The account below is taken from a newspaper archive that allows me to conveniently copy images, but does not allow me to copy text. So I'll just include some screen shots that tell the story. We hear an account of what seemed like an out-of-body experience and near-death experience occurring while H. L. Bertrand was mountain climbing.
Here is the first part of the account:
The University of Manitoba has a web site allowing text searching through newspapers that include many years of editions of the British weekly publication Psychic News. You can read many a fascinating newspaper story by using the link below, and typing in search terms such as ghost or apparition or haunting or poltergeist.
https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2939726
One of the searches I tried gave me results that included a headline proclaiming: "Multi-million selling newspaper declares him World's Greatest Psychic." We read of a person named Roberto Campagni. Witnesses claim that objects would appear around him mysteriously, objects that might gradually form as the witnesses watched. Such objects are called apports in the literature of parapsychology. We read this:
"Astounded witnesses testify that Campagni's hands begin to glow with a blue light. He passes a shapeless cloud of this light into a visitor's cupped hands. Within the palms the cloud becomes a solid object."
We read the testimony of a priest who states, "He put a luminous ball of light into my hands, and there it became a small silver angel."
The strange tale can be read in full using the link below:
https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2962855
Photo date: April 27, 2024. Photographer: Mark Mahin.
We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. We see a strange effect in which a shadow stripe appears as a kind of overlay on top of a curved line.
Photo date: April 26, 2024. Photographer: Mark Mahin.
We see below a mysterious orange orb I photographed indoors.
The book "Automatic Or Spirit Writing: With Other Psychic Experiences" by Sara A. Underwood is an interesting account of the paranormal, one that can be read online free using the link here. On page 35 Sara gives this account of witnessing the death of a friend:
"Slowly over the dying one's face spread a mellow radiant mist — I know no other way to describe it. In a few moments it covered the dying face as with a veil, and spread in a circle of about a foot beyond, over the pillow, the strange yellowish white light all the more distinct from the partial darkness of the room. Then from the center of this, immediately over the hidden face, appeared an apparently living face with smiling eyes which looked directly into mine, gazing at me with a look so full of comforting assurance that I could scarcely feel frightened. But it was so real and so strange that I wondered if I were temporarily crazed, and as it disappeared I called some one from another room, and went out into the open air for a few moments to recover myself under the midnight stars. When I was sure of myself I returned and took my place again alone. Then I asked that, if that appearance were real and not an hallucination, would it be made once more manifest to me ; and again the phenomenon was repeated, and the kind, smiling face looked up at me — a face new to me yet wondrously familiar."
Photo date: April 18, 2024. Photographer: Mark Mahin.
We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors.
I continue to observe at irregular intervals spooky things happening where I live. You can read quite a few posts I have made about such events by using the link here. A few days ago my Simplisafe home alarm device acted strangely. Whenever I turn off the alarm in the morning, I get a recorded voice saying, "Alarm off." But a few days ago when I turned off the alarm, the voice simply said, "Alarm."
I also get unpredictable results from recharging electronic devices overnight. I recharge my laptop computer and my I-Pad overnight. In the morning I often find them with random levels of charge, anything from 100% to nearly 0%.
This morning something very strange happened in my bathroom. After using the toilet, I left the bathroom, and at about the moment I got to my bed, I heard a loud recognizable noise. It was the sound of the toilet lid falling down from a raised position. At first I thought, "I must have just somehow positioned the lid so that it might fall down about five seconds later." But I did tests in the morning showing that such an explanation does not work.
Tests I did showed there are only 4 possible "lid states" of the toilet:
(1) A "both lids up" state that is stable.
(2) A "both lids down" state that is stable.
(3) A "lower lid down and upper lid up" state that is stable.
(4) Some state in which either lid is neither fully up nor fully down, which is an extremely unstable state that will always cause that lid to fall down within one second.
So how could the toilet lid have loudly fallen down in an empty bathroom about five seconds after I had left the bathroom? There seems to be no natural explanation. It was as if the toilet lid had briefly levitated.
In the 19th century a host of witnesses would report levitations in their house. The most common report would be of table levitations. Endless seance witnesses would report tables either rising on two legs or fully levitating in the air. Very many times witnesses would report no one was touching the table when such events occurred. Such observations seeming to indicate spirit manifestations have been senselessly censored from the pages of this century's history books and science books. You can read many accounts of such observations (often reported simultaneously by three or more named witnesses) in my "Spookiest Years" series (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here and here).
Postscript: On June 27, 2024 in the very early morning I heard a strange sound in my bathroom, unlike any I can recall hearing at night in that bathroom. It was too dark to look around, so I wrote down my observation, and went back to sleep After waking, I looked around to investigate, and saw something that seemed to explain what had caused the sound. A plastic bolt cap at the bottom of my toilet had been moved from its normal position. What I saw was what we see below.
A few seconds after restoring the cap to its normal position (which covers the bolt), I thought to myself: that must have been what caused the strange sound -- the cap must have been mysteriously lifted. At that very instant I heard the strange sound again, just exactly as if the cap had again been mysteriously levitated.
The British medium Gladys Osborne Leonard achieved successes so remarkable that she is sometimes called "the British Leonora Piper," a reference to a medium whose successes are described here. Gladys stated that she was visiting friends while her mother was sick, and Gladys awoke at 2 AM:
"I looked up and saw in front of me, but about five feet above the level of my body, a large, circular patch of light about four feet in diameter. In this light I saw my mother quite distinctly. Her face looked several years younger than I had seen it a few hours before. A pink flush of health was on her cheeks, her eyes were clear and shining, and a smile of utter happiness was on her lips. She gazed downward on me for a moment, seeming to convey to me an intense feeling of relief and a sense of safety and well-being. Then the vision faded. I was awake all the time, quite conscious of my surroundings."
The next day she found her mother had died at 2 AM.
My previous post describes some spooky events I witnessed over the weekend. Today there was another spooky event. I was running a normal load (80% full) on my late model high-quality General Electric washing machine (which still has 8 years left on its warranty), when the machine simply froze at the "two minutes left" mark in the countdown. After about five minutes of the machine frozen in such a state, I had to turn off its power and remove the clothes. I noticed that the spin cycle never occurred. In this case I have proof of this spooky event, in the video below that shows the machine frozen for three minutes at the "two minutes left" mark. The video is not very exciting viewing, but at least it is good to have some video proof of one of the spooky events I have been reporting recently (which have occurred in great variety).
Just after mentioning that today was the 100th birthday of my late mother, I found this quarter mysteriously lying on a bedspread I had laid out a few minutes earlier without seeing such a thing. Massachusetts was her home state.
