40 GHOST STORIES
When I heard that she had been killed by a fall from her horse, riding in Central Park, I would not believe that it could be true. Emily had been vibrant with life, to an extraordinary degree. Death seemed to be a word that might be associated with any one else, but never with her.
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I found myself listening to the voice of Emily Greenway — her words sounding clearly through my brother's lips!
Forced at last to acknowledged the truth, my grief war devastating. There would be little gained by attempting to describe it. Those who have lost the person dearest to them in all the world will understand.
I had, at that time, already gone pretty seriously into the matter of spiritualism. The results to be obtained from table tipping, the ouija board, automatic writing and other similar means of communication were familiar to me.
I was not convinced that the messages received were actually messages from the departed, though I did not deny that they might be. Was there a life beyond the tomb, any way? Absolute proof of this appeared to me to be lacking. I kept my mind open to the theory that all the
phenomena ever produced by any medium might be due to the workings of the law of telepathy, or mind-reading. Emily had known of my interest in the subject, but had said little about it to me. She had never cared to attend a séance, and I had taken it for granted that she looked upon the whole busi- ness as hocus- pocus.
After the first shock of her death had worn away, I inevitably thought of trying to establish a contact with her by way of the occult. Yet I found myself shrink- ing from making a definite attempt, as though it were some- thing that might harm her and was, in a way, an insult to her memory.
I didn’t then understand why I felt that way. I went so far as to reason with myself and conclude that I was super- sensitive, perhaps hysterical on account of my sorrow, that what I really dreaded was failure in an attempt to com- municate and consequent loss of faith in the persistence of her identity. I resolved that as soon as I had my nerves
