Last Saturday, on July 13th, 2024, an attempt was made on the life of former U.S. President Donald Trump. While the 2024 Republican presidential nominee was speaking at a campaign rally in the city of Butler, Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired six rounds at him with an AR-15 rifle from a rooftop about 150 yards (137 metres) away. The first bullet fired by the would-be assassin grazed Trump’s ear, prompting the former present to duck for cover, and his Secret Service detail to neutralize the shooter. Unfortunately, three rally attendees were struck by Crook’s stray rounds, one of whom, named Corey Comperatore, died at the scene.
This tragic event appears to have been foreseen by an American Christian named Brandon Biggs, who claims to receive prophecies from God. In a video uploaded to the YouTube channel ‘Steve Cioccolanti & Discovery Ministries’, Biggs related a disturbing vision he received, saying, “I saw Trump rising up, and then I saw an attempt on his life. This bullet flew by his ear, and it came so close to his head that it busted his eardrum. He fell to his knees during this timeframe, and he started worshipping the Lord. He got radically born again during this timeframe. He becomes really on fire for Jesus.”
Throughout history, people like Brandon Biggs have described seeing, hearing, or having premonitions of events before they happen. Whether attributable to divine will, sorcery, luck, or some mysterious power beyond mortal comprehension, cases of apparent prophecy and clairvoyance recur with surprising frequency throughout Canadian history. In the last video published on this channel, we re-examined old tales of the Shaking Tent, a device by which native medicine men appear to have acquired hidden knowledge, avowedly with the assistance of human and inhuman spirits. In two previous pieces, we examined cases of clairvoyance on the Canadian frontier, in which Dene natives apparently gifted with Second Sight were able to watch distant events unfold while they slept, as if by astral projection. In my documentary on the mysteries of the Beaver Wars, we learned about the prophecy of Jesuit martyr Father Jean de Brebeuf, who predicted the genocide of the Huron nation, and of the foresight of Sister Catherine de Saint-Augustin and two Algonquin women, who appeared to have received divine warnings of the 1663 Charlevoix earthquake. In our episode on Forerunners, we delved into old Maritime Canadian tales in which people from all walks of life received mysterious warnings of impending disaster. In the video ‘Phantom Trains in Canada’, we learned the story of the Medicine Hat ghost train, a sort of locomotive doppelganger portending a deadly crash in 1908. And in the video ‘Psychic Warnings on the Canadian Pacific Railway’, we heard the strange experiences of Matthew Crawford, an old CP Rail engineer whose life was saved twice by the warnings of what seems to have been a sort of guardian angel.
In this video, we will dig up more stories of prophecy, clairvoyance, and foresight from Canadian history, from the uncanny predictions of native medicine men to the story of an old man from Sault Ste. Marie who dreamed the winning numbers of a horse race. Enjoy!
Petroglyph Predictions at Writing-on-Stone
On the southern edge of the Canadian prairie province of Alberta, just 27 kilometres northeast of the Coutts border crossing, lies Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, one of the strangest-looking places in the whole country. This desert-like stretch of the Milk River Valley, in the shadow of Montana’s Sweetgrass Hills, is more congruous with the surface of the moon than the wilds of the Great White North, with its eerie sandstone hoodoos and wavy sedimentary cliffs, supposed to have been carved millennia ago by the waning glaciers of the last Ice Age.
These badlands were once regarded as sacred by members of the Blackfoot Confederacy, an alliance of four related tribes who dominated the western prairies from the North Saskatchewan River to the Missouri. For centuries, Blackfoot youths made vision quests to the area in the hope of attaining the guardianship of one of the many powerful spirits said to haunt that unearthly country.
Writing-on-Stone owes its name to the many petroglyphs and pictographs carved and painted on sandstone walls throughout the area, most of them inscribed by long-forgotten native medicine men. The most complex of these – and one of the Park’s only petroglyphs not sequestered in the Archaeological Preserve – is the so-called ‘Battle Scene’, located at the end of the Hoodoo Trail. This glyph depicts over two hundred and fifty characters, including a hundred and fifteen warriors armed with bows and muskets, and seventeen horses, some of them hitched to travois. This scene depicts one of the most decisive victories of the South Piegan Blackfeet – a bloody conflict known as ‘Retreat Up the Hill Battle,’ fought on the banks of the Milk River just east of the park in the fall of 1866. Incredibly, according to Blackfoot tradition, the ‘Battle Scene’ was carved before the battle took place by some mysterious prophetic artist, warning the Blackfeet of what to expect and foretelling their victory.
