To one of the extracts below.

 

1.One night in December 1868 three gentlemen of ‘unimpeachable reputation’ sat together in the dark in an apartment on the upper floor of Ashley House in London. On of them was Lord Lindsay, a notable scientist, the second was Lord Adare, and the third his cousin, Captain Charles Wynne. All three were silent, nervous and tense as though waiting for something extraordinary to happen.

After a few minutes they heard the window in the next room being raised and almost immediately saw the figure of Daniel Dunglas Home floating in the air outside the window of the room in which they were sitting. He must have been at least eighty feet from the ground. Lord Lindsay wrote later: ‘The moon was shining full into the room… I saw Home’s feet about six inches above the window sill. He remained in this position for a few seconds then raised the window, glided into the room feet foremost and sat down.’ And Lord Adare gave his word: ‘The fact of his having gone out of one window and in at the other, I can swear to.’

Although in his mature years Home could levitate at will and became best known to the general public for his spectacular drifting about in the air, he also levitate without seemingly being aware of it. On one occasion when his host drew his attention to the fact that he was hovering above the cushion in his armchair, Home seemed most surprised. To the end of his life he maintained that he could only fly through the air because he was lifted up by the spirits. ‘Since the first time, I have never felt fear,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘Should I, however, have fallen from the ceiling of some rooms in which I have been raised, I could not have escaped serious injury. I am generally lifted up perpendicularly; my arms frequently become rigid and are drawn above my head as if I were grasping the unseen power which slowly raises me from the floor…’

 

2. A year before the outbreak of the Second World War, Mrs. Mary Carpenter, on a boating holiday in East Anglia, burst into flames and was reduced to ashes in front of her horrified husband and children. There was no flame from which she could have caught fire.

 

3. Christine Ross has been ‘receiving’ messages since the age of ten. She ‘saw’ the man she was to marry and the pub they would live in. She also experiences visions: ‘I have tried to switch off but it doesn’t work. These days I try to’go with it’. People say it is a gift but it can only be that if I can learn how to use it. The most recent occasion was when a little boy went missing from Butlin’s at Ayr. I saw a picture of him lying in a ditch at the bottom of a steep grassy slope. There was a hill nearby with trees at the top. I rang the police incident room and told them. Then on the Sunday afternoon I told a friend that I felt the boy had been found. The next day it was in the paper, he was found in the Carrick hills and the photograph was the ‘picture’ I had received.

 

e) Look through all the texts again quickly and try to answer the following questions. Work in pairs and try to work out the meaning of any vocabulary you don’t know.

1. Could Dunglas Home levitate when he wanted to?

2. How did he do it, according to him?

3. Where was Mrs. Carpenter when she burst into flames?

4. What ‘picture’ did Christine Ross receive?

 

f) Do you know any similar stories? Tell each other stories you know, in groups.

a) Read the following stories and match them to the phenomena which a person with sixth sense may experience:

telepathy; ghosts; premonitions; intuition; déjà vu

Strange Tales Indeed!

In May 1957seven people were sitting in a dining room just after lunch. Suddenly a man in brown walked past the open door into the kitchen. Four of the people saw him, and one got up to ask him what he wanted. The man had vanished, yet he could not have left the house unseen. Only then did the people realize that they must have seen a ghost.

 

This happened near Sydney, Australia, one evening in 1873. Six weeks after Captain Towns died, his married daughter entered a bedroom where there was a burning gas lamp. Reflected in the shiny surface of the wardrobe was a ‘portrait’ of her father. His thin, pale face, and grey flannel jacket were unmistakable. A young lady who was with the daughter saw the image too. They called other members of the household. Altogether eight people came and marveled at the apparition. But when the Captain’s widow tried to touch it, the image faded away.

 

An old man was seen trudging home through a stormy night, dressed only in pyjamas. The driver who passed him on the road discovered that the old man had died three weeks before.

 

One night in 1976, a woman awoke to see a tall, thin, female figure in her bedroom. The phantom pressed skinny fingers around the woman’s throat as if to strangle her. Then the grip relaxed, and the figure faded. Later, the victim described the ghost to her fiancé. The description fitted his long-dead Malaysian grandmother.

 

In 1964 a huge press was accidentally set moving inside a Detroit car factory. A nearby worker claimed his life was saved only by a tall, scarred black man who pushed him clear of the machinery. No one with him saw that person, but some recognized the description. It fitted a black worker accidentally killed there 20 years before.

 

In the middle 1800s, a young girl was walking down an English country lane. Suddenly she seemed to see her mother lying on a bedroom floor. The girl fetched a doctor and they found her mother exactly as the girl described her. The mother had fallen with a heart attack. Luckily the doctor arrived in time to save her life.

 

In 1926, two women on a country walk near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England, saw a big house in a garden surrounded by a high wall. Soon afterwards they passed that way again. They found only overgrown waste land that had not been disturbed for years.

 

(from ‘The Piccolo Explorer Book of Mysteries’)