It is well known that even the great reformer, Martin Luther, knew of several similar cases, and in his "Table Talk" mentions more than one remarkable instance.
Another well-known and much discussed occurrence of this kind happened in the days of Mazarin, and created a great sensation in the highest circles at Paris. A marquis of Rambouillet and a marquis of Preci, intimate friends, had agreed to inform each other of their fate after death. The former was ordered to the army in Flanders, while the other remained in the capital. Here he was taken ill with a fever, several weeks after parting with his friend, and as he was one morning towards 6 o'clock lying in bed awake, the curtains were suddenly drawn aside, and his friend dressed as usual, booted and spurred, was standing before him. Overjoyed, he was about to embrace him, but his friend drew back and said that he had come only to keep his promise after having been killed in a skirmish the day before, and that Preci also would share his fate in the first combat in which he should be engaged. The latter thinks his friend is joking, jumps up and tries to seize him—but he feels nothing. The vision, however, is still there; Rambouillet even shows him the fatal wound in his thigh from which the blood seems still to be flowing. Then only he disappears and Preci remains utterly overcome; at last he summons his valet, rouses the whole house, and causes every room and every passage to be searched. No trace, however, is found, and the whole vision is attributed to his fever. But a few days later the mail arrives from Flanders, bringing the news that Rambouillet had really fallen in such a skirmish and died from a wound in the thigh; the prediction also was fulfilled, for Preci fell afterwards in his first fight near St. Antoine (Petaval, Causes Célèbres, xii. 269).
The parents of the well-known writer Schubert were exceptionally endowed with magic powers of this kind. The father once heard, as he thought in a dream, the voice of his aged mother, who called upon him to come and visit her in the distant town in which she lived, if he desired to see her once more before she died. He rejected the idea that this was more than a common dream; but soon he heard the voice repeating the warning. Now he jumped up and saw his mother standing before him, extending her hand and saying: "Christian Gottlob, farewell, and may God bless you; you will not see me again upon earth," and with these words she disappeared. Although no one had apprehended such a calamity, she had actually died at that hour, after expressing in her last moments a most anxious desire to see her son once more.
Tangible perceptions of persons dying at a distance are, of course, very rare. Still, more than one such case is authoritatively stated; among these, the following: A lawyer in Paris had returned home and walked, in order to reach his own bedroom, through that of his brother. To his great astonishment he saw the latter lying in his bed; received, however, no answer to his questions. Thereupon he walked up to the bed, touched his brother and found the body icy cold. Of a sudden the form vanished and the bed was empty. At that instant it flashed through his mind that he and his brother had promised each other that the one dying first should, if possible, give a sign to the survivor. When he recovered from the deep emotion caused by these thoughts, he left the room and as he opened the door he came across a number of men who bore the body of his brother, who had been killed by a fall from his horse (La Patrie, Sept. 22, 1857). The Count of Neuilly, also, was warned in a somewhat similar manner. He was at college and on the point of paying a visit to his paternal home, when a letter came telling him that his father was not quite well and that he had better postpone his visit a few days. Later letters from his mother mentioned nothing to cause him any uneasiness. But several days afterward, at one o'clock in the morning, he thought, apparently in a dream, that he saw a pale ghastly figure rise slowly at the lower end of his bed, extend both arms, embrace him and then sink slowly down again out of sight. He uttered heart-rending cries, and fell out of his bed, upsetting a chair and a table. When his tutor and a man-servant rushed into the room, they found him lying unconscious on the floor, covered with cold, clammy perspiration and strangely disfigured. As soon as he was restored to consciousness, he burst out into tears and assured them that his father had died and come to take leave of him. In vain did his friends try to calm his mind, he remained in a state of utter dejection. Three days later a letter came from his mother, bringing him the sad news, that his father had died on that night and at the hour in which he had appeared by his bedside. The unfortunate Count could never entirely get rid of the overwhelming impression which this occurrence had made on his mind, and was, to the day of his death, firmly convinced of the reality of this meeting (Dix Années d' émigration. Paris, 1865).
