George Ritchie, who was later to become a psychiatrist, experienced a profound NDE in 1943 which he later described in his 1978 book “Return from Tomorrow”. Ritchie’s encounter with spirit occurred three decades before Moody coined the term NDE and introduced them to the public. Although he had attended church for much of his 20 years, he said that he was not particularly religious and did so only because it was expected. Almost certainly he had no awareness of either near-death experiences or the metaphysical view of life and death. What occurred was as follows.
As a 20- year-old Ritchie was newly enlisted in the army and stationed in Texas for basic training. While there he was informed he had been selected for a specialized training program in medicine and was to start classes in Virginia. A few days before he was to travel there he came down with the flue and had a dangerously high temperature. Yet he was desperate to get to Virginia as he feared otherwise the class would be filled.
Ritchie reports that while very sick in his barracks, he attempted to communicate with someone who appeared completely unaware of his presence. He saw a doorway, headed toward it, and then found himself outside racing along above the earth in some kind of strange flight. He spotted a town below him and was suddenly on the sidewalk where he saw a man, but he couldn’t make contact with him. When he tried to tap his shoulder there was nothing there. He leaned against a guy wire, and his body went through it. At that point he realized that perhaps in some impossible, unimaginable way he had lost his physicality. Perhaps he had gotten separated from his body back in Texas. In a panic Ritchie experienced himself flying back to Texas and his camp where he began desperately searching for himself, his physical body. After considerable effort he found a body under a sheet with his ring on its finger, but he could not make contact with it.
At that point a brilliant light began to fill the room, and a man made of light appeared. With stupendous certainty Ritchie realized he was in the presence of the Son of God. Along with the presence every single episode of his entire life was there, in full view, contemporary and current, all seemingly taking place at that moment. As he witnessed these events he knew he was seriously lacking. Yet at the same time he was being loved unconditionally (Ritchie, 1996).
Tthe being of light, Jesus, took him on an incredible journey. Moving higher and faster than before they arrived at a city. Among the busy people there some were unaware of others right beside them trying to attract their attention. Was this what death was like, he wondered, to be permanently invisible to the living yet permanently wrapped up in their affairs? Ritchie encountered a boy trailing a teenaged girl through the corridors of a school saying, “I’m sorry, Nancy!” and a middle-aged woman begging a grey-haired man to forgive her. The being of light beside him, Jesus, explained they were suicides, chained to every consequence of their act. Ritchie became aware that all of the living people were surrounded by a faint luminous glow, almost like an electrical field over the surface of their bodies. The non-physical beings didn’t have this.
He and the light entered a dingy bar where a crowd of people were drinking. A number clutched at their shot glasses, but their hands passed through the solid tumblers, and they were unable to lift their drinks to their lips. Every one of these lacked the cocoon of light that surrounded the others, the living. Those living, light-surrounded people drank and talked and could not see the desperately thirsty disembodied beings among them. One drunken young sailor rose unsteadily from a stool and then sagged heavily to the floor. The bright cocoon around him simply opened up, peeling away from his head and shoulders. Instantly one of the insubstantial beings was on top of him like a beast of prey. In the next instant this figure vanished into his body. One minute there were two individuals, then there was only one. Twice more Ritchie saw the identical scene repeated.
Ritchie next found himself on a plane crowded with ghostly discarnate beings. All were frustrated, angry, and miserable, locked in battles with one another using only their bare hands and feet and teeth. They could not kill, though they clearly wanted to, because their intended victims were already dead, and so they hurled themselves at each other in a frenzy of impotent rage. Even more hideously they were attempting to perform sexual abuses on one another “in feverish pantomime,” perversions he had never dreamed of.
They didn’t simply walk away from all the misery they were inflicting on others and themselves because there was no other place for them to be. Yet, he realized that not one of these beings on the plane had been abandoned. They were being attended, watched over, and ministered to, and the equally observable fact was that not one of them knew it.
The environment then began to change for Ritchie and his guide, and he became aware of a very different realm filled with pervading peace that featured beautiful buildings. In one, people of all ages seemed totally engaged in some kind of study. The atmosphere hummed with the excitement of great discovery. Everyone appeared absorbed in some vast purpose beyond themselves. One building contained a studio where music was being composed and played, another housed an enormous library, and others were filled with some kind of technological machinery, huge laboratories, and what might have been some kind of space observatory. Surely this was heaven-like with a lack of ego among people engaged in a single-minded pursuit of truth. Yet he realized this was not perfection, as they didn’t seem to recognize the Truth Himself, standing there in their midst, while they searched for Him in books and test tubes.
Up to now, Ritchie and his guide seemed to be travelling through some kind of earthly realms. They then then left the earth behind and entered what appeared to be in an immense void, but one filled with “some unnameable promise” that seemed to vibrate through that vast emptiness. In the distance, infinitely far off, was a city glowing with a brightness and from which beings moved about. Everything in it appeared to be made of light. At that point two of the bright figures detached themselves from the city and started toward them, but Ritchie and his guide drew away and the vision faded. Walls closed around them, and he recognized he was back in the little hospital room. The next few days Ritchie was very sick, but he tried to communicate what had happened to him. However, but no one listened.
Richie later learned his condition was diagnosed as double lobar pneumonia, and 24 hours after he lost consciousness the medical officer had pronounced him dead. The ward boy was told to get him ready for the morgue but noticed what appeared to be movement of a hand under the blanket. The medical officer again observed and pronounced him dead a second time. The ward boy refused to accept the verdict and suggested that Ritchie be given a shot of adrenalin directly into his heart muscle. This made no sense medically because his condition after so long without oxygen to the brain should have been totally irreversible. But the doctor did it anyway. Ritchie’s heart began to beat and respiration returned. Three days later he regained consciousness.
The commanding medical officer called his recovery the most amazing medical case he had ever encountered, and years later in a notarized statement wrote – “Private George G. Ritchie’s . . . virtual call from death and return to vigorous health has to be explained in terms of other than natural means”
Following this experience Ritchie was accepted into medical school, but he became overwhelmed and began failing. He was returned to active duty and shipped overseas. Because of his partial medical training, he was assigned to the Medical Administrative Corps and sent to a field hospital in France. As he worked to care for the injured and dying he began yearning to be back with Jesus. His physical survival, when others died, he felt was a rejection by Him. Longing for death became an obsession.
Then he met a man who appeared exceptionally loving and compassionate. Ritchie felt as though he was in the presence of a familiar friend. He realized that he was seeing Christ looking out through his eyes. At that point he began to understand that if he wanted to feel the nearness of Christ, something that he wanted more than anything else, he would have to stop trying to recapture an otherworldly vision of Jesus and start looking for Him in the faces across from him in the mess table. That was the beginning of his integration of his neardeath experience with the rest of his life