Near-Death Phenomena

"Apparitions at the Moment of Death: The Living Ghost in Legend, Lyric, and Lore," unveils the mysterious world of crisis apparitions. Discover the eerie phenomena where people witness apparitions of loved ones coinciding with their deaths, often without prior knowledge. Through extensive research author Daniel Bourke uncovered the astonishing universality of these encounters across different cultures and eras, and he shares them in his interview with Stan Mallow on “Paranormal Yakker”.

Chapters

• 0:00 Daniel Bourke interview on Paranormal Yakker
• 0:25 What happens at the moment of death?
• 1:52 What is a crisis apparition?
• 3:36 How was Apparitions at the Moment of Death researched?
• 4:36 Crisis apparitions and near-death experiences - Is there a relationship between crisis apparitions and near death experiences?
• 6:17 What's the connection between death and survival?
• 7:28 Are near-death experiences universal?
• 8:48 How widespread are ghostly encounters?
• 13:49 Daniel Bourke on Apparitions at the Moment of Death?

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone, I'm Stan Mallow. Welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest on today's show is author, researcher, poet, & singer-songwriter, Daniel Bourke. I'll be talking with him about his book, Apparitions at the Moment of Death, The Living Ghost in Legend, Lyric & Lore. Daniel Bourke, welcome to Paranormal Yakker. Thanks a lot for having me on & I really appreciate the invite. Since ancient times, people from nearly every culture & corner of the world have experienced visions of loved ones that coincided with their faraway death. Your book explores that. What, Daniel, was there about the moment of death & what occurs when it happens that got your curiosity & inspired you to write about it? It's an interesting question. What inspired me to write this book? Well, what inspired me specifically to write this book was that I couldn't find this book. So in other words, I understood this thing called a crisis that personally existed. I understood it had been researched by psychical researchers for 200 years plus. To be honest, I also came across a very particular paper by Dr Bruce Grayson. He wrote a paper called Seeing People Unknown To Have Died.& it caught my interest because it included many cases of what are called peak & dying experiences, which is when on the deathbed, the dying person will attain information regarding the well-being of somebody far distant. That information will later turn out to be correct. In these cases, it's the information that's attained is always death. So when I read that, there were a number of cross-cultural examples in there. There was one from, I believe, a Navajo Indian source, for example. I just thought to myself, these accounts, because I've read so many from England& France, for instance, in the early studies, I knew that if I looked for them, I would find them.& thankfully, I did. & that's where this book comes in because I've brought to as many sources to bare as possible on the question as to their ubiquity. In your book, Daniel, you write about crisis apparitions & say that it's not rare. In fact, you say they have always been a part of our collective experience, blurring the lines between our knowledge of life & our beliefs about the afterlife. What exactly is a crisis apparition? Well, put simply, a crisis apparition is it kind of comes under the umbrella of general intimations of a distant death. So a crisis apparition is the experience in which, & just to take kind of a typical example, you may be in bed. You don't have to be asleep by any means, though. & you see the form of a loved one, not always a loved one, but it is most commonly loved one. They may do nothing. They may wave goodbye. They may walk through the room. They may walk past you on the street, for example. They may specifically offer the information that they have died, for instance.& then very often in the accounts, the phone call will come five minutes later, 10 minutes later the next morning that that person who you saw at that time actually died at that time.& in many cases, there's much more to it. In many cases, there's certain details on the apparition which are suggestive of the nature of their death, for example. But fundamentally, the mystery of the crisis apparition is the coincidence of the apparition itself with the death.& speaking of apparitions more broadly, it can be an auditory intimation. There can be intuitive intimations. There can be even the manner in which the individual dies. The type of pain or injury can be reflected on the individual themselves who are receiving this intimation. But the primary mystery is that the individual who receives this experience, whether it's a hallucination, a vision, a dream, they were unaware of the death at the time. So they had no necessary reason to expect a death. Those are the most ideal cases. How, Daniel, did you go about researching your book & what resources did you employ in the writing of it? I used many different resources. I used libraries. I used my own bookshelf. I used Amazon, the Kindle store. But I would say primarily I used the likes of Gutenberg & Internet Archive, which are just incredible resources, especially for the kind of 50 years to a century old, like, ethnological & anthropological type reports where I looked for a lot of accounts, et cetera, et cetera. So I drew on as many sources as possible in terms of actual specific sources, like in the book. The reason I call it in legend, lyric & lore is because you will find crisis apparitions there from the Norse Sagas as much as you'll find them in Native American traditional tales. You'll find them in Aboriginal Australian tales as much as you'll find them in poems & legends of the Middle Ages, for example.& specifically, & they're very ubiquitous in the lives of the saints, which is something that I found.