[On July 17th, 1885, after Colonel Bigge had described the occurrence but before the account was taken from the envelope and read, he dictated the following remarks to Gurney:—]
When Colonel R. got off the car about a couple of hours afterwards, Colonel Goldie and other officers said to me, "Why, that's the very dress you described." They had not known where he was or how he was engaged. The month, February, was a most unlikely one to be fishing in. Colonel Reed was much alarmed when told what I had seen.
The quartermaster, sitting at the window, would have been bound to see a real figure; he denied having seen anything.
I have never had the slightest hallucination of the senses on any other occasion.
[It will be seen that these recent remarks exhibit two slips of memory. It is quite unimportant whether Colonel Reed was seen walking in at the gate or getting off a car. But in making the interval between the vision and the return two hours instead of ten minutes, the later account unduly diminishes the force of the case. If there is any justification at all for the provisional hypothesis that the sense of impending arrival is a condition favourable for the emission of a telepathic influence, it is of importance that, at the time when the phantasmal form was seen, Colonel Reed was not busy with his fishing, but was rapidly approaching his destination; for thus the incident, at any rate, gets the benefit of analogy with other cases.]
VI. B. From the Journal S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 129. The case is recorded by the Misses H. M. and L. Bourne.
Additional evidence of the hallucinatory character of the figure seen is afforded by the details having been more clearly discernible than those of a real figure at the same distance would have been, and also by the second appearance, where the percipient had the impression of being transported to a different scene.
Miss L. Bourne writes:—
On February 5th, 1887, my father, sister, and I went out hunting. About the middle of the day my sister and I decided to return home with the coachman, while my father went on. Somebody came and spoke to us, and delayed us for a few moments. As we were turning to go home, we distinctly saw my father, waving his hat to us and signing us to follow him. He was on the side of a small hill, and there was a dip between him and us. My sister, the coachman, and myself all recognised my father, and also the horse. The horse looked so dirty and shaken that the coachman remarked he thought there had been a nasty accident. As my father waved his hat I clearly saw the Lincoln and Bennett mark inside, though from the distance we were apart it ought to have been utterly impossible for me to have seen it. At the time I mentioned seeing the mark in the hat, though the strangeness of seeing it did not strike me till afterwards.
Fearing an accident, we hurried down the hill. From the nature of the ground we had to lose sight of my father, but it took us very few seconds to reach the place where we had seen him. When we got there, there was no sign of him anywhere, nor could we see anyone in sight at all. We rode about for some time looking for him, but could not see or hear anything of him. We all reached home within a quarter of an hour of each other. My father then told us he had never been in the field, nor near the field, in which we thought we saw him, the whole of that day. He had never waved to us, and had met with no accident.