Terminal Lucidity: The Researchers Attempting to Prove Your Mind Lives On

The case Anna Katharina Ehmer, a 26-year-old woman with severe mental disorders/disabilities who had allegedly never spoken a single word during her entire life. She was reported to have sung 'dying songs' for a half hour before she died. The case was reported by the head of the Hephata Psychiatric Institution in Kurhessen-Nassauis (Prussia /Germany)

One day I was called by one of our physicians, who is respected both as a scientist and a psychiatrist.
He said: “Come immediately to Käthe, she is dying!” When we entered the room together, we did not believe our eyes and [i]ears. Käthe, who had never spoken a single word, being entirely mentally disabled from birth on, sang dying songs to herself. Specifically, she sang over and over again “Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace, [i]peace, heavenly peace!” For half an hour she sang. Her face, up to then so stultified, was transfigured and spiritualized. Then, she quietly passed away.[/i][/i]

https://www.researchgate.net/publication...l_Lucidity

Sceptics feel free to disregard it but surely it must mean something.

The case Anna Katharina Ehmer, a 26-year-old woman with severe mental disorders/disabilities who had allegedly never spoken a single word during her entire life. She was reported to have sung 'dying songs' for a half hour before she died. The case was reported by the head of the Hephata Psychiatric Institution in Kurhessen-Nassauis (Prussia /Germany)

One day I was called by one of our physicians, who is respected both as a scientist and a psychiatrist.
He said: “Come immediately to Käthe, she is dying!” When we entered the room together, we did not believe our eyes and [i]ears. Käthe, who had never spoken a single word, being entirely mentally disabled from birth on, sang dying songs to herself. Specifically, she sang over and over again “Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace, [i]peace, heavenly peace!” For half an hour she sang. Her face, up to then so stultified, was transfigured and spiritualized