What do you think about this?
Most people have heard of near death experiences, where someone on the edge of dying reports a tunnel, a light, a feeling of peace. But there is a stranger and lesser known cousin to that story, one that happens not to the dying, but to the perfectly healthy people sitting beside them.
They are called shared death experiences. A husband holding his wife’s hand as she passes suddenly feels himself lifted with her, seeing a brilliant light he cannot explain. A daughter at her mother’s bedside watches the room seem to change shape, or senses a presence come to gather her mother home. Some report seeing a glow leave the body. Some say they briefly glimpsed scenes from the dying person’s life, as if a door had opened for a moment and they had been standing too close.
The physician Raymond Moody, who first popularized near death research, spent years collecting these accounts and argued they cannot be waved away as the oxygen starved brain of a dying person, because the person having them is not dying at all.
Could it be that death is less of a solitary passage than we assume, and that the people we love can walk us to the threshold and feel, for an instant, what waits on the other side?
Grief and imagination, or a real glimpse shared between two people? What do you think these bystanders are experiencing?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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