“Preview of Death,” Eerie Adventures #1 (Ziff-Davis, Winter, 1951). Sir Melville Duff,
alarmed by a presentiment of death, avoids entering an elevator. It then crashes,
killing all its occupants. This version of the “Room for One More” legend, with
its distinctive motif of a mysterious man seen carrying a coffin on his back,
is probably based on the story told by (and later told of) Lord Dufferin, which
was popularized by its appearance in Camille Flammarion’s Death and Its Mystery at the Moment of Death (1922). Other versions
have been traced back to the late nineteenth century.
“Escape from the Coffin,” Black Magic, vol. 4,
no. 1 (25), June/July 1953.
Camille Flammarion, Death and Its Mystery at the Moment of Death, trans. Latrobe Carroll
(New York: The Century Co., 1922), 200-1.
Rev. Stainton Moses, “Notes by the Way,” Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and
Mystical Research (London), vol. 12, no. 588, 16 April 1892, p. 1.
Some other versions can be found in Alexander
Woollcott, “The Triple Warning,” The New
Yorker, 19 September 1931, p. 36; Bennett Cerf, Try and Stop Me (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944), 277-9; Edgar Cayce, Auras: An Essay on the Meaning of Colors (Virginia Beach: A.R.E.
Press, 1945), 8; Augustus Hare, In My
Solitary Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), 297-8; Albert
Howard Carter, “Some Folk Tales of the Big City,” Arkansas Folklore, vol. 4, no. 1 (15 August 1953), 4; Katherine
Briggs and Ruth Tongue, Folktales of
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 67-8; and Joseph J. Weed, Psychic
Energy: How to Change Desires into Realities (West Nyack, NY: Parker
Publishing Company, 1970), 157-8.
For an overview, see Melvin Harris, Investigating
the Unexplained (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986), 107-20, 213-14.
Here is another supernatural legend from the late nineteenth
century about a woman avoiding death in an elevator.
Andrew Lang, The
Book of Dreams and Ghosts (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), 82. “In
the same way, in August, 1890, a lady in a Boston hotel in the dusk rang for
the lift, walked along the corridor and looked out of a window, started to run
to the door of the lift, saw a man in front of it, stopped, and when the
lighted lift came up, found that the door was wide open and that, had she run
on as she intended, she would have fallen down the well. Here part of her mind
may have known that the door was open, and started a ghost (for there was no
real man there) to stop her.”
[Update] Carl Memling (script), Gerald McCann (art), “Who Was the Stranger?” Ghost Stories #5, Dell Publishing, January-March 1964. A six-page story based on the legend. Shown below are non-adjacent panels.
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=33935
[Update] "The Vision of Death," Strange Terrors #6, Jan. 1953.
[Update] “Scared to Life,” House of Mystery #180, May-June 1969. Three-page story on the Lord Dufferin legend.
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