Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

While there are, of course, many stories of ghosts communicating with friends or family, it’s rare that they’re as chatty as the one in the following tale given in the “Plattsmouth Daily Herald,” April 15, 1889.  (Note: Withers’ original, and slightly longer, account is still extant.)

Robert Withers, M.A. Vicar of Gately, England, in 1706, relates, in a publication of that time, the following singular story of the supernatural: 

Mr. Grose went to see Mr. Shaw on the 2nd of August last. As they were talking in the evening, Mr. Shaw says: “On the 21st of last month, as I was smoking my pipe and reading in my study, between eleven and twelve o'clock at night, in comes Mr. Naylor (formerly fellow of St. Johns College, but who had been dead for four years). When I saw him I was not much affrighted, and I asked him to sit down, which, accordingly, he did for about two hours, and we talked together. I asked him how it fared with him. He said: 'Very well.' Were any of our old acquaintances with him? ‘No,’ (at which I was very much alarmed), ‘but Mr. Orchard will be with me very soon, and you not long after.’ As he was going away I asked him if he would not stay a little longer, but he refused. 'No, he had but three days' leave of absence, and he had other business.’ 

Mr. Orchard died soon after, Mr. Shaw is now dead. He was formerly fellow of St. Johns College --an ingenuous, good man.  I knew him there; but at his death he had a college living at Oxfordshire, and here he saw the apparition."