A Near Thing
As a young man staying at a country house in Ireland, Lord Dufferin woke one night unable to sleep and went to the window. Below, in the dark, he saw a man carrying something heavy on his shoulder — a coffin — and the man's face was so unpleasant that it stayed with him. No one else in the house had seen anyone, and no funeral was expected for miles around.
Years later, by then a diplomat, Dufferin was crossing the lobby of a Paris hotel toward the lift when he stopped short: the lift operator had exactly the face of the man from that Irish night. Unsettled, he made an excuse, stepped away, and went to ask the desk who the man was.
Before he got an answer, the lift itself gave one: it dropped, hard, partway up the shaft, injuring everyone riding in it. Whatever the warning had been for, it had worked.
Based on a post on Futility Closet.