Spooky! Messages from the beyond or just coincidence? | Oliver Burkeman

We've all heard eyebrow-raising tales - so what's really going on?

In 1944, a British soldier fighting in Italy was knocked unconscious by shell fragments. That same day in Monmouthshire, he later recalled, "my wife was washing up after lunch. My daughter, aged two and a half, to whom I was only a name, was playing with some bricks on the kitchen floor. She suddenly got to her feet, went over to my wife, said 'Daddy's been hurt,' and went back to her bricks."

This eyebrow-raising tale appears in Connecting With Coincidence, a new book by the psychiatrist Bernard Beitman - along with so many others it becomes easier to keep one's eyebrows permanently raised. Beitman has one of his own: in 1973, he found himself inexplicably choking at his kitchen sink - only to learn, the next day, that his father had choked on his own blood and died at the same moment.