Legend has it that, before the battle, a South Piegan war party came to Writing-on-Stone and saw petroglyphs portending an imminent attack. With this foreknowledge, the warriors were able to ambush and defeat a combined war party of Gros Ventres, Crow, and Plains Cree, which had come to the sacred area seeking Blackfoot scalps, whose presence was foretold by the lithic omen. According to a Blackfeet elder named Bird Rattle, whose version of the event, related to American civil engineer Roland Willcomb during his visit to the area in 1924, appears on a didactic sign in the park, the South Piegan warriors managed to dispatch more than three hundred enemy braves in this conflict.
In his mid-20th Century field notes on Blackfoot belief, now housed in Calgary, Alberta’s Glenbow Archives, American ethnologist Dr. Claude Everett Schaeffer said that some Blackfoot attributed the mysterious rock art of Writing-on-Stone to the work of bluebirds, endowed with artistic ability by the Thunderbird, the colossal winged creator of thunder and lightning. Others, like Schaeffer’s informant Jim White Calf, believed that the petroglyphs of Writing-on-Stone were made by spirits who “know everything and can predict [the] future.”
“Green Grass Bull claimed that bluebirds drew dotted pictures on stone cliffs with their beaks,” Schaeffer wrote. “He had seen this done, as had Old Bull Child. There is a cliff north of the Sweet Grass hills that carried pictures predictive of the future. These had been done by the bluebirds. They were given power from the sky to do this.
“Short Face claimed that Thunder created the bluebird and ‘gave the bird its paint.’ The rock cliff north of Sweet Grass Hills carries picture writing too high to be reached by humans, i.e. done by birds, long ago.”
Schaeffer went on to relate the tale of a Blackfoot brave named Many Spotted Horses, who went on a vision quest in Writing-on-Stone long ago. “He was warned by a spirit to leave the place,” Schaeffer wrote, “as humans are forbidden to see the birds do writing on the cliff. The novice continued to fast there, despite warning that he wouldn’t live long. That night, he saw birds of different colors flying about the cliffs. The bluebird said that his blue color would last longer than others. He awakened to see bluebirds and others poking figures on the stone cliff. All the birds pecked out plain drawings, but the bluebird was able to make drawings of different colors. The novice started to make fun of the birds, refusing to believe what they said. They warned him that he wouldn’t live long but would see his picture on the cliff. He awaked next morning, went to the cliff, and saw the representation of himself, with his head cut off. He started home. En route he was killed by the Crees, who cut off his head. People still journey to the cliff to see what the future has in store for them.”
Another tale of prophecy from Writing-on-Stone appears in Scots-Cree frontiersman James Francis Sanderson’s 1894 series Indian Tales of the Canadian Prairies, initially published in the Medicine Hat News. According to this tale, two Plains Cree chiefs and brothers-in-law named Little Gun and The Man Who Didn’t Miss left the Moose Jaw Valley, in what is now south-central Saskatchewan, and led a war party of fourteen braves into Blackfoot Country in 1872, travelling by way of the Cypress Hills and the Milk River. Near Writing-on-Stone, one of the party’s scouts returned with news that a Piegan camp numbering a hundred teepees lay nearby.
“Little Gun, having made medicine,” Sanderson wrote, “told the young men that if they preferred to avoid a battle they could make a detour and pass the camp of the enemy.” The Man Who Didn’t Miss, however, declared that he would not return home without fighting the Blackfoot so as to avenge the death of his son, who had died the previous winter.
“On hearing this,” Sanderson continued, “Little Gun asked the young men if they were willing to go and attack the enemy, and they said they were. ‘Then,’ said Little Gun, ‘half of us will never see our homes again or, if over half of us should return from the fight, every one will be wounded. I am no coward, as you know, and I will go with you, but I think my brother-in-law has done wrong in inducing you to undertake this fight. This I know – that neither he nor I will ever see our campfire again.”
