A WIlliam J. Groo asserted that a judge had told him this account:
"That, sometime in the night, he awoke and saw the form of the lady robed in white with whom he had boarded when reading law. That she was standing near his berth, and said to him : 'I have just died, and thought I would come and tell you.' She then disappeared; whereupon he arose, procured a light, and made a note of the occurrence and of the exact time. That soon after reaching home that day a telegram was received, announcing the death of the lady, and that subsequently he ascertained that it had occurred at the exact time that she had appeared to him on the boat."
Robert Crookall's book What Happens When We Die contains many fascinating accounts of out-of-body experiences. In the book we read this account on page 40:
"Four years ago my sister was killed in a car crash. That night -- before I knew she had died -- I saw a smoky figure take form before my eyes; it gradually formed and then gradually materialized. I learned of her death the next day."
I omit in this quote a bracketed comment that seems to be a speculation by Crookall.
On the web site of Psychology Today, a PhD tells us the following account:
"In one of the cases of crisis apparitions I have investigated myself, a young woman was on vacation and started to feel concerned about a friend who hadn’t returned to their youth hostel. He was a fell runner and had set off that morning to run up a mountain. Suddenly, the man appeared before her, although not in his normal physical form. He walked up the stairs of the youth hostel, then 'moved towards me as though he was floating and with his arm outstretched as though trying to reach out to me. I just sensed he had died and was visiting the people and places he knew as though trying to figure out where he was. I went downstairs to tell my boyfriend that I’d seen our friend and felt he had passed.' The man’s dead body found was on the mountain the next day."
The book Psychism: Analysis of Things Existing by Paul Gibier MD contains some very interesting accounts. On pages 146 to 150 we have one of the earliest detailed accounts of an out-of-body experience. The subject reports floating out of his body, traveling to a neighbor's never-previously-seen apartment, and then later verifying (with his physical body) what he had seen in his out-of-body experience. On page 245 we read an account sent to Gibier by a son who heard it from his father. While being the captain of a boat at sea, the father saw an apparition of his brother. The apparition persisted for several days. Later the father found out that his brother had died
In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues the singer Billie Holiday recalls an experience that may not quite qualify as an apparition sighting, although it would seem to qualify as an apparition experience. We read this:
"We were just sitting there when suddenly I felt my mother come up behind me and put her hand on my shoulders. And I knew she was dead. I turned to Joe. 'Mama just left and she’s dead,' I told him.
'You’re crazy,' he told me. 'You must be blowing your top.' 'You listen to what I said,' I told him, 'and g*ddamnit, you better be good to me because you’re all I’ve got now.' "
Holliday's mother had died unexpectedly at age 38, around the time the quoted dialogue had occurred.
On page 64 of her very interesting book Opening Heaven's Door: What the Dying Tell Us About Where They're Going, Patricia Pearson tells us of a man named Derek Whitehead who was working on a ship in the Merchant Navy when he was very surprised to see his grandfather in front of him. Whitehead would learn by mail awaiting him in Australia that his grandfather had died the same evening.
On pages 72-75 of the book The Scalpel and the Soul by Allan J. Hamilton M.D. we learn of a boy named Thomas who was very badly burnt, and received skin grafts at a hospital, which his body rejected. The boy's father died of a heart attack while doctors were trying to save the boy. The surgeons grafted the father's skin to try and save the boy. The boy regained consciousness, and asked, "What happened to my father?" Hamilton told the lie that the father was okay. The boy then said that his father was standing silently at the end of his bed. The boy was then told that his father had died. The boy said, "That must be his ghost then that's waving back at me." The boy survived to become an honor student.
On page 30 of the same book Allan J. Hamilton M.D. discusses a strange phenomenon he has observed. Hamilton says this:
"A dull, waxy, yellowish light accumulates around those who are about to die....This glow would seem to shine from underneath the patient's skin. Invariably, when I saw it, patients would die soon....I've seen patients precariously close to dying in the ICU, who have had this soft, candle-like light come into their being. Then it faded back to a crisper, cleaner white light as they recovered. But when the yellowish hue comes, the individual is near death."
