departure from the Hollenbeck until the finding of the hidden article was less than twenty minutes."
Below is an 1886 report of mind-reading by W. Irving Bishop. Bishop became very well-known for his telepathy skills. He performed countless public demonstrations successfully,
Bishop would become very famous as a mind-reader, before suddenly dying three years later (during a telepathy demonstration) from what a newspaper called catalepsy. His death is reported in the 1889 article below, one with a title of "Death of the Great Mind Reader":
"Dr. S. Fleet Speir, an eminent Brooklyn physician, has attended Miss Fancher ever since her first illness. 'I am a firm believer in her power of clairvoyance,' he said. 'It exists. That is all I know, and is all anyone knows. For years and years she took no solid food. During as many ensuing years her lips were merely moistened occasionally with fruit juices and other slight nourishment....Dr. C. E. Adamson said that he had visited Miss Fancher on many occasions with Dr. Speir. He continued: 'I really believe that Miss Fancher possesses in the highest degree the perceptivity those fraud clairvoyants pretend to have. She is a wonder....You could take a bank check and hold the reverse side toward her, or in fact, shield it entirely from the view of anyone but yourself, and Mollie would tell you the contents of the check, the name of the bank, the amount and the signature. In the same way you could read a letter and Mollie would immediately reproduce the contents. Mind, the person testing her would not move the lips in reading or give any sign or indication by which she could gain the knowledge she exhibited.' ...."
We read in the account that the wonder show organizer P. T. Barnum (convinced of her clairvoyant powers) offered Mollie a fortune if she would become a star attraction of his traveling wonder shows, saying, "I offered other than money inducements, such as all possible luxuries of travel in a private car, the finest quarters at hotels, the best of attendance, and, in short, a very great betterment of her mode of living." But Mollie turned him down flat, saying that "millions would not tempt her to exhibit herself for a single day to the public."
We read in the account of the accidents that led to Mollie becoming permanently bed-bound: first a fall from a horse, and later a fall from a street car. Then we read this account narrated by a Rev. Talmadge:
"That was about twenty-one years ago. Her nervous system seems to be shattered. She had alternative spasms and trances for a month, and that was followed by a death like continuous trance of two months. Then came nine years of a wonderful and unexplained condition. She lay in bed in an unaltered position, apparently blind and with her eyes tightly closed. Trances were interspersed with spells of a sort of ecstacy, during which she told of marvelous visions and supernatural experiences. She seemed to have the gift of second sight [clairvoyance], and this was tested daily. Her physical rigidity remained a singular accompaniment of her mental exaltation."
"It was in 1875 or ’76 that a change came to pass in her. Her
body relaxed, and she professed to have no recollection of what occurred during the nine years. But her clairvoyance developed, and the stories are innumerable of her reading of sealed letters, her discernment of visitors before they came into her room, and of all imaginable sort of second sight [clairvoyance]. The experiments were made so numerously and carefully, and by gentlemen of such unassailable probity, that there can be no doubt of their genuineness. Within the past two or three years she has recovered some of the lost flesh—for she had become little more than a living skeleton—and her appearance was much less spectral. But her mind reading power has been unimpaired.”
The Mollie Fancher case is described in my post here, and in the long bookhere.
Similar to the case above are the equally dramatic cases of Eliza Hamilton and Mrs. Croad, discussed in my post here, and the cases of Frederica Hauffe and Adele Magnot discussed in my post here. The denialism or evidence-ignoring under which male science professors refuse to mention or study cases of clairvoyance and mediumship so well documented in females (with other cases such as here, here and here) is a lamentable example of lingering sexism in the patriarchy of academia, where the most empirically groundless theories of male professors often get 1000 times more attention than the most well-documented and philosophically relevant effects related to female psychics or mediums.
Speaking of females who act as if they have psychic abilities, the Internet is currently abuzz about the recent interview you can see here, in which two twins (Brigitte and Paula Powers) describe their mother's encounter with a thief. It seems that for most of the three-minute interview, the twins seem to speak in sync, with one twin saying exactly what the other twin says at the exact time the other twin says it, as they both describe something they recently saw.
Another sync-speaking interview with the two twins is below:
