"At the Hour of Death" apparitions

Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson write in At the Hour of Death: “Many examples were reported in which the hallucinations were not only consistent and appropriate to the situation of dying but also exhibited characteristics which seemed to fit into the framework of the postmortem survival hypothesis. Here is a typical one:

She didn’t say a word, but I saw her looking at something or someone who wasn’t there, and smiling. She had been so miserable just before that. She told me [afterwards] she had just seen her [dead] sister who had come for her. She realized she would die but did not seem to mind. It [seeing the dead sister] seemed to relieve her. A pleasant experience.

“We call experiences where the patient ‘sees’ a kind of other-worldly messenger ‘afterlife-related hallucinations.’ Perhaps hallucination is not the right word since there is the possibility that it was a real perception of a deceased person whose apparition was, in one sense or another, present. For example, one respondent was convinced that the following vision of a two-and-a half-year-old-boy was something more than a hallucination because the child was apparently too young to have had any conception about death.

He was lying there very quiet. Then he just sat himself up, and he put his arms out and said, ‘Mama,’ and fell back [dead].

The child’s mother had, in fact, died when he was two years old. Furthermore, he did not engage in any similar behavior before the time of the incident above—that is, moments before death."

“In the pilot study, we found the following basic characteristics of apparition experiences in the dying.

1. The majority (two-thirds) of apparitions portray dead rather than living persons. The opposite has been found to be true of hallucinations by persons in normal health.

2. The main ostensible purpose of the apparition is to take the patient away to another mode of existence. This purpose is expressed exclusively by apparitions of the dead and by religious figures.

3. Upon seeing an apparition with an ostensible take-away mission, the patient’s predominant reaction will be that of serenity and peace, religious emotion, and ‘otherworldy’ feeling—like those reported by mystics during their alleged encounters with ‘transcendental reality.’"

“The bulk of these deathbed hallucinations were of short duration. About half of them lasted only five minutes or less, as is true of the following case."

A female cardiac patient in her fifties knew that she was dying and was in a discouraged, depressed mood. Suddenly, she raised her arms and her eyes opened wide; her face lit up as if she was seeing someone she hadn’t seen for a long time. She said, ‘Oh, Katie, Katie.’ The patient had been suddenly roused from a comatose state, she seemed happy, and she died immediately after the hallucination. There were several Katies in this woman’s family: a half-sister, an aunt, and a friend. All were dead.

"Although most patients did not die immediately after having witnessed the apparition, 27 percent of them died within an hour, and 20 percent died between one and six hours later. In the majority (62 percent) of the cases, the hallucinations heralded death within a day."

 

At the Hour of Death (Hastings House, 1997) written by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson reports on a four-year study involving fifty thousand terminally ill patients observed just before death by one thousand doctors and nurses in the United States and India.