Who You Do See When You're Dying? (Real Cases)

[00:00:00] It is October 2021 and Mecca is looking for a job. She's a mortuary science student and she's not graduated yet. She's a single mom trying to find, you know, whatever's kind of related to the job. So she's like, you know what? A retirement home. That would work. So she applies and she gets the job. But then when she's there, she realizes it's not a retirement home. It's a nursing home. Now, a retirement home is people that are retired and they're living their best lives.

[00:00:26] And a nursing home is people that are basically needing help to do, to take care of themselves. And to top it all off, she ends up working a 3 p.m. shift to 7 a.m. That's 16 hours, a 16 hour shift at this place. So she's going to be working overnight. And also where she's stationed is a place where they have some total care patients. But she's like, you know what? Let's do it.

[00:00:49] And then one Halloween night, they're hanging out and down the hallway, they start hearing steps and cries. And out from the darkness comes this woman. Her name's May. Mecca looks at her and says, May, what's wrong? May's crying, nervous. And she's like, there's something big and black crawling across my ceiling. And they start making their way down the hallway. And that Halloween night, Mecca would witness something that she still can't explain to this day.

[00:01:16] So in this episode, we're going to talk about when people are about to pass away, the things that they see. They have evidence to back them up that say that they witness things. They see things that the rest of us cannot. You ready? My name is Edwin. And this is Paranormal Club.

[00:01:41] So Mecca is walking down the hallway, middle of the night, right? She's holding on to May. And they're making their way back all the way down. They get to the room. They flick on the lights. And Mecca's like, there's nothing here, May. Are you sure you weren't dreaming? Because she would normally fall asleep pretty early, which was odd to see her awake that late.

[00:02:00] She's like, I need to leave. Like, I can't stay in this room. There's no way I can stay here. Like, there's a thing roaming around. Then I calm down. It's okay. You know, like, nothing's here. Let's just relax. So they calm her down. She goes back. They just have to basically stay awake. Like, that's their job, right? To stay awake and do the rounds.

[00:02:17] So Mecca starts texting her friend. She's like, hey, you know what? This just happened. Like, did this woman, you know, explains the story. And the friend's like, is she sick? Is she okay? Now, you and I were probably thinking the same thing right now, right? She's seeing this thing in her room. And it's like a nursing home. And she's old. You might be thinking like, uh, maybe she's not doing that good. But stick around, because that's not actually what happens. Like, what you think is going to happen.

[00:02:43] They find absolutely nothing in the room again. And she tells her, like, there was nothing there. And they're like, well, you know what? What if it's over the text messages? The friend's like, what if it's death and it's following her? Like, she's next. Kind of nervous. By the way, this is Halloween, right? It's Halloween night. So she goes back. And they have to do the rounds again. So she goes to, you know, they go around. And there was this patient. His name was George. And he wasn't doing that well. He was actually pretty sick. He couldn't get out of bed.

[00:03:12] And they go into the room. And they see on the dresser, two drawers are, like, completely open. So Mecca's like, well, this is odd. She walks up, closes them. They continue on the rounds. Then a little bit later, on the other rounds, they come in. And they see the drawers open again in George's room. So her and a co-worker look at each other like, oh, what's happening? This is really weird. So they assume, you know what? Maybe somebody's out there roaming at night, going in the room, maybe searching for something.

[00:03:41] Because there's no way George got out of bed and opened the drawers. It's impossible. He couldn't get up. And the next day, they get a message, like a group text. And it says, hey, just wanted to let everyone know that George passed away. Because George had passed away that morning. Mecca immediately texts the director. And they're like, you know what? I can't work here anymore.

[00:04:04] Like, she was convinced that that dark presence that was up in the ceiling of May's room got George instead. How do we explain that, right? You have a patient that sees stuff and somebody else passes away. You might think, well, it's just a coincidence. The thing is, it was very out of character for Mecca to do that, to act that way. And for Mecca to actually quit, you know, when she needs the money, she likes the job, it's okay.

[00:04:32] She was scared enough that she just left. The whole thing is eerie because there's a lot of talk about what people see when they're about to die. Some of the things that, you know, whether that's talking to dead relatives, to looking up at the lights in the hospital, to saying things that don't make sense, but there's a really strange phenomenon that I kept reading about when I was doing the research here. And it's that people have a different mood. Like, now they're excited. They're happy.

