Goethe saw his own double riding by his side under conditions which really occurred years later.
Tasso saw and conversed with beings invisible to those about him.
Cellini was dissuaded from suicide by the apparition of a young man who frequently visited and encouraged him.
Mozart was visited by a mysterious person who ordered him to compose a requiem, and came frequently to inquire after its progress, but disappeared on its completion, which occurred just in time for its performance at his own funeral.
Ben Johnson was visited by the apparition of his eldest son with the mark of a bloody cross upon his forehead at the moment of his death by the plague.
Thackery wrote: “It is all very well for you who have probably never seen spirit manifestations to talk as you do, but had you seen what I have witnessed you would hold a different opinion.”
Hugh Miller, Maria Edgeworth, Captain Marryat, Madame de Stael, Sir Humphrey Davy, William Harvey, Francis Bacon, Martin Luther, George Fox, Cardinal Newman, Bishop Wilberforce, and many others have seen apparitions, or held converse with the unseen world in one form or another, as recorded by themselves.
Among the famous historical hauntings, we must not forget to mention the famous Cock Lane Ghost which occurred about 1760. According to a brief paragraph printed in the London Ledger, 1762, we read that:
“For some time a great knocking having been heard in the night, at the officiating parish clerk’s of St. Sepulchre’s, in Cock Lane near Smithfield, to the great terror of the family, and all means used to discover the meaning of it having failed, four gentlemen sat up there last Friday night, among whom was a clergyman standing withinside the door, who asked various questions. On his asking whether anyone had been murdered, no answer was made; but on his asking whether anyone had been poisoned, it knocked one and thirty times. The report current in the neighborhood is that a woman was some time ago poisoned, and buried in St. John’s Clerkenwell, by her brother-in-law.”
These knockings and phenomena occurred for a considerable time, until the whole community became interested in the manifestations. While various theories were advanced at the time—and since—to explain this ghost, no definite conclusion has ever been arrived at.