Page:The elephant man and other reminiscences.djvu/174

162 usually received at the very moment at which the body from which they emanate ceases to be. Warnings or announcements may be conveyed by voices or by visions of various kinds. The voices may be recognized as those of the dying, or the actual death scene, "visioned from a distance," may be presented complete in every detail. Some of the manifestations may take a physical form, such as knockings upon doors and windows, the sound of footsteps or of gliding feet, the moving of articles of furniture, the falling of portraits from the wall, the opening of doors, the passage of a gust of wind.

Many of the phenomena appear to me to be hardly worthy of being recorded. As illustrations I may quote the movement of a hat on a hat peg used by the deceased, the violent shaking of an iron fender to announce a daughter's death, the fact that about the time of a relative's decease a table became "split completely along its whole length," while on another like occasion a gas jet went out in a room in which a party was sitting, playing cards.

The following circumstance will not commend itself to the reasonable as one that was dependent upon a supernatural agency. "My grandmother," a student writes, "died in 1913. At the hour of