When Raymond Moody’s groundbreaking book Life after Life hit the market in 1975, with its accounts of life-after-death/near-death experiences, it created a cultural phenomenon. The book described account after account of individuals who, either on the verge of death or actually clinically dead, survived and revived, bringing with them vivid memories of an existence outside their physical bodies. Suddenly, the idea that some people may have actually had a view into what happens after death didn’t seem quite so crazy. Since that time, accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) have filled the bookshelves and television talk shows to the point that I think most people (in the US, anyway) are familiar with them, at least in passing.
If you’ve read my post on miracles, you know that while I love a good theological or philosophical discussion, I’m even more interested in direct encounters with the divine. I like the idea of going straight to the source. It seems to me that the accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) have a lot of potential for that sort of thing — assuming, of course, they’re the real deal and not just manifestations of brain malfunction. So just like with miracles, I think it’s fair to approach the topic with a fair amount of skepticism. But the criteria for evaluating whether they’re real or not needs to be objective. We can’t just dismiss them simply because they don’t match up with our pre-conceived ideas, whether Mormon, atheist, or anything else.
The “average” account of an NDE, as popularlized in books and on TV, would go something like this: the person is in severe physical travail; she finds herself outside her body, looking down on herself and realizes “this is it — I’m dead”; she feels pulled away, possibly through a tunnel into another plane or spiritual existence; her fear dissipates and she feels tremendous love and peace; she sees a light and desires to move toward the light; she’s met either by another being (possibly a deceased family member) or she hears a voice; she’s told she can come no farther and that she must go back; she wants so much to remain; she wakes up in her body, having had the most real and lucid experience of her life. You’ve probably all heard it before — it’s almost cliché at this point. But actually, my impression of NDEs (having read dozens) is that they’re all very unique. So different, in fact, that it seems pretty impossible to jam more than a few into the description just given, and even those will have details that seem way too significant to leave out. Also, that “average” account is actually more involved than most, and could be considered a “deeper” experience.
Another thing I found interesting: NDEs just aren’t that rare. They’re common enough and widely reported enough that various doctors and psychiatrists have started researching them — real science! — and publishing their results in peer-reviewed journals. In fact, they’ve even started their own journal. But when I say real science, I mean as real as it gets for psychiatry. Just like psychiatry, researchers are mostly dependent on people’s responses and descriptions, not things they can directly measure. It would be fascinating to run an electroencephalogram (EEG) on the brain of someone who was experiencing an NDE, for example, but it’s hard to arrange that experiment in a way that wouldn’t be unethical. Consequently, researchers are mostly reduced to using surveys.
I recently listened to Evidence of the Afterlife (on audiobook) by Jeffrey Long, M.D. who started the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, which is essentially a web page inviting people who have experienced an NDE, to describe it and answer a fairly extensive questionnaire. At the time he published his book (2010), which contains the results of several studies based on the answers to the questionnaire, he had about 1600 respondents on his NDERF website. Now, he has collected over 4000 such experiences which he has categorized as NDEs, probable NDEs, and possible NDEs. They come from all over the world, and he has a small army of volunteer translators (some better than others) to help with communication. While every account is unique — some dramatically so — he’s still been able to identify 12 elements that seem to create a common thread, based on 617 of the first accounts to his website:
- Out-of-body experience (OBE) — 75.4% of respondents report observing events from a vantage point outside of their bodies, usually from above. They can report seeing doctors or emergency personal attempting to save their lives or relatives grieving over them, although their body is clearly unconscious and their eyes are closed.
- Heightened Sense of Awareness — 74.4% said they felt more conscious/alert than normal
- Intense and generally positive emotions — 76.2% said they experienced incredible peace or pleasantness, 52% said they experienced incredible joy
- Passing into or through a tunnel — 33.8% said they passed through a tunnel
- Encountering a mystical or bright light — 64.6% said they’d seen a mystical/bright light
- Encountering other beings or relatives or friends — 57.3% said they’d encountered other beings
- Sense of alteration of time or space — 60.5% said time/space was different
- Life Review — 22.2% reported seeing the events of their lives played out before them
- Encountering unworldly, heavenly realms — 50.2% said they entered some other unearthly world
- Special Knowledge — 56% reported having a sense of knowing special knowledge, and 31.5% felt like they suddenly seemed to understand everything
- Encountering a Boundary or Barrier — 31% reported reaching a boundary or limiting physical structure that prevented them from proceeding further.
- Return to the Body, either voluntary or involuntary — 58.5% said they involved in or aware of a decision for them to return to their bodies
Dr. Long feels that the prevalence and consistency of these elements showing up across all NDEs, and especially the fact that they show up with essentially the same frequency across ethnicity, culture, age, and religious backgrounds (he’s done studies) is strong evidence that NDEs are the real deal. I find that somewhat persuasive, but just a quick calculation using his own numbers (assuming no correlation, which probably isn’t accurate) shows the likelihood of a single NDE including all 12 elements at less than 0.04%. Even if you take out the less common elements (ie., Tunnel, Life Review, Barrier) the odds of all the remaining elements occurring within a single NDE are only 1.6%. To me, this implies as much inconsistency as consistency.
