Mr. Usher: W. T. Stead was a writer interested in the paranormal. He received warnings from friends not to go on the Titanic. He also wrote a book- From the Old World to the New (1892)- containing a fictional episode involving the S.S. Majestic, headed by E. J. Smith, following another ship that struck an iceberg in the mid-Atlantic. Stead went on the Titanic anyway, and died. His daughter managed to get Stead's report on his experience channeled by a medium, and the daughter (Estelle Stead) published it in The Blue Island: Experiences of a New Arrival beyond the Veil. A portion of this is in The Titanic Reader, edited by John Wilson Foster and published by Penguin, 1999. (This is a GREAT anthology). Anyway, Stead reported that when all the dead were gathered and ready, they all rose up with great speed on what felt like a platform, to a place where "all was brightness and beauty". Right after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, I saw a small sketch done by a college employee, showing the dead from the World Trade Center rising up to heaven on a sort of platform. Hmmmm.