& I found interesting personally as well. That would be the spread of the sources used. Is there any relationship, Daniel, between crisis apparitions& near-death experiences? That's a very interesting question because there's been very little work done on that. So there hasn't been much work that has spoken to those relationships, but they are there. For instance, in the book, you'll find accounts wherein the individual will, for instance, wake up at night, look at the window, see their grandfather walking through the woods. But he's not just walking through the woods. He is described as being received by beams of light, for instance, or he's walking towards some form of tunnel. In other words, in many of these crisis apparitions, it almost seems as if the appearing party is undergoing a near-death experience at the time, which obviously would technically make sense because they are dead at the time, or dying. That is an interesting connection. Just to give a very basic idea is that there are some very highly idiosyncratic aspects of the apparition in general that are not necessarily spoken too often. For instance, something you find a lot is that when you encounter the apparition of a dead person, for whatever reason, they often appear younger than they did at the time of death. This is very common. You find this in after-death communications, deathbed visions. You could make the argument that would be something that maybe we would expect in some sort of expectancy of the afterlife how it would be. But what's interesting is they also turn up their way in crisis apparitions, despite the fact we don't know that we're actually looking at a dead person.& the connection between that & the near-death experience is that it's incredibly common for deceased relatives to appear younger during the near-death experience also. In general, there are serious connections there. & to get the more specific you get, you will actually continue to find those connections. In terms of other connections, there are more. & that's actually something I'm working on at the moment for another book. To what extent, Daniel, does your book directly or indirectly speak to the question of survival? The question is interesting because this is a book where, by no means did I set out to prove survival using this book. The main goal of this book was to finally show the true cross-cultural extent of this experience in a parapsychological context as well. Like, I wanted to tie the work of the parapsychologists with the historians, the folklorists, the ethnologists, & the anthropologists, etc., etc. To give a sense of the continuity of this experience through time. However, it is the kind of book that will speak to different degrees both directly& indirectly to that question of survival depending on the individual reading the book. Because it could be said that there is enough anecdotal evidence in this book to convince somebody, for instance, for another person. There may not be enough anecdotal evidence if they even accept anecdotal evidence at all. The extent to which this book speaks on survival is very much related to what the individual will take from it & whether or not maybe they follow up on some of the references in the bibliography, etc. To be clear, there wasn't a goal, but if it's a side effect for certain people, it would not surprise me.& the opposite as well. From the temples of ancient Egypt to the emergency rooms of New York & from Saint to Shaman, you examine the crisis apparition & the phenomena of the living ghost in legend, lyric, & lore demonstrating their universal nature. In what ways, Daniel, have you found them to be universal? The fundamental way in which they're universal is that rather than a cultural phenomenon as such, rather than some sort of contrived legend or tale based on a singular experience that is then later kind of copycated, etc. Not to say those examples can't exist. It seems to be a part of the universe. For whatever reason, the universe that we live in, it seems to be the case that it offers individuals news of the death of their loved ones in what we would call non-ordinary fashion. Of course, non-ordinary is a relative term. If it's happening, it's clearly ordinary. We could call it maybe rare, but yet these dichotomies can make the conversation challenging at times. But fundamentally, it's universal because it's found on every continent & at all times. You find it in ancient Egypt, you find it in ancient Greece, you find it in the Middle Ages. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the viewers right now knew somebody who had an experience of exactly this kind.& if they were to read some of the old accounts, they would find them essentially & importantly indistinguishable. So I think that is fundamentally why it's a universal phenomenon. In your book, you share profound accounts from a wide range of sources, including history, literature, folklore, theology,& contemporary culture to reveal how widespread ghostly encounters are throughout the ages. Can you, Daniel, give me from a wide range of sources, including a few examples of that? The accounts in the book span essentially the entirety of human history. One of the oldest accounts in the book is an ancient Egyptian account, which is remembered in a poem that relates to the Pharaoh Sennacherib, who it's recorded that while his son was sleeping, he was killed in his castle in a raid, & his ghost came to his son specifically to inform him not just that he had died but how he had died, & the specifics were then later confirmed. Just to speak around a little bit, this generally isn't... I've never seen this actually referenced in the literature by anyone. It has a crisis account. It's usually spoken to by sociologists, etc., who are interested in potentially literary device or some sort of politically motivated poem. But nevertheless, the format & the details are exactly what one would expect in a remembered crisis apparition that fits the form exactly. Then we can move forward to, for instance, multiple thousands of years to the lives of the saints. We can go to the Irish saints. There are many accounts there, not just of crisis apparitions, but of kind of psychic experiences that we would consider psychical experiences in general are found widely in the lives of the Irish saints.& like, for instance, Saint Columba, one of Ireland's most well-known saints, there are multiple accounts of him during meditations, for example. Just to speak to this, very commonly in the lives of the saints & not just the Irish saints, these accounts occur during meditation, during prayer, during altered states of consciousness, which I wouldn't think is unimportant. This is something you'll see in the Japanese accounts also. In the North, Native American accounts, they're often induced specifically in order to attain this type of information. But to come back specifically to Columba, he will, for instance, during his meditations, he will have a vision. It could be an intimation. It could be an actual experience of seeing the soul of a certain individual lifted up to this. For instance, up through the clouds, for example, there are many different ways in which he will then come out as the text will remember, the biography of the saints will remember this. As he comes out to his brothers, speaks to them, gives them the information as to who has died, such & such has died, this is how they've died.