Paranormal record / 1875
Shanghai, 1875. Sir Edmund Hornby, Chief Judge of the British Supreme Court for China and Japan, was woken by a tap at his bedroom door. A reporter he knew stepped in. Deadly pale. Dressed as usual. He sat on the foot of the bed as if in pain, took down a judgment in shorthand, and said it was the last time he would ever see the judge anywhere. The next morning, the man was found dead in his room. The Society for Psychical Research printed the story in 1884 as a crisis apparition. Within months a letter from Shanghai disputed its main facts, and the case was withdrawn. Hornby never retracted a word.
In the early 1880s the Society for Psychical Research appealed for first-hand accounts of apparitions. One reply came from a man whose word carried unusual weight. Sir Edmund Grimani Hornby had been Chief Judge of the British Supreme Court for China and Japan, sitting in Shanghai from 1865 to 1876. Edmund Gurney and F. W. H. Myers printed his story in "Visible Apparitions," in The Nineteenth Century, July 1884. It was offered as a crisis apparition. A figure seen at the moment of death.