We learn from such accounts that there prevails among all men, at all ages, a carefully repressed, but almost irresistible belief in supernatural occurrences, and in the close proximity of the spirit world. This belief is neither to be treated with ridicule nor to be objected to as unchristian, since it is an abiding witness that men entertain an ineradicable conviction of the immortality of the soul. No arguments can ever destroy in the minds of the vast majority of men this innate and intuitive faith. We may decline to believe with them the existence of supernatural agencies, as long as no experimental basis is offered; but we ought, at the same time, to be willing to modify our incredulity as soon as an accumulation of facts appear to justify us in so doing. Our age is so completely given up to materialism with its ceaseless hurry and worry, that we ought to hail with a sense of relief new powers which require examination, and which offer to our intellectual faculties an untrodden field of investigation, full of incidents refreshing to our weary mind, and promising rich additions to our store of knowledge.
It can hardly be denied that there is at least a possibility of the existence of a higher spiritual power within us, which, often slumbering and altogether unknown, or certainly unobserved during life, becomes suddenly free to act in the hour of death. This may be brought about by the fact that at that time the strength of the body is exhausted, and earthly wants no longer press upon us, while the spiritual part of our being, largely relieved of its bondage, becomes active in its own peculiar way, and thus acquires a power which we are disposed to call a magic power. This power is, of course, not used consciously, for consciousness presupposes the control over our senses, but it acts by intuitive impulse. Hence the wide difference existing between the so-called magic of charmers, enchanters, and conjurors, justly abhorred and strictly prohibited by divine laws, and the effects of such supreme efforts made by the soul, which depend upon involuntary action, and are never made subservient to wicked purposes.
The results of such exertions are generally impressions made apparently upon the eye or the ear; but it need not be said that what is seen or heard in such cases, is merely the effect of a deeply felt sensation in our soul which seeks an outward expression. If our innermost being is thus suddenly appealed to, as it were, by the spirit of a dying friend or companion, his image arises instantaneously before our mind's eye, and we fancy we see him in bodily form, or our memory recalls the familiar sounds by which his appearance was wont to be accompanied. Dying musicians remind distant friends of their former relations by sweet sounds, and a sailor, wounded to death, appears in his uniform to relatives at home. The series of sights and sounds by which such intercourse is established, varies from the simplest and faintest vision to an apparently clear and distinct perception of well-known forms, and constitute feeble, hardly perceptible, sighs or sobs to words uttered aloud, or whole melodies clearly recited. If a living person, by such an unconscious but all-powerful effort of will, makes himself seen by others, we call the vision a "double," in German, a "Doppelgänger;" if he produces a state of dualism, such as has been mentioned before, and sees his own self in space before him, we speak of second sight.
Such efforts are, however, by no means strictly limited to the moment of dissolution, when soul and body are already in the act of parting. They occur also in living persons, but almost invariably only in diseased persons. The exceptions belong to the small number of men in whom great excitement from without, or a mysterious power of will, cause a state of ecstasy; they are, in common parlance, "beside themselves." In this condition, their soul is for the moment freed from the bondage in which it is held by its earthy companion, and such men become clairvoyants and prophets, or they are enabled actually to affect other men at a distance, in various ways. Thus it may very well be, that strange visions, the hearing of mysterious voices, and especially the most familiar phenomenon, second sight, are in reality nothing more than symptoms of a thoroughly diseased system, and this explains very simply the frequency with which death follows such mysterious occurrences.
