by a practicing psychiatrist

This astonishing survival story is told by an eminent physician who “died” when he was 19 years old.

In 1942 my plans were all set. I was to be the youngest doctor ever to be graduated from the Medical College of Virginia. I would graduate at 19 with a Bachelor of Science degree and in a rushed-up program for World War II, by going to classes summer and winter, I would receive my medical doctorate degree by the time I was 22 years old.

But man proposes and God disposes.

My father, who was past draft age, was called into service to be in charge of all the storage of fuel for the D-Day invasion of Normandy and I could not see sitting out on the sidelines. I volunteered for active duty and after completing the work for my B.S. Degree at the University of Richmond, all except for six hours of German, I was sent down to the only place in the world where I have marched in mud up to my knees and still had dust blowing in my face – Camp Barkeley, 11 miles southwest of Abilene, Tex.

I went through basic training there and just about the time I was finishing basic I came back off a march one day to have the top sergeant say to me, “Private, they want to see you up at Regimental Headquarters.” I reviewed everything I’d done since I’d been in service that I’d hoped they didn’t know about and reported to Regimental Headquarters. There I was asked a whole bunch of questions and then told to report back the next afternoon. It didn’t sound to me like they were checking up on my leaves and I was right because the next afternoon a full colonel stood up and said, “Private, we have selected you to be returned to the Medical College of Virginia to study medicine.”

I never have fully determined whether they thought I would make a good doctor or whether I was making such a poor soldier but all of my hopes, dreams and ambitions snapped right back on schedule.

This was in the winter of 1943 and ’44 and we had terrible upper-respiratory epidemics throughout the southern army camps that year. Two weeks after receiving this good news I went into the hospital with something the doctors called an upper-respiratory infection – a virus infection. I was in the hospital for about a week recuperating and getting awfully nervous about the situation because the time was approaching when I was supposed to return to Virginia to study medicine and I meant to get there.

Then the unexpected happened. I collapsed and was sent back into the isolation ward. Finally on December 19 I was back in the recuperation ward. This time I was sweating because I knew I was due to take the train in the early morning. To pass that evening a friend and I decided to see a motion picture which was being shown inside the hospital. I told my friend I wanted to go early because I had to get up the next morning at 3:15 to catch the train which left Abilene at 4:00 A.M.

We came back from the early show about nine o’clock and I was in bed by 9:15 but I felt extremely hot. I asked the ward boy for aspirin and APC tablets which I knew were supposed to reduce a fever and I was sure I was running one. But I wasn’t about to lose my opportunity again. So I took two aspirin and an APC tablet and went to sleep. About 12:00 I awoke and took two more aspirin and another APC and went back to sleep. It was about 2:00 o’clock, I guess, when I awoke again. I was burning up so I took the last two aspirin and APC and tried to go back to sleep but I couldn’t because I kept coughing up something. Finally, after an indefinite length of time, I turned on the bedside light to see the time. It was 3:00 o’clock. I looked over at the little sputum cup on my bedside table and there was a cupful of bright red blood – my blood! This frightened me into hunting up the ward boy. I asked him for a thermometer to take my temperature. When I took that out my mouth I don’t know who was the most shocked, he or I, because it registered 106.5 degrees. Today, as an M.D., I’m still amazed that with a fever that high I was rational.

There was no chance of getting him not to squeal on me because he already was hollering for the nurse. She came and took my temperature all over again, got the same reading and went hollering for the O.D. – the officer in charge of the ward. He came in, took one look at me, put a stethoscope on my chest and said, “Get this boy to X-ray.” So an ambulance came to carry me over to another section of the hospital. Maybe I wasn’t so rational after all because I thought: how utterly ridiculous; they don’t realize I’ve got to be at the medical college in 48 hours.

The last thing I remember was the captain in X-ray saying, “Do you think you can stand up long enough for us to get a picture?”

I thought, the real problem is not to stand up long enough for an X-ray; I’ve got to leave here in 15 minutes! I remember hearing that X-ray machine make that peculiar whirring sound and click and I’m told that I clicked in a heap at the base of it.

This was on the night of December 19. The next time I was to be humanly conscious was on December 24 and remember this very well because the nurse came in and when she saw my eyes open she said, “Good to have you back with us.” I said, “What day is this?” And she said, “It’s Christmas Eve.”

You may have read this story before. It was written up in Catherine Marshall’s book, To Live Again, and also in Guideposts in 1963.

Captain —, in a letter to Catherine Marshall 13 years after my wonderful experience took place, wrote, “There is no way, by any medical means we know, to account for Dr. R–‘s being alive today. His case is the strangest I have seen in 23 years of medical practice.”

