An Orb at the Hour of Death

Basking in the glitzy neon glow and glittering shallow sparkle of our current age, some may regard it as an Age of Light, although I can think of some reasons why people of the future may regard our age as rather like an Age of Darkness. One reason is that almost all of our experts are so very bad at paying attention to a hundred important phenomena deserving of careful study, phenomena that give us important clues about who we are and what type of universe we live in. It wasn't always this way. Back in the late nineteenth century experts studied such phenomena with the utmost care, producing works like the massive two-volume work Phantasms of the Living, which documents many hundreds of apparition sightings. You can read the work online here and here.  

In volume 2 of the work, page 76, we read the following account of an orb seen at the hour of death. 

"About  the  year  1841,  I  was  in  a  room  with  my  father  in  our house  in  the  Isle  of  Wight,  when  he  exclaimed,  'Good  God,  what  is  that?' starting  up  as  he  spoke,  and  apparently  looking  at  something.  He  then turned  to  me  and  said  that  he  had  seen  a  ball  of  light  pass  through  the room,  and  added,  'Depend  upon  it.  Nurse  Simonds  is  dead.'  This  was  an old  servant  in  London,  to  whom  he  had  been  sending  money,  in  illness. In  course  of  post  came  information  that  she  passed  away  at  the  very  time in  question."

Page 194 of the same volume tells us this:

"In  another,  a  luminous  ball  was  seen  in  a  corner  of  the  room. A  fourth  very  remarkable  instance,  of  the  brilliant  illumination  and then  sudden  darkening  of  an  empty  room,  is  described  to  us  by  the Rev.  Edward  Ram,  of  Norwich,  as  a  personal  experience  of  himself  and his  wife — but  this  was  in  a  house  where  other  unaccountable  phenomena have  been  observed ;  as  was  also  the  case  in  a  fifth  instance, where  a  light  is  described  by  one  percipient,  Mrs.  W.  B.  Richmond,  as  a  glow  over  the  whole  room,  out  of  which  (according  to  her recollection)  two  bright  little  balls  of  light  seemed  to  flash  out ;  and by  the  other  (her  mother)  as '  flickering  about'  specially  in  a  particular part  of  the  room.  In  none  of  these  cases  does  it  seem  possible that  the  light  was  in  any  way  cast  or  reflected  into  the  room  from outside."