I would guess that most doctors dismiss NDEs as simply manifestations of a highly distressed brain. Once the heart stops beating, it only takes about 20 to 30 seconds for the brain’s oxygen supply to decrease to the point where electrical activity in the neocortex (where higher cognitive functions occur, including consciousness) stops entirely. During the transition, it seems neurons could fire all sorts of random shots, and when the brain reawakens, its highly interpolative nature [1] could create whole stories from them.
A neuro-surgeon by the name of Eben Alexander admits he would say such things to his patients too, until he had his own NDE. In his book Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, Dr. Alexander describes how he came down with an extremely rare bacterial meningitis which put him in a coma for 7 days. During that time, he says had the most vivid, lucid, and conscious experience of his life, in which he moved between planes of existence and interacted with other beings, including God. His account is fascinating and well-written, and he agrees with Dr. Long that there’s no way to dismiss NDEs as simply manifestations of a misfiring brain. Dr. Alexander points out that he also experienced the psychosis common to people whose brains are coming out of coma, including delusions, paranoia, and extremely realistic and terrifying dreams (in which his wife was trying to kill him). But he points out that afterwards he could look back on that period and recognize those memories and thoughts for the psychosis they were. On the other hand, his NDE memories, he says, remain the most real he has. He points out that when he was in coma, his neocortex was entirely shut down. It was physically impossible for him to be processing visual or auditory images or creating memories, especially those as rich and complex as he had during his NDE, without some higher functioning brain activity. Furthermore, he points out that the symptoms of hypoxia (low oxygen in the brain) include disjointed and indistinct images and thoughts, not the highly lucid narratives that accompany NDEs.
One topic that’s attracted a lot of research is the out-of-body experience (OBE). OBEs are rather common in contexts other than NDEs [2] — one estimate says that 1 in 10 people will have an OBE at least once in their lives. An OBE is basically having a sense that one’s self is located outside of one’s body, and there are claims they can be caused by meditation, sensory deprivation, sensory over-stimulation, rapid changes in blood pressure (such as in astronaut training), disassociative hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, artificial stimulation of particular parts of the brain, and even from achieving a body asleep / mind awake state (Thomas Edison and Salvador Dalí are said to have deliberately put themselves in this state for their work). However, as both Dr. Long and Dr. Alexander point out, the OBEs described during NDEs tend to be qualitatively different than those induced in other ways. For example, those experiencing NDEs (NDEers) often describe seeing things that they simply couldn’t, as they were unconscious and their eyes were closed. Skeptics don’t find descriptions of doctors using a defibrillator or paramedics doing CPR all that convincing, though, because the NDEer’s brains could construct those things from images on television. However, there have been several cases in which NDEers reported seeing things that could be verified. In one account I read, a woman found herself at the ceiling looking down on her grieving husband and her inert body, and she happened to see an important document on the top of a cabinet. When she awoke, she told her husband where it was. She couldn’t have seen it without the OBE. Another time a man flatlined and they were trying to intubate him. They removed his dentures, as they were getting in the way, and someone put them in the drawer of the crash cart. Later, when he’d revived and they’d wanted him to eat, nobody knew where the dentures were. Since he’d been outside his body watching the whole event from above, he could tell them not only that the dentures were in the crash cart, but in which drawer. In yet another case, a woman described seeing a shoe on a window ledge as she passed out of the hospital, and she described it in detail (color, styling) upon her revival. A researcher went from window to window of the hospital’s upper floors and actually found the shoe.
Since OBEs seem like something that could actually be checked out, Dr. Sam Parnia initiated the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study. Shelves were placed in hospital rooms in which resuscitations were likely to occur, and on each shelf was placed an image that could only be viewed from above. The idea was that if the patient experienced an OBE in which they were looking down from the ceiling, they would be able to describe the image, but otherwise would be unable to see them. Seems like a good test, right? Well, the results of the study have been published, and they produced no new evidence of a real OBE. Of 2060 patients, only 101 both survived and achieved a good enough health for a stage 2 interview, and of those, only 9 were identified as having had an NDE. Of those 9, only 2 were deemed to have had an OBE (a lower percentage than Dr. Long’s study would have predicted), and one of them was too ill for a stage 3 interview. The remaining guy’s cardiac arrest happened in a room that hadn’t had the shelves, so all he could do was describe the doctors working. There’s some noise about trying the study again (AWARE II).
Dr. Long, however, is thoroughly convinced that NDEs occur, and he has several reasons besides OBE evidence (his book lists a dozen). For example, people who have been blind from birth and had an NDE describe what they’ve experienced very much like a sighted person would, which is remarkable, considering they’ve no real concept of what sight is. They may not call it sight, but they described being able to investigate things and gathering information about their surroundings in a way a sighted person would call “seeing”. Another example is that those reporting an NDE from early childhood (age 5 or younger) would describe their NDEs in much the same ways as adult NDEers would, before they were at an age to know anything about NDEs, tunnels, bright lights, or anything that would have prejudiced their account.
