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“There are spectral visions; people see ghosts, they see images of their mothers, they see dead comrades,” said the Canadian War Museum historian and the author of the First World War historiesShock Troops and At the Sharp End.

He told conference delegates about the “dozens and dozens” of supernatural accounts he has unearthed in 20 years of studying diaries, letters and memoirs.

One of the most vivid accounts comes from Ghosts Have Warm Hands, a memoir by Canadian veteran Will Bird published in 1968.

Its defining moment comes when the writer, sleeping in a dugout, describes how he was awakened by the ghost of his brother Steve, who had been killed two years before.

“Steve grinned as he released my hands, then put his warm hand over my mouth as I started to shout my happiness,” he wrote.

Saying “get your gear,” Steve gestured for Mr. Bird to follow him before disappearing. Moments later, the shelter in which he had been sleeping was hit by a shell.

Other accounts found by Mr. Cook reported a “calming presence.” Seconds after a shell explosion buried him in corpses during the 1916 Battle of the Somme, Wallace Reid crawled out to find the battlefield had become silent.

“I waited, scarcely breathing, for something — waited, it seemed minutes that could only have been seconds. Then it came — invisible, intangible, but nevertheless, very real. Something came to that place of desolation, stopped a moment and passed on again,” he wrote to his mother.