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B J Laubscher – Where Mystery dwells

Mrs. K. who wished to remain anonymous wrote in Afrikaans from Pretoria.

"I want to tell you about my experience as briefly as possible and I would very much prefer not to have my name mentioned for reasons which you will understand. But please do not doubt the truth of my letter.

I was a mother of five children and lost one of them a few years ago. I was very tired and exhausted from deep depression, worry and hard work. I felt completely without energy and decided to lie down on my bed and rest a while at about two o'clock in the afternoon.

Now I do not remember for how long I was lying on my bed.

I had lost my son of nineteen in April 1958 as a result of a motor car accident. He was in the army and a few of them were killed at Muldersdrift. Well his death made me so sorrowful and depressed that there were times when I lived as an automaton. Then I began to contemplate suicide, and felt convinced that I could not continue in that frame of mind, and that death by my own hand was the only way out. That afternoon when I went to lie down to think of suicide, it was just four months since his death.

Then as from nowhere my soldier son appeared and stood before my bed. He was in uniform and I could see his corporal's stripes. He was brown from the sun the way he always looked in life. Then with some effort he spoke and said :'Mother see for yourself I am alive-I am living. I am not dead the way you think' and with that he vanished into nothing.

He was killed on the 19th of April 1958 and ever since on the date of his death he has appeared to me. Sometimes without his tunic and his cap, and at other times in full uniform, and always he has had something encouraging to say to me, and to impress on my mind that he existed and was alive and found his new life tremendously interesting. From his first appearance in that solid body so vital and real I have become a different person and have realized that he came to rescue me from what I contemplated.

I must tell you what happened after his first appearance. I was again lying down in the afternoon when it seemed as if I went into a slumber, and at once I found myself up near the ceiling of my room. There was my body lying on the bed and here was I somewhere in the air.

I then began to hover and came down to about three feet above my body on the bed. Then I moved away again and closely observed every article, of furniture and other knickknacks in the room.

I went outside, so lovely and free and peaceful, and saw my little daughter of three playing with her toys, and my husband hard at work in an outbuilding.

Please understand me, this was no dream because all that happened where my husband was working and what he was doing I saw in my new body outside the house while my physical body was on the bed. I could see what they were doing but they could not see me, and yet I knew this was the same sort of new body which my son had, for I felt life as something so different, as if the most glorious feelings were flowing to this new body from some profound far-away source. It was too wonderful."