"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.

Apparitions that help patients let go of this life

In the following cases from At the Hour of Death written by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson the dying patient has an apparition who seems to have a will that is contrary to the patient.

This cancer patient was the nurse’s sister. She saw her dead husband for three nights in a row. He called her. He wanted her to come. She told him that she wasn’t ready to go, not until Agnes [the nurse's sister] was taken care of. It seemed that when she knew that, then she was ready: "Now I am ready to go. I can go."

And she did. She died within twenty-four hours. Agnes was impressed. "Some hallucinations are induced by drugs, but some, like my sister’s, it was different with her. She could see or forecast things that I never could."

A Catholic woman, sixty-one, had cancer that was in its terminal stages. She saw the apparition of her mother and a vision of God, who, in the vision, seemed to have set a time for her death—the first Friday of the month, an auspicious day in the old Catholic tradition.

The patient, however, had mixed up her calendar. Thinking that the next day would be the first Friday, she told the priest, "I want you to come tomorrow by ten of eight," when she expected to die. What actually happened was that she died—contrary to her expectations—at seven-fifty a week later, which was actually the first Friday of the month, as indicated in her vision.

Such experiences might happen to patients who are convinced that they will recover and who are not at all ready to "go." A cardiac patient, a fifty-six-year-old male whose consciousness was clear, saw the apparition of a woman who had come to take him away.

He stared at a bouquet of flowers—he did not seem to be repulsed by it [the apparition], just slightly frightened. He pointed to it and said, "There she is again. She is reaching for me." He described her hand and also the flowers, which were in the room. He did not particularly want to go, but he did not make a fuss. He became calmer. This experience made him serene. He died a day later. The "otherworldly" encounter brought him serenity, peace, and acceptance of his fate.

Sometimes, however, there is a very sharp clash. A college-educated Indian man in his twenties was recovering from mastoiditis. He was doing very well. Both the patient and his doctor expected a definite recovery. He was going to be discharged that day. Suddenly at 5:00 a.m. he shouted, “Someone is standing here dressed in white clothes. I will not go with you!” He was dead in ten minutes.

This last case is that of a Hindu woman in her thirties suffering from second-degree burns. At first, she interpreted the apparition’s take-away purpose as a cruel abduction. She pleaded with the nurse: “Please, save me. There are four men dressed in white coming toward me. They want me to accompany them.” She felt as if the four men were dragging her away.

The woman was in terror. After about ten minutes, however, she said to the nurse: “I then saw a big tree. On each leaf was written: Ram [name of the Indian deity].” She was now ready to die.

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.

Dying at peace and without fear

At the Hour of Death 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. Its authors, Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, begin their report with these paragraphs.

“Our destiny at death is probably the most important area of human experience into which we can inquire. According to the prevailing scientific world view, the destiny is a harsh one. Textbooks tell us in no uncertain terms that after the heart stops circulating blood, the brain is no longer nourished and begins to decay rapidly—within a quarter of an hour or so. At that point, the texts say, the patient’s personality is simply no more. It is irreparably destroyed. The individual ceases to exist.

“For centuries, medical schools have inculcated this grim, uncompromising concept into doctors and nurses—those who will be the ones to help us when we die. But has this view of human nature really been so well established as to allow of no doubt?

“Surprisingly, the experiences of the dying themselves often contradict the accepted medical view. What insights do we get from the dying? What do they experience? What do they ‘see’ at the end?

“Although most patients apparently drift into oblivion without awareness of it, there are some, clearly conscious to the end, who say they ‘see’ into the beyond and who are able to report their experiences before expiring. They see apparitions of deceased relatives and friends. They see religious and mythological figures. They see nonearthly environments characterized by light, beauty, and intense color. These experiences are transformative. They bring with them serenity, peace, elation, and religious emotions. The patients die a ‘good death’ in strange contrast to the usual gloom and misery commonly expected before expiration. Other deathbed patients, although they report no visions, nevertheless undergo the same transformation, which sometimes includes the cessation of pain.”

