Sportsman’s Hotel,
Alberta, Canada.

Dear Sir,

I should be glad if you would allow me to bring before the notice of the Society an amazing case of Forewarning which I myself have experienced. To my mind this extraordinary event carries with it its own evidence; for, had it not been for this premonition, I should not now be here to write the story. These are the facts, to which, if necessary, I am prepared to set my oath.

In the summer of the present year, 1910, I and my friend Colonel Symes arranged a grizzly-bear-shooting expedition in the Rocky Mountains. We wished to be entirely alone, and so we pushed off into the wilder country, eventually building our little hut just within the upper limits of the tree-line at a place marked on the enclosed map, a spot so remote that it has as yet no name.

Three weeks of excellent sport followed, and then calamity overtook us. While rounding a precipice path in Indian file we were met and attacked by a bear, and, before I could do anything to help, both the colonel and the bear had fallen over the cliff and were dashed onto the rocks below.

There was nothing to be done. Thirty seconds had sufficed to close our expedition in appalling disaster. I returned alone to the hut. For the rest of the day I wandered aimlessly round the clearing, trying in vain to make up my mind to return home to civilization. But I was numbed by the disaster, and after much barren thought I decided to put a double boarding onto the hut and stay where I was.

For the next five weeks I spent a solitary existence, living on what I shot and on the provisions which the Indian pack-horses had brought up when we first arrived. And then began the snow. It started little at first, and I cleared it away from the door of the hut. But soon the storms grew in violence, and before long all hunting was out of the question, and I spent my days in clearing a path from the hut door, and in reading over the camp stove.

On the fourth day of the blizzard the wind got up, and blew very hard with a most melancholy and dispiriting noise through the pine-trees above my hut. I felt wretchedly lonely; and, though I managed to pass the day in cooking meals and putting the finishing stitches to a heavy sleeping-suit of bear-skin, by the time darkness came on I was in the depths of depression.

At ten o’clock I turned in—that is, I rolled myself up on my bear-skin couch—and for half an hour I read in my copy of Shakespeare: showing that my mind was in a perfectly normal condition. At 10.30 I shut the stove, blew out the lantern, and went to sleep, the blizzard still raging with great violence outside.

It must have been about five hours later that I woke with a feeling of oppression and horror such as I had never before experienced. At first I was at a loss to understand the cause of my fright. I sat up, on one elbow, and shivered. Then I realized what it was—there was someone else in the room! Now the door was barred against wild animals; moreover I was full fifty miles from the nearest encampment. And the horror of this unseen presence made the hair crawl upon my scalp. I sat bolt upright and held my breath. It was then that a full perception of the Horror flooded in upon me like a wave—the Thing was lying on the couch by my side! It was pitch dark of course, and I could see nothing. I merely “sensed” this presence on the couch. With a leap I was across the room and lighting my lantern with trembling fingers. Then I returned to the couch.

I cannot attempt to express the horror of what I saw. My breathing stopped with a jerk and my heart stood still. For there was myself lying dead upon the couch, crushed across the body by some unseen and appalling weight!

I dropped the lamp, leapt to the door, and in a frenzy of terror staggered out into the storm. Twenty seconds passed—it can hardly have been more—when with a rending noise like an avalanche one of the great pine-trees fell clean across the centre of the hut, crushing it into matchwood!

As soon as it was day I pushed off for the lowlands (luckily my ski and gun were in the outhouse, and so escaped).

I have no evidence beyond the word of a gentleman to prove the truth of what I have narrated; I can only assure you of the absolute and literal truth of the premonition; though whether the apparition was an objective reality or a figment of my own imagination I must leave to the opinion of the Psychical Research Society.

Believe me, Sir,

Yours very truly,

Nimrod Hunt.