Observations placeholder
Mrs. M. A. Larcombe - You may be sure your friend, Anne Cox, has gone to Heaven
Identifier
023488
Type of Spiritual Experience
Inter composer communication
Hallucination
Background
This is the engraving from Dante’s inferno. It seems her composer gave her a picture to help her understand.
A description of the experience
A casebook of otherworldly music – D Scott Rogo
This case reported by Mrs. M. A. Larcombe was dated July 17, 1882 and was part of the evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research for their work Phantasm of the Living.
When I was about eighteen or nineteen, I went to stay in Guernsey. This would-be about thirty years ago. About 10 a.m., one day, I was sitting in the kitchen, blowing up the fire with the bellows. I heard some very beautiful music and stopped to listen, at the same time looking up I saw above me thousands of angels, as tight as they could be packed, seeming to rise far above and beyond me. They were only visible as far as the head and shoulders. In front of them all I saw my friend, Anne Cox.
As I looked and listened, the music seemed, to die away in the distance, and at the same time, the angels seemed to pass away into the distance, and vanish like smoke.
I ran up to Miss White, the young lady staying in the house, and told her what I had seen. She said, “You may be sure your friend, Anne Cox, has gone to Heaven."
I wrote home at once, to Lyme Regis, and found that Anne Cox had died that very day. Anne Cox and I had been very close friends. She was just my own age and was almost like a sister to me.
Mrs. Larcombe states positively that she was in no anxiety about her friend and had no knowledge of her illness. She has had no other hallucinations, unless an unexplained appearance seen by her in early childhood, and by others as well as herself, was of that character.