Noiselessly—like a puff of gray-blue vapor—a figure emerged and confronted us. Its head and shoulders were well defined, but the arms appeared to trail off into smoke-like veiling. Its eyes were indistinguishable, its chin vague, but it bowed several times in slow and solemn fashion!
Meanwhile I was studying the psychic who stood with a strained, distracted look on his face, his knees shaking. One hand was outstretched and clutching at the air as if he were making a supreme effort to hold the apparition till I should have time to study it. The other was at his heart as if to ease a pain.
Slowly he crept toward the wraith. Each second he seemed to bend, to grow weaker and the ghostly visitor turned toward him, became vaguer and more formless and then, as two drops of water do, they appeared to meet and mingle and the psychic fell like a log inside the curtain, but the heel of one foot remained visible.
The wife continued to play softly on the piano until at last the heel was withdrawn and my young host appeared looking pale and weak, but calm and mentally alert.
He told me that he had held the “materialized form” as long as he could; that he felt a “drawing out” of his vital force, through his solar-plexus and from his forehead.
“It is always hard to produce a form so far away,” he said.
Conditions were not as I would have made them for a test, but they were plain and simple and the sitting a courtesy on the part of a young man who earned his living
