Observations placeholder

 from the Revue des Études Psychiques (1902, p. 151).
Mr. G. P. H., a member of the "Society F. P. R.", was personally known to the editor of the magazine, Mr. César de Vesme, and had sent the report of an important psychological case to the newspaper The Spectator. This report resulted in a confirmatory letter being sent by the person concerned in the case in question. Here is the letter:

To the Editor of the Spectator,

Sir,

"The letter sent to you by Mr. "G.P.H.", which you published in your June 1st issue, under the title: "La Maison du Rêve", obviously refers to a dream that my deceased wife had had. The story is broadly accurate, although I cannot recognize the identity of your correspondent. But the same story was less accurately reported in Sir Mounstuart Grant Duff's Diaries, quoted in your May 25 article. It will therefore not be redundant for me to give, in turn, a brief overview of this event.

A few years ago, my wife had several dreams of a house, whose interior layout she described in detail, although she had no idea where it was located.

Later, in 1883, I rented a house in the mountains of Scotland from Lady B. for the fall, surrounded by hunting grounds and fishing ponds. My son, who was then in Scotland, dealt with the matter, without my wife and me visiting the property in question.

When I finally went there, without my wife, to sign the contract and take possession of the property, Lady B... was still living in the house; she told me, if I didn't object, she would give me the bedroom where she usually lived and which had been haunted for some time by a "little lady" who made continuous apparitions there.

As I was rather skeptical about these matters, I replied that I would have been delighted to meet her ghost visitor. So I went to bed in this room, but I didn't have any ghosts visiting me.

Later, when my wife arrived, she was very surprised to discover that this was the house she saw in her dream. She inspected it from top to bottom; all the details corresponded to what she had so often seen in a dream. But when she went down into the living room again, she said: "Yet it can't be the house of my dream, since it had a number of rooms on this side, which are missing here." –

She was immediately told that the rooms in question really existed, but that they were not entered through the living room. When they were shown to her, she recognized each room perfectly. However, she says that it seemed to her that one of the bedrooms in this house was not intended for this purpose when she visited the house in a dream. It turned out that the room in question had recently been transformed into a bedroom.

Two or three days later, my wife and I visited Lady B...; as they did not yet know each other, I introduced the two ladies to each other. Lady B... exclaimed immediately: "Well!  you're the lady who haunted my bedroom!"

I have no explanation to give for this event. My wife did not have, for the rest of her life, any other such adventure, which some will call a remarkable coincidence, and which the Scots would call a case of "double vision." My dear wife was certainly the last person in the world who would allow the imagination to rule her life. I can therefore guarantee, as do other members of my family, that she was able to give an accurate and detailed description of a house that was arranged in a rather special way, long before she or the other members of her family had only learned that the house in question existed.

You can freely give my name to people who are seriously interested in psychic research and who may wish to obtain further information on this subject. For this purpose, I include my business card."

(Mr. G.P.H. informed the Editor of the magazine of the surnames and forenames of Lady B., who belonged to Scotland's most illustrious aristocracy).

In the presented case, the telepathic hypothesis is made implausible because of the lack of any emotional relationship or simple knowledge between the medium and the percipient.

Let us add that the reported episode can also be considered as an example of "precognition", since the house visited in a dream by the narrator's wife was the same one where she was to stay several years later, a circumstance which, if it adds nothing in favour of the "duplication" hypothesis, nonetheless specifies the limits of the telepathic hypothesis.