A Famous Deathbed Vision Experience   First recorded in Sir William Barrett's Death-bed Visions [1926] and later made available in At the Hour of Death [1977, 1998] by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haroldsson.

According to Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haroldsson, deathbed visions were long overlooked in the field of psychical research until the incident cited below was described to Sir William Barrett, then a physics professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, by his wife, Lady Elisabeth Barrett, who was a physician.           On 1/12//1924, Lady Barrett, whose specialty was obstetrics, delivered a baby for a woman referred to as "Doris."  Although the infant appeared to be out of danger, the mother was evidently dying.  She was with Doris during the last minutes of her life.  Here are some excerpts from her story:           Suddenly [Doris] looked eagerly towards one part of the room, a radiant smile illuminating her whole countenance.  "Oh, lovely, lovely," she said.  I asked, "What is lovely?"  "What I see," she replied in low, intense tones.  "What do you see?"  "Lovely brightness--wonderful beings."  It is difficult to describe the sense of reality conveyed by her intense absorption in the vision.  Then -- seeming to focus her attention more intently on one place for a moment--she exclaimed, almost with a kind of joyous cry, "Why, it's Father!  Oh, he's so glad I'm coming; he is so glad.  It would be perfect if only W. (her husband) would come too."           Her baby was brought for her to see.  She looked at it with interest, and then said, "Do you think I ought to stay for baby's sake?"  Then turning towards the vision again, she said, "I can't -- I can't stay; if you could see what I do, you would know I can't stay."           [Osis and Haroldsson:  'Apparently the young woman "saw" something so real to her, so gratifying, so valuable, that she was willing to give up her life and her own baby!']              But she turned to her  husband, who had come in, and said, "You won't let baby go to anyone who won't love him, will you?"  Then she gently pushed him to one side, saying, "Let me see the lovely brightness."           [Osis and Haroldsson:  'Could all this have merely been wish fulfillment expressed in the form of a hallucination?  Barrett considered such an explanation, but he rejected it because among the apparitions of the dead was someone whom Doris had not expected to see.  Her sister, Vida, had died three weeks before.  However, Doris had been kept uninformed of this because of her precarious health.  Therefore, Doris was a bit surprised when the following occurred.']           She spoke to her father, saying, "I am coming," turning at the same time to look at me, saying, "Oh, he is so near."  On looking at the same place again, she said with a rather puzzled expression, "He has Vida with him," turning again to me saying, "Vida is with him."  Then she said, "You do want me, Dad; I am coming."           It was the appearance of Vida, whom Doris could not have known had passed over before her, that induced Sir Barrett to collect and eventually publish a number of such stories and his well-done study of them.  Given her experiences and familiarity with just such events as a physician, and in particular this event that initiated the project, Lady Barrett also deserves some of the credit for the resulting famous little book, Death-bed Visions.