Personally, I have two different points of view when it comes to NDEs. First, I’m hesitant to draw conclusions from too little data, and I’m not convinced there are as many NDEs as claimed. It’s impossible to know how close to death most NDEers really were. Somebody passing out from lack of blood, or from drowning, or from a car accident isn’t necessarily brain dead. Short of an EEG to verify the brain is truly not functioning, it’s really hard to rule out that something funny isn’t going on in there. Our sense of time, place, context, and every other perception our earthly body has, resides in some circuit in the brain. There are cases, such as those of Dr. George R. Ritchie (Return from Tomorrow) and Dr. Eben Alexander where the evidence is pretty strong they were brain dead, but these cases are rarer [3], and even then it seems quite possible the brain constructed those experiences as it was shutting down or firing back up.
On the other hand, the thing that I find most compelling is how absolutely transformative the near-death experience is for so many who’ve had one. I haven’t gone into this at all yet (next installment! — you can’t wait, I know!), but for me, it’s the most marvelous and wonderful part of the whole discussion [4]. Reading some of those accounts, it’s like listening to a convert at church who will bear testimony of the spiritual witness she’s received, that the church is true, or the Book of Mormon is the word of God. She can describe her experience as absolutely real, and you can easily put it down to her emotional state or whatever, but you can’t deny that whatever she claims to have experienced seems to have dramatically influenced her life.
Next post we’ll dive into some of the content of these NDEs, how they line up with Mormon Doctrine, and how they influence the lives of those who experience them.
But first, has anybody out there had a near-death experience, or even an out-of-body experience?
Do you believe the phenomena is actually real, or do you think NDEs are simply the results of fevered minds and a fad promoted by Oprah?
[1] The brain doesn’t store every detail of a memory, but rather stores bits and pieces and interpolates between them to make a whole picture. That’s part of why eye-witnesses of abrupt events are so notoriously unreliable, even when they’re so sure of what they saw. Their brain remembers just a couple parts to what happened and fills in the gaps in a way that makes sense, even if it doesn’t line up with reality. The biarn si prtaliacurly gdoo at aranrgign the wlhol pticure from sctatered pntois, as yuo cna tlel by how esialy adn qukcliey yua cna raed tihs snteenec.
[2] My mother might have had an OBE. When I was quite young, she was involved in a serious car accident. She said that just as impact was imminent, she found herself outside the car looking down as the accident happened. After things came to rest, she found herself back in the car, entirely unhurt. I think she thought her whole body had been removed from the car, because I remember her saying that when she found herself back in the car, there was glass everywhere, but not on her.
[3] Dr. Long would argue this point strenuously, given all the NDEs that occur during anesthesia, or from an overdose of anesthesia, which would completely shut down the neocortex.
[4] In the sense that they make me marvel and wonder — and are generally really good.
Wheat & Tares 
Great post and interesting questions. I think it’s interesting when things point to the fact that there is some kind of afterlife or something “more” there. It’s exciting. I think we as Mormons are often expecting that the details will confirm what we knew all along and we are confused when they don’t. My takeaway is that we don’t know a lot about what is on the other side and there is a good chance it will be nothing like what we expect. That is exciting and terrifying. I would love to see a shift in focus from preparing for the afterlife to enjoying and progressing in this life and leaving the next life much more mysterious. But I will concede that is not very Mormon.
I love reading them all! I find all the details fascinating.
felixfabulous: Actually, that is very Mormon in one sense. Mormons don’t like to admit that they don’t know a lot about the afterlife, but we really don’t. I think it’s as much a mystery to us as it is to anyone. It’s just that we don’t like to admit it.
Oops. I left out the footnotes and nobody called me out on them! There… fixed!
I was recently thinking about this and talking with a friend about it as well. We don’t know why some people commit suicide but come back and others commit suicide and don’t come back. I recall reading about how some people kill themselves in a graphic way but come back all in one piece, what divine law is working there? but others don’t seem to have that option.Why do some suicides have a NDE and others don’t?In going further i’ve read numerous NDE’s and to me it seems so random and almost personalized and as you say some have some experiences and others don’t have that.
whizzbang, interesting you should bring up suicides. It turns out that most NDEers report very positive experiences, but a small percentage report seeing things that we’d consider quite negative (eg., hell). There is some evidence to suggest that NDEs induced from suicide are more likely to be more negative than is usual. However, it’s hard to make too much out of that, considering the mind-state of those attempting suicide is usually quite negative to start with. Regardless whether the experience was negative or positive (and I’ve read compelling versions of each), NDEers whose experience comes from a suicide attempt are unlikely to try suicide again.
When the NDE involves seeing Buddha or some other God other than a Christian one, or some other aspect does not jive with our Mormon world view, we dismiss it.
What would constitute convincing proof of dying and coming back? Perhaps we could ask an easier but similar question. What would constitute proof of going to Japan and returning? A pocket full of Japanese coins? But I have some in a box from my mission and my kids could get them. Perhaps acquiring knowledge only available there ? Secrets about future Honda automobiles?
