In our overview of deathbed visions we assembled the evidence in adults – from Barrett's case collection to modern hospice research. This article looks at a special group: dying children. They see the same things adults see – deceased loved ones receiving them. But they bring something adults no longer have: they do not yet know the cultural scripts. That makes them the most uncorrupted witnesses this phenomenon has.
Why children are the harder witnesses
Against adults' deathbed visions one can always object: the dying person knew they were dying, was religiously formed, had come to expect the comforting reception. With children this objection grips far less. Small children often have no concept of their own dying; many do not even know they are terminally ill. They know their culture's images of the beyond at most from children's songs – and that is precisely where it gets interesting: where their visions deviate from the learned imagery, children correct the expectation instead of serving it. The most famous example is more than 160 years old.
Daisy Dryden (1864): "There is no river"
Daisy Irene Dryden (1854–1864), daughter of a Methodist preacher in San José, California, contracted typhoid fever at the age of ten and, after a brief apparent recovery, died of its complications. In her last three days she was clearly conscious – and reported throughout on her brother Allie, who had died of scarlet fever seven months earlier at seventeen: he was with her, she was speaking with him, he was answering her questions. Her mother sat beside her and wrote it down; her notes later appeared as a book (Daisy Dryden: A Memoir), and the case entered the literature of psychical research.
Two scenes make the case so remarkable. A visitor spoke of Daisy soon crossing the "dark river" – the era's customary pious image of the river of death. Daisy's answer, in substance, according to her mother's notes:
"There is no river and no curtain. There is not even a line between this life and the other. I see all of you – and I see them there, at the same time."
And when her little sister Lulu sang her a song about angels with snow-white wings, Daisy interrupted her: Allie had no wings at all – he "just comes". A dying preacher's child of the nineteenth century rejecting the angel imagery of its own upbringing because what it sees looks different: that is the opposite of expectation fulfilment. Honesty requires adding: the source is the recollection of a devout mother, published decades later – a moving historical document, not a study protocol.
Kübler-Ross: the accident children as a natural control experiment
What the historical case lacks was supplied a century later by the researcher who worked with dying children like no other. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross spent more than ten years sitting at the bedside of children dying after severe family car accidents – asking what they were experiencing. The decisive feature of this setting: the children did not know who of their family had died at the scene. And yet, while dying, they named exactly those relatives who were in fact already dead – in one case the brother who had died only ten minutes earlier in a different hospital. Her summary: "In ten years of this research, not a single child has ever given me a wrong name." The details and quotations are in our Kübler-Ross portrait – what counts here is the methodological point: this is the children's variant of the "Peak in Darien" cases, in which the dying person sees someone whose death they could not have known about.
The modern clinic: Kerr's young patients
That dying children report such experiences today as well is documented by the hospice research of Christopher Kerr in Buffalo, presented in our main article (over 1,400 patients interviewed, published peer-reviewed). In his book Death Is But a Dream, Kerr expressly includes children's cases. The best known: Jessica, thirteen years old, dying of a malignant bone tumour. She repeatedly dreamt of her deceased dog Shadow – he was "in a good place", running and playing. And she saw Mary, her mother's deceased best friend, who reassured her: wherever she went, someone would be there to look after her. A child who quotes no catechism but is reunited with her dog – that is exactly what the documented children's cases look like. Kerr's clinical finding: these experiences occur in clear consciousness, are plainly distinct from delirium – and they take away the children's fear palpably.
The honest counter-side
What can be objected? Fever, medication and oxygen deprivation can produce hallucinations – undisputed. But delirium looks different: confused, fearful, fragmented, without recognisability. The episodes described here are the opposite – clear, calm, coherent, directed at familiar persons, and the children insist on details that contradict their expectation (no wings, no river). The expectation objection, in turn, carries least weight with children: those who have no concept of dying cannot conjure up the comfort of dying by expectation. What must be conceded is something else: the data on children are thinner than on adults – individual cases, parents' reports and clinical observations, no large children's surveys. Anyone wanting to do research here will find a largely untilled field.
Context
The pattern of deathbed visions in children is the same as in adults – reception by familiar deceased, calm instead of fear, clarity instead of confusion – only without the cultural conditioning that can be held against adults. Together with terminal lucidity, these experiences belong to a family of threshold phenomena that stubbornly refuse to fit the story that the dying brain merely produces comforting images. A child who sees its angels without wings, names its dead brother whom it could not have known to be dead, or is reunited with its dog, poses the question in its simplest form: how do the children know what they are seeing?
Sources: S. H. Dryden, Daisy Dryden: A Memoir (the mother's notes, book edition 1909; Google Books); Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1981 television interview (accident-children study; documented in detail in our Kübler-Ross portrait); Christopher Kerr (with Carine Mardorossian), Death Is But a Dream (Avery, 2020; containing the Jessica case) and Kerr's peer-reviewed studies on end-of-life dreams and visions, overview; William Barrett, Death-Bed Visions (1926, full text at the Internet Archive).
For more, see the overview article Deathbed Visions, our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.