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Death and its Mystery, At the Moment of Death; Manifestations and Apparitions of the Dying – Camille Flammarion

The newspaper "Le Temps” of JuIy 3rd 1899, related the following facts:

From our English correspondent – For some days a report has spread that a suite of the House of Commons giving upon the speaker’s courtyard was haunted.  Nothing was said as to whether the spectre had ever ventured into the lobbies of the House.

Several members of Parliament grew uneasy.  The truth was at last discovered.  The phantom is not a ghost, but the double of a person still living.  And this person is none other than the wife of one of the principal office holders of Westminster palace, Mr Archibald Milman, secretary of the House of Commons – at a salary of 38,000 francs.

Mrs Milman tells in these words the story of her spectre:

The strangest thing about it is that it is true.  It has lasted for years.  I am afflicted with another self, that people meet in places where I am not.  The other day a friend took leave of me in the workroom in which I give myself up to a passion for binding books.  Scarcely had he stepped out at the door, when he found me again on the landing of the stairway.  Dumbfounded, he shrank aside to let me pass.  I had not stirred.

Every moment there are adventures of this kind.  One of my governesses has just left me because she is very nervous and the frequency of these apparitions made her positively ill.  This very day a young woman living with us saw me in the courtyard, without me having left the house.

I have never seen my double.  But I have heard it.  One evening, just as I had come into my room, I heard a creaking sound and went out onto the landing.  All the doors that I had just closed were open.  I went back precipitately and rang both for the nurse and the house steward.  There is only one stairway; the nurse sleeps in the attic and the house steward in the basement.  They were forced to meet the intruder.  And, as a matter of fact, the nurse had seen nothing, but the house steward was most surprised to find me in my room, since he had just seen me, he said, opening the door of a hall on the ground floor