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A Friend's Deathbed Encounters

gattino

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
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One of my closest friends, Yan, told me some paranormal experiences in his life several months ago, and I've just had the chance to get him to repeat the stories in detail so I could recall and recount them accurately.

He's from Newcastle, of Bangladeshi parents. In the early 90s at the age, he estimates, of no more than 8, his surrogate "granddad" in Newcastle was ill in hospital. He and his younger brother went to visit him on the - say - Tuesday evening, and he was doing well and seemed his normal self.


Returning home and to bed, Yan apparently woke from a dream in great distress at around 4am, rushed to his parents room and was insistent he wanted to go back to the hospital. His parents calmed him and he returned to bed. Later that morning they got the call to say "granddad" had died.


Being Muslim the funeral was held swiftly, on the Friday. It was a long day and later that evening, after returning home to shower, they set off to gather with all the other family and friends at the grandparents house around 9pm. Yan told his parents he didn't want to go in as it was too upsetting, so they left him in the car in the back seat while they went into the house. He found himself drifting into that not quite sleep state where he was half dozing but certain any passing thing such as a car's headlight would not escape his awareness.


He reports he became aware of a small blue light hovering to his right..he looked at it and it grew and took the full bodily form of the deceased granddad. He was fully dressed in his typical clothing, which he described in detail, despite the whole thing remaining blue in colour. He was gobsmacked and scared. Granddad smiled at him and spoke - in an audible exterior voice, rather than telepathically - and told him he was ok now etc. He then "whispered" something to him (the implication here was that knowledge was passed this time without being necessarily audible). To this day, he says, he can't remember what it was he was told. Yan ran terrified from the car and into the house telling his family he'd just seen granddad. His dad chastised him for talking silly and upsetting people, but he ran to his "granny", sat on her knee and whispered into her ear what he had been told. Granny silenced the dad by saying, no he has seen him, because there's no other way he could know what he just told me. She shed, he says, a peaceful tear. She didn't tell anyone what it was and he has never had the courage to ask her in the years since, because of the silence around it. (He inferred it was something only the couple would know, akin to what she was wearing when they met or whatever..but purely as an example)


That took longer than I thought so I'll tell the other tale after I've had something to eat.
 
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The second incident was in adult life, about 8 years ago, during an extended visit with his mum to relatives in Bangladesh.

He was sharing a room with his mother and on this particular night he couldn't get to sleep. Watching the shadows in the darkness they began to take form. A human figure, solid black, but inexplicably familiar in form and presence, sat on the bed. He was experiencing sleep paralysis in that he was unable to move, but makes the distinction that there was no "sitting on my chest" often associated with that phenomenon. The figure just sat there. Yan was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread and then ..."woke up" screaming. Again it was around 4am, Bangladeshi time. His bed was drenched in sweat. He was insistent to his mum that they had to phone home to Newcastle and phone home NOW. She reasoned with him and promised him if he'd go back to bed she'd wake him at 7 and they'd do it then.

In fact he didn't wake till 11am, because he'd had so little sleep earlier int eh night, and was annoyed with his mum, still demaning to know if she had phoned home like she said. She hadn't. So they did, and Yan's dad back in Newcastle says no nothing's wrong, everything is fine.

That evening while there are guests in the house, his mum takes a phone call from the other room....and lets out a sobbing scream. Yan rushes in to ask what's happened and in the end takes the phone himself. It's his dad. Apparently "Aunty Sheila" (another family-like non relative)'s dad had died. He apparently had an equally close relationship with yan and his family. Given the time difference between the two countries it transpired he'd had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital at 3.30am Bangladeshi time, and died ...at 4am.
 
Many of these strange things occur at around 4 a.m. in the morning. I've heard of many other events at that time.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Many of these strange things occur at around 4 a.m. in the morning. I've heard of many other events at that time
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Isn't it traditionally 3 or 3.15 or some such? I think in the accounts above the only significance of it being 4am ..in the second case at least..was that that was hte time the man happened to die, taking into account the time difference. The 4am in the first story may be for the same reason, though I'm uncertain in that instance, and I can imagine the specific time was just his rough guess, perhaps influenced by association with the time in the second story.

Actually, though off topic, its an interesting point in it own right, the idea of a witching hour or that demonic or ghostly things happen at a particular time in the a.m., as of course the time is always a local thing, not an objective global one.
 
gattino said:
Isn't it traditionally 3 or 3.15 or some such?
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3am is the "Devil's Hour"...
The 3am time slot is regarded by paranormal experts as a time when pure evil - either demons or entities from the spirit world - make their presence felt.