The nurse, who is now living in Corpus Christi, Tex., also sent a certified letter to Catherine Marshall stating that not only was I pronounced dead on the night of December 20,1943, but actually was pronounced dead two times an estimated nine minutes apart. As far as we know the human brain cannot survive for more than five minutes without oxygen; at least one becomes a vegetable after such a passage of time. But it did not work this way for me.

* * * * * *

During this time, from what I have been told, what took place went like this:

After I crumpled unconscious on the floor, I was carried back to bed where I remained unconscious for five days. The ward boys always made four rounds every night, checking on the patients. At three o’clock in the morning on December 20 when the ward boy came to my bed he was shocked at the way I looked. He thought I looked dead! He could find no pulse and no respiration and ran for the O.D. The captain, after examining me, said, “Blood pressure at zero, no pulse, no respiration, body temperature falling rapidly. I’m sorry but . . .”

The ward boy apparently felt terrible about this. He said, “But he was so young . . .”

The doctor left but the ward boy sought him out again a few minutes later. “I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” he said, “but that private – I can’t get him off my mind. Shouldn’t we make one more try? Adrenalin or something?”

The O.D., seeing the boy was really shaken, said all right and asked him to prepare a large hypo with Adrenalin in case he decided there was any reason for using it.

But when he examined me again he sighed and said, “It’s no use. He’s gone.”

The ward boy persisted, “Please sir, let’s use the hypo anyway.”

So without saying anything more the captain plunged the needle directly into my heart muscle . . .

I have been told this, because of course I was not there.

* * * * * *

According to what I remember something quite different occurred:

I had collapsed in front of the X-ray machine and I woke up sitting on the side of the bed realizing I had missed my train back to school. I knew I was expected to report in to the commandant of the Medical College of Virginia at a specific time and I wasn’t about to go AWOL. I began to look all over trying to find my uniform and I got the shock of my life when I looked back at the bed and saw a body there that looked disgustingly like I always thought I looked like lying in bed.

There was a paradoxical side to this. When I was a young boy my grandfather loved to tell me ghost stories and when I looked over at that body I didn’t like its looks – I had no desire to be in the room with a ghost. I think that’s one of the reasons I moved out of there. Another reason was that I knew I had to get home. So I came on out of the ward.

There were three isolation rooms and I was in the middle one. At the back of this middle room was a much bigger room with approximately 12 beds on each side. Across from it were the nurses’ room, then the doctors’ room, the ward boys’ room, the storage and medical supplies and then a door opened onto a connecting ramp that led to many such wards and also to a door going outside.

So I came on out of my room, walked up this little corridor between these rooms toward the outside door. I met a ward boy. Probably he was carrying a tray of medical instruments because the tray was covered. I started to tell him to watch where he was going because he was about to bump into me but either he went through me or I went through him. However, I had only one thing in mind: to get back home and then to school. As soon as I got outside I just took off – at the most terrific rate of speed you’ve ever seen. Then suddenly I saw in front of me a little town. It was very late at night and I saw a lone person walking down the street toward an all-night cafe on a corner. I thought I’d alight beside him and find out where I was.

I asked him, “Where am I?”

I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with me but there certainly was something wrong with this man because apparently he could neither see or hear me. I tried to tap him on the cheek to get his attention and I couldn’t tell whether I went through him or he through me. This disturbed me.

There was a guy wire to a telephone pole nearby so I went over to lean against this and my hand went through it! It suddenly hit me that I had left my body back there on the bed in the hospital in Barkeley, Tex. And another horrible thought hit me. I knew that freshman medical students work on cadavers and I wasn’t reassured by the thought of some fool medical student working on me.

Still another thing bothered me; if the ward boy couldn’t see me and this man couldn’t see me, what good would it do me to go on? Chances were my stepmother at home wouldn’t be able to see me. Certainly the commandant of the medical college wouldn’t be able to see me.

With this I decided the best thing to do would be to go back and get my body before some medical student did.

You may find what happened next amusing but I assure you, back then, 25 years ago or a little more, I wasn’t laughing.

I had left the hospital in such haste that I hadn’t bothered to note which ward I came out of, much less which room. We think we know what we look like but really we don’t. We’ve seen reflections in two-dimensional glass objects we call mirrors but if you ever have to find yourself in an army hospital at night when every soldier is lying under the same type blanket, wearing the same type pajamas, you’ve got trouble coming up.

I must have gone through an interminable number of wards and the farther I searched the more desperate I became for while I could see doctors, nurses and soldiers I could not communicate with them in any way. Obviously they were like that fellow in that town – they couldn’t communicate with me either.

Finally I went into a small isolation room. I remember it had white curtains drawn across the door. Beside the door was a white medical table and a lamp in which a 15-watt night-light was burning. Something was wrong here because the body in this room was completely covered. But fortunately when they drew the covers up over the face they had left one hand out. At that time I was wearing a fraternity ring and that’s the way I identified myself!