& later, of course, the news is confirmed as to when & who died exactly as one would expect in a crisis apparition.& in those texts, obviously, these types of things would speak specifically to the sanctity of the individual, to their being special or holy or chosen or having a special line to the holier & the other, etc. So there would be reasons why these things would be actually implemented in the lives of the saints, even in cases where they didn't necessarily specifically happen. But of course, neither that doesn't speak to whether or not these are technically real human experiences, of course, which is which we know they are, which is why we can even make the comparison in the first place. Then we could come to revolutionary Italian general, for instance, Garibaldi. Garibaldi recorded in his notebooks, I believe, in 1852, he recorded that on the same day that his mother died far off from the world of waters, were his words. He dreamed of her being born to the grave by the very particular by the ladies of Nice, which is I can't remember what exactly references to, but it's certainly relevant to death & his conception of what would constitute death. Of course, the news is then later confirmed if & damn so it just in those 3 accounts, we're spanning multiple thousands of years.& then we could come to any number of accounts from the 21st, the 20th century, for instance, the late 20th century, the authors of the phantasms of the living, the kind of seminal volume related to death coincidences recorded hundreds of these accounts, many hundreds. Like there's there was one in the book that was just a very specific a woman saw a procession of the dead & found herself on a riverbank & have the account here actually looking into the road where the people were walking 5 or 6 of them hundreds passed by me neither looking aside nor looking at each other. There are people of all conditions & all ranks of life. But what was interesting is that she saw a middle aged friend there dressed as a farmer. She pointed to him & calls out who is that please he turns around & says I am John of Kelmsford. This is her friend. The dream ended the next day. The news comes that he had died on that exact day that is recording the phantasms of the living. But then you'll find the same exact accounts recorded in just casual poetry like a guy called William Allingham wrote a poem for a member. I remember it's called a dream & in the dream one of the lines one of the he dreamed of very similar to this account, which is why it comes to mind. He dreamed of a procession of the dead. He spoke to he spoke to all of them.& then at the very end noted the words including some I hadn't known were dead. So it's kind of interesting to see these these crisis apparitions remembered even in poetry of a relatively recent type as well as, for instance, that ancient Egyptian poem we remembered. That's why I called the book in legend lyric & lore because a lot lyrical poetry is a very specific genre in general lyric remembers these accounts in general kind of folklore & kind of oral tradition remembers these accounts & they they will be found. They will continue to be found & I wouldn't be surprised if I think I mentioned are already some of your readers are sorry some of your listeners probably have had many experiences of this kind or at least know of somebody who has. What is your hope Daniel the readers of your book take away with them after they read it? Honestly, I just hope they see that the universe is a very interesting strange place maybe stranger than they thought maybe it's confirming it's as strange as they thought. Maybe it's confirming that there's who knows maybe they think I'm mad for even attempting to work on this subject. But I just hope that they will feel a sense of the kind of strangeness that I felt when compiling the accounts & the mystery & also fundamentally just the human aspect the people who have these experiences their outlook has often changed. They feel like they have a different relationship to the cosmos things have shifted. There's a maybe there's an olive branch being given by the universe in these moments to people, you know, these moments of death, whether we believe it or not, whatever it means. That's what they experience & that's what I think is important. Out of curiosity, Daniel, I was wondering what other projects or projects are you now working on? I'm working on multiple different projects & working on another book within our traditions right now called Telepathic Tales, which will release in July 2025.& it's available for pre-order now actually.& it's a it is taking the concept of this book would expand it into different areas of psychical research & taking the cross cultural& historical approach. But I'm also applying it to areas of research that are very overlooked, such as the Norwegian Vardager or Vardoger. It's a type of psychical experience in which one becomes aware that a visitor is coming, for instance, it could be a vision, a dream, etc. They're very common in the Norse countries. I'll also look at nearing death awareness, for example, the individual becomes aware of their death & specific day that they're going to die.& oftentimes how they're going to die. This is a known phenomenon today, but it happens to be have been recorded widely in legend, lyrical or also. That's something I want to look at. So there are many different chapters in that book. I won't go on too much about that, but I'm also working on another book called which works on the phenomenon of Deja Reve in legend, lyrical or which is the concept of dreaming or visualizing someone before we meet them.& this is actually very surprisingly widespread throughout the historical record & folklore, etc. So that's something I wanted to bring attention to also. But that one is a long way off. If people find this book interesting, they may consider finding those interesting to you. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to buy Apparitions at the Moments of Death, the Living Ghost in Legend, Lyric & Lore, how Daniel can they do that? They can find the book at Amazon.com. They can find it at all good online bookstores. You can find it at InnerTraditions.com. Basically, I think Amazon.com is the big one. Really Barnes & Noble, I think. Yes, I believe Walmart as well. I won't go on. You get the idea. Daniel Bourke. I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. It has been a been great yakking with you.& I wish you much deserved success with your book. Thank you so much, Stan. I really appreciate inviting, those kind of words.