Osis and Haraldsson explain their research method. “First, we collected massive amounts of data through three extensive surveys of physicians and nurses who attended the dying. Second, our research was transcultural, drawing upon American and Indian medical people. Third, our data were collected carefully and systematically through modern sampling techniques, including questionnaires, and probing interviews. Fourth, our data were subjected to elaborate statistical, pattern, and content analysis through computer evaluation.

“Although we applied scientific rigor to this research, we did not neglect the experiential aspect of our inquiry. Death and dying is not just an intellectual problem. Rather, it is something which should be understood with the whole depth of our being. Therefore, we sought to examine it objectively and subjectively. Wherever possible, we obtained the direct words of the dying. This enables us to be in touch with what actually happened in the hospital rooms.

“What we found is both surprising and hopeful. This book will offer new evidence, based on observations by more than a thousand doctors and nurses, bearing on the question of postmortem survival. To anticipate our conclusions, we will state here that this evidence strongly suggests life after death—more strongly than any alternative hypothesis can explain the data. Neither medical, nor psychological, nor cultural conditioning can explain away deathbed visions. Moreover, they are relatively independent of age, sex, education, religion, and socioeconomic status. Taken in conjunction with other evidence obtained by competent research into this question—to be examine shortly—we feel that the total body of information makes possible a fact-based, rational, and therefore realistic belief in life after death.”

The following case report illustrates “one of more than a thousand cases of this sort” that Osis and Haraldsson collected:

A seventy-year old patient had seen here deceased husband several times and then she predicted her own death. She said that her husband had appeared in the window and motioned her to come out of the. House. The reason for his visits was to have her join him. Her daughter and other relatives were present when she predicted her death, laid out her burial clothes, laid down in bed for a nap, and died about one hour later. She seemed calm, resigned to death and, in fact, wanted to die. Before she saw her husband she didn’t speak about imminent death. Her doctor was so surprised by her sudden death, for which there were no sufficient medical reasons, that he checked if she had poisoned herself. He found neither signs of poisoning nor any such drugs in the house.

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.

A spiritual known as "By and By"

We are often tossed and driv’n on the restless sea of time,
somber skies and howling tempest oft succeed a bright sunshine;
in that land of perfect day, when the mists have rolled away,
we will understand it better by and by.

Refrain:
By and by, when the morning comes, when the saints of God are gathered home,
we’ll tell the story, how we’ve overcome, for we’ll understand it better by and by.

We are often destitute of the things that life demands,
want of food and want of shelter, thirsty hills and barren lands;
we are trusting in the Lord, and according to the Word,
we will understand it better by and by. [Refrain]

Temptations, hidden snares, often take us unawares,
and our hearts are made to bleed for any thoughtless word or deed;
and we wonder why the test when we try to do our best,
but we’ll understand it better by and by. [Refrain]

African-American composer, Charles A. Tindley (1851-1933). This spiritual was written in 1905.

 

An African-American congregation singing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0IJ9aLBkcE

Telesa H's NDE was a blessing and a curse

December 6, 2017, I was holding my newborn baby who had been born in the evening via c-section. Our family was finally complete, and I was savoring every moment, except perhaps the sleep deprivation.

On December 7, 2017, I was in absolute bliss. The evening had come and my husband and I had just eaten dinner. Then I relaxed against the bed and drifted off to sleep. Moments later it was as if someone had stood up onto the bed and kicked me square in the chest. I sat up clutching my chest, trying to hand the baby to my husband. He took the baby and ran to the hall to get a nurse. My heart was beating so hard that I could hear it in my ears and as I looked down, I could see it through my gown. I was vaguely aware that my husband was panicking, since he could not get a nurse into the room.

Then the light began in the corner of the room near the ceiling, just behind my husband. My energy began leaving my body and flowing into the light. Then went into the sky, flowing with the light. The light carried me off into space, beyond our universe and into a ball of light so bright that I could see it long before I actually reached it. Energy was flowing not only into the massive ball of light but from it as well. The light was heading off in various directions through the multiverse. I entered the ball of light that I now know as the 'central sun.'

I began having visions of my life, not just this one but every life I had ever lived. This life was the last vision I was shown. The visions were almost like those pictographs I had as a kid. I was shown key points in my lives. I then was given visions of the bad things I had done, as well as the good. My good seemed to outweigh the bad; although in past lives, I had done some pretty appalling things.