With this ominous portent ringing in their ears, the warriors prepared themselves for battle and made for the Blackfoot camp. In the skirmish that ensued, The Man Who Didn’t Miss was shot dead immediately, and six more Cree braves, including Little Gun, lost their lives. Thirteen Piegan were killed in the engagement, but only one of them gave up his scalp. “Thus,” Sanderson concluded, “was the rashness of one man punished, and the prediction of the other literally verified.”
Useful Forerunners
As we have explored in previous pieces, the folklore of Atlantic Canada is replete with tales of ‘forerunners’ – mysterious sounds which are retrospectively determined to be omens of disaster. Nova Scotian folklorist Helen Creighton included many tales of these paranormal warnings in her 1957 classic Bluenose Ghosts, some of which we will reproduce here. One of these stories, set in the community of Jordan Falls, at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, begets the cheerful notion that mysterious omens of impending doom might actually be helpful warnings, the heeding of which allows for the averting of said disasters, rather than gloomy foreshadowings of some inevitable predetermined fate permanently etched onto the unchanging fabric of time.
“At Jordan Falls,” Creighton wrote, “the story is told of a vessel that was supposed to sail out of Shelburne with a crew of eighteen or twenty men. One Ephraim Doane was lying in his berth when he heard the mainmast fall. He got up to investigate and found the mainmast intact, so he took this as a warning, and the vessel sailed to Boston without him. It was December 1888 and there was a great gale. The ship was lost off the New England coast with all hands, but the man who had heard the mainmast fall was spared.”
Creighton heard a similar story from the widow of a sea captain from the town of Liverpool at the southeastern end of the province. One day, while in his cabin preparing for a voyage at sea, the captain was struck by a stack of papers hurled at him from across the room. Turning around, the sailor saw a man-sized blaze of fire burning in the centre of the room. A voice issued from the inferno, telling him that if he sailed in that ship one more time, he would be lost at sea, but if he heeded the warning, he would live to be an old man and die at home in his bed. The captain promptly resigned his post, to the bewilderment of his crew. A new captain was appointed, and the ship set sail, to be lost with all hands somewhere on the Atlantic. “After that,” the widow said, “he sailed on ships all over the world, and it was just as the voice said. When he died, he was an old man, and he died at home in his bed.”
Creighton’s third tale about a useful forerunner featured a French-Canadian sailor from Pubnico, an old Acadian village at Nova Scotia’s southern tip. One day, while embarking on a ship at Shelburne Harbour about 37 kilometres northeast of his hometown, the sailor saw a vision of his mother, who implored him not to sail. “It was so vivid,” Creighton wrote, “that he jumped overboard and swam to shore. On that trip, the ship was lost, and all hands perished.”
Forerunners that Went Unheeded
Creighton included many more forerunner tales in her book in which the mysterious warnings failed to prevent the disasters they foretold. One of these is set near the village of Petite Rivere, on the eastern shores of Nova Scotia, just south of historic German-Canadian settlement of Lunenburg. “If the young man in our next story had been of Scottish instead of German descent,” Creighton wrote in her introduction to this tale, “he might have been better prepared for the following tragedy. He was coming from Petite Rivere to his home at Broad Cove one foggy night when he saw a woman alongside the road and, as he described it, she was a mass of fire. One night shortly after that, when his mother was going to bed, he heard her scream. He hastily flung open her door and found her a mass of flame. He tried to save her and was badly burned, but his help was too late. The lamp she was carrying must have overturned and set fire to her night clothes.”
Creighton went on to relate two more forerunner stories with unhappy endings. In one of them, a woman saw the apparition of a strange man, whom she took to be a physician, standing in the doorway of her home. Two weeks later, he husband broke her leg, and was treated by the very doctor whom the wife had seen in her vision. Another story which Creighton recorded tells of a fisherman who saw a strange shapeshifting shawl in the ocean, which sank when he tried to retrieve it. Three days later, his wife died in childbirth.
