Sir:–Among many strange coincidences which I have experienced in my time, one of the most singular which I can recall at the moment happened to me in connection with a play which I wrote some twenty years ago for the German Reed entertainment. One of my characters was named Robert Golding, and for the requirements of the plot I had made him the sole survivor of the crew of a ship called the Caroline, which had been lost at sea. A few days after the production of the play I read in a newspaper an account of the shipwreck of a vessel named the Caroline, which had gone down with all hands, with one exception, and this exception was a man of the name of Golding. Now Golding is not at all a common name, and the circumstance of his being, both in fact and fiction, the sole survivor of the shipwrecked Caroline, impressed me at the time as being a coincidence of a very peculiar nature. Yours faithfully, ARTHUR LAW.

– London Daily Graphic, Sept. 7, 1905, quoted in Experiments in Psychical Research at Leland Stanford Junior University, 1917