Near-death experiences first started to become well-known around 1975, with the popularity of Raymond Moody's book on the concept (entitled Life After Life). But we have very good reason to believe that such experiences have been a fact of human experience long before Moody's book. In my posts below I document near-death experiences dating from long before 1975:
Near-Death High-Speed Life Reviews From Before 1950
Let us look at some more cases of near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences dating from long before 1975, and in this post rather than quoting text I will be giving images from old newspapers. The Chronicling America web site makes it very easy to search the text of old newspapers, but once you've found a story, there's no easy way to copy text from the story. So I'll have to use images instead.
The story below appeared in 1911:
Methodist ministers of the time typically believed in the doctrine of the Resurrection, that the dead were silent and lifeless, waiting for some future Judgment Day, in which they would all be resurrected. So this account of seeing deceased parishioners alive in an afterlife is not an account in which a Methodist minister saw what he expected to see.
The story below appeared in 1915, and involved a young girl who clearly was very close to death. We can't be sure whether the being identified as God by the girl was a supreme being or perhaps some other supernatural entity or paranormal entity the girl identified as God. Clicking on the image may allow you to read the text more carefully:
Below from 1907 we have the remarkable story of Eula Wilson, a blind or nearly-blind young girl who recovered from a death-like state that no one nearby thought she would recover from. She reports a near-death experience (click on the image if you have trouble reading the text):
You can read the full account below, which includes additional text not shown above. The full account gives us the additional very interesting detail that the child was blind in one eye before her near-death experience, but reportedly had perfect vision after the experience.
A similar story is told by a man in the 1911 story below. When we get accounts of seeing God or "the Lord" in such accounts, they may be guesses about mysterious powerful-seeming figures seen. Click on the image if you have trouble reading the text.
The 1897 account below also involves trances in a young girl, apparently trances occurring in a state near death. We have some interesting evidence cited suggesting that more than mere imagination is involved:
You can read the account on its original news page using the link below:
The 1903 account below involving Mary A. Kidder is of possible interest in this context, although it merely mentions trances rather than a state near death. I include it because it rather tends to corroborate the account above, both involving reported trips to heaven during trances:
You can read the account using the link below:
I find it interesting that the child reports what she calls angels moving through the air, although she says "they have no wings," telling us something different from what a child might tell based on traditional images of heaven and angels.
We may presume that the 1912 account below refers to a girl who was close to death, as the account reports that the vision occurred while the girl slept for five days:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/1912-08-06/ed-1/seq-1/
Another story that seems like an early account of a near-death experience is the 1897 one below:
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