Observations placeholder
Bozzano, Professor Ernesto - Psychic phenomena at the moment of death – 06 Mr. G. Hall Tench dying in 1902 of a carcinoma
Identifier
027226
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Ernesto Bozzano - Psychic phenomena at the moment of death [110 cases suggesting survival after death]
First category - Cases in which the apparitions of the deceased are perceived solely by the dying person, and relate to persons whose death he knew.
8th case. - Mr. S. Bennett communicates to Professor Hyslop this other episode which I also extract from the Journal of the A.S.P.R. (1918, page 607):
Mr. G. Hall Tench died in 1902 of a carcinoma, after years of great suffering borne stoically ... During the last weeks, I have watched over it assiduously. In spite of the terrible suffering that was tearing him apart, he still refused to take narcotics or stimulants, saying to those who urged him: "I have always lived in true Hall Tench, and I want to die all in one piece. "
In the night when the end came, he woke his son and invited him to reunite the family, his time having arrived. He spoke to everyone in the most rational and conscious way; when at last his brother arrived, he said to him again, "Farewell, Will; I am leaving. Then he closed his eyes. His friends thought the end had come, but after a short interval he opened his eyes again, raised his head, looked with interest at the top of the bed, and said in a very clear voice:
‘How then ! but they are people like us! And immediately he expired’ ...
Tench was not a religious man, although he was assisted to the end by a Methodist minister. On the other hand, he was a man of high morality, rigidly honest in all manifestations of life. He was, moreover, possessed of a great deal of firmness and courage, as he proved by refusing to allow his sufferings to be attenuated at the expense of his sensibility.
He was not a very cultivated man, nor passionate about reading. But I have no doubt that he would have thought long and hard about the destiny that awaited him, and most probably he would have felt his head filled with the usual images of winged angels and angelic harps; therefore, nothing more likely than at the last moment he expressed his surprise by seeing that the deceased who came to welcome him had the appearance of "people like us".