Strange Violation of the GravePsychological Study
L'Observateur, d'Avesnes (April 20th, 1867) reports the following fact:
“Three weeks ago, a worker from Louvroil, named Magnan, aged twenty-three, had the misfortune of losing his wife, suffering from a breast disease. The deep sorrow he felt was soon heightened by the death of his child, who only survived his mother for a few days. Magnan spoke incessantly of his wife, not being able to believe that she had left him forever, and imagining that she would soon return; it was in vain that his friends tried to offer him some consolation, he rejected them all and shut himself up in his affliction.
Last Thursday, after many difficulties, his coworkers in the workshop decided to accompany a mutual friend to the railroad, a soldier on leave that was returning to his regiment. But as soon as they got to the station, Magnan slipped away and went alone into town, even more worried than usual. He took a few glasses of beer in a cabaret, that completely disoriented him, and it was in that state of mind that he returned home, about nine in the evening. Finding himself alone, the thought that his wife wasn’t there any more overexcited him again, and he felt an insurmountable desire to see her again. He then took an old hole digger and an ordinary shovel, went to the cemetery, and despite the darkness and the dreadful rain that was falling at that time, he immediately began removing the earth that covered his dear deceased.
It was only after several hours of superhuman work that he managed to remove the coffin from its grave. With his hands alone and breaking all his fingernails, he tore the cover off, then taking the body of his poor companion in his arms, he carried it home and laid it on his bed. It must have been about three in the morning by then. After lighting a good fire, he discovered the face of the dead woman, then almost joyfully, he ran to the neighbor who had buried her, to tell her that his wife had returned, as he had predicted.
Without giving any importance to Magnan's words, who, she said, had visions, she got up and accompanied him to his house in order to calm him down and make him sleep. We can imagine her surprise and her fear when she saw the exhumed body. The miserable worker spoke to the dead woman as if she could hear him and sought, with touching tenacity, an answer, giving his voice the sweetness and all the persuasion of which he was capable; such affection, beyond the grave, presented a heartbreaking spectacle.
However, the neighbor had the presence of mind to urge the poor hallucinated man to return his wife to her coffin, which he promised, when she saw the obstinate silence of the one he believed to have brought back to life; it was by faith on this promise that she returned home, more dead than alive.
But Magnan did not stop there and ran to wake up two neighbors who got up, like the burial woman, to try to calm the unfortunate man. Like her too, having passed the first moment of amazement, they urged him to return the dead woman to the cemetery, and this time the man, without hesitation, took his wife in his arms and returned the body to the coffin, from which he had taken her, replaced it to the pit and covered it with earth.
Magnan's wife had been buried for seventeen days; nevertheless, she was still in a perfect state of preservation, for the expression on her face was the same as when she was buried. When they questioned Magnan the next day, he seemed not to remember what he had done or what had happened a few hours earlier; he only said that he thought he saw his wife during the night. (Siècle, April 29th, 1867).