Then I was shown a vision of the earth. Next I saw the vision of myself approaching the central sun. It was as if I were being shown that the central sun was where all energy comes from and returns to, no matter where one calls home from lifetime to lifetime.

However, I did encounter familiar energies of loved ones who had passed from this lifetime and other past lives. They were not physical matter, just energy. I knew them instantly and they knew me, especially those who had been with me in other lives beyond this one.

These visions came from within my subconscious and I understood things that I couldn't possibly have known. I was not met by another entity who claimed to be 'god.' I suddenly was well-versed in the knowledge of how the universe works and where dark energy and matter come from. This has led me to research quantum physics to try to understand what happened to me.

I was shown a small portion of what my future holds as my purpose in this life was revealed to me. My purpose is to love and be loved and to teach and be taught. I am to be a beacon for those like me, those who have experienced a life-altering reality and are seeking understanding. I was to raise my children to lead from their hearts and accept all of humanity to help them seek balance and understanding.

Everything was hyper-realistic, perhaps more real than I have ever known reality to be. I felt like I was there for years and was sure I had died that day in the hospital holding my baby.

I tried to check in on my husband and kids, only to realize that only moments had passed. I realized time is an illusion and our energy can communicate without word and it can travel without measure of speed.

As I checked in on my family, my newborn daughter cried and I could see my husband crying as well. I then violently slammed back into my body and felt intensely everything they were doing to bring me back. I had 4 IV's inserted in various places throughout my body as the nurses injected me with adenosine, three separate times to try to get my heart rate back down from 225 bpm. It worked on the third try and my heart rate went back down to a normal 80 bpm instantly. I looked over at my husband and told him I loved him and he said he loved me back.

They then wheeled me down for a cat scan. I was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism that had lodged in my heart for several moments before traveling to my left lung. The type of embolism I had was referred to by the nurses as a 'widow maker' because 98% of people do not survive them.

My NDE has made me more grateful for the time I get to spend with my loved ones. It also seems like a double-edged sword as I can vividly remember how calming and serene I felt in the light. In the year since my experience I have met some amazing people with similar experiences as mine, and some vastly different with similar parts to their story as mine. I know there is life after life and that while I am in this lifetime, it is my duty to share my gifts with others. I am also trying to raise my own vibration and those around me through frequency IE creativity and talent in order to awaken their soul to its greater purpose.

My life since the NDE has been a bit traumatic since the people I have talk to so far cannot understand what I am talking about when I try to explain my NDE to them. Some think I have gone mad. I also notice that I do not connect to people the way I used to. Now much of the human race disgusts me and I have severe anxiety trying to understand their 'issues.' Many times their experiences seem so trivial and self-centered to me that my heart actually aches. I have also some new gifts since my NDE. I can hear, smell and even taste electricity. I hear a humming or buzzing, when an appliance or device is plugged in, even when it is turned to the off position. I can hear peoples thoughts sometimes and get visions of their lives. I can read people's energy and have deja vu often. I dream in vivid color and often leave my body again, as if checking on things at home and reaffirming that what I experienced is real. I remember things from the first 5 years of my life that I never knew before or had never been told.

My whole life has completely turned around and I have found it to be a blessing and a curse as I do not relate to the average person the way I used to. I do hope my story can help others who may be experiencing or have experienced what I went through. Brightest blessings to all who may come across my story.

NDERF.org 

Clairvoyance, remote viewing, and NDEs

Psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell writes: “Whereas telepathy implies coupling one’s consciousness with that of another conscious being, clairvoyance is visualizing distant or hidden images as though one had a psychic telescope, periscope, or camera. Clairvoyance (sometimes called remote viewing) has reportedly found oil, mineral deposits, hidden treasure, and missing people. It has also been reported to diagnose medical and mechanical problems by seeing inside ill people and malfunctioning machines.

“There are at least two different types of clairvoyant experiences. For some the images arise from their unconscious just as telepathic thoughts do. The image can come spontaneously in a flash, or can evolve over time while the person concentrates on retrieving it. In the other type, clairvoyant experiences occur in what are called ‘out-of-body experiences’ (OBEs).

“Edgar Cayce (1877-1943) is considered the ‘father of holistic medicine; because his recommendations form the basis for much of the holistic medicine still practiced. Starting in 1901, Edgar Cayce did more than 14,000 clairvoyant readings based solely upon the client’s name and address. He told his secretary about his visions while still in a self-induced OBE. Of these readings, more than 9,400 concerned medical diagnoses and treatment recommendations.

“In 1910 Cayce’s reading for ‘Dr. Wesley Ketchum, a reputable homeopath,’ revealed his condition was due to a pinched spinal nerve, not appendicitis—as Ketchum thought and other doctors confirmed. Ketchum submitted a paper on Cayce’s readings to the American Society of Clinical Research, and The New York Times published an article with the headline: ‘Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized.’

“The psychologist Gina Cerminara spent a year studying records of his readings and wrote her conclusions in Many Mansions (1967). She found that many readings were extremely accurate and the clients improved after following Cayce’s recommendations.

“The physician Norman Shealy researched medical intuition in the 1980s with the medical intuitive Caroline Myss. Their study involved fifty patients who individually sat in Shealy’s consultation room while Myss made diagnoses based upon their names and birth dates from her office twelve hundred miles away. She felt that the physical distance was an advantage because personal connections with patients sometimes blocked her ability. The results are described in their book The Creation and Health (1988). Shealy reported that Myss had an overall accuracy of 93 percent. Examples of diagnoses Myss and Shealy made in common were schizophrenia, migraine headaches, myofascial pain, depression, sexual problems, venereal herpes, back pain, anxiety, wasting of the brain or Alzheimer’s, and epilepsy.1

“Research on remote viewing was done at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, two former laser physicists, and Edwin C. May, a former nuclear physicist. The federal government funded SRI’s research during the Cold War, because United States intelligence was concerned about the Soviet Union’s involvement in psychic research.

“Initially the SRI studies were done with Ingo Swann and Pat Price. Swann was a New York artist known for psychic abilities who wrote a book called Natural ESP (1987). Price was a retired police commissioner from Burbank, California, who for years had used his psychic abilities to solve crimes. Both Swann and Price became adept at accurately describing distant locations without an observer by being told the location’s latitude and longitude or its address.

“The researchers wondered if there was a physical limit to the distance for successful remote viewing. To test this, Swann was asked in 1973 to draw Jupiter just before a NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. He sketched a ring around Jupiter, which was considered an error until NASA discovered Jupiter’s ring.

“Another result was also considered a mistake at first. Price’s drawing of a site in Palo Alto contained some resemblance to the target, but it was less accurate than typical for him. Years later, Targ read an article about the history of that site. The article included a picture that looked just like Price’s. The site had been a water processing plant fifty years before the experiment. Structures from the past had been incorporated into Price’s picture. Targ concluded that remote viewing isn’t limited to present time.

“One of the best viewers at SRI was Joe McMoneagle. While stationed in Germany he had a near-death experience (NDE). His heightened psychic abilities appeared afterward, which is not an unusual story.

“A total of 411 remote viewing trials were conducted and published over a twenty-five-year period at Princeton University by a psychologist, Brenda Dunne, and an emeritus dean of engineering, Robert Jahn. Like Targ and Puthoff, they found that distance between the target and the viewer didn’t matter. However, their success rate declined over the years as the subjects became bored with the experiments and received less feedback on their accuracy. This diminution of accuracy over time has been one reason scientists have been skeptical of the phenomenon.

“The SRI research has led to several conclusions about remote viewing. For one, accuracy and resolution do not appear to be affected by distance. This is very unusual for any kind of signal processing since electromagnetic signals become weaker with distance. Since the Faraday cage did not interfere, it is even less likely that the mechanism involves electromagnetic waves. So the brains of psychics probably don’t receive electromagnetic signals like our televisions and cell phones.2

“Another conclusion was that study results were less accurate when the psychics knew the target possibilities. As in telepathy, one’s preconceptions or expectations can adversely affect results by engaging the brain’s analytical capacities. Everything suggests that psychic material becomes available first to the nonanalytical unconscious.

“Many SRI ‘controls’ were capable of remote viewing, so another conclusion was that it may be a latent ability in all of us. Psychic abilities are like motor skills and become perfected when the analytical mind isn’t in charge of their execution.”3

1 See Mona Lisa Schultz, Awakening Intuition (1999).

2 “A Faraday cage is a hollow conductor, in which the charge remains on the external surface of the cage.” https://science.howstuffworks.com/faraday-cage.htm. Remote viewers in these experiments were inside a Faraday cage, which means they couldn’t have utilized electromagnetic fields for their remote viewing.

3 Powell, The ESP Enigma, 46-71.

 

Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (Walker Publishing Company, 2009).

---

 

 

Emotion makes telepathy more discernible

Psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell reports that René Warcollier, a twentieth century chemical engineer, “became interested in telepathy after he had a series of telepathic dreams.” His research led him to conclude: “the brain’s circuitry for dreaming is involved.” Emotional stimuli seem to be more discernible through telepathy than nonemotional stimuli. And distinguishing form and color “can be separated in telepathic imagery,” as in dreams “which frequently are in black and white. Warcollier found, as well, that the rational mind interfered with accuracy, and in dreaming the rational mind is absent or muted. Also, the perceived images were often condensed, as images are in dreams.”1

“If people experience concurrent and identical changes in brain activity,” Powell writes, “when only one of the pair is given a stimulus, this would suggest a coupling of consciousness. Research by Marilyn Schlitz and Dean Radin was done on twenty-six pairs of volunteers, whose brainwaves were measured by EEG simultaneously while they were in separate rooms. If one of the pair was shown video images, the other pair member had corresponding EEG changes, as though the images were shown to him or her as well. Some of this work showed positive results even when the pair were strangers, provided they had spent an hour or so together to form a bond, which can happen with effort within this relatively short period of time.” 2

 

“Other research suggests that the brain may not be the only body part involved in telepathy. A more primitive ‘brain,’ or neural network, in the gut is thought to be involved in emotional responses, or ‘gut reactions,’ which can occur independent of the brain. The gut contains more than 100 million neurons and is the only organ other than the brain with such a complex neural network.

 

“The research studies discussed here give results that are statistically significant by scientific standards. Telepathy has been reported to be more common in creative people. Perhaps telepathy, like creativity, usually happens spontaneously and is difficult to turn on with the flick of a switch.” 3

 

Telepathy, of course, is the standard means of communication during near-death experiences, when the sensory systems of the body are not available. Moreover, telepathy has been widely reported by anthropologists and other Westerners who have observed indigenous peoples, at least prior to their exposure to modern technology and its mechanistic forms of communication.

Barbara E writes of her near-death experience: The next thing I knew I was mildly aware of hurling through a tunnel type atmosphere. Then I was situated in the midst of a startling, seemingly alive, white, white light. Still feeling a bit stunned and confused, I wondered. 'Where am I, what is going on?' Then it hit me. I thought to myself, 'oh shoot (not exactly the word, if you get my drift), I must be dead!'

Almost simultaneous with that realization, it seemed as if the light penetrated throughout me and I felt the most magnificent warmth, peace, and acceptance imaginable. I felt awe. Loved and cradled. It was clear that the light loved me so completely, knew me through and through, had no hesitance in accepting my foibles and weaknesses, and felt quite a bit of humor about how seriously I took myself and my life.

As I settled into the love without condition, I realized more and more how utterly and absolutely intelligent light was. The sheer level of creativity and intellect was emotionally and psychologically beyond comprehension. I knew that because light was telepathically melded with me, allowing me to sense at least a minute degree of what was contained within. There was so much thought and information that it felt as if zillions of scrolls of data about the true nature of reality just kept unraveling. I was lost and overwhelmed and had no comprehension of what it all meant. Yet the central message came through loud and clear. Reality is SO much larger, multi-layered and multi-dimensional than we realize. Consciousness is able to experience so much more than what we commonly practice. Everything has purpose and meaning.  

From NDERF.org

1 Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma, 7-8, 37-39.

2 Dean Radin, The Noetic Universe (2009).

3 Ibid., 41-45.

Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (Walker Publishing Company, 2009).