What if your whole earthly life is the mere infancy of your soul's existence? Then when you die, it may be like progressing from being a baby to being a toddler.
In the series of posts listed below I gave many examples of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the person had died about the same time the apparition was seen:
An Apparition Was Their Death Notice
25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death
25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death
Let us look at some more cases of this type. Here is an account of someone "ghost-told" of a death, with the interesting twist that the ghost viewer then died:
You can read the account here:
The account below is from the newspaper story here:
The account below seems to qualify as a case of being "ghost-told" of a death:
The full newspaper story can be read here:
The account below was told by Doctor Elliot Coues, a biologist member of the National Academy of Sciences, in a story printed in 1900 in the Washington Post. Although in the same article Coues refers to "death wraiths," which he says appear "a little before or a little after the death of the sender," it is not quite clear whether he knew of the death of the person mentioned below before the apparition was seen.
Later in the same article the biologist makes these interesting statements:
The volumes referred to are Volume One of Phantasms of the Living, which can be read online here, and Volume Two of the work which can be read here. A significant fraction of the 700+ cases reported in that two-volume work are cases in which someone reports seeing or hearing an apparition of a particular person they did not know was dead, only to find out later that just such a person had died on about the same day or exactly the same day (and often on the same hour and day).
The 1872 newspaper account below appeared with a title of "Seeing a Sister's Apparition and Then Hearing of Her Sudden Death."
Here is yet another case of being "ghost-told" of a death:
You can read the account here:
On page 592 of the document here, we read a Dr. Coleman state the following case of a young boy who saw the apparition of a teacher who had very recently died, a boy who had never been told of the teacher's death:
"The day before the little boy died he and his mother and the nurse were alone together in the room. The child said his Sunday school teacher was in the room with them, told how she was dressed,
etc. At the time this took place the teacher, who had suddenly died, was lying in her casket. The child had not been informed of her death."
The next case in this post does not quite qualify as being "ghost-told of a death" as no one at the time knew that either a ghost had been seen or that a death had occurred. But the case does seem like evidence of an apparition of a person appearing near a relative at about the time of that person's death. The case is found as Case # 242 in Volume I of the famous work Phantasms of the Living, and can be read on the page here:
"October 30th, 1885.
(242) In the month of August, 1864, about 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I was sitting reading in the verandah of our house in Barbadoes. My black nurse was driving my little girl, about 18 months or so old, in her perambulator in the garden. I got up after some time to go into the house, not having noticed anything at all — when this black woman said to me, ' Missis, who was that gentleman that was talking to you just now ?' ' There was no one talking to me,' I said. ' Oh, yes, dere was, Missis — a very pale gentleman, very tall, and he talked to you, and you was very rude, for you never answered him.' I repeated there was no one, and got rather cross with the woman, and she begged me to write down the day, for she knew she had seen someone. I did, and in a few days I heard of the death of my brother in Tobago. Now, the curious part is this, that I did not see him, but she — a stranger to him — did ; and she said that he seemed very anxious for me to notice him.
"MAY CLERKE."
On the same page someone else corroborates the tale:
"I well remember that on the day on which Mr. John Beresford, my wife's brother, died in Tobago — after a short illness of which we were not aware — our black nurse declared she saw, at as nearly as possible the time of his death, a gentleman, exactly answering to Mr. Beresford's description, leaning over the back of Mrs. Clerke's easy-chair in the open verandah. The figure was not seen by any one else.
SHADWELL H. CLERKE."
On pages 547 to 559 of Volume XI of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1895), which can be read here, we have a most unusual and complex report of being ghost-told of a death. In this case the witness does not report seeing an apparition of someone she knew (as typically occurs), but of someone unknown to her. Reportedly the apparition made a series of predictions that were verified, such as that the witness would learn of the death of a child who was buried in a particular graveyard she would soon visit. The case seems to have been diligently checked out by members of the Society, who found quite a lot of corroborating evidence. But the account is too complex for me to summarize here.
A drawing from an old newspaper story
The great majority of accounts in this post and the posts mentioned at the top of this post involve cases in which someone reports seeing an earthly apparition of someone he did not know was dead, and then soon learns the person died at about the time the apparition was seen. A very similar type of account I have rarely heard of may have a form such as this:
(1) Person X may have a near-death experience in which he reports seeing some person who he knew had died, perhaps in some mystical realm. This Person X may also report seeing in such a place a Person Y who he did not know was dead.
(2) It may then soon be confirmed that this Person Y had died, unknown to Person X when he had this near-death experience.
The quote below from a 2024 article seems to describe a case of this type, which we might describe as "spirit-told of a death" rather than "ghost-told of a death":
"A young nine-year-old boy named Eddie was seriously ill in a hospital. Recovering from a thirty-six-hour fever, Eddie immediately told those in the hospital room that he had been to heaven, recounting seeing his grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle there. But then his startled and agitated father heard Eddie report that his nineteen-year-old sister Teresa, away at college, was in heaven too, and she told Eddie that he had to return. But the father had just spoken to Teresa two days prior. Checking with the college, the father found out that his daughter had been killed in a car accident the previous day, but that the college could not reach the family at their home, presumably because of Eddie’s hospital stay!"
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