On page 260 of the document here, we are told a memorable tale of an apparition:
"A NEW YORK doctor was called on by a little girl, who begged him to come and see her mother who was very ill. The doctor demurred at first about going, as he was very busy and had some important cases to attend to, and told the child it was impossible that he could go just then ; however, her persistence and some unaccountable influence at last prevailed, and, leaving his patients, he accompanied the girl in a cab to a poverty-stricken part of the city, where he found the child’s mother in a tenement house ill with diphtheria. The little girl after showing him the room, left him at the door and was not seen again. The doctor told the invalid that as it was diphtheria she was suffering from it would be dangerous for her little daughter to come near her. The woman, much surprised, said she had no daughter, as her little girl had died the previous day and the corpse was lying in the adjacent room. The doctor assured her that a little girl calling herself her daughter had called on him and begged him with the most earnest entreaties to come to her mother, and that she had brought him as far as the room door and then left him. The doctor, after attending to the woman, went into the adjoining room, where he saw the body of the child lying there awaiting removal to the mortuary, and was astounded to find that it was the corpse of the little girl who had just brought him to the house."
We are assured that this account is "quite true, and was told by the doctor himself to one of the Cowley Fathers, residing at Oxford, who was then on a visit to New York." On page 202 of the document here, May Crommelin describes being told by a woman that her father was a skeptic about life after death. But one day the father reported to the woman that he had seen the apparition of a friend who he did not know had died. "I have left the earth-life" said the apparition. When asked how he was, the apparition reportedly said this:
"Very happy. Of course had I been a better man I should be much more so. Still I am much happier than ever I was in my former life.”
The apparition then reportedly disappeared. The experience was so dramatic that the father immediately changed his views about life after death. The friend's death was subsequently confirmed.
In Florence Marryat's very interesting book There Is No Death she tells this account of her father:
"As my father was lying in his berth one night, anchored off the island, with the brilliant tropical moonlight making everything as bright as day, he saw the door of his cabin open, and his brother Samuel entered and walked quietly up to his side. He looked just the same as when they had parted, and uttered in a perfectly distinct voice, ' Fred ! I have come to tell you that I am dead ! ' When the figure entered the cabin my father jumped up in his berth, thinking it was some one coming to rob him, and when he saw who it was and heard it speak, he leaped out of bed with the intention of detaining it, but it was gone. So vivid was the impression made upon him by the apparition that he drew out his log at once and wrote down all particulars concerning it, with the hour and day of its appearance. On reaching England after the war was over, the first dispatches put into his hand were to announce the death of his brother, who had passed away at the very hour when he had seen him in the cabin."
In the Atlantic Monthly of May 1862 (pages 579-580), we read a writer who interviewed Harriet Horner, a sculptor. She said that she long had in her employment an Italian female named Rosa, who had to stop working for her on account of bad health. After visiting Rosa and thinking that she would have quite a few future visits with her, Harriet went to sleep and awoke with the feeling someone else was in the room. She then was surprised to see Rosa, who said, "I am well now." Rising to talk to her, Harriet was surprised to find no one there. At breakfast Harriet said, "Rosa is dead," and remembered hearing the clock strike five during the experience. After sending someone to check on Rosa, Harriet was told Rosa had died at five in the morning.
A Reverend C. C. McKechnie reported seeing the following "crisis apparition" of his grandfather, when C. C. was a boy of ten:
"At the time of his death, and without my having any apprehension of his end, I happened to be at my father's house, about a mile off. I was leaning in a listless sort of way against the kitchen table, looking upward at the ceiling and thinking of nothing in particular, when my grandfather's face appeared to grow out of the ceiling, at first dim and indistinct, but becoming more and more complete until it seemed in every respect as full and perfect as I had ever seen it. It looked down upon me, as I thought, with a wonderful expression of tenderness and affection. Then it disappeared, not suddenly but gradually, its features fading and becoming dim and indistinct, until I saw nothing but the bare ceiling. I spoke at the time of what I saw to my mother, but she made no account of it, thinking, probably, it was nothing more than a boyish vagary. But in about fifteen or twenty minutes after seeing the vision, a boy came running breathless to my father's with the news that my grandfather had just died."
A man named Edward Jackson stated that while indoors he suddenly felt a current of cold air, as if the door had opened. The door was not open, but standing between himself and the door was a figure who Edward recognized as a boyhood friend. The figure (dressed in a polo outfit) walked past Edward, and disappeared into an inner room. Edward went looking for the figure but could not find him. Edward said "there was no way anybody could have got out unknown to me." He wrote about the event to his father, who told him that the boy had been killed on the same day Edward had seen him. The boy had been killed while playing polo.
These are just additional examples of a phenomenon often reported in the West: that of someone seeing an apparition of a person he did not know had died, and later finding out that the person had died on the same day, often at the very hour the apparition was seen. You can read about hundreds of such "wraith cases" by reading my posts below:
An Apparition Was Their Death Notice
25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death
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