Mrs. A’s Out-of-Body Experience

In June of the year 1857, a lady, whom I shall designate as Mrs. A., was residing with her husband, a colonel in the British Army, and their infant child, on Woolwich Common, near London.

One night in the early part of that month, suddenly awaking to consciousness, she felt herself as if standing by the bedside and looking down upon her own body, which lay there by the side of her sleeping husband. Her first impression was that she had died suddenly, and the idea was confirmed by the pale and lifeless look of the body, the face void of expression, and the whole appearance showing no sign of vitality. She gazed at it with curiosity for some time, comparing its dead look with that of the fresh countenance of her husband and of her slumbering infant in the cradle hard by. For a moment she experienced a feeling of relief that she had escaped the pangs of death; but the next she reflected what a grief her death would be to the survivors, and then came the wish that she had broken the news to them gradually. While engaged in these thoughts she felt herself carried to the wall of her room, with a feeling that it must arrest her further progress. But no, she seemed to pass through it into the open air. Outside the house was a tree; and this also she seemed to traverse as if it interposed no obstacle. All this occurred without any desire on her part.

She crossed Woolwich Common, visited the Arsenal. returned to the barracks, and then found herself in the bedchamber of an intimate friend, Miss L. M., who lived at Greenwich. She began to talk; but she remembered no more until she waked by her husband’s side. Her first words were, “So I am not dead after all.” She told her husband of her excursion, and they agreed to say nothing about it until they heard from Miss L. M. When they met that lady, two days after, she volunteered the statement that Mrs. A. had appeared to her about three o’clock in the morning of the night before last, robed in violet, and had a conversation with her.

Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World by Dale Owen, p. 256 (Reported in Real Ghost Stories: A Record of Authentic Apparitions by William Stead, p. 29)