W. Martin

Graphic and unusual details of an out-of-body experience are given by W. Martin of 107 Grove Street, Liverpool, in a letter published in the Sunday Express of May 26th, as one of an interesting series dealing with Reincarnation.

“In 1911 at the age of sixteen,” Mr. Martin writes, “I was staying about twelve miles from my own home when a high wall was blown down by a sudden gust of wind as I was passing. A huge coping stone hit me on top of the head.

“It then seemed as if I could see myself lying on the ground, huddled up, with one corner of the stone resting on my head and quite a number of people rushing towards me. I watched them move the stone and some one took off his coat and put it under my head, and I heard all their comments: ‘Fetch a doctor.’ ‘His neck is broken.’ ‘Skull smashed.’

“Now all this time it appeared as though I was disembodied from the form lying on the ground and suspended in mid-air in the centre of the group, and could hear everything that was said.

“As they started to carry me it was remarked that it would come as a blow to my people, and I was immediately conscious of a desire to be with my mother. Instantly I was at home, and father and mother were just sitting down to their midday meal. On my entrance mother sat bolt upright in her chair and said, ‘Bert, something has happened to our boy.’

“There followed an argument, but mother refused to be pacified, and said that if she caught the 2 p.m. train she could be with me before three.

“She had hardly left the room when there came a knock at the front door. It was a porter from the railway station with a telegram saying I was badly hurt.

“Then suddenly I was again transported—this time it seemed to be against my wish—to a bedroom, where a woman whom I recognised [sp.] was in bed, and two other women were quietly bustling around, and a doctor was leaning over the bed. Then the doctor had a baby in his hands. At once I became aware of an almost irresistable impulse to press my face through the back of the baby’s head so that my face would come into the same place as the child’s.

“The doctor said, ‘It looks as though we have lost them both,’ and again I felt the urge to take the baby’s place in order to show him he was wrong, but the thought of my mother crying turned my thoughts in her direction, when straightway I was in a railway carriage with both her and father.

“I was still with them when they arrived at my lodgings and were shown into the room where I had been put to bed. Mother sat beside the bed and I longed to comfort her, and the realisation [sp.] came that I ought to do the same thing as I felt impelled to do in the case of the baby and climb into the body in the bed.

“At last I succeeded, and the effort caused the real me to sit up in bed fully conscious. Mother made me lie down again, but I said I was all right, and remarked that it was odd she knew something was wrong before the porter had brought the telegram.

“Both she and dad were amazed at my knowledge. Their astonishment further increased when I repeated almost word for word some of the conversation they had had at home and in the train.

“I said I had also been close to birth as well, and told them that Mrs. Wilson, who lived close to us at home, had a baby that day, but it was dead because I would not get into its body. We subsequently learned that Mrs. Wilson died on the same day at 2.5 p.m. after delivering a still-born girl.”

Light, (May 30, 1935), p. 342.