Many times someone near death may seem to get a glimpse of light from some mysterious world beyond. Some have claimed to see a glorious vision of a heavenly realm, maybe something like this:
Apparitions of the dead are often reported at a deathbed. A much less common type of report is a report of mysterious music occurring at the time of death. One such report appears on page 221 of Volume II of the classic two-volume Phantasms of the Living. We read this 1885 account by Sarah A. Sewell of events in 1863, near the deathbed of a sick girl Lilly who died on the Tuesday mentioned:
"Our attention was roused by sounds of the music of an Aeolian harp, which proceeded from a corner cupboard in one corner of the room. All was hushed, and I said, 'Lilly, do you hear that pretty music?' and she said, ' No,' at which I was much surprised, for she was a great lover of music. The sounds increased until the room was full of melody, when it gradually and slowly seemed to pass down the stairs and ceased. The servant, who was occupied in the kitchen, two stories below, heard the sounds, and our eldest daughter, who was going into the larder, stopped in the passage to listen and wonder where the music came from, and the servant called to her, ' Do you hear that music?' ...' The next day (Sunday) my old nurse and aunt came up to see how Lilly was, and were, with my husband, all in the room with the child. I had gone down into the kitchen to prepare some little dainty milk-food for her, when the same sounds of Aeolian music were heard by all three in the room, and I heard the same in the kitchen. Monday passed, but we had no repetition. On Tuesday, at the same hour, we [i.e., Mr. and Mrs. Sewell] once more heard the same wailing Aeolian music from the same part of the room ; again it increased in volume, until the room was full of wailing melody ; and again did the sounds appear to pass through the door, down the stairs, and out at the front door. Now, this music was heard three different days, at the same time each day, and not only by those in the room with the child, but by myself, my daughter, and the servant, two flights of stairs below the room the child was in ; and on the second day by my aunt and nurse and the children, who were in the dining-room."
On the next page Matthew Sewell corroborates the account:
"I heard the sweet music identically with my wife. The music was heard on Saturday, 2nd of May, a little before 4 o'clock in the afternoon, also on the next day at about the same time, and also on the following Tuesday at about the same hour. Those who heard the music were my wife, myself, my wife's aunt, the nurse, our son Richard, aged 7 ; our son Thomas, aged 9 (the last four all dead), our eldest daughter, aged 11, and our servant, who shortly left us and went to Ireland to her husband, who was a soldier, and was soon lost sight of. Our eldest daughter is now in New York, and I have no doubt but that she will remember the circumstance. I am quite satisfied that the music heard was not produced by someone at a distance, for our house was then situated in a long garden, some 50 yards distant from the public road, and the adjoining house to ours was unoccupied at the time. The sound was not a muffled sound at all, but the soft, wild notes of an Aeolian harp, which rose and fell distinctly, and increased gradually, until the room was full of sound, as loud as the full swell of an organ, and it rolled slowly down the stairs, dying softly on the ear in weird cadences. I am certain it was not produced by human fingers."
The reported events occurred in 1863, before there were any machines capable of playing back prerecorded music, and decades before music could be transmitted by radio. The two witnesses were interviewed by one of the authors of Phantasms of the Living.
On page 223 of the same volume, we read an 1884 account by Mrs. Yates, who states this:
"In 1870 I lost a dearly loved daughter, 21 years old ; she died at noonday, of aneurism. At night, my only other daughter was with me, when all at once we both assumed a listening attitude, and we both heard the sweetest of spiritual music, although it seemed so remote, my ears were hurt listening so intently. Till some hours after, my dear girl and I were afraid to inquire of each other had we heard it, for fear we were deluded, but we found both had been so privileged and blessed."
Giving her address, the daughter (A. Beilby) states the following:
" I can speak with certainty respecting the beautiful music my dear mother and I heard on the 26th November, 1870. I shall never forget it; we were both afraid to speak, it was so exquisite."
Camille Flammarion was the author of the monumental three-volume work Death and Its Mystery, a classic of parapsychology which you can read here, here and here, as well as the massive tome The Unknown, which you can read here. On this page of The Unknown, we read an account by M. Alphonse Berget, involving a friend of his mother's (Amelie) who had become a nun:
"Amélie had been in religion about three years, when one day my mother went up to the garret to look for something she was anxious to find. All at once she ran back to the salon uttering loud cries, and fell down unconscious. They flew to her help, lifted her up, and she came to herself, crying with sobs :
' Oh, it is horrible ! Amélie is dying — she is dead, for I have just heard her singing as only a person who is dead could sing !'