The thinking behind the specific time of 3am is that it is a deliberate mocking of the death of Jesus Christ, who, according to ancient writing, died in the middle of the afternoon - at 3pm.
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https://uk.news.yahoo.com/the-devils-hour-this-is-why-you-might-feel-153152317.html

3:15am is The Amityville Horror!
 
gattino said:
Actually, though off topic, its an interesting point in it own right, the idea of a witching hour or that demonic or ghostly things happen at a particular time in the a.m., as of course the time is always a local thing, not an objective global one.
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But it seems these things happen to people at these times in their local time zone. This suggests these happenings occur during night-time when people are normally sleeping. So either they are an artefact of sleep itself, or else sleep opens the mind to paranormal connections.
 
GNC said:
Isn't that concept just a rip-off of Ray Bradbury's claims for 3am in... The October Country, I think it was? Back in the 1950s? (He asks, not bothering to look it up when Google is RIGHT THERE)
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Maybe Bradbury was using the "Devils' hour" legend..?

All I know is, Geroge Lutz said he awoke around 3-3:30 most nights in that house... and author Jay Anson, made it more specific - 3:15 - and tied it in with the time of the murders (although an exact time has never really been established)
 
It didn't read that way, I read it as a kid and the thought that 3am and not midnight was the witching hour blew my tiny mind.
 
In the Prologue of "Will Storr vs the Supernatural" when he's out with the "demonologist" Lou Gentile, the latter refers to them hearing 3 knocks, saying "its always three".

"Why three?" I ask
"Threes are a blasphemy to the trinity" he says. "Father, son and holy spirit. When these things come in threes its mocking God. Often you'll experience stuff between three and four in the morning - 3.33 can be a real hot time."

This was part of a magazine article Storr wrote and included as a prelude to his book. In re-considering the experiences described in the article he reports later in the prologue that he later got a panicked phone call from someone who'd heard his account third hand and told him she and her father both used to wake up inexplicably at 3.33am every night to the extent it was a family running joke, but now she was frightened.

The time appears in later incidents reported in the book too.
 
As a big Sopranos fan I'd like to mention that when Christopher (important gangster) is heavily drugged-up while recovering from a shooting, he is given a warning to pass onto the Boss. The danger is three o'clock!

This haunts Paulie, another top gangster, who finds himself repeatedly waking up at that time.
 
gattino said:
In the Prologue of "Will Storr vs the Supernatural" when he's out with the "demonologist" Lou Gentile, the latter refers to them hearing 3 knocks, saying "its always three".

"Why three?" I ask
"Threes are a blasphemy to the trinity" he says. "Father, son and holy spirit. When these things come in threes its mocking God. Often you'll experience stuff between three and four in the morning - 3.33 can be a real hot time."

This was part of a magazine article Storr wrote and included as a prelude to his book. In re-considering the experiences described in the article he reports later in the prologue that he later got a panicked phone call from someone who'd heard his account third hand and told him she and her father both used to wake up inexplicably at 3.33am every night to the extent it was a family running joke, but now she was frightened.

The time appears in later incidents reported in the book too.
Click to expand...

But until, say, well into the 20th Century, how would most people know what time they had woken up in the middle of the night anyway? Didn't most associate midnight with the witching hour and not be aware of when 3am was?
 
GNC said:
But until, say, well into the 20th Century, how would most people know what time they had woken up in the middle of the night anyway?
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Clocks with chimes.
 
GNC said:
Were they widespread before the 20th C?
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Among the more well-to-do, quite common.
Poorer people probably didn't have a timepiece.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Among the more well-to-do, quite common.
Poorer people probably didn't have a timepiece.
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There were more poor than well-to-do, but I suppose what we should be asking is if there are any references to 3am being scary before Bradbury? I'm no scholar, but I can't think of any offhand.
 
From a history article on clocks "In the early 1800’s, one of the most important events in clock making occurred. Eli Terry developed machines, patterns, and techniques that produced clock parts that were exactly alike, so they could be mass-produced and interchanged from one clock to another. This drove the price of clocks way down, and allowed common people to own at least one, if not many, timekeeping devices."
 
gattino said:
He reports he became aware of a small blue light hovering to his right..he looked at it and it grew and took the full bodily form of the deceased granddad. He was fully dressed in his typical clothing, which he described in detail, despite the whole thing remaining blue in colour. He was gobsmacked and scared. Granddad smiled at him and spoke - in an audible exterior voice, rather than telepathically - and told him he was ok now etc. He then "whispered" something to him (the implication here was that knowledge was passed this time without being necessarily audible). To this day, he says, he can't remember what it was he was told. Yan ran terrified from the car and into the house telling his family he'd just seen granddad. His dad chastised him for talking silly and upsetting people, but he ran to his "granny", sat on her knee and whispered into her ear what he had been told. Granny silenced the dad by saying, no he has seen him, because there's no other way he could know what he just told me. She shed, he says, a peaceful tear. She didn't tell anyone what it was and he has never had the courage to ask her in the years since, because of the silence around it.
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Believe it.