Now, this really frightened me. It suddenly hit me: this is what they call death. I could see this body lying there on the bed but I was the being that was, in every way, shape and form, just as big as the one on the bed. And I knew I was too young to die because all my life had heard about three score and 10 and I had had just one score and somebody hadn’t written me the right insurance policy.

Then I felt compelled to go out of this room again. But intuitively, if there is an intuitive sense, I knew that if I went out of that room again I’d never come back. Nothing in my early Baptist and Presbyterian background training had prepared me for this.

I was experiencing the most horrible isolation. People who knew me before this experience used to think of me as an introvert. Those who have known me since refer to me as an extrovert. Strangely enough, except for the times when I’m meditating, I have no desire to be alone again and I think you can understand why.

As I was sitting there I thought the little 14-watt bulb was getting brighter and brighter. Then I realized it wasn’t the bulb. The intensity of this light was such that if you turned on 20 million arc-welder’s lights you’d have some idea of the intensity of light that had come into that room. And three things took place all at once. I have to describe them in series but they all happened in a flash.

Out of the center of this light stepped a Being of pure light. Something inside my spiritual being which was sitting on the bed because my physical being still lay on the bed, said, “Stand up, you’re in the presence of The Son of God.”

The walls of the hospital disappeared and every single thing that had happened from the time I was born through my 20th year came into panoramic view. Everything I had done in light, in dark, in public, in private was there. This scared me but I was more impressed by this Being. I never have been in such a Presence as this; I can understand why the New Testament states that when He was in human form and planted Himself in the doorway of the Temple after chasing out the money-changers nobody attempted to come back in. He would make any male I have ever met seem like a sissy. But what impressed me most was the absolute, indescribable love. The best way I can state this is to say I was in the presence of a Being who knew everything about me, good and bad, and yet totally accepted and loved me.

Never have I been in the presence of such absolute, pure love. Never have I been in the presence of such absolute, total wisdom. After 12 years of schooling since high school and after 20 years of medical practice, I can say it is no wonder this Being was the greatest physician who ever lived and the greatest psychiatrist of all time. For He could do instantaneously what I have spent better than 25 years of my life trying to do. But, you see, He is everything.

Now, He asked me a question. The closest thing we have to this kind of communication is mental telepathy for it was as if the question came from within me and I understood that he was instantaneously aware of my every thought. There’s one thing about being in His presence – hypocrisy is impossible. You can’t say one thing when you mean another. His first question, which came from within, was: “What have you done with your life?”

More than 25 years later as I look back I believe the Lord had a terrific sense of humor and even greater compassion not to have burst out laughing. For the only answer I could think of was, “Well, I’m an Eagle Scout.”

In His loving, compassionate way He repeated the question, “What have you done with your life?”

Then I thought, I tried to help some boys and girls in high school and college while I was president of my track team and president of my fraternity.

Again the question was repeated but still I was hedging and I thought, “I’m too young to die.”

Time, as we know it, belongs only to the dimension in which we are living now. Actually time doesn’t exist and I can understand why the Bible says in Psalms, “A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday.” But speaking in earthly terms I would say maybe I wasn’t in His presence more than five minutes – or five years – or five million years – because it’s immeasurable. But before He came into that room I was frightened. I do not recall seeing fire and brimstone but I saw something worse. I saw total isolation. And I knew I never wanted to be without Him again. I had wanted to see my stepmother, my father, my brother and sisters and my friends, but nobody loved me like this. I didn’t want to leave Him.

All of a sudden there was a wave of light. I was frightened because I thought this might mean I was going to have to leave but now we both were traveling at terrific speed through space.

If you ever have come over a large city on a clear night in an airplane you have seen a magnificent sight. Frankly I don’t know what city we came over but it was a great city. I looked and I couldn’t quite focus my eyes because while I could see a city there was something strange about it. I could see ordinary buildings but I also could see other buildings through them. I could see human beings with their auras or electrical fields and I could see other beings who did not have electrical fields or auras.

We looked down into a pretty rough section of this large city. It was full of bars and red-light houses. And the human beings at the bars were being “possessed” by the discarnate alcoholics who jumped inside their human bodies at any moment when their electrical fields or auras were relaxed and began to open. I could understand this compulsion on the part of the discarnate alcoholics because it was the only way they could pick up a glass of anything to drink and for an alcoholic not to be able to pick up a glass sitting in front of him would be a real frustration!

In the great business section of the city I saw men and women at their desks working and I also could see astro-beings trying to communicate with these physical beings. But, of course, the physical people could neither hear nor see them. And this was another form of frustration.

We traveled to still another section of this realm where astral and physical overlap and here a young man, 28 to 33 years old, was walking down a road. He met an astro-female, also walking down the road, who tried to tell him how to live his life – I thought it was his mother – but he couldn’t hear her. And this too was frustrating.