[00:05:01] Like, they're greeting everybody with excitement. And when nurses see that, they get a little freaked out because they're like, oh, man, they might be leaving soon. You know, in a recent live stream that I did on YouTube, we had this question that popped up in the chat. And it was asking me about my friend who recently passed away. Actually, he passed away last October. And the question was how I was doing with it, which I appreciate because it was really a tough thing to deal with,

[00:05:31] especially, you know, being away for so long and feeling like, oh, man, I failed as a friend. And all these things, like thoughts that come after that. And we're all gathered around, my friends and I and his family, around the bed in the hospital. By this point, he couldn't speak, couldn't talk, like as in he couldn't look at us anymore. But he would react. He would move his hands. He would, you know, see you and like try to react. And that was all we got, right?

[00:05:59] But we had talked about at one point about this kind of thing because actually his story, it's on True Scary Story's story. It's actually the very first episode. It's him and my other friend, Natalia. And they're sharing this story with me about a time when they went to see a scary movie in a haunted location. Right. Because we love the paranormal. We really like talking about it and everything. And thinking about this, right, we had said, like, what do we do? Like, should we give each other a sign or something? And we never really cleared it up.

[00:06:29] You know, it just kind of happened. But all those thoughts, all those ideas, you know, nobody prepares us to watch somebody pass away. And even if they try to prepare you, you're never going to be ready for it. Thinking about death in that way in the aftermath, you know, the flight back and how everything seems really still, really quiet after somebody passes away. It really made me think about what death is, what it means. How do we know if there's something else out there?

[00:06:58] It turns out there was this physicist that his name was Sir William Barrett. And he was collecting all these stories about people who were about to pass away. And he noticed a lot of patterns, which I have a whole list here. So I'm going to go through them so you see exactly what I'm talking about. So we have there's documented deathbed cases where he left this book. Actually, it's called Deathbed Visions that I found. And it was published by his wife after he died.

[00:07:25] So this came out in April 1926 because Sir William Barrett had died in 1925. Here's one obstetrician's wife. Obstetricians. I don't know if I say that right. I have a really tough time pronouncing things. You'd be surprised. His wife, Lady Florence Barrett, was one of Great Britain's most prominent and more respected surgeons. And she actually witnessed one of these cases that he talked about in the book. This one's this is the most famous one that if you look up some of the things that he published, these are the things that are going to pop up.

[00:07:55] This is the case of Doris. Right. Mrs. B. So there is a mother's hospital in Clapton. And this young mother, her name is Doris, she was in labor and she was dying. So the resident medical officer, his name was Dr. Phillips, he was like Lady, you know, Lady Barrett to come and help. And, you know, the baby was fine. But Doris started dying and she was holding on to Mrs. Barrett's hand and said, oh, don't let it get dark. It's getting so dark, darker and darker.

[00:08:25] A moment later, Doris's entire like demeanor, it just changed. She started smiling. She stared eagerly at this brightly lit area in the room. And she like is this empty space. And Mrs. Barrett was like, what are you looking at? And Doris was like, lovely brightness and wonderful beings. Doris then said, like really happy. She was like, why? It's father. Oh, he's so glad I'm coming. He is so glad. She spoke to him.

[00:08:54] Saying, I am coming. I'm going. And gently, it pushed her husband aside so she could keep looking at this area, this bright space that they had in the room. Doris then turned to her mom. Her name was Mary Clark. She said, oh, he is so near. But then she was happy. And then her expression turned into this like deep confusion. And she was like looking at this empty space and asking, Vida's with him. This Vida person, Vida.

[00:09:21] I would assume it's pronounced Vida because that's how you say life in Spanish. But this isn't a Spanish story. So the thing is that Vida here was the sister. Right. And the mom and the hospital matron, Miriam Castle, were like, what is she talking about? Because Doris's sister had been a long term like she couldn't move. And she had actually died Christmas Day, 1923. Exactly two weeks and four days before.

[00:09:50] And the thing is, Doris was pretty like, you know, she wasn't very healthy at this point. She was really sick. And the hospital matron was telling the family like, hey, you know what? If you tell her about the sister's death now, she might die. Like Doris might die. So just you can't say it. And so they would keep like an absolute secret. Like nobody was going to say it. Like they actually visited the place without them in like their mourning clothes, like no black clothing to mourn the death or anything. They were just like acting all normal. Actually, when Doris would get mail, they like intercepted it.

