Can You Foretell Death.

Levin Daily Chronicle, 24 September 1918, Page 3

Can You Foretell Death.

One of the strangest faculties is that of dowsing, or ascertaining the exact situation of hidden water by means of

a forked hazel-twig, about sixteen inches long, held in both hands, with the joint pointing downwards. When the dowser comes to the spot, where the water lies hidden under the ground, the twig immediately bends with a very rapid motion and often, so violently, that it breaks in half.

Dowsing for water is still occasionally met with in Cornwall, where the rod was once used to detect the /preence of minerals as well. The faculty, however, is very rare.

Scenting the presence of death is another strange faculty, and a far from pleasant one. In a recent murder case in the North of England, one of' the witnesses —a conutry girl—stated that she knew a death was about to take place in tha house because she smelt its presence.

This faculty, is perhaps, commoner in animals, particularly in dogs, which frequently howl outside a house where someone is about to die. Owls and ravens scream violently close to a house

where a fatality- is about to occur; and cats occasionally walk out of a house before a death and refuse to return till after the funeral.

Then there is faculty of telling what is about to happen. Some people have this in a most marked degree. They know, for example, when the postman raps that ho is bringing them a letter from some friend they have not heard from for ages, and that when they 'turn a corner they will meet So-and-So, whom they have not seen for months.

Then, too there are the faculties of seeing visions in. the crystal and fire, and of dreaming prophetic dreams, all of would seem to run in families, and the wonderful instinct some \people possess, especially women, of picking out. at first sight people likely to prove antagonistic to them or whose motives towards them are sinister.