The Unknown Guest

The first is now published and is a brief study of veridical apparitions and hallucinations and haunted houses, or, if you will, the phantasms of the living and the dead; of those manifestations which have been oddly and not very appropriately described as "psychometric"; of the knowledge of the future: presentiments, omens, premonitions, precognitions, and the rest; and lastly of the Elberfeld horses. In the second, which will be published later, I shall treat of the miracles of Lourdes and other places, the phenomena of so called materialization, of the divining-rod and of fluidic asepsis, not unmindful withal of a diamond dust of the miraculous that hangs over the greater marvels in that strange atmosphere into which we are about to pass. ?Maurice Maeterlinck, from the Introduction to The Unknown Guest AUTHOR BIO: Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was born in Ghet, Belgium, into a prosperous Francophone Catholic family. Maeterlinck was closely associated with the French literary movement of symbolism, which used symbols to represent ideas and emotions. The author of more than 60 books replete with suggestions of universal mystery and auras of impending doom, Maeterlinck's work as a whole can be read as a symbolist manifesto. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911.