Is Second Sight Real?

Using supernatural elements in fiction can be risky. Will the reader believe a scene in which a character experiences a vision and sees an event that may happen in the future – or that takes place somewhere other than where the vision is received? Or will the reader think it’s hokey and put the book down? (Or throw it across the room.) 

Two characters in the Gideon Stoltz mysteries possess “second sight”: Arabella Burns, the grandmother of my main character’s wife, True Burns Stoltz, and True herself. 

image by FARZAD SEDAGHAT FROM PEXELS

I’m not writing fantasy in these novels, or horror, genres in which visions and clairvoyance frequently appear. What I’m trying to do is present a picture of a believable place that existed in the past, with believable people living there. I’m trying to create, in my fictional Colerain County in central Pennsylvania, a setting that is “both deeply familiar and utterly strange,” as one reviewer put it. I like that unsettling duality, the way it can put a reader on edge. It seems fitting for a mystery.

In the 1800s, people thought differently about many things than we do today, including the supernatural. You can pick it up from some of their sayings. “If a bird flies into the house, someone will die.” “The twitching of an eye is a sign that one is bewitched.” “As a couple is being married, the one who takes the first step forward will die first.” (Not that some don’t believe in the supernatural today. Two different friends who stayed in our 19th-century farmhouse here in northern Vermont both reported seeing, in an upstairs bedroom, a young woman in an old-fashioned gray dress. I’ve slept in that room myself and haven’t met the ethereal lass. Yet.)

In A Stranger Here Below, True wakes up agitated from a dream in which a face with bloody white teeth appears. She tells Gideon that the white teeth mean a child will die; if they had been yellow teeth, an old person would die. Gideon, who prides himself on being rational, doesn’t believe the dream has significance. Events later in the story change his mind.

In Nighthawk’s Wing, True is at her grandmother’s cabin when she wakens suddenly in the night to the sound of wings beating. She thinks a bird must be trapped inside, frantically trying to get out. She gets up but can’t find the bird or anything else that could be making the racket. As she stands there, the cabin’s walls seem to press inward, and a powerful choking sensation overcomes her. She sees Gideon caught in a desperate situation in a valley to the east where he has gone to investigate a murder. The vision compels True to get on a horse and ride to help her husband.

The “Premonitions Bureau,” an article by Sam Knight published in The New Yorker on March 4, 2019, reports on people in Britain who have experienced forebodings and dreams that presaged accidents and disasters. Their visions may be preceded by splitting headaches (“as if a band of steel were around my head”); names and numbers; earthy, decaying smells; blazes of light; or the feeling that things are closing in on them. The premonitions “cannot be summoned,” Knight writes, “and the effect [is] often painful.”

Second sight is also called precognition. It’s considered to be a form of extrasensory perception. Science has failed to confirm it. A related phenomenon is scrying, in which a person uses a mirror, a crystal ball, a piece of polished obsidian – or fire or smoke or water – to induce a vision. In A Stranger Here Below, True tells Gideon about her grandmother: “When I was little, Gram had this raven’s foot. It was big, and black as tar, with scales all over it and sharp claws. The toes were clenched most of the way shut, except for this little hole between them. She could look through that hole and see things that would come to pass.”

A belief in second sight was prevalent among the Scotch-Irish who settled in the Appalachians. True’s family is Scotch-Irish, descended from tough, resilient people who went from Lowland Scotland to northern Ireland and then on to America in the 1700s. Visionary folks, you might call them.

In 1773, Samuel Johnson visited the Hebrides and found that second sight was a well-accepted phenomenon among the islanders there. They saw friends or relatives or spouses fall from horses when far away from home, and watched future bridal parties and funeral processions make their way across fields: “Things confusedly seen, and little understood,” Johnson called this prescience. “Those who profess to feel it do not boast of it as a privilege, nor are considered by others as advantageously distinguished.”

True doesn’t think her visions are a privilege. Far from it. They make her fearful. They cause her to take risks and do dangerous things she’d rather not attempt. She grew up being afraid of her grandmother Arabella, who interprets dreams and sees visions and sometimes predicts the future. True also loves her gram, who helps her get through some tough times.

For True and Gram Burns, the lines blur between the “real” world of Colerain County – the world they see, hear, feel – and a spirit world that is never far removed.