Other Nova Scotian forerunner stories can be found in Mary L. Fraser’s 1932 book Folklore of Nova Scotia. One of Fraser’s tales, told to her by an intimate friend of the witness, takes place on Cape Breton Island, the rugged landmass north of the Nova Scotian Peninsula, on a lonely country road between the towns of Baddeck and Margaree. One night, while returning home from a sick call, a doctor travelling by carriage stopped in the middle of the road, his horse being unwilling to proceed. “Then the doctor saw a light coming toward him,” Fraser wrote. “Nearer and nearer it approached until it stood just in front of him. Then gradually there appeared in its midst the outline of a human face, which by degrees evolved into a countenance so beautiful that he could not tire of looking at it. At last it began to grow dimmer and dimmer, until it disappeared into the ball of light; then this, too, faded away. The doctor was so much impressed by it that although it was after midnight when he reached home, he awakened his wife to tell her of the strange happening; then he lay awake all night thinking about it.”
One week later, the doctor was called out to the same stretch of road on which his extraordinary experience had taken place, a family of three having been thrown from their carriage in an accident. “He first went to attend the woman who was moaning and groaning,” Fraser wrote. “Then he picked up the child, who was lying perfectly still. At a glance, he saw it was dead. Its beautiful face he recognized as the face he had seen in the ball of light.”
Another of Fraser’s forerunner tales, which appears to be a Maritime variation of the German legend of the doppelganger, is set near the town of Antigonish, at the northern end of the Nova Scotian Peninsula. “A young man was attending school at Antigonish,” Fraser wrote, “a distance of eleven miles from his home in Glen Alpine. On one occasion, he walked the whole distance in order to get home for a holiday. That night, although he was very tired, he could not sleep. As he lay awake in a little bedroom off the parlor, he happened to look out into that room, and was horrified to see the dead body of his sister laid out just opposite him. As she was in very good health at the time, he concealed his strange experience from the family. A month later, he was summoned home for her death. She was laid out just where he had seen her.”
The Psychic Bond Between Friends and Family
Stories like these, in which a person has a premonition of something terrible befalling a loved one, or is somehow struck by a terrible sense of dread at the very moment that such an event takes place, are the most poignant tales of ESP, or extrasensory perception, suggesting the existence of some sort of psychic bond which ties us to our friends and family. Helen Creighton included some of these stories in Bluenose Ghosts. One involves two brothers named Rod and Hector, who hailed from the rural community of Scotsburn, in Pictou County, in Nova Scotia’s North Shore region. One day, while Rod was building a wooden bridge, a timber slipped, causing the heavy supports to fall on him and injure him severely. In his distress, Rod’s thoughts drifted to his brother, who he wished was there to help him.
At that very moment, Hector was driving to the town of Pictou, Nova Scotia, about twelve kilometres to the west. All of a sudden, he was overwhelmed by the sensation that Rod was in trouble and needed his help. Unable to shake the disturbing sensation, he turned around and headed back to Scotsburn.
On the way, Hector stopped to pick up a friend, who could see his obvious anxiety, and asked him what was wrong. Hector told him about his hunch, and the friend nodded soberly. Neither of the two were particularly surprised when they arrived at Scotsburn to see Rod’s injured body being carried into his house.
“Another story where the family tie was very strong,” Creighton wrote, “came from the same county. ‘A man and his wife arose one morning and set out for the house of their daughter Mary without the slightest idea of why they were going. As they approached her house they met a friend who said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. Isn’t it too bad about Mary.’
“‘What happened?’ they asked.
“‘Didn’t you know? She went to bed last night as well as we are and died in her sleep.’”
Creighton went on to tell another tale about a beloved matronly woman named Mrs. Bishop who, at the time of publication, lived in the community of Westphal, Nova Scotia, on the northern outskirts of Dartmouth. One of her friends was a young sickly bachelor who, like many others in the settlement, often came to her for comfort and encouragement.
“About five years ago,” Creighton wrote, “Mrs. Bishop had retired for the night and was reading in bed when suddenly everything in the house became very quiet, as it does sometimes just before something happens. She kept expecting a rap on the door or a telephone call, and the tension lasted a good fifteen minutes. At that time, the young man was presumably on his way to see her, but was stricken on the ferry, lost his balance, fell in the harbour, and was drowned.”
Another story illustrating this eerie phenomenon was published in the January 1953 issue of the magazine Fate, under the headline “Parental Prescience”. According to this brief article, a 22-year-old outdoor enthusiast named Dave Thomas and his friend, Alan McBurney, decided to test their canoeing skills on Ontario’s Kapuskasing River, a remote northern waterway in the James Bay drainage basin. They decided to shoot a particular rapid, overturned their canoe, and drowned in the frothing white water.
