Neville recalls standing outside a small bookshop on 49th Street in New York City in 1939, where the two elderly women who ran it had put a large photograph of him in the window even though he had no books published at the time. Passing by, he overheard one woman ask another who he was, and heard himself described as "the mad mystic" who taught that a person's own consciousness is God and that imagining creates reality — a story he uses to illustrate that being called mad for this teaching was nothing new.
Date (happened)
1939
stated · preferred
Why
The passage names the bookshop's street two ways within the same telling — '49th Street' when he introduces the shop, 'the mad mystic on 47th Street' inside the overheard quote — left as spoken/transcribed; not resolved here.
Reasoning
Neville directly and plainly names the year the overheard exchange took place ('back in 1939'), closing the anecdote; this is a direct statement of the happening year, not a computation from a relative expression.
Told / reported
7 October 1966
estimated · probable
Why
Lane L7 (#2354) re-derivation. Supersedes in substance, not in storage, the refuted-date told claim(s) on this event; those rows stand per append-only.
Reasoning
Re-derived, not walked down. The existing told claim(s) on this event took their date from a delivery claim on node 1252 that the corpus has since REFUTED, so the corpus was asserting that Neville told this on a day it separately says he did not lecture. That is a contradiction rather than an over-confidence, and lowering the confidence would have hidden it instead of resolving it. The refutation stands and the told claim is the wrong side of it. Node 1252 surviving (non-refuted) claim: 1966-10-7 at `probable`. All claims on the node: 1967-1-18 refuted; 1966-10-7 probable (preferred). Superseded here: delta 0: 1967-01-18 at `probable` (run `v1.1/l4/w1/B5`). The telling is dated by its lecture, so with the refuted date removed from consideration the surviving claim is what the telling inherits, at that claim own confidence and no higher.
18 January 1967
estimated · refuted
Reasoning
Only one delivery claim exists for this lecture and nothing in the packet's processing notes contradicts it, so field_told inherits it; confidence capped at probable per the inheritance rule since the underlying claim is an unreviewed legacy catalog backfill rather than an independently verified date. || v1.1/l7/told-close: the delivery claim this was derived from (nid 1252, 1967-1-18) was refuted by the L7 adjudication (#2363). The corrected told claim from the same lecture stands at 1966-10-7. This row is retired rather than deleted so the derivation history remains readable.