[00:10:20] They're like, no ways. Nobody's going to tell her like, hey, I'm sorry for your death. Nothing like that. Not I'm sorry for your death. I'm sorry for your sister's death. So she all this time was she was thinking like the sister is alive. The thing is, there's a spot here that's called like double consciousness where you can see dead people pretty much in layman's terms here. But you can also be conscious of whoever's around you. So you can be seeing somebody who isn't there yet. Somebody next to you, they're seeing you.

[00:10:50] You can talk to them normally, but you can also see this other thing. Double consciousness. The thing is that Doris was calmly and sensibly like arranging like, you know, where the baby was going to end up, like how they were going to take care of them and everything. But the thing was that Sir William Barrett here, he was like, OK, if deathbed visions are subjective hallucinations or projections of our own desires, why would a dying woman hallucinate the sister that she believed was still alive?

[00:11:19] Does that explain something? Does that show us that maybe they can see the deceased when they're about to join them? Maybe that veil is thinning at that moment, at that borderland between life and death. So Sir William Barrett started searching through all the records he could find. And he found Doris' experiences along with the sister not being an isolated incident. Turns out he started to find case after case, like decades in countries and all these other places, people from like cross-cultural places.

[00:11:49] Like as in there was patterns that dying people would see visitors that they believed were alive and well. Now, these aren't just cases of people that are dead and you say, oh, I see my father. I see my grandma. I see like, no, these people believe that, you know, they know that the person is alive or they think that the person is alive. Yet they can see them and they're confused about it. They're like, why is this person there? Those are the cases that he was looking for, which makes sense. Here's another case here. Jenny and Edith.

[00:12:18] This is from June 1889. This is in an American city, two young schoolmates, Jenny and Edith, both around eight years old. They were sick and Jenny died at noon on Wednesday, June 5th. Now, fearing that the shock would make Edith's health worse, the parents and doctor decided that they were going to hide the death of Jenny. So just before like slipping into unconsciousness, Edith selected two of her own photographs to be sent to Jenny as a gift and told their family to say goodbye to Jenny.

[00:12:48] Now, Edith died at 630 p.m. that night, that same Saturday. But right before her death, she suddenly revived and said goodbye to everybody, to the family, smiling as she recognized like various deceased people like friends. And suddenly, with this look of intense surprise, she was like, father, I'm going to take Jenny with me, followed by why, Papa? Why didn't you tell me that Jenny was here? She was seeing Jenny in the room. Now, she stretched out her arms and welcome. Then she passed away.

[00:13:18] This other case is David and Harry. Now, this takes place in November 1870. David was three. Harry was four. And they were very sick. They had scarlet fever. Harry died 14 miles away at Abbott's Langley on November 2nd. And David was laying dying at the vicarage in Aspley on November 3rd. And by the way, he didn't know that his brother had passed away. But an hour before that, David died completely free of delirium.

[00:13:44] He suddenly sat up, pointed to the bottom of his bed and said distinctly, there is little Harry calling to me. Now, this is a case of John Alkin Ogle. It comes from July 17th, 1879. He was laying in his deathbed in Leeds. And John looked up and called out the name of his brother, Joe, who had died 16 years before. Immediately after, with a huge surprise like in his face, John was like, George Hanley.

[00:14:10] His mom was surprised because George Hanley was an acquaintance who had died only 10 days ago, 40 miles away in Melbourne. John's mother was the only person in the room who knew of Hanley's death. And the family had carefully like, you know, try to hide that. Somebody else had died. Now, this reminds me that we keep talking about all these cases, but I'm going to tell you a personal one. This actually happened to me in 2011 in the summer. I was in Florida. I was doing this internship slash job over in Cape Canaveral.

[00:14:40] It was in the middle of the night. I remember it was a Wednesday and I was suddenly woken up by this, I guess, a lack of sound, silence, complete stillness in the middle of the night. Now, I had this fan, this ceiling fan that was spinning around the ceiling. I remember I woke up, this complete stillness. By the way, the weather in Florida is pretty crazy. And I remember there had been a storm earlier that evening and or earlier that week. And it was like on and off and stuff. And I remember it being so quiet, it really startled me. Right.