At the very moment at which was supposed that Dave and Alan were struggling in the current, Dave’s father, who lived in Vancouver, BC, more than 1700 miles (2700 kilometres) to the west, was struck by a peculiar urge which prompted him to phone his son. One hour later, Dave and Alan’s empty canoe was found washed up on the banks of the river, starkly declaring its occupants’ tragic fate.
Prophetic Dreams
A less dramatic account of familiar foresight appeared in the July 1959 issue of Fate, in an article by Herbert H. Wilkins of New Westminster, British Columbia, entitled ‘The Broken Finger’. The author – who, in the introduction, diagnosed himself with “an incurable case of wanderlust” – described a strange dream he had while sailing home from an excursion to the South Atlantic.
“In the dream,” Wilkins wrote, “my two brothers and I were in the room we called the schoolroom, where the governess gave my brothers and sisters their lessons. It was raining and we three were having some target practice with an air pistol I was taking home as a present for Rex, my youngest brother (and my favorite). He had just fired the three vacuum cup arrows at the target and had gone to count his score, when Gus, my other brother, put a dart into the pistol and aimed at the back of Rex’s head. I picked up a club, which was lying on a table, and knocked the pistol out of Gus’ hand, breaking his middle finger at the top joint.
“Two months later I was home. It was pouring rain and my two brothers and I decided to have a shooting match. The governess was home for her holiday, and we went into the schoolroom. Everything happened just as I had dreamed it in the South Atlantic, except that it was the second flange of Gus’ finger that I broke.”
A similar story involving a prophetic dream appeared in an article entitled “Premonitions,” written by Frank Sudlow of Victoria, British Columbia, and published in the July 1960 issue of Fate.
“I’ve had a few psychic experiences,” Sudlow wrote, “such as the time a friend and I decided to go for a bicycle ride in the country in [New South Wales], Australia one fine, warm afternoon along rough, winding, hilly roads. My mother warned my friend that she had a strong feeling he would have a bad accident if he went. Going down a steep grade, he got into a patch of deep loose gravel and was thrown from his bike, sustaining numerous severe cuts and bruises.
“I once dreamed that a scaffold I was working on with my brother collapsed under us while we were putting up weather boards on the side of a house. The next day we built just such a scaffold and started putting up weather boards. Suddenly the scaffold gave way beneath us. We fell to the ground but were not injured.”
The last prophetic dream we will recount here was described in an article in the February 1961 issue of Fate. According to the author, in October 1960, a “sprightly little old man” from the city of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, decided to make a trip to Detroit, Michigan. One night during his holiday, he dreamed he was watching the horse races at the track at Hazel Park. In his dream, the first two races were won by horses numbered 10 and 3.
On October 6th, he headed to Hazel Park and bet on the horses from his dream. “He bought five $2 tickets on the daily double,” the article explained, “which paid $1,256 for a $2 wager – highest in the 1960 Michigan racing season… and collected $6,280 as a result of a dream… The kind of dream we all wish for!”
Canadian Clairvoyants
For most of the characters in these stories, paranormal warnings of disaster are rare once-in-a-lifetime occurrences. There are some Canadians, however, who seem to be blessed or cursed with the gift of foresight who, whether by dint of some mysterious genetic trait or by the will of Providence, are regularly bombarded with hazy snapshots of the future, the windows of their minds randomly thrown open onto the murky train tracks of time. One of these was the late James H.P. Wilkie, a renowned Scots-Canadian psychic who died in 2007. Another was the so-called witch of Plum Hollow, Upper Canada, whose story we may explore in a future piece.
The career of another Canadian clairvoyant is summarized in the 1879 book History of Leeds and Grenville, Ontario, From 1749 to 1879, by Theaddeus Leavitt and E.A. Turner, the former, incidentally, being an authority on the witch of Plum Hollow. The brief biography of this singular psychic was reprinted in an essay on the folklore of Ontario’s Oxford and Waterloo Counties, near the city of Kitchener, written by Canadian archaeologist William John Wintemberg and published in the 1888 issue of the Journal of American Folklore.
