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MYS417: Something happens at the moment of death. Sometimes the living sense it from miles away — a vision, a voice, a presence, a sudden inexplicable certainty that someone they love is gone. These are crisis apparitions, and they’ve been documented in the scientific literature since 1882.

Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli trace the full history of crisis apparition research, from the founding of the Society for Psychical Research and its landmark Census of Hallucinations — a survey of more than 17,000 people — through modern studies on deathbed phenomena and altered states of consciousness. Along the way, they examine the cases that shaped how researchers think about these experiences: a soldier’s wife who sees her husband’s figure and notices a wound on his right temple, later confirmed; a man who perceives his brother at the exact moment of death; collective apparitions witnessed by multiple people simultaneously.

The SPR defined a strict “crisis window” — within 12 hours of a death or serious physical crisis — and documented six distinct categories of crisis impressions: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, emotional, and dreams. When analyzed statistically, the rate of crisis coincidences was far beyond what chance alone would predict.

The word “telepathy” was coined specifically to explain these experiences. Researchers needed new vocabulary because nothing existing fit what they were documenting. That line of inquiry eventually fed into the development of the EEG — one of the unexpected downstream effects of taking these phenomena seriously as a scientific question.

Jimmy and Dom also work through the skeptical objections: coincidence, selective memory, the tendency to remember the hits and forget the misses. They walk through what the evidence actually supports and what it doesn’t.

And they look at what the Catholic tradition says. The Church has never found crisis apparitions troubling. The soul’s journey after death isn’t instantaneous, and Catholic tradition has always left room for mystery at the threshold between this life and the next.

140 years of data. Still no clean answer. But the evidence is stranger — and more compelling — than most people realize.

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Links for this episode:

• Daniel Bourke’s book Apparitions at the Moment of Death
• Phantasms of the Living, vol. 1
• Phantasms of the Living, vol. 2
• Proceedings of the SPR (1st Literary Committee report)
• Census of Hallucinations
• Pearson, Mossbridge, and Beischel’s paper Crisis Impressions: A Historical and Conceptual Review
• Phenomena Related to Danger, Death, and Bereavement (Psi Encyclopedia)
• Society for Psychical Research (Psi Encyclopedia)
• Hans Berger (Grokipedia)

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Chapters:

• 0:00 – MYS417
• 0:13 – Intro
• 1:28 – What is a crisis apparition?
• 5:26 – Reorts of crisis apparitions
• 10:02 – Mrs. Birkbeck
• 13:31 – Captain Colt
• 17:43 – J.G. Keulemans
• 21:30 – Sarah Jardine
• 23:18 – Multiple percipients
• 23:48 – C. Colchester
• 26:06 – Liston and Creigh
• 28:51 – Silence in apparitions
• 29:18 – Miss H.
• 32:46 – Apparitions without death
• 33:27 – Bishop Wilberforce
• 34:49 – Auditory apparitions
• 35:05 – R. Fryer
• 37:08 – Frederick Corder
• 44:13 – Apparitions in dreams
• 45:03 – Dr. A
• 48:44 – Origin of telepathy
• 51:21 – Census of Hallucinations
• 53:33 – Hans Berger
• 58:01 – Thank you to Patrons
• 58:30 – Sponsor: The Secret of the Goldfish
• 59:24 – Sponsor: The Grady Group
• 59:41 – Reason Perspective
• 1:00:14 – Crisis impressions
• 1:02:35 – How common?
• 1:06:51 – Six categories
• 1:07:51 – Visual or auditory hallucinations
• 1:13:07 – Dreams or borderland visions
• 1:14:38 – Mental impressions
• 1:19:59 – Physical impressions
• 1:22:03 – Deathbed visions
• 1:23:36 – Sensed-presence experiences
• 1:24:59 – Components of crisis impressions
• 1:25:50 – Genders of the agents and the experients
• 1:27:23 – Relationship between experient and agent
• 1:31:07 – State of consciousness of experient
• 1:33:08 – Geographic occurrence
• 1:34:47 – Frequency of experience
• 1:35:48 – Telepathy? Paranormal?
• 1:38:27 – Faith Perspective
• 1:44:40 – Bottom Line
• 1:45:28 – Further Resources
• 1:46:34 – Mysterious Feedback: #406 Exposing the Myth of the Zodiac Killer
• 1:52:31 – Your mysterious feedback
• 1:53:12 – Thank you to Oasis Studio 7
• 1:53:16 – Jimmy’s YouTube channel
• 1:53:58 – Next Time: Skeleton Lake
• 1:54:09 – Share the show
• 1:54:18 – Get your Mysterious merch
• 1:54:26 – Show notes
• 1:54:33 – Become a Patron
• 1:54:42 – Sponsor: Rosary Army and School of Mary
• 1:55:05 – Sponsor: The Lord Is A Warrior
• 1:55:53 – Outro

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