[00:15:08] So I looked up and look at the ceiling and it's doing this. The fan is spinning around and then it stops completely. And then it starts again. Now, there are random things in the room that beep when the light, the power goes out. None of that. I didn't hear any of that. The regular alarm clock was still there in the morning. You know how sometimes when the power goes out, it blinks like those old school alarm clocks. And it wasn't doing that. So the power hadn't gone out. Turns out just the fan that turned off and turned back on.

[00:15:37] Now, I didn't know anything about this. Right. Like as in something had happened in my family, I would say about a week or two weeks after that. My dad calls me and I asked him, how's my uncle doing? And because it was in hospital and then he passed away. And I was like, whoa. But the thing is, that didn't coincide with the with the ceiling thing. I didn't even think about it until then. They told me that my grandpa had also passed away. And it was that night when I was woken up in the middle of the night to the ceiling fan stopping completely.

[00:16:06] Was my grandpa saying goodbye? Is that the only way he could think of? Did he think that maybe appearing in the foot of my bed would freak me out, which it would have probably. But it really freaked me out. And it really made me think like there's there's a lot out there that we don't know. There's a lot of stuff that we're not aware of. And again, I say this over and over. It is it would be very like ignorant. Very dumb for us to think that we know everything that's out there.

[00:16:33] So that's the whole premise of like all the stuff that I do, like with the paranormal is we don't know what else is out there. We can't say that we do and we try to investigate it, have fun with it, whatever. But we don't know. We don't know what it is. Let's continue on with some of the cases here. Right. So this one's from M. Paul Duroc. This is from Caracas, June 24th, 1894. Caracas, Venezuela. It turns out this guy, he was traveling. He actually got yellow fever in Venezuela when he was traveling.

[00:17:01] And just before his death, he was surrounded by his family. He ended up having this vision where he was looking around and calling like the names of old friends, friends that were, you know, had been left behind in France. He said like, well, well, you too. And you, you as well. He kept seeing everybody. Specifically, he called out the name of an old companion, M. Echeverry, with whom he had not communicated with in years. And then his surviving family said.

[00:17:28] And finally, like when he returned to Paris, they were shocked to find that the formal funeral invitation cards of M. Echeverry and the other friends Daroka had seen while he was dying had passed away in France shortly before he did. So he didn't know that they were dead when he was seeing them. Other case here. The brother in India. This is H. Wedgwood's case. This young girl was dying of consumption. She was unresponsive for days.

[00:17:54] And suddenly she was opening her eyes and she looked upward and called out the names of three deceased sisters, Susan, Jane and Ellen. And after a brief pause, she added with a look of surprise. She was like, and Edward too? Edward was her brother. Everybody in the room thought that he was alive and well in India. But weeks later, letters arrived from India announcing that Edward had died from an accident a week or two prior to his sister's vision.

[00:18:23] Another one. The Peak and Darien case. Kind of a similar case right here. This is dying lady. She was calling out the names of three brothers who had been dead for years before suddenly recognizing this fourth brother who they believed that was alive. Now, here is how Sir William Barrett counter argues here with the skeptics, right? Because here's the thing. Materialists and skeptics try to explain these cases in certain ways, right? They say like, well, it's telepathy. Or you know what?

[00:18:51] There's another thing called collective hallucinations where everybody in the room, like their thoughts are combining in some weird way. And the visitor was seen not just by the dying person, but by the healthy, wide awake bystanders that are standing right around them. But the thing is that this telepathy thing is like somebody in the room does know about the death. Like they know somebody died and they communicate that to the person who's about to die. And they see them as a dead person.

[00:19:19] I don't know how that makes more sense than the other part. But hey, that's his argument with the skeptics, because I don't know. A skeptic would probably be like, oh, sure. Telepathy? Okay, we'll go with that instead of seeing dead people. I think seeing dead people might be a little more believable. I don't know. Just a thought. His other case, the Pearson case from December 23rd, 1864.

[00:19:42] Ms. Harriet Pearson was sick in Brighton and begged to be moved back to her old home in London, where she had lived for decades with her sister, Anne. And her sister, Anne, had died years prior. Now, Harriet was nourished by the three nieces, which were Emma, including Emma, sorry, and her housekeeper, Lisa Quinton. Now, on the night of December 23rd, Harriet was dying, pretty much. And Mrs. John Pearson sat by her bedside. And Emma Pearson and Mrs. Kupinger lay awake in the next room.

