“As I said, [Percy] Shelley was at first in perfect health, but having over-fatigued himself one day, and then the fright my illness gave him, caused a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his worse times. I think it was the Saturday after my illness, while yet unable to walk, I was confined to my bed–in the middle of the night I was awoke by hearing him scream and come rushing into my room; I was sure that he was asleep, and tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream, which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed and ran across the hall to Mrs. [Jane] Williams’ room . . . . What had frightened him was this. He dreamt that, lying as he did in bed, Edward [Williams] and Jane came in to him; they were in the most horrible condition; their bodies lacerated, their bones starting through their skin, their faces pale yet stained with blood; they could hardly walk, but Edward was the weakest, and Jane was supporting him. Edward said, ‘Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house, and it is all coming down.’ Shelley got up, he thought, and went to his window that looked on the terrace and the sea, and thought he saw the sea rushing in. Suddenly his vision changed, and he saw the figure of himself strangling me; that had made him rush into my room, yet, fearful of frightening me, he dared not approach the bed, when my jumping out awoke him, or, as he phrased it, caused his vision to vanish. All this was frightful enough, and talking it over the next morning, he told me that he had had many visions lately; he had seen the figure of himself, which met him as he walked on the terrace and said to him, ‘How long do you mean to be content?’ . . . But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs. Williams saw him. . . . She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, at a window that looked on the terrace, with Trelawny. It was day. She saw, as she thought, Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket; he passed again. Now, as he passed both times the same way, and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall 20 feet from the ground), she was struck at her seeing him pass twice thus, and looked out and seeing him no more, she cried, ‘Good God, can Shelley have leapt from the wall? Where can he be gone?’ ‘Shelley,’ said Trelawny, ‘no Shelley has passed. What do you mean?’ Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this, and it proved, indeed, that Shelley had never been on the terrace, and was far off at the time she saw him.”
– Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, describing phenomena which occurred in the the days leading up to the death of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (from The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Volume II, ed. Florence A. Thomas Marshall; emphases mine)