The most interesting NDE I have heard was told to me by my grandmother about a childhood friend of her mother. This person when 12 years old contracted a severe infection and died on a Sunday during stake conference. A visiting apostle went to her home after she had been dead for a couple of hours. He brought her back and restored her health. She related seeing a bright light and meeting loved ones who had gone before her. She was given a choice to return or stay and she wanted to comeback. So far pretty typical.
What was so interesting; while in heaven she met a man wearing fishing boots. She did not know him but he introduced himself as an uncle who drowned in the Bear river many years before she was born. He had a message for his wife who always wondered what happened to him. He had gone fishing without telling anyone, and he disappeared without a trace. He told the 12 year old girl the exact location where he drowned and where his bones could be found still in the fishing boots like he was wearing.
The older members of her family were astonished when the 12 year old girl told them this story from beyond the grave. They had assumed this uncle had ran off to California and they had never told any of the next generation about him. The following day they made a trip to the Bear river and quickly found his body where the 12 year old girl told them it would be, and the leg bones still in the fishing boots she described and also other personal items known to belong to him. His remains were taken to the family cemetery and he was given a proper burial and memorial service. His wife was greatly comforted, especially since she had remarried and had children and always worried that he might return and ruin her new life.
This 12 year old girl brought back accurate, tangible information from the other side that could be verified and she had no other way of knowing it. Of course, the story is third hand like most really great folk tales.
Bishop Bill, the way you said that sounds so cynical about Mormons! Of course people reject new information that appears to be outlier — everybody does that, Mormon or not, and that’s not only normal, but good. I’m sure you’ve tried the Atkins, the pescatarian, the vegan, and the paleo diets, bought all the essential oils, and have used acupuncture and cupping to cure all your ills, right? People are open to new information when something just doesn’t fit in how they used to see things or when there’s a preponderance of evidence or a particularly credible witness. We’re not expected to take the witness of one man, though he prophesy the whole earth pass away. Besides, there are a lot of NDEs, and they’re contradictory so you can just choose the ones you like. Personally, I think it’s wise to interpret NDEs as a group, using each other as references, and see what can be gleaned from them. Which is what I intend to do next time.
I wrote an essay for the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 2/1 called “Nigh Unto Death: The Book of Mormon and NDE Research” in which I showed not only that Alma’s conversion matches modern NDE accounts, but that both Alma and the resurrected Jesus demonstrate all of the after-effects. Writing it now, I would also point out that when Jedediah Grant reported his NDE experience to Heber C. Kimball, the most telling comment was, “Why it was just as Brigham has told us many times.” For the background on that comment, look to Brigham Young’s vision of Joseph Smith at Winter Quarters when taken very ill, and also consider the kinds of things that Brigham describes in “The Spirit World” chapter of the Brigham Young Priesthood manual. It goes far beyond anything in the scriptures, and yet, it matches closely the kinds of things that appear in modern accounts. I would also note that in 1999 at the IANDS conference in Salt Lake City, I heard Howard Storm report and experience that closely matches Alma’s account, and also has him saying many things that closely match the after effects and manner of speaking.
So, yes, it is an interesting topic. Whereas Ralph Waldo Emerson urged people to avoid this kind of question and inquiry, Joseph Smith encouraged it as an urgent and important topic of inquiry. And Mormon culture has been notably hospitable to telling such stories.
Kevin, that was a really interesting essay, and from 25 years ago! You didn’t include a link, but here it is:
https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1382&index=2
Mike, great story, and since it happened in what I’ll assume are fairly modern times, we should be able to document the facts, such as the date the Apostle visited the town for the conference, the finding of the bones would have required a corners inquest, so there would be those documents, and the obituary and burial in the cemetery would be documented, with an actual head stone in the cemetery would be available with death date that corresponded to the dates of him going missing. Plus all the newspaper articles about him missing, finding the bones, etc.
Not that I’m doubting the story, but this seems like an excellent opportunity to provide definitive proof of NDEs and an afterlife! As they say, “”Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” Somebody needs to dig in to this!
@Bishop Bill, it was President Lorenzo Snow, he raised a young Ella Jensen back from the dead, and she recounts the visit with the Uncle
http://www.ldsliving.com/When-President-Snow-Called-a-Girl-Back-from-the-Dead-An-Incredible-Account-of-the-Spirit-World/s/82410?page=1#story-content
https://ldsscriptureteachings.org/2016/12/13/ella-jensen-raised-from-the-dead-by-lorenzo-snow/
whizzbang, thanks for that! I had not heard that story, and matches well with what Mike recounted, except there was no mention of finding Uncle Han’s remains. I found her descriptions of meeting other relatives and especially the deceased child from her Sunday School class very moving. They hadn’t told her the child was dead because they didn’t want to vex her in her fragile state. This would definitely qualify as “deep” NDE, and the fact that she claimed Pres. Snow was the one who called her back because she had a work to do makes the story extremely Mormon. (As did some of the closing words of the article: “It may well be thought that Ella Jensen’s work on earth was not yet completed, as indicated by President Snow, for she afterwards became president of the Young Ladie’s Mutual Improvement Association in Brigham City. Afterwards she married and became a mother in Israel, and surely a woman can do no greater work in the world than to become a mother of men”).