[00:20:11] The door was slightly open. And suddenly, a woman saw this figure walk down the hallway. Now, the figure was wrapped in this old shawl, wearing this old, like, black cap, a wig with three distinct curls on each side. Mrs. Kupinger called out, Emma, get up. It's old Aunt Anne. And Emma replied, So it is. Then Aunt Harriet will die today. I don't think they said it that way. So they jumped up.

[00:20:40] And Mrs. John Pearson came rushing out of the Harriet's room, terrified, screaming, That was old Aunt Anne. Where has she gone? And they searched this locked, secure house and found absolutely no one. Harriet died at 6 p.m. that evening. But before she passed, she told her family that her sister, Anne, had come to call her and that she had seen her. The healthy bystanders had seen the visitor before the dying woman even spoke.

[00:21:06] So after looking at these cases, right, with the Pearson case, like the other case, the call that we got about a person seeing this shadow at the nursing home, how do we explain these? Like, how does modern science, for example, explain these? And here's the materialist thing, right? They say that bedside visitors are simple biochemical failures of the brain. Neurological misfires caused by failing organs, the lack of oxygen, high fevers, heavy clinical sedatives,

[00:21:35] like morphine. All these things can make you see things and hallucinate. Even some of these skeptics, like the most brilliant ones in the past, they had been kind of like stumped by these cases. Because, like, for example, this one, Professor Charles Richet, this world-famous European physiologist who did not believe in a soul thing or survival after death, he also documented these visions. The cryptesthesia theory. Here's an interesting one.

[00:22:02] Hang on here, because this one takes us a little bit to kind of explain this. So this theory of cryptesthesia suggests that certain individuals have this hidden sensory organ, a thing that's unknown to science, but it lets people subconsciously perceive distant material or immaterial things. So even Richet admitted that dying people see visitors that they believe were alive but had secretly died. Like, all these things that, you know, these cases, he read about them.

[00:22:32] He's like, these are the most disquieting from a materialistic standpoint. But now skeptics try to jump onto these visions with, like, more of the clinical delirium. Right? But modern medicine draws these, like, massive boundaries between these two things. Right? Because clinical delirium is that they say that hallucinations are, like, not organized. They're chaotic. You see things. You, like, hear things. You're, like, going a little crazy. The patient's usually terrified, anxious.

[00:22:59] Like, they feel like this thing is coming to approach them and they're freaking out. And then you have the end-of-life dreams and visions, ELDVs. Now, these are visually, like, vivid. They are structured. They are logical. Also, like, they always bring this profound, lasting sense of comfort, security, and peace. Now, this is this case, actually, the Sydney ICU study.

[00:23:24] To see if these bedside visitors are just, like, drug-induced tricks or not. They look at this, like, medical study that was published in January 31st, 2024, by researchers Allison Hessian, Tim Luckett, David Corot, and Michael Barbato. And here's what they did, right? They surveyed this intensive care nurses at 200-bed Metropolitan Teaching Hospital in Sydney, Australia. These people worked directly with dying patients.

[00:23:53] And out of the ICU nurses that were surveyed, 61% reported that they're directly witnessing or receiving reports of dying patients that are saying that they can see all these, like, very precise pre-death visions. And 86.3% of these ICU nurses, these are highly trained medical professionals, right? They administer heavy drugs and they witness clinical delirium daily.

[00:24:17] They said with absolute certainty these pre-death visions are not drug or fever-induced hallucinations. And 76.4% of these ICU nurses agree that these visions, like, have a profound spiritual source of comfort for the dying. And 74% of them view them as deeply transpersonal, life-reviewing, psychological constructs. Now, here's the thing.

[00:24:44] These encounters are so common in the hospitals. Only 12% of these intensive care nurses had ever received any specialized training on them. How do you handle visions that are being, you know, things somebody's telling you. You have a patient. They're like, hey, I'm seeing these people. I don't feel scared. I see them and I see you and I can react to both of you. I don't know how to deal with this. So a staggering 98% of these nurses say that they desperately want formal education on these phenomena.

