Death warnings come in many guises. The Rev. Frederick Lee, in glimpses in the twilight 1885, gives an account of a Buckinghamshire farmer’s son who in a dream saw himself accidentally shot by his own gun, a dream realize to the letter on the following Tuesday. He does not locate this event, but other Buckinghamshire death warnings were collected from a nap Hill woman, DG A, in 1910 and 1928, and later published in folklore 1932. All three were supernatural manifestations, and all three are narrated – convincingly – without art.
Particularly Erie is the first:
Mrs. W, then in her teens, some time ago, just before her mother died, was walking along at Highwood bottom, and saw a little figure dressed in silk and satin walking along the hedge. A little figure about as big as a doll walked along until it came to her mother’s gait, and then disappeared, and then Mrs. W heard the rustling of silk and satin. Her father afterwards said, that is always a warning.
Also unnerving was the experience of DGA’s uncle Alf who was bed ridden:
Uncle Alf, sometime before his father died… Heard someone lifting the latch of the door three nights running three times each night at the same time; but no one came in. He had his stick ready to hit the income. And that was just before my grandpa died.
On another occasion, the warning was believed not simply to have announced the coming death, but to have prevented a suicide:
One day – said D GA – my father walked to see to the horses up at a farm as he did every night, and that night he had not got his lantern with him. He thought that someone was walking by his side. He spoke and got no answer. He put his hand out and felt nothing. He got more scared. When he reached the farm gate, my father stopped, and so did the man. My father entered the gate, and was surprised at the man entering two. The man stopped at the back door of the farm, while my father went on to the next door to get his lantern. Now, the postman, who lived at Wycombe, used to stay in an outhouse at the farm, when the weather was too bad to return to Wycombe. My father called in and told this postman what he thought, and the postman said – we had better go into the farmhouse, and see what old B is doing. They went in, and he was sitting there with a revolver. They stayed with him most of the night. He had always said he would shoot himself, and carried about a loaded revolver. My dad said he always thought it was a warning.