I had a very very similar experience as a child, relaying a message to my great grandmother at the wake after my great grandfathers funeral. It stuck with me because of the reaction it got, which wasn't good.
 
Church clocks chiming to keep the hours is far older than 19th/20th century - dates back to the 12th century (outside China - they had clock chimes even earlier than that) and the oldest surviving one in the UK is at Wells Cathedral and dates from the early 1300s. The quarterly chimes commonly used now date from the mid 18th century, though the Wells clock also marks the quarter hours so this concept is maybe far older. It developed from monastics marking the hours for prayer with a bell, and stayed as a public service as the vast majority of people pre 19th century had no clock and couldn't tell the time any other way and needed to know service times, and later work times. My local church still chimes the quarter hours 24 hours a day although there's no visible clock.
So yeah, the concept of 3am is very old. Also remember there's a lot of evidence that our pre industrial revolution sleep patterns involved two sleep periods - sunset to midnight and then awake for several hours before a second sleep before dawn.
 
Roland Deschain said:
had a very very similar experience as a child, relaying a message to my great grandmother at the wake after my great grandfathers funeral. It stuck with me because of the reaction it got, which wasn't good.
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Could you recount the story in as much detail as possible. I'd like to pass it on to him if its as close to this experience as it sounds.
 
Strangely all the clocks in my house (battery operated) on different days, weeks and months apart stop at 3.40am.
 
Eve11 said:
So yeah, the concept of 3am is very old. Also remember there's a lot of evidence that our pre industrial revolution sleep patterns involved two sleep periods - sunset to midnight and then awake for several hours before a second sleep before dawn.
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That's true, and explains why midnight was the Witching Hour of myth and legend, but why would there be two witching hours? Would they go, oh, get to sleep by midnight, then wake up at two and get to sleep at three again in time for witching hour part 2? Was the whole night fraught with terror that peaked twice?
 
gattino said:
Could you recount the story in as much detail as possible. I'd like to pass it on to him if its as close to this experience as it sounds.
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I was very young, just preschool. I saw my Great Grandparents often at least weekly as my Father had spent at least as much time with them as his parents during his childhood.

I can recall my Father telling my Mother about his Grandfathers passing.

I did not attend the funeral, but was taken to the wake which was at my Great Grandparents home. I was put out into the garden, probably being a bit boisterous for the general mood.

Out in the garden I wandered into the greenhouse where I had spent many an hour pottering around with him, the kindly old man getting me potting things and sowing seeds etc.

In the greenhouse I became aware of a voice, his voice calling me. He then relayed a message for me to urgently tell my Great Grandmother - just little things really - not to worry, he's ok they will be together again etc. There was a bit more to it and he was very reassuring to me when I asked him where he was and why he wasn't here.

Anyway I did as asked, and it didn't go down well. I recall the immediate circle of adults surrounding my G. Grandmother going silent and turning to look at me and then the fury of my Father, which is the bit that fixed it into my memory. I had never feared him until then.

In later years I asked my Mother about it. She confirmed what I had said and it wasn't some dream. Also that wasn't the end of the matter as he visited others that night - guess he wanted his say but sadly they were terrified whereas I just accepted what he wanted.

Some aspects are still quite vivid. The greenhouse, the soil, the warmth of the sun, my clothes, the faces.
 
Thanks for that. The correlations are striking.

I've been reading Peter Fenwick's The Art Of Dying and a couple of other books on deathbed visions, crisis apparitions etc, and there are clear patterns to this stuff. Children seem far more receptive to experiencing actual apparitions for one.
 
Slightly off topic but my sister in law had a jack Russell terrier which was very fond of her father. One morning, the dog seemed very subdued. Instead of his usual running around he walked quietly from one member of the family to the next, licking their hands and curling up beside them for a while before moving on to the next person.

When he done that he went to his bed, curled up facing the wall and began whining. They were concerned about him and thought about phoning the vet when the phone rang, it was the nursing home calling to say my sister in law’s dad had died.
 
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