[00:25:14] They say that by validating these comforting visions instead of just medicating them and telling them, like, you know, they don't exist. Knowing what to do with these is key to help families experience a peaceful, dignified, good death. Now, children, right? When we think of children in a horror, paranormal, scary movie kind of sense, they're pretty creepy. Like, they're like eerie little, I don't know, just thinking about that gives me chills.

[00:25:44] Because you see, children are innocent, right? They haven't experienced a lot of stuff. They haven't experienced a lot of pain. They haven't experienced a lot of things, at least a lot of the majority of them, right? The thing is, when they see deathbed visions, they consider them a little bit, like, stronger. Because they say, how were they able to see that? Why would they lie about this? Like, they're not simply, like, making this, like, they're not making this up. You know, we can agree with that. There's this case of Daisy Dryden.

[00:26:12] She was 10 years old and she got really, really sick. She was in San Jose, California in the summer of 1864. Now, she was fighting off this five-week, like, really, really serious fever. She contracted enteritis and was given only days to live. Now, Daisy would spend her days, the final three days, she was just lingering on this borderland. Like, this space between life and death. And because her physical body was, like, highly emaciated, she developed this, like, vivid double consciousness.

[00:26:42] You know, that thing I mentioned a little bit earlier. She was fully conscious. She was interacting with her family and everybody that was there. But she was also actively interacting with her deceased six-year-old brother, Ali, who had died of scarlet fever seven months before. Here's the thing. A Sunday school superintendent was visiting Daisy and told her that she was going to soon cross a dark river of death. Imagine you tell a kid that. You're about to cross the dark river of death.

[00:27:10] And then she was like, what? No. Like, she told her father, it's all a mistake. There is no river. There is no curtain. There's not even a line that separates this life from the other life. Now, she stretched her hands out. She said that she could see her family and the dead in the room at that exact same time. Then a neighbor read to her from the New Testament about many mansions in heaven. And Daisy questioned it. Mansions? That means houses.

[00:27:39] I don't see real houses there. But there is what would be places to meet each other in. Ten years old and she's arguing with these people, right? And we've all kind of been there. I mean, look, you might be that Christian friend in your group of friends that's trying to tell people the right way to do things, right? I know I've had them. And I've been cornered at a Taco Bell while eating my taco, literally half like out. I was like halfway through the taco.

[00:28:06] Two of my friends are sitting across from me and they're like, hey, you want to talk about Jesus? They're not really like that, but more like, have you thought about what? I don't even remember. It was traumatizing, though. It's awkward, right? It feels like I don't know what to tell you. I'm trying to eat my taco. I respect your beliefs. Like, it's not anything bad. People find comfort in that and truth in that, you know?

[00:28:31] But then you have these people that are trying to tell you, hey, by the way, you're about to get to the mansions of heaven. There's no mansions. There's no mansion. There's no dark river of death. There's no current. There's no... It's just places where we meet. A little girl's arguing about this, right? And I feel like... I mean, obviously, I don't have the knowledge for it. I don't have the knowledge to even argue about these kinds of things. But this little girl, Daisy, is telling people, not arguing, just saying, hey, no.

[00:28:58] You know, it gets a little stranger here because Daisy's sister, Lulu, was singing the hymn about angels bearing her away on snowy wings. But Daisy was like, stop right there. Oh, Lulu, is it not strange? We always thought that the angels had wings, but it's a mistake. They don't have any. Lulu was like, well, then how do they fly down from heaven if they don't have wings? And Daisy was like, oh, but they don't fly. They just come.

[00:29:28] Now, fascinated with how Daisy could be talking with her deceased brother when her lips remained entirely motionless, her mother asked how they spoke. And Daisy smiled and said, we just talk with our think. It makes sense. I mean, with our think. We don't say it like that, but it makes sense. And this neighbor, right, the skeptical neighbor, Mrs. B, who had just lost her young son, Bateman, came to visit. And Daisy told her that Bateman was there alive and was learning how to be good.

[00:29:56] Other neighbors were shocked, pointing out that Bateman had been a notoriously bad boy who swore and stole playthings. Again, I think it's a British thing or Australian or something. Daisy defended him with astonishing maturity, saying, oh, auntie, don't you know that he never went to Sunday school and was always hearing so much swearing? God knows he did not have half the chance. A little girl saying that. Goodness. Daisy's Sunday school teacher shows up, Mrs. H.

