However this may be, both he and Professor Sidgwick were greatly interested in it, for, as they explained, there were fifty accounts of haunting by the dead to one such example of haunting by the living.
Of course, such a case presents innumerable difficulties; still the salient fact remains, that after a lapse of nearly thirty years I traced the rooms occupied by an old friend, in a city I had never before entered, and that this knowledge did not come to me by chance, but _as the result of a series of investigations, started by me solely on account of the experiences that came to me in a house and in a room of which I had absolutely no previous knowledge_. Those interested in these subjects will naturally ask: "_Do you suppose that the spirit of Mr Forbes came to you at the moment of your remarks to him and his to you? If so, was he conscious of any such experience?_"
I can answer this last question decidedly, and in the negative; for four years later, circumstances brought me once more within the orbit of Mr Forbes' life. He was then living in the north of England, and he and his wife and I have discussed the question more than once.
We can only suppose that the impression of his presence did in some way cling to the surroundings; that my sleeping there, even in complete ignorance of his tenancy, enabled me, as a "sensitive," to pick up this special influence from many others presumably present; and that the memories of the past galvanised the impression into some sort of temporary astral existence. The entity to whom I seemed to be speaking was doubtless _not_ the Judge Forbes of later life, but some distorted image of his earlier days of disappointed and often reproachful affection.
When Mr Myers suggested that I should get Mr Pound to sign a paper mentioning that he had told me that Mr Forbes had occupied these special rooms twenty-seven years previously, the latter did so readily, only remarking that he had naturally concluded that I _knew_ my friend had lodged with him.
"Pound will 'smell a rat' if I go," said Mr Myers.
So I went myself, and thus the story was made evidentially complete.
My second visit to America was paid in the year of the Diamond Jubilee, 1897.