Medical memories, like all memories, are subject to the distortions of time and the influences of the story as it has been told in the intervening years.

Hammond may have remembered correctly.

He may have remembered incompletely and filled gaps with the story as he had heard it retold.

He may have been remembering accurately a real event whose specific details were already somewhat unclear after four decades.

The ministers themselves — at least three men who, if the story is true, had the most immediate and terrifying firsthand experience of the event — do not appear in the evidentiary record.

No minister from the 1915 funeral appears to have been interviewed or to have provided a documented account.