Observations placeholder
Colonel Jones's father has a vision of his sister in a coffin
Identifier
016680
Type of Spiritual Experience
Inter composer communication
Hallucination
Background
I think the communication came from the person who was viewing the coffin and was driven by the extreme emotion of grief. Whoever this was they were tied via a bridge to his father
A description of the experience
Death and its Mystery, At the Moment of Death; Manifestations and Apparitions of the Dying – Camille Flammarion
Account sent to authors of Phantasms of the Living from Colonel Jones of London 1883 who enclosed a letter from his father written to him a short time after this experience
In 1845 I was with my regiment in Maulmain Burma. In those days there was no direct mail; sailing vessels brought us our letters, and months often went by without our receiving any.
The evening of March 24th 1845, I was dining with some other people at the home of a friend. Seated on the veranda after dinner, with the other guests, I was talking of local matters, when suddenly I saw before me, distinctly, a coffin, and stretched out in this coffin with every appearance of being dead, one of my sisters, especially beloved, who was then at home.
It goes without saying that I stopped speaking and every one looked at me questioningly. They asked me what was the matter. Laughingly I told what I had seen and my story was taken as a jest.
In the course of the evening, in the company of an officer much older than I (the late Major General George Briggs, retired of the Madras artillery and at that time Captain Briggs), I went back to where I lived. He returned to the subject and asked me if I had received any news that my sister was ill. I replied in the negative, adding that my latest letters from home were those I had received about three months previously.
He asked me to make a note of the vision because he had heard of similar experiences. I did this making a note of it on a calendar opposite the date.
In the seventh of the following May I received a letter telling me that my sister had died on the very day of the vision.