[00:30:24] And Daisy was like, hey, I can see your two children. And Mrs. H was like, how is that possible? Like they died as babies, like infants. And then Daisy said, well, Ali says that children do not stay children. They grow up as they do in this life. She also noted that Mrs. H's daughter, Mary, was like severely crippled, was not perfectly straight and beautiful. Now, on her final morning, Daisy was asking to look at the small, like in a small mirror.

[00:30:53] And she looked at her, you know, calmly, she was looking at her reflection and said, this body of mine is about worn out. It is like that old dress of mama's hanging there in the closet. She doesn't wear it anymore. And I won't wear my body anymore. She then asked her father to raise her up, looking out the window to say a sweet goodbye to the sky, the trees, the roses.

[00:31:18] And that evening at 8.30 p.m., Daisy looked at the clock, told her parents, all right, so it is half past eight now. When it's half past 11, Ali is going to come for me. And at Lulu's bedtime, Daisy called out this final lingering goodbye to her sister. At 11.15 p.m., Daisy turned to her father and said, now, Papa, take me up. Ali has come for me.

[00:31:43] And just as the hands of the clock hit exactly 11.30 p.m., she lifted her both arms to the empty room and cried, come, Ali. And immediately she took her last breath. And, you know, Daisy's father, who was like profoundly like moved by what we had just seen his 10-year-old daughter do, he spent years studying the New Testament in original Greek, publishing this major work on the resurrection in 1872.

[00:32:12] So we just looked at some data from like modern hospitals. This happened in 2024, so fairly recently. People were wondering about death, you know, in this sense, like what is it? Like how do we deal with this thing, people that are seeing these things when they're about to die? But these questions aren't recent, right? We already heard a lot of stories from late 1800s, early 1900s. But these have been going like for centuries, like thousands of years. So people are wondering what happens when you die.

[00:32:40] And for all these years, we've come up with different ways to personify death, to see what does this thing look like when it's coming after you. And some of us actually might be familiar with the Green Reaper, like what it looks like, right? The skeleton kind of thing, hood and is carrying this scyther. Now, this popular story came out in the late 13th century illustrations of this popular medieval legend. It's called the Three Living and the Three Dead. Now, in this story, there's three finely dressed young aristocrats or kings that are out hunting.

[00:33:10] And then they encounter these creatures, these three humans that are in various stages of decay. These skeletal figures, like they look at the young man and they're like, as I am, so you too will be. I said it kind of weird there, but basically as I am, so you too will be. And it was telling them, like, hey, you know, live, like repent and live righteously. So this relationship with death, like it was actually changed in the 14th century because of the bubonic plague.

[00:33:40] All these people, Europe, Asia, Africa in the mid-14th century, they were being wiped out by this disease. And to process all of this stuff that was going on, people like, and this like invisible thing that was coming to take you, they started coming up with like a thing where they would say like death is just like us. That way, death wasn't like this abstract idea, but like a human kind of thing. And then we started seeing the dance of death, right? The dance macabre.

[00:34:10] It was painted on church cemetery walls across Europe. And now these murals, they're, if you look up some pictures of these things, they depict skeletal figures and their half decomposed corpses that are dancing and interacting with people from like all walks of life. And they show that neither wealth, royalty, nothing is going to spare anybody from death. Renaissance artists obviously got into it. The Greeks got into it. Roman figures got into it.

[00:34:36] Like death was always like a figure that, you know, we looked at and we try to personify. But nobody, I guess, maybe, I mean, I don't want to say nobody, but like we don't get this idea that death itself, like people that are going to come welcome you into the other, you know, the afterlife are people that you knew in your lifetime. And we're not aware of that. Like we don't see that a lot in paintings. We usually see this creepy thing, right?

[00:35:02] Mexico City, there's the whole, you know, the Day of the Dead celebrations and the Catrinas, which are these skull figures that are like these skulls, these skeleton figures wearing like fancy dresses and suits. And this personified death that way, right? As people that died in the afterlife, this is what they look like. And they look pretty cool. I don't know. But all these things like of the Grim Reaper, I've often wondered where does it come from, right? And the name, here's where it comes from.