Men have claimed—and proved to the satisfaction of more or less considerable numbers of friends—that they could at will cause a partial and momentary parting between their souls and their bodies. Here also antiquity is our first teacher, if we believe Pliny (Hist. Nat. vii. c. 52), Hermotimus could at his pleasure fall into a trance and then let his soul proceed from his body to distant places. Upon being aroused, he reported what he had seen and heard abroad, and his statements were, in every case, fully confirmed. Cardanus, also, could voluntarily throw himself into a state of apparent syncope, as he tells us in most graphic words (De Res. Var. v. iii. l. viii. c. 43). The first sensation of which he was always fully conscious, was a peculiar pain in the head, which gradually extended downward along the spine, and at last spread over the extremities—evidently a purely nervous process. Then he felt as if a "door was opened, and he himself was leaving his body," whereupon he not only saw persons at a distance, but noticed all that befell them, and recalled it after he had recovered from the trance. An old German Abbé Freitheim, of whose remarkable work on Steganographie (1621), unfortunately only a few sheets have been preserved, claims the power to commune with absent friends by the mere energy of his will. "I can," says he, "make known my thoughts to the initiated, at a distance of many hundred miles, without word, writing or cypher, by any messenger. The latter cannot betray me, for he knows nothing. If needs be, I can even dispense with the messenger. If my correspondent should be buried in the deepest dungeon I could still convey to him my thoughts as clearly, as fully, and as frequently as might be desirable, and all this, quite simply, without superstition, without the aid of spirits."
The famous Agrippa (De occulta philos., Lugduni, III. p. 13) quotes the former writer, and asserts that he also could, by mere effort of will, in a perfectly simple and natural manner convey his thoughts not to the initiated only, but to any one, even when his correspondent's present place of residence should be unknown. The most remarkable, and, at the same time, the best authenticated case of this kind, is that of a high German official mentioned in a scientific paper (Nasse. Zeitschrift für psychische Aerzte, 1820), and frequently copied into others. A Counsellor Wesermann claimed to be able to cause distant friends to dream of any subject he might choose. Whenever he awoke at night and made a determined effort to produce such an effect, he never failed, provided the nature of the desired dream was calculated to startle or deeply excite his friends. His power was tested in this manner. He engaged to cause a young officer, who was stationed at Aix-la-Chapelle, nearly fifty miles from his own home, to dream of a young lady who had died not long ago. It was eleven o'clock at night, but by some accident the lieutenant was not at home in bed, but at a friend's country-seat, discussing the French campaign. Suddenly the colonel, his host, and he himself see at the same time the door open, a lady enter, salute them sadly, and beckon them to follow her. The two officers rise and leave the room after her, but once out of doors, the figure disappears, and when they inquire of the sentinels standing guard outside, they are told that no one has entered. What made the matter more striking yet, was the fact that although both men had seen the door open, this could not really have been so, for the wood had sprung and the door creaked badly whenever it was opened. The same Wesermann could, in like manner, cause his friends to see his own person and to hear secrets which he seemed to whisper into their ears whenever he chose; but he admitted upon it that his will was not at all times equally strong, and that, hence, his efforts were not always equally successful. Cases of similar powers are very numerous. A very curious example was published in 1852, in a work on "Psychologic Studies" (Schlemmer, p. 59). The author, who was a police agent in the Prussian service, asserted that persons who apprehended being conducted to gaol with special anxiety, often made themselves known there in advance, announcing their arrival by knocks at the gates, opening of doors, or footsteps heard in the room set aside for examining new comers. One day, not the writer only, but all the prisoners in the same building, and even the sentinel at the gate heard distinctly a great disturbance and the rattling of chains in a cell exclusively appropriated to murderers. The next day a criminal was brought who had expressed such horror of this gaol, and made such resistance to the officials who were to carry him there, that it had become necessary, after a great uproar, to chain him hands and feet. It is well known that the mother of the great statesman Canning at one time of her life suffered under most mysterious though harmless nightly visitations. Her circumstances were such that she readily accepted the offer of a dwelling which stood unoccupied, with the exception of the basement, in which a carpenter had his workshop. At nightfall he and his workmen left the house, carefully locking the door, but night after night, at twelve o'clock precisely, work began once more in the abandoned part of the house, as far as the ear could judge, and the noise made by planing and sawing, cutting and carving increased, till the fearless old lady slipt down in her stocking feet and opened the door. Instantly the noise was hushed, and she looked into the dark deserted room. But as soon as she returned to her chamber the work began anew, and continued for some time; nor was she the only one who heard it, but others, the owner of the house included, heard everything distinctly.