Letters From a Living Dead Man, War Letters From the Living Dead Man, Last Letters From the Living Dead Man
9781465571120
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
One night last year in Paris I was strongly impelled to take up a pencil and write, though what I was to write about I had no idea. Yielding to the impulse, my hand was seized as if from the outside, and a remarkable message of a personal nature came, followed by the signature “X.” The purport of the message was clear, but the signature puzzled me. The following day I showed this writing to a friend, asking her if she had any idea who “X” was. “Why,” she replied, “don’t you know that that is what we always call Mr. ——?” I did not know. Now, Mr. —— was six thousand miles from Paris, and, as we supposed, in the land of the living. But a day or two later a letter came to me from America, stating that Mr. —— had died in the western part of the United States, a few days before I received in Paris the automatic message signed “X.” So far as I know, I was the first person in Europe to be informed of his death, and I immediately called on my friend to tell her that “X” had passed out. She did not seem surprised, and told me that she had felt certain of it some days before, when I had shown her the “X” letter, though she had not said so at the time. Naturally I was impressed by this extraordinary incident. “X” was not a spiritualist. I am not myself, and never have been, a spiritualist, and, so far as I can remember, only two other supposedly disembodied entities had ever before written automatically through my hand. This had happened when I was in the presence of a mediumistic person; but the messages were brief, and I had not attached any great importance to the phenomena. In childhood I had several times put my hand upon a planchette with the hand of another person, and the planchette had written the usual trivialities. On one occasion, some months before the first “X” letter, I had put my hand upon a planchette with the hand of a non-professional medium, and the prophecy of a fire in my house during a certain month in the following year was written, supposedly by a dead friend, which prophecy was literally verified, though the fire was not caused by my hand, nor was it in my own apartment.