Then we went farther into this astro-realm and it now was separate and no longer overlapped the physical realm. It was almost as if I were standing on the porch of the Greek Parthenon overlooking what must have been endless miles of the most horrible sight I ever imagined. For astro-beings, or whatever you wish to call them, were tied up in all kinds of lewd relationships. I never have seen such hate and animosity. And working in the midst of this horrible place were what I call “beings of light.” They were trying to save these people.

I began to understand what Jesus meant when he told the story of Lazarus who died and went to Heaven and the rich man who died and went to hell. Remember, the rich man said, “Let me go back so I can tell my brothers.” And Jesus ended the story saying, “If they would not believe a live man what makes you think they’d believe a dead one?”

These people in this horrible place were so narcissistic as to be completely self-centered. We live in a universe in which we can have but one god and when we make ourselves that god then we can’t acknowledge another god! And so these beings couldn’t acknowledge God.

Another thing! God is not a judgmental God but if you think you can commit suicide without cost you’re wrong. There is universe work loss when a suicide occurs and the suicide becomes an earthbound soul until he learns the cost of taking his own life. He must remain present to understand the unhappiness he has brought into the lives of others and until that lesson is learned he cannot continue on into other realms.

There was another wave of light and another whole realm was superimposed on our physical realm which, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the mental realm. I believe this must have been the realm where all the great songs, paintings, symphonies and inventions come from. I went into centers of higher learning – we would call them universities in this physical realm. I wasn’t altogether a dodo when this took place. I had majored in chemistry and minored in biology and psychology and taken physics and calculus but I could not understand the instrumentation I saw them working on in these astro-laboratories.

I went into one technical building and saw them working on some sort of instrument panel. In 1952 or 1953, 10 years after this experience, I picked up a Life Magazine that had a picture of our first atomic-powered submarine, Nautilus, and I felt the hair creep up on the back of my neck. I had seen them working on it in 1943 in one of those technical laboratories!

I recall one room in a library large enough to hold the entire University of Virginia. And this one room was full of holy books of which the Bible, as we know it, was just one translation. I take it that this room contained the books on the religions of the universe. And again I insist, we have a one-god universe.

With another wave of light, out in space was another whole dimension, another whole realm. Here was a city of pure light. I didn’t see any golden streets, but what I did see was even more amazing. The beings who came and went from this city of pure light were like the Being who was conducting me. He did say, “I am the first fruit of many that are to follow.”

Two of those beings from this glorious city started toward us and then the whole thing was gone! We suddenly were back in the hospital room in Texas!

Then I knew that I was going to have to leave Him and return to my body. I didn’t want to do this because, as I have said, one doesn’t want to leave the presence of such love and wisdom, of such a Being as this. And yet it was painless; He must spiritually have anesthetized my psychic being because I lost consciousness and only remember opening my eyes and seeing the fraternity ring on the physical finger of the body I knew was mine. Then I knew nothing more until the morning of December 24.

I have told this story as it took place, as it happened to me. I do not ask that you believe it. Some of you will be able to believe; some of you will not.

I never have been given permission to tell this whole experience and some of it I have forgotten with the passage of time. However, I do remember more that transpired and let me quote this, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” (Galatians 6:7) Let a word to the wise be sufficient!

* * * * * *

After this experience I did enter medical school, a month and a half late, and a year later I got conditional marks in two subjects. At that time if you conditioned subjects you could not retake the exams and you were immediately reassigned to active duty. So I was being sent back to Camp Barkeley.

Another medical student and I set out to drive there in September, 1944. Our route took us from Richmond, VA., to Memphis, from Memphis to New Orleans, on over to Dallas, to Fort Worth and into Abilene. This is the straightest route to Barkeley. Suddenly, as we were riding down the east side of Mississippi River into a little town named Vicksburg, I recognized the place. I said to my companion who was behind the wheel, “If you will drive one block farther down this street you will find a white all-night cafe on the corner.”

He looked at me in surprise and said “I thought you’d never been here.”

I replied, “In one sense I haven’t.”

He went the one block farther down the street and there was the all-night cafe I had seen the night I died and left my body.

If you look at a map you will see Vicksburg, Miss., is on a straight line way in my astro-body back in December 1943.

I like to add this postscript to my story because I think it helps some of you believe.

A Note from the Editors of Fate Magazine: The editors first heard this wonderful experience at the May, 1970, Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship Spring Conference held in Chicago. We were so impressed by the speaker’s sincerity and conviction we felt we must bring this testimony to the readers of FATE. Because of the author’s professional standing he requests we identify him only as a graduate of Virginia medical school and a practicing psychiatrist.

Excerpt from Fate Magazine – December, 1970