Bismarck weekly tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, Dakota [N.D.]) 1884-1943, 1895-11-01

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STORIES OF SPIRITS.
STRANGE CASES OF MANIFESTATIONS
BY sPooks.
Investigated by the Society For Psychical
Research, They Are Presented With
Strong Backing -Examples Furnished
BY Widely Separated Countries.
REWRITING to the lore Of the Psychical
Research society, here is a case in which
apparitions of the dead and the living
were oommingled. A lady doctor says that
in 1869 she was living in the family of a
retired naval officer, Mr.. r., and his wife,
two miles from q seaport town. Mrs. r.,
who was the sister of the British consul at
Cadiz, married her husband, a widower,
in that city. When, after the marriage,
they came to England, her husband was
unable to find the nurse with whom his
youngest child had been left. After o vain
search they came to London. One night
Mrs. R. saw the sitting room door open.
A beautiful lady came in, followed by a
common looking woman, carrying a child
about a year old, dressed in a yellow Pc
lisse. The lady came up to the bed and
said, pointing to the baby: ''This is John
ny. You will remember Johnny" She
smiled, and Mrs. R. was just going to an
swer when the vision was gone. Her hus-
band said she had exactly described his
first wife, and that the child's name was
Johnny. Some days after, returning from
Westminster abbey, they lost themselves
in a narrow congeries of streets. Suddenly
Mrs. r. saw the common looking woman
of her vision carrying the baby with a yell
low pelisse. She told her husband, who
spoke to the After discreet in
quiry it turned out that she was tho nurse
that was wanted, and that the baby was
the missing child.
Thu antithesis of unconscious spiritual
manifestation by the living is the conscious
severance from the body and a foretaste Of
DEATHS mystery. DR.. Wiltse of Skiddy,
Kan whose case was first published in
the st. Louis Medical Journal in 1889, APP
parently died Of fever. Flo was declared
to be dead by the physician who attended
him. To make assurance doubly sure,
needles were thrust deeply into the flesh.
This was done many times. Tho doctor
who pronounced the patient dead subse-
quently said, II observed his symptoms
closely, and if there are any symptoms
marking a patient in articulo mortis that
were not present. in his case 1 am ignorant
Of them" Meanwhile, the spirit of the
man alleged to be dead had, according to
his W story, discovered itself from the
body. The disembodied spirit even con-
templated the dwelling of clay it had just
quilted. The liberated DR.. Wiltse was
conscious Of two weeping ladies in the
room (his wife and his sister) and Of two
gentlemen at the door. With one of these
gentlemen he came into contact and, very
much to his surprise, perceived that the
other party was unconscious of the COLI
sion. II now attempted to gain the atten-
ton Of the people with the object of COM
forting them as we'll as of assuring them
of their own Immortality. I bowed to
them playfully and saluted with my right
hand. 1 passed about among them also,
but found that they gave me no heed.
Then the situation struck me as humor-
GUS, and I laughed outright" Going out
Of the house, he noted the redness of the
soil and the washes that the rain had
made. Presently he found himself in the
air, borne along by a pair of hands till he
came to where were three prodigious
rocks, which, his conductor told him, was
the road to the eternal world, whence he
could no more return in the flesh. He at
tempted to pass, but his path was barred
by a black cloud, and he Knew he was to
be stopped. The cloud tho1 touched his
face. When he ragained consciousness, he
found himself at home in his bed very i'll.
Nor, tho,n &c o1,,,,1nrf ox,s1o,,oo - n-o,o
that DR.. Wiltse's wife and sister did not
fall a-weeping until he was pronounced
dead; there is evidence that the soil and
the rain washes were as he described i'm
mediately he found utterance, though they
must have been very different the last
time he saw them with his bodily eyes;
there is evidence that he told all these
things as soon as he could speak and as
often as he was permitted.
The Rev. L. j.. Bertrand, a Huguenot
minister Of Neuilly, Paris, writing in
1873, gives a strange experience that befell
him in the Alps 80 years previously. The
sleep of death had come upon him as he
crouched in the snow upon a ledge of a
precipice. His mind continued active,
though his body was benumbed. The ap-
proach Of death was not painful till the
last, when there was a dreadfully acute
pain Of molnentary duration. "Then," he
says, "my life went out" His spirit scared
above his body, to which, however, it was
still attached by a kind of elastic string.
With the spiritual eye he saw the remain
der of his party and their guide in q posi-
ton where he could not possibly have seen
them from the place where his body lay.
He saw that the guide had disobeycd in
structions as to the route to be traversed.
He saw the offender take a sly pull at the
percipient's own Madeira and eat the alb
stracted leg of a fowl. Still more wonder
full, he saw his wife, who was always nerv-
GUS about him when he was alpine climb
ing, going to Lucerne till the following
day. "Well, wife, he %soliloquized, II am
a dead man. Goodby." Suddenly he felt
q shock, realized that his party had re-
turned and that the guide was rubbing
him with snow to reanimate him. His
first attempt at speech was to reproach the
guide. "If you had simply cut the string!''
he peevishly exclaimed. By and by he
taxed the guide with his small misdeeds,
and the delinquent ran off in dismay.
When he reached the inn, the guide be-
came elirious, being convinced that the
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