According to the article, the event happened in 1891 when Ella was in her twentieth year (means she was 19, right?).
No problem!!! It seemed vaguely familiar to me and I recalled Pres. Snow had some kind of an experience like that and it mentioned the deceased uncle and fishing. It’s an interesting account for sure!
I couldn’t resist – I had to follow in Martin’s footsteps and learn more about Ella – to see if there were contemporary reports in conjunction with the 1920s sources whizzbang provided. The family is in the 1880 census in Brigham City. They are also on Family Tree on FamilySearch (though she appears as Mary Ellen Jensen, not as Ella, as she is in 1880). According to Family Tree, she did have an uncle Hans who died in 1888. Stories attached to his profile include the 1929 Improvement Era article and an unsourced account echoing much of the story related above by Mike. Brigham City news that made it into Ogden and Salt Lake papers (on Utah Digital Newspapers) reported Ella’s illness and recovery in March-May 1891, with no mention of any extraordinary events associated with her recovery (not to say they didn’t happen, just that the newspaper didn’t report any). In March 1892 she was again reported as having had a return of the dangerous illness she had the previous year – an illness that had her “confined to her bed and part of the time out of her mind.” (Ogden Standard Examiner, 6 Mar 1892 – Brigham City notes). She recovered and by September (1892) she spoke about self control at the YLMIA conference and in December she was running for “Most Popular Lady in Box Elder County” (Brigham City Bugler, 24 Sep and 10 Dec 1892). She regularly appears in the newspaper, up to her marriage in 1895, but never with any mention of the events around her illness- perhaps because they weren’t recorded at the time, or perhaps were not considered appropriate to share beyond the family.
Looking for Hans found more contemporary sources, but no definitive answers. The Salt Lake Herald for 21 Oct 188 reported his drowning in the Snake River near Glenns Ferry, Idaho on 19 Oct. The account is detailed and suggests an eye-witness to the drowning, but they had not yet discovered the body. I didn’t readily find any newspaper notice of the discovery of his body and subsequent burial. Glenns Ferry is over 200 miles from Brigham City – so any recovery would have taken time. He was buried in Antimony, but the Utah Cemetery database doesn’t have a date for his burial. Why he was buried in Antimony (250 miles south of Brigham City and nearly 500 miles from Glenns Ferry) is a mystery.
Whizzbang:
That is astonishing. I never have heard about this healing story of Ella Jensen Wright. That I remember.
My grandmother was born in the 1890’s; the time frame fits. My grandmother and her mother lived most of their life about 20 miles from Brigham City at a time when people tended to know the folks in their community and those nearby. These towns were about the size of wards. It is highly likely my great grandmother knew Ella Jensen. The age of 12 versus 19 years old is similar, bracketing the teen years. The infection and scarlet fever matches. Lorenzo Snow was an apostle in 1891 although he was not visiting from very far.
The major difference is the proof. The ldsliving account includes Ella reporting meeting a boy about her age in heaven who died the same day. She had not been told about his death. (Impossible to prove or refute that). No mention is made of fishing boots and discovery of bones in the Bear river which is only a few miles west of Brigham City. Little of the documentation Bishop Bill describes would have been made at that time. I can image the family just going out there and doing it all themselves.
The ldsliving version of the story is not without merit. But it lacks the potential for more solid proof of my “fishing boots” version. The ldsliving version was taken from church publications, (The improvement Era and a biography of Lorenzo Snow). They would have been edited. It is highly likely my grandparents read this material decades before I was born. They read like people watch TV or play with digital devices today. So these sources are not exactly distinct.. Which is more accurate?
A quick look at the wiki article for the Prophet Lorenzo Snow lists 9 wives and 42 children.
Lorenzo Snow had a son named Alphonzo Houtz Snow born 1858 died 1933. He is mentioned in the ldsliving account as the father of the recently expired boy Ella met in heaven. The find-a-grave site* for Brigham city lists 73 people with the surname of Snow, almost a blizzard of them. This list includes, of course, the Prophet Lorenzo Snow, his son of interest Alphonzo Houtz Snow and a Alphonzo Houtz Alphie Snow, born 28 March 1885 and died 3 March 1891, exactly matching the ldsliving account. He would have been almost 16 years old and about 3 years younger than Ella. At least they are not making people up.
I find little to question in the ldsliving account after a first blush. The “fishing boots’ account will have to await further proof. With scads of Jensens living around there at the time, it might be difficult to exclude it. Or a similar event happened twice. But I have relatively little to no documentation and in comparison my version is at best “fishy.”. That seems to be the trouble with so many of these NDE, the proof is in the pudding and the pudding is often only have baked.
The horrible irony is that Lorenzo Snow raised this young woman Ella from the dead the exact same day as one of his grandsons of similar age died, both in the same small town.
*I like this source because it sometimes has actual pictures of the headstones and I feel like I am standing right there..
OK, now I put on my cynical hat. All these great stories took place long ago, before modern things like photography, Internet, etc. So while HH9 made a valiant attempt to validate the story, it falls short. Does anybody else notice that all these miraculous events took place before the modern age of instant verification? Today there would be Facebook posts on the girl being raised from the dead, newspaper articles, cell phone photos, etc. It would be hard to fake it, and if it was fake, it would soon be found out.
Just like when Elder Holland told a somewhat miraculous story of a young man going on a mission and finding his long lost brother! This was in modern times, and the internet carried it far and wide and it only took a few days before the parents heard the story and called Holland and told him it was not true.
I could see the same thing happening with the Story about Ella if the internet had been around then. Somebody would tell the embellished story in a Stake Conference, somebody else would post it on Facebook, and then Ella or her parents would see it and say “ya, that’s not exactly how it happened”
So we have great stories from long ago, but not so much today.
Bishop Bill, that’s your skeptical hat — much better than your cynical hat. I absolutely agree the story isn’t validated, but thank you HH9 for that research! Fascinating stuff. I have little doubt that there are parts of that story that don’t check out — after all, the report in the Improvement Era was 38 years after the fact. But the closer you get, the more bits of truth you get, which is really fun. But even if she hadn’t been dead for 3 hours, or even if Pres. Snow had called her back, or even if some of the details of the NDE account aren’t entirely accurate, the overall account does fit right into what I would call the mainstream of NDE accounts. It’s just even more interesting to me because of its distinctly Mormon flavor.
IIRC Dennis Horne in his bio on Lorenzo Snow, talks about this experience, if someone has a copy they could scan through and see if there is more to the story?
I know we’ve gone off topic here a bit, but I found one more tidbit that complicates the story (if it is accurate). (Because it turns out trying to find Hans and Ella is way more exciting than doing my job today.) I will say that I’m with other skeptical commenters – not that this event didn’t happen, just that having contemporary 19th century evidence (not necessarily proof) would be a nice complement to the current NDE research. I’m fascinated by your post Martin, and was just hoping we could find historical nuggets of use.
As for the tidbit I found: there is a 18 Jul 1889 report in the Salt Lake Herald that states a body was found in the Snake River – down river from where Hans Jensen drown the previous October. Rumor in Brigham was that this was Hans’s body, but it hadn’t been confirmed yet. If this was Hans , it doesn’t work with the story. However, there is no follow up, which makes me think that body wasn’t Hans. (As an aside, a SL Herald article from 28 Oct 1888 has a letter describing the search for his body and the sadness and tragedy expressed there make me think that no matter what evidence there is of Ella’s later experience, it must have had a major impact on the families.)
Can you imagine though the reality of raising someone from the dead? You get a call saying that so and so is dead but can you give them a blessing anyways? You go to the place and there is a deceased body laying before you. I would want gloves myself to even touch it and then to bless the person and feel inspired to come back to life and then they actually do? That would be the scare of your life, you’d remember it forever i’d imagine. I found this in Elder Rudger Clawson’s journal, dated Oct. 14, 1900
“I made remarks upon the subject of signs following believers and related an incident where a young woman [Ella Jensen], who had apparently died, was restored to life and health by the anointing and laying on of hands of Pres. Snow and myself.”
I don’t know if he ever referred to it earlier in his journals from that time ,but the 1890’s ones are at the UofU and hard to get at, Pres. Snow’s diary, if he kept one from that time is non existent.
Is it allowed now to be skeptical of my own story? Or must I defend it to the bitter end.
The anguish felt by Lorenzo Snow that day must have been enormous and is undeniable. This got me to wondering. Let us speculate that he visits Alphie’s family either a little before or after his death. That would be so hard, he was so young. He was almost his name sake, Lorenzo and Alphonzo. Then later that day he visits Ella and gives her a blessing. She rallies a bit, sleeps awhile and she overhears President Snow mutter something like, Oh how blessed you are to be alive. I wish my dear Alphie had been spared. Ella feels survivors guilt and concocts the story about dying and going to heaven and seeing Alphie there so happy. The main point of her story is that we need not grieve too much over the death of our children. This provides much comfort and they make it through a difficult day. The story gets retold and embellished greatly and eventually pruned back to an acceptable version suitable for publication in the church magazine. The “fishing boots” version is near the pinnacle of the process.
One of the most difficult medical diagnosis is death. Usually it becomes obvious when the heart stops beating and rigor mortis sets in. Modern medical technology can keep the heart and lungs going after the brain is dead and so there are complex criteria for that. And there are accounts of people appearing to be dead when they are not and can be revived. Some drug overdoses and brief very cold water near-drownings are examples. One of the key parts of NDE is the medical establishment of death. I don’t think we had that well established in the 19th century. There was also an obsession at that time with people waking up alive but buried in their coffin and measures were taken for such an event so that a buried person could alert someone just in case. .Perhaps there was a good reason for it. Are there recent NDE with clearly established rigor mortis? I can think of an ancient one, Jesus and Lazarus who was quite beyond even that.
Footnote:HH9. The reason Hans was buried in Idaho is simple if you think about it and especially if you have ever talked to someone who witnessed the recovery of a person who drowned days earlier. Like maybe a WWII Navy vet. The lungs of a drowning person fill with water and the body sinks to the bottom. It takes a few days of bloating from bacteria making gas for the body to come back to the surface, This is why the mafia ties cement blocks to the feet of bodies they throw in the river. By the time the body floats again it smells horrible. It will be buried as soon as possible and as close as possible or else cremated. Transport it 200 miles without air-tight below zero refrigeration? Heck no.
I did have one High Priest lesson that I was near (wanting) death from boredom, but I don’t think that counts.
Martin – really interesting stuff.
And I generally keep my skeptic hat on most of the time. It fits the shape of my (slightly balding) skeptic head. I am not going to debate Mike on of this did or didn’t happen. I am fine with him and others believing what they may. I am not against all miracles. It is a miracle my mom didn’t kill me being the real brat I was as a kid growing up.
But the question remains why dramatic “miracles” seem to always be in the past. It does seem odd that UFO stories actually dramatically dropped once everyone had a cell phone that could take reasonably good videos. Now that there are 15+ million members it would seem statistically probable that MORE should be happening right in front of our eyes. Radio Free Mormon on MormonDiscussionPodcast.org did a podcast a few weeks ago complaining that the miracles we have now are nothing compared to those we can’t verify in the past.
At the Church History library there is some kind of a statement from Ella herself dated, Feb 5, 1934, obviously long after the event but might be neat to check out. Also on Family Search for Hans Jensen
Birth: Jan. 6, 1864 Brigham City, Box Elder County, Utah, USA
Death: Oct. 19, 1888, USA
Burial plot in Antimony Cemetery, Antimony,Garfield County, Utah,
“He was a teacher and was newly wed to Bernice Valentine on March 30, 1887. They had a 3 month old son when he died. Hans was fishing in the Snake River and was drowned accidentally. His body was never found. When his niece, Ella Jensen died, she saw him in the spirit world still dressed in the clothes he was wearing when he was drowned in the Snake River in Idaho. When Ella Jensen was brought back to life by Lorenzo Snow, she shared how everyone was all dress in white excepting her Uncle Hans Jensen, who for this occasion still had on his dark clothes and long rubber boots.”
Ella Jensen’s first name is Mary. On Family search there is a much more detailed account of all that happened and a few corrections of the 1929 IE story, this was written in 1964 by a Dorothy Jensen Schimmelpfenning, how she is related I don’t know
According to this Dorothy Jensen, Ella had been dead for about 2 hours when Pres. Snow and Clawson came by and she was in the spirit world for a few hours.
I don’t know if you can or should compare miracles, everyone is different, different situations, and there are lots of miracle stories out there, not all LDS or raising from the dead either. I like what Pres. Hinckley experienced,
“I recall once when I arrived in Hong Kong I was asked if I would visit a woman in the hospital whose doctors had told her she was going blind and would lose her sight within a week. She asked if we would administer to her and we did so, and she states that she was miraculously healed. I have a painting in my home that she gave me which says on the back of it, ‘To Gordon B. Hinckley in grateful appreciation for the miracle of saving my sight.’ I said to her, ‘I didn’t save your sight. Of course, the Lord saved your sight. Thank Him and be grateful to Him.’”Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley (1997), 343.
whizzbang and HH9, I gotta say thanks again for the research. Yeah, it’s a threadjack, I guess, but I’m caught up in it as much as anyone and don’t have your skills.
I am inclined to to want to believe in NDEs, but this leaves me in an impossible position with respect to the “Free the Birdies” Mormon NDE story heavily circulated two decades ago, because it heavily emphasizes the importance of temples. Since I don’t believe most Mormon theology about temples, it doesn’t ring true to me, but there is otherwise differentiating the story from any other NDE I’d like to believe in.
*nothing otherwise differentiating*
Oh my heck, whizzbang.
The fishing boots story has independent verification of being half correct! That is two gold medals in church history research for you. And HH9 is on the podium too.
Except it still is missing that elusive piece of hard evidence. Did Ella learn information known only in heaven that led to verification later? Still appears not. She would have been about 16 years old when Uncle Hans drowned and I doubt she would been kept in the dark about it. Skepticism reigns. People need miracles to believe whether they happened or not.
She said the body of Uncle Hans was never found. Yet he has a burial plot in Southern Utah. Yet I doubt that they would transport a decomposing drowned body that far unless they found his remains quickly. History is never squeaky clean.
Anybody up for a midnight trip to the cemetery with shovels to see who is buried there?
I ‘ll help dig! with severe trepidation with every turn of the shovel! it isn’t so squeeky clean! hahaha
I’ve never been to Anitmony, Utah – so I’m up for the road trip. What’s a little grave-digging among friends?
Late to the party here, but something I find interesting are the legit scientific attempts to validate NDEs. My favorite, and one that’s fairly common, consists of placing a playing card face up in a high location within surgical rooms – a location above where a patient would see it but, if they floated out of their body they’d be able to see it as they look down upon their body. The scientists ask people claiming an NDE what the card was. None have ever answered correctly.
Cody, that’s probably the AWARE study I talked about in the post
Martin, maybe it is. It’s been a while since I read the details of the study. Pretty ingenious, I think.
Thanks for adding the link to my JBMS NDE essay. As for “twenty-five” years ago, well, people could ask questions about culture and revelation and such, and read and research back then. We had books, libraries and such. Writing it was fascinating. I found that writing and talking about it led several people to share experiences with me. Which reminds me of a report in one of the books. Moody was speaking somewhere, and a cardiologist stood up and said, “I’ve resuscitated hundreds of people and I have never heard anything like this.” Before Moody could respond, a person stood up and said, “I am one of the people you resuscitated and let me assure you that you are the last person I would share my experience with.” Radiating skepticism and doubt can be shield against further light and knowledge.
For Brigham Young’s experience in Winter Quarters. There is this:
Click to access 097-86.pdf
I rather think that there was more to it than that account gives, especially due to the kinds of the things reported in this chapter of the Brigham Young Priesthood manual.
https://www.lds.org/manual/teachings-brigham-young/chapter-38?lang=eng
For an example, “I can say with regard to parting with our friends, and going ourselves, that I have been near enough to understand eternity so that I have had to exercise a great deal more faith to desire to live than I ever exercised in my whole life to live. The brightness and glory of the next apartment is inexpressible. It is not encumbered so that when we advance in years we have to be stubbing along and be careful lest we fall down. We see our youth, even, frequently stubbing their toes and falling down. But yonder, how different! They move with ease and like lightning. If we want to visit Jerusalem, or this, that, or the other place—and I presume we will be permitted if we desire—there we are, looking at its streets. If we want to behold Jerusalem as it was in the days of the Savior; or if we want to see the Garden of Eden as it was when created, there we are, and we see it as it existed spiritually, for it was created first spiritually and then temporally, and spiritually it still remains. And when there we may behold the earth as at the dawn of creation, or we may visit any city we please that exists upon its surface. If we wish to understand how they are living here on these western islands, or in China, we are there; in fact, we are like the light of the morning. … God has revealed some little things, with regard to his movements and power, and the operation and motion of the lightning furnish a fine illustration of the ability of the Almighty (DBY, 380).”
If you have read George Ritchie’s Return from Tomorrow, and others , you ought to recognize these kinds of observations. There is nothing like it in the scriptures, so Brigham is not teaching from tradition, but personal experience. Moody’s The Light Beyond comments that LDS leaders taught these kinds of things, but it turns out that by LDS leaders, if you check his sources, it is usually Brigham Young. Incidentally, David B. Haight reported his NDE in the October 1989 conference in which he reported a view of Jerusalem and the Savior.
https://www.lds.org/ensign/1989/11/the-sacrament-and-the-sacrifice?lang=eng
It is interesting that before Moody published Life after Life, Duane Crowther published Life Everlasting, which contained a range of LDS accounts. One of them here, Heber C. Kimball, reporting what Jeddy Grant told him. The most telling bit to me is Grant’s acknowledgement that Brigham knew all about it before and had discussed it often and at length.
http://jod.mrm.org/4/135
Regarding the notion of “playing cards” and operating rooms for OBEs. There is a line in the Book of Mormon where Nephi comments that Lehi’s mind was so much taken up with other things that he beheld not the filthiness of the water. If you were having an OBE, how important, really, would it be to look for a playing card? Would that be your first priority? Or even the second? One of the first books to respond to Moody was Michael Sabom’s Recollections of Death. A cardiologist, he had been skeptical of Moody’s book, but the first time he actually asked a patient if anything had happened, he got a full blown NDE account. His book reports that he had asked25 patients who had been rescuscitated to describe the procedure. None of them made mistakes, whereas members of a control group all made major mistakes.
At one point the best selling NDE book was Bettie Eadie’s Embraced by the Light. She was (and is) LDS and the book was unexpectedly successful, so there was some skeptical pushback about how a nobody like her could have had such an experience when she wasn’t a high ranking church official, an odd charge from people who also love the story of a boy prophet. Tom Nibley responded with a detailed manuscript (unpublished, alas, but had a copy of it on disk somewhere, a few computers ago) that showed that all of the details that her LDS critics thought were “too much” could be matched with earlier traditional LDS teachings.
In considering debates about NDEs, as in all debates, it’s important to notice which accounts, and which kinds of accounts, people generalize from, the narratives and sources that different people put forward as representative, as the standard against which to measure, the parable that provides the measurement and judgement as a guide to what they see as real, the map they prefer to take as a guide to walk through the territory of life. Discernment is not the same as knee-jerk dismissal of everything.
We’ve got Joseph Smith’s story. Around the time I did my essay, Robert Fillerup presented at Sunstone on how closely Joseph’s First Vision account fit with NDE accounts. That means that our paradigmatic origin story is hospitable to these accounts, so LDS culture has such reports from very early. We also have dubious accounts, but it’s not that hard to sort figs and thistles, grapes and thorns, unless you decide that the presence of a thistle or thorn rules out the possibility of figs and grapes.
And the LDS scriptures are very much open to the possibility of God speaking to others (D&C 1 bluntly states that this is the case), and Alma 29 talks about God speaking to all nations. Joseph Smith talks about God adapting himself to our capacity to understand, which raises the question, where would we be if God didn’t adapt himself to our capacity to understand?