[00:35:31] Actually, it's pretty modern. The word grim, meaning fierce, cruel, savage, has been used in the late 10th century. And the phrase Grim Reaper appeared in English literature in 1847 in a book called The Circle of Human Life, which was a translation of an 1841 German devotional text. Interesting. There's a lot more things like the Anku and all these other ways that we can see death.

[00:35:59] Like, for example, this one, I'm not going to just mention it and not tell you about it, obviously. But in Celtic folklore, there's the Anku or Anku, this chilling personification of death in Lower Brittany that announces and precedes the passing. So according to this legend, the last person to die in each parish during the year becomes that parish's Anku for the entire next year.

[00:36:23] So that means it's like they're in charge of escorting and taking people, the souls of the newly dead, out into the afterworld. The afterworld, the other world, the afterlife, the other place, whatever comes next after death. And it's at the travel exclusively at night. Right. So it drives this wooden cart. It's this agonizing, grinding screeching that it's making. I hate that sound. And it's like signifying the approach. Like, and it's terrifying. This creepy thing that's approaching.

[00:36:51] And the Anku is actually described as a draped skeleton or as an incredibly tall, emaciated man with long, flowing white hair. His face hidden beneath a wide brimmed felt hat, building a scythe with its blade turned outward. Now, there's only 14 physical representations of the Anku that are in Brittany today. And the oldest wooden sculpture of the Anku originally stood in St. Matthew Church of Morley, Tragor region. All these things, if you look them up, you're going to find them really eerie.

[00:37:20] Like, people were wondering about death for forever. Like, as in the people, early people, they weren't like necessarily, you know how I often wonder, like how animals, dogs, like how they perceive death. But you've seen videos of people that record dogs when a dog friend or their owner passes away. And they react. Like, they're aware that they're never going to see them alive again. Like, they know. Right? So death is a very familiar thing.

[00:37:48] But it's a thing that we never really want to encounter. Yet we know for sure, like 100% certainty that we're going to meet death one day. So whether there is this creature thing crawling across the ceiling or you see a deceased friend, sibling, family member that's coming to you when you're about to pass away. I don't think we should see them as things that are taking our lives.

[00:38:15] I think, if anything, these constructs, like these things, should remind us that when the time comes, we won't have to cross to the other side alone. And there's something oddly beautiful and comforting about that. What do you think?

[00:38:41] You know, this is a surprisingly tough episode to record, just thinking about death so much because I've had these thoughts for a little bit. And it's been kind of a roller coaster, you know, thinking of death in this way. Anyway, just last week, I went with a friend. We were getting a Korean barbecue somewhere in Los Angeles, Southern California. And we talked about, you know, the death of our friend.

[00:39:10] And the reason was because his widow had left all the stuff with him, like with her, with my friend Natalia. And there were shirts, there were, you know, trinkets, little things that we don't know what to do with because here we can donate them, toss them, whatever.

[00:39:33] But it just feels like doing so is like actually like getting rid of things that remind us of him. Even though the most important thing that he left us are the memories, right? The stories that we built just by spending life with him.

[00:39:55] But, you know, as I was doing the research for this episode, thinking of everything that, first off, everything that goes on when we think of death and all the stories that also were sent to me about people who, you know, they lost a loved one.

[00:40:12] It was very strange looking at this from because I feel like if I would have done this research before, like had I never experienced somebody close to me passing away like that, they're there the next day they're not.

[00:40:29] But I think I would have looked at this episode a lot differently, you know, but thinking of it now like this is definitely a new perspective on death. And believe it or not, I do find it comforting knowing that he didn't go alone.

[00:40:51] You know, if he was greeted by people, he was greeted by people that he knew, people that love him and his life wasn't taken away. You know, he just he was he was greeted by people and taken somewhere else. I feel that's very comforting. And I really wish wish it's it's like that. I really hope that death is like that. And it's not like a.

[00:41:18] A really sad, bleak, dark affair all the time. Let me know what you thought of this episode. It was interesting learning about death in this in this way and also some of these cases that were really eerie, like in some parts. But again, I do find it interesting how we can shift our ideas of how we perceive these really creepy things by just adding some context and some life experience in there.

[00:41:44] But let me know what you want to hear about in this podcast in some upcoming episodes. Let me know what you thought of this one. I'll read your comments in the comment section. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. Hit the like button if you're watching on YouTube. And that's all I got. Thank you very much for watching or listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon.