Harbingers of Death: A Final Farewell

As Dennis Bardens writes in Ghosts and Hauntings, “The harbingers of death, or death visitants, are those spectres whose coming presages doom or disaster, either immediate or imminent. There is a strong supposition that on occasion, telepathy—contact between two minds separated by distance, but habitually in sympathy—plays a part.”

Here is a statement made to Mr. Bardens by a Mrs. Maureen Hayter of Baltimore, Maryland:

‘In November, 1942, I was living in Minnesota with my three children while my husband, Lieutenant Commander Hubert Montgomery Hayter, U.S.N., was far away in the Pacific. (He was forty-one on October 17^th, and was First Lieutenant and Damage Control Officer in the heavy cruiser U.S.S. New Orleans.) One night I was awakened by a terrific jar, so violent that I got up and went downstairs to investigate. I found nothing amiss, and again retired. Suddenly my husband was beside me, and we were bathed in a heavy mist. But his arms were protectively about me. We had been months apart, and now I had such a sense of that protection and of being reunited. I looked up into his face. There was a look of ineffable longing and of sadness. I touched his cheek and it was so cold. Next morning I decided that it had been a comforting dream, for I had not heard from him for some days. I was strengthened and buoyed up by it. Days passed, then I recalled his expression and the cold I’d felt with foreboding. Thus, when I received the fateful telegram announcing that he had been killed in action, I felt that I had been forewarned and given the needed courage to meet the disaster. Checking back, it had all occurred on November 30^th, when the Battle of Tassafaronga took place, and when he perished courageously after saving all his men. I am not a dreamer, and I firmly believe that his heroic spirit and presence was transmitted across those many miles to reassure and sustain me. It was truly a final farewell.’

Source: Dennis Bardens’ Ghosts and Hauntings