“At an early date,” Leavitt and Turner wrote, “there lived in the vicinity of Kilmarnock, on the north side of the Rideau River, a man by the name of Croutch, who claimed to have the gift of foresight. Many old and respected settlers believed that he received warnings of the approaching death of any person who resided in the settlement. According to the testimony of his wife, who bore the reputation of being a Christian woman, Croutch would frequently retire to bed, where in vain would he seek slumber; restless and uneasy, he would toss from side to side, at times groaning and muttering names of the departed. Do what he would to shake off the mysterious spell, in the end he was compelled to submit. Rising, he would quickly dress himself, take his canoe and paddle across the river, where he declared he always found waiting a spectral funeral-procession, which he would follow the graveyard, where all the rites and ceremonies would be performed. Croutch, having watched the ghostly mourners fade away, would then return home, retire to rest, and sink into a profound slumber. It was always with the greatest difficulty that Mrs. Croutch could ever elicit from her husband the name of the party whose death had been heralded. It is related of the late Samuel Rose, that upon one occasion [when] he was in the company of Croutch, in crossing a common both saw a light. Croutch exclaimed, ‘Did you hear that cry?’
“‘No,’ replied Mr. Rose.
“‘Oh,’ said the fatalist, ‘it was the cry of a child,’ the name of which he gave. In a few days, the child breathed its last.
“Upon another occasion he predicted the death of a man named McIntyre. Colonel Hurd, of Burritt’s Rapids, informs us that he knew Croutch and that far and wide he was regarded with terror by the children, who had learned from their parents his supposed power of communing with the spirits of the departed.”
According to a brief article in the December 1962 issue of Fate, another Canadian clairvoyant – a nameless fortune teller – told one Alfred Kasprick, a young dairy manager from Neepawa, Manitoba, that he would be lucky to reach the age of thirty. Kasprick himself had a deep and unaccountable fear of the date Friday the 13th, and always took pains to avoid taking risks on those inauspicious days. On Friday, April 13th, 1962, while driving on a lonely highway, Kasprick’s car lost control and rolled into the ditch. Two days later, at the age of 30, he died of a fractured skull.
Another tale of Canadian clairvoyance hidden away in the pages of Fate was written by Curtis Fuller and printed in the April 1954 issue of that publication. This story involves the disappearance of a 60-year-old Toronto-based physician and outdoor recreationist named William Fleming, who disappeared in the bush near Parry Sound, Ontario, on the shores of Georgian Bay, in November 1953.
“Fleming had been hunting partridges,” Fuller wrote, “and his body was found with a shotgun wound in the left breast lying against boulders in Thirty Dollar Rapids in the Magnetawan River.
“Discovery was made by members of a family search party, led by the widow, following instruction of a clairvoyant. The widow’s sister reported that the clairvoyant had told her three different times that the missing man would be found dead in the water. Another clairvoyant had told a relative that Dr. Fleming’s body would be found dead of a gunshot wound and that he was even lying ‘clutching his chest.’”
Sources
The Alberta Stretch of the Milk River and the mystique of s surrounding landscape. 2010, Johan F, Dormaar
From Sandstone to Settlers: Writing on Stone District History, 1983, Masinasin Historical Society
Back Roads of Southern Alberta, 1992, Joan Donaldson-Yarmey
http://www.albertaparks.ca/writing-on-stone
Plains Indian Rock Art (2001), by James D. Keyser and Michael A. Klassen
Indian Tales of the Canadian Prairies (1965), by James F. Sanderson
Glenbow Archive, Claude E. Schaeffer Fonds
Bluenose Ghosts (1957), by Helen Creighton
Folklore of Nova Scotia (1932), by Mary L. Fraser
“Folk-Lore Collected in the Counties of Oxford and Waterloo, Ontario,” by W.J. Wintemberg, in the 1888 issue of the Journal of American Folklore
History of Leeds and Grenville, Ontario, From 1749 to 1879, With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (1879), by Thaddeus William Henry Leavitt and E.A. Turner
“Fateful Fortune,” in the December 1962 issue of Fate
“I See by the Papers,” by Curtis Fuller in the April 1954 issue of Fate
“Parential Prescience,” in the January 1953 issue of Fate
“The Broken Finger,” in the July 1959 issue of Fate
“A Dream That Didn’t Fail,” in the February 1961 issue of Fate
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