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Brother and Sister

On a summer’s afternoon in 1945 Mrs Hopkins of Stratford-upon- Avon was walking through the town and reached the street where the stationer’s shop, in which her brother Billy had worked before the war, was to be found. Her brother had recently been killed in action and Mrs Hopkins said later that at the time her brother had been very much in her mind. The streets were fairly deserted as it was half-day closing. Suddenly ahead of her she saw the figure of her brother and assumed, apparently without much surprise, that he was returning to work from his lunch break. The figure turned into the stationer’s and disappeared. It was only at that point that Mrs Hopkins remembered her brother was dead and simply could not be there. In her book The Mask of Time Joan Forman raises some important questions about this incident. At face value it is a straightforward ghost story and might easily be explained as such.

However, the fact that Mrs Hopkins’s brother was in her mind at the time increases the possibility of some sort of self-generated illusion; furthermore she described him as wearing his civilian clothes but, as Forman points out, it might have been reasonable for him to be dressed in khaki, the way Mrs Hopkins had seen him before his death. On the basis that the civilian clothes are the product of the civilian surroundings Joan Forman suggests that Mrs Hopkins experienced an event of the past superimposed on the present, fusing the two into one image, Essex | France | Wiltshire | Wiltshire | Cornwall | Devon | Devon | Devon | Essex | France | France | Hampshire | Indonesia | Ireland | Isle of Wight | Italy | Kent | Lancashire | London | London | London | London | Norfolk | North Yorkshire | Norway | Norway | Oxford | Oxford | Phenomena | Salop | Suffolk | Surrey | Surrey | Surrey | Unknown | Wiltshire |