“For two years we saw nothing more of the white bird, and we had moved to another place.

“One day I was in my room, and my two little girls, aged six and eight, were standing at the window watching a kitten in the garden, when suddenly the youngest cried out: 

“‘Oh, mamma!  Look at that great white bird,’ putting her hands as if to catch it, exactly in the way it flies round one.

“I saw nothing, and the elder child said, ’Don’t be silly, Jessie; there is no bird.’

“‘But there is,’ said the child.  ’Don’t you see?  There, look!  There it is!’

“I looked at my watch.  It was twenty minutes past three.

“Two days after we received the news that a niece of mine had died at twenty minutes past three.  The children had never known anything of the former appearances, as we had never talked about it before them.  We have seen nothing since of the bird, but have for some years had no death in the family.”

So runs the article in the Occult Review, and I can corroborate it with similar experiences that have happened to my friends and to me.

Some years ago, for instance, a great friend of my wife’s died, and on the day of the funeral a large bird tried to fly in at the window of the room where the corpse lay; while, shortly afterwards, an exactly similar bird visited the window of my wife’s and my room in a house, several hundreds of miles away.  If it was only a coincidence, it was a very extraordinary one.

Then again, this spring, just before the death of one of my wife’s relatives, a large bird flew violently against the window-pane behind which my wife was sitting—­an incident that had never happened to her in that house before.

Undoubtedly, spirits in the guise of birds—­most probably they are the phantasms of birds that have actually once lived on the material plane—­are the messengers of death.

A Case of Bird haunting in East Russia

Some years ago the neighbourhood of Orskaia, in East Russia, was roused by an affair of a very remarkable nature.  The body of a handsome young peasant woman, called Marthe Popenkoff, was found in a lonely part of the road, between Orskaia and Orenburg, with the skin of her face and body shockingly torn and lacerated, but without there being any wounds deep enough to cause her death, which the doctor attributed to syncope.

The people of Orskaia, not satisfied with this verdict, declared Marthe had been murdered, and made such a loud clamour that the editor of the local paper at last voiced their sentiments in the East Russia Chronicle.  It was then that M. Durant, a smart young French engineer, temporarily residing in those parts, became interested in the case, and decided to investigate it thoroughly.  With this end in view he wrote to his friend M. Hersant—­a keen student of the Occult—­in Saratova, to join him, and three days after the despatch of his letter met the latter at the Orskaia railway station.  M. Durant retailed the case as they drove to his house.