And another nervous seizure again made her lose her senses.
Half an hour after this, Colonel M. rushed like a madman into my grandfather's house, holding a dispatch in his hand. The dispatch was from the Mother Superior of the convent at Strasbourg, and contained only these words : ' Come. Your granddaughter very ill.' The colonel took the first train, reached the convent, and heard that the Sister had died at three o'clock precisely, the hour of the nervous attack experienced by my mother. This fact has been often told me by my mother, my grandmother, and my father, who were present, as well as my uncle and aunt, all of whom bear testimony that they had witnessed this strange incident."
On page 314 of the May 14, 1921 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we read this account by F. H. Rooke:
" Some years ago my sister and I had a joint experience, which has been the greatest comfort to us. Our mother lay dangerously ill , every nerve racked with rheumatoid arthritis, and both nurse and doctor seemed to think that her sufferings could not last much longer.
One night about 1 a.m. my sister was sitting up with the nurse ( I was sleeping on another landing ), when her attention was transfixed by the most beautiful majestic chords, as if every golden note of melody was being played on some heavenly instrument - music far exceeding anything she had ever heard . Turning to the nurse, she said , ' Did you hear that ? ' 'I heard nothing,' was the answer. At that moment I entered the room saying 'Where does that beautiful music come from ?' The music had awakened me out of heavy slumber.
As we spoke the sounds died away, and on looking at the bed, it was evident to me that the sweet spirit of our devoted mother had passed to other realms to these beautiful strains."
On page 92 of the April 24, 1885 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume 3), which you can read here, we have the following account involving mysterious music at the scene of someone's deathbed. It is an account supplied in 1885, of events in 1874. The writer apparently used "Julia X" where he meant to write "Julia Z."
"Six or seven years passed away, and Mrs. --, who bad been long ill, was dying, in fact she did die the following day. I was sitting at the foot of her bed talking over some business matters that she was anxious to arrange, being perfectly composed and in thorough possession of her senses ; in fact she was right, and my solicitor, who advised that the step she wanted to be taken was not necessary, was wrong. She changed the subject and said: ' Do you hear those voices singing?' I replied that I did not; and she said: 'I have heard them several times to-day, and I am sure they are the angels welcoming me to Heaven; but,' she added, 'it is strange, there is one voice amongst them I am sure I know, and cannot remember whose voice it is.' Suddenly she stopped and said, pointing straight over my head, 'Why there she is in the comer of the room; it is Julia X. [Julia Z.]; she is coming on ; she is leaning over you ; she has her hands up ; she is praying; do look ; she is going.' I turned but could see nothing. Mrs. -- then said, 'She is gone.' All these things I imagined to be the phantasies of a dying person. Two days afterwards, taking up the Times newspaper, I saw recorded the death of Julia Z., wife of Mr. Z. I was so astounded that in a day or so after the funeral I went up to -- and asked Mr. X. if Mrs. Z., his daughter, was dead. He said, 'Yes, poor thing, she died of puerperal fever. On the day she died she began singing in the morning, and sang and sung until she died.' "
In a 1920 publication here, we read the account below:
"The most famous of all cases of ghostly music, however, is that of Samuel Foote. When staying a night at his father’s house, in Truro, he was awakened by the sweetest music he had ever heard. He got up, roused the household, and they all listened to it, but no one could tell who was responsible for it, or whence it originated. Shortly afterwards, Foote learned that, at the very hour he had listened to the mysterious music, his maternal uncle, Sir John Goodere, had been kidnapped, taken on board the ship of his brother, Captain Goodere, and deliberately strangled."
The eerie 1891 account below (which you can read here) claims that a periodical called the Pittsburgh Dispatch reported "ghostly sounds...the music of a violin" was long heard after a murder, at a log cabin location.
We may wonder whether anything supernatural was going on, or whether it was just some natural sound that vivid imaginations interpreted as mysterious violin music (maybe a whistling of the wind through woods surrounding a log cabin). Nature can suddenly astound us with sounds that seem like the most wonderful or eerie music. Just yesterday, I heard some songbird outside my window, and its music was so stunning that I thought to myself: this is the Maria Callas of songbirds. The notes were ever-changing and always delightful. Hearing that bird, I can understand the kind of natural music that inspired Shelley to write his ode "To a Skylark."
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