Michael Prescott's Blog
Archived blog focusing on the paranormal
Category: Deathbed visions
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Roger Knights directed me to this story in the Washington Post. It's heartwarming and reassuring, and may provide some comfort in these increasingly crazy (and crazy-making) times. The story is written by a hospice social worker, Scott Janssen, who, like many people in that field, has encountered patients with compelling stories of deathbed visits and…
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A New York Times article from 2016, "A New Vision for Dreams of the Dying," came to my attention recently through a Facebook post. It details the research into deathbed visions (primarily dreams) conducted at Hospice Buffalo under the direction of Dr. Christopher Kerr. (It appears that Hospice Buffalo is now known as the Center…
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The New York Times ran a somewhat interesting piece on deathbed visions recently. Called "A New Vision for Dreams of the Dying," it was written by Jan Hoffman and appeared originally on February 2, 2016. Throughout the article, the term "deathbed" is used rather loosely, as some of these visions occurred months before the patients actually…
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I scoured the Internet (and my memory) for some well-known last words of famous people. Not all of these are literally the last words the person ever spoke, but they are alleged to be among the person's final communications. A lot of urban legends have sprung up about deathbed quotations, and it's possible that some…
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New research on deathbed visions has been published by a Buffalo, NY, college. In interviews with 66 dying patients, the investigators found that near-death dreams and visions don’t resemble typical dreams and are distinctive from the hallucinations or confusion associated with medications, dementia or illness. Nearly 90 percent of the patients in the studies reported having…
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Going through some old papers of mine, I came across notes I took on a telephone conversation a few years ago. The person I was speaking to had just been to see a doctor, and the doctor, in turn, had recently been present when his elderly father passed away after an illness. Clearly, this is…
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Vitor Moura sent me an interesting article by NDE researcher Bruce Greyson, which appeared in the December 2010 (Vol. 35, issue 2) edition of Anthropology and Humanism, a journal published by the American Anthropological Association. Titled "Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died: 'Peak in Darien' Experiences," the article lists a number of deathbed…
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A recent Irish study of deathbed visions adds more cases to the database. One interesting element of the study is a comparison of patients who were heavily medicated and/or suffering a fever with those who weren't. One common sense explanation may be that the visions are drug- or fever-induced hallucinations. But 68 per cent of…
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The recent publication of Glimpses of Eternity by Raymond Moody and Paul Perry has raised awareness of what the authors call "shared death experiences." These are cases in which the visions of the dying person are shared by someone close by. As the authors point out, stories of this type have circulated for many years.…
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Here’s an interesting tidbit from Anthony Everitt’s fine bio, Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor. It concerns Augustus on his deathbed, after a long reign filled with accomplishment but also crowded with bloody strife. Just before he died, his wits seemed to wander, for he suddenly cried out in terror: "Forty young men are…