Sidney Dickinson - True Tales of the Weird

"Some time before she [my wife] had put a whole package of matches into a stewpan, in which she heated water, and set the pan in with these paints and rags. Then, one night, when in a hurry for some hot water, she had gone in, in the dark, and forgetting all about the matches, had dumped them upon the tubes of oil paints when she pulled out the pan.

"Every one of the heads of these matches had been burned off, evidently through spontaneous combustion. I went through them all, and not one had been ignited. The rags were burned and the whole inside of the drawer was charred. The fire could not have been kept under longer than the following night, and would probably have burned the child and me in bed, before anyone dreamed there was a fire."

Among the "phenomena" which attend the average spiritualistic séance a favorite one is the apparent production from space of quantities of flowers – to the supernatural source of which credence or doubt is given according to the degree of belief or scepticism inherent in the individual sitters. Having never attended one of these gatherings, I am not able to describe such an incident as occurs under such auspices; but the suggestion recalls to my mind two very remarkable events in which flowers were produced in a seemingly inexplicable manner, and without the assistance (if that be the right word) of mediumistic control. In one of these experiences I personally participated, and in both of them my wife was concerned – therefore I can vouch for their occurrence.

Some months after the happenings recorded in the two previous narratives, I was spending the summer following my return from Europe in Northampton, Massachusetts, at the residence of my father, having with me my wife and daughter. The mother of the child, who, as I have said, died in giving her birth, was a resident of the town at the time of our marriage, and her body reposed in our family's lot in the cemetery. The circumstance of this bereavement caused the warmest affections of my father and mother to centre upon my daughter, she being then their only grandchild.

The little girl was passionately fond of flowers, and her indulgent grandfather, himself a zealous horticulturist and grower of choice fruits, had that summer allotted to her sole use a plot six feet square in his spacious gardens, which became the pride of her heart from the brilliant array of blooms which she had coaxed to grow in it. Her favorite flowers were pansies, with the seeds of which she had planted nearly one-half of the space at her disposal. They had germinated successfully and flourished amazingly, and at the time of which I write that part of the bed devoted to them was a solid mass of pansies of every conceivable variety.

At about four o'clock one afternoon my wife and I set out for a walk through the famous meadows that stretched away from the back of the grounds, and on our return, some two hours later, we saw at a distance the child standing upon the terrace awaiting us, clean and wholesome in a fresh white frock, and bearing a large bouquet of her favorite pansies in her hand. As we approached she ran to meet us and extended the pansies to my wife, saying: – "Mamma, see these lovely pansies! I have picked them for you from my pansy-bed."

My wife thanked the child and kissed her, and we went upstairs to our room together to prepare for supper that was then about to be served. A vase stood on the shelf at one side of the room, and in this, first partly filling it with water, I placed the bunch of pansies.

After supper I suggested to my wife that we should call upon some relatives who lived about a quarter of a mile away, and went with her to our room while she made her preparations for our excursion. While waiting for her I took from the shelf the vase containing the pansies, and we examined and commented upon them for some time; then, her toilette being completed, I restored the vase and flowers to their former position, and we left the room, and immediately thereafter the house, together.

We found our friends at home and spent a pleasant evening with them, leaving on our return at about ten o'clock. The night was warm and perfectly calm, and, as there was no moon, the way was dark save where, here and there, a street lamp threw about its little circle of light. As we turned into the street which led to my father's house we passed under a row of maple trees whose heavy foliage made the darkness even more profound than we had known it elsewhere, and beside a high hedge which enclosed the spacious grounds of a mansion that stood at the corner of the two highways. This hedge extended for a distance of about fifty yards, and as many feet beyond the point where it terminated a lighted street lamp dimly illumined the pathway. We were at a point about midway of the hedge when my wife, who was the nearer to it, suddenly stopped and exclaimed: "Was it you that gave that pull at my shawl?" and readjusted the garment – a light fleecy affair – which I at once observed was half off her left shoulder.

"Why, no," I replied, "I did not touch your shawl. What do you mean?"

"I mean," she answered, "that I felt a hand seize my shawl and try to draw it away from me."

I pointed out the fact that I could not well have reached her shawl on the side on which it had been disarranged, and suggested that it might have caught upon a projecting twig; but although she accepted this explanation as reasonable she still insisted that she had the consciousness of some person having laid a hand upon her.

After a few moments we went on, and had left the hedge behind us and were within a few feet of the street lamp, when my wife stopped a second time, declaring that her shawl had been seized again. Sure enough, the garment was as before, lying half off her shoulder, and this time obviously not because of any projecting twig, since we were in a perfectly clear space, and could look about us over an area of several yards in every direction. This we did, puzzled but not alarmed at the twice-recurring incident; then, on a sudden, my wife seized my arm with a convulsive grip, and, raising her eyes until I thought she was looking at the light in the street lamp before us, whispered: "Heavens! Do you see that ?"

I followed the direction of her gaze, but could see nothing, and told her so, in the same breath asking her what she meant.

"It is Minnie!" she gasped (thus uttering the name of my dead wife) "and she has her hands full of flowers! Oh, Minnie, Minnie, what are you doing?" and hid her face in her hands. I clasped her in my arms, thinking she was about to faint, and gazed fearfully above us in a vain effort to discern the declared apparition – and at the same moment I felt a shower of soft objects strike upon my upturned face and upon my straw hat, and saw against the light before me what seemed like blossoms floating downward to the ground.

As soon as I could quiet my wife's agitation and induce her to look again for the appearance which she believed she had beheld, but which she told me had now vanished, I made a search upon the sidewalk for the objects whose fall I had both felt and seen. They were plainly evident, even in the dim light, and I gathered up a number of them and carried them under the lamp for examination. They were pansies, freshly gathered, and with their leaves and stems damp, as if just taken from water. Hastening to the house, we went directly to our room, and lighting the gas looked eagerly toward the shelf where we had left the vase filled with pansies some three hours before. The vase was there, half-filled with water, but not a single flower was standing in it.

The next day was Sunday and all the family went to morning service at the church. As my wife and I, with our daughter between us and following my father and mother at some distance, reached the scene of our adventure on the previous night, we saw lying on the sidewalk a half-dozen pansies which we had evidently overlooked, owing to the dim light in which we had gathered up the others. At sight of them the little girl dropped my hand, to which she was clinging, and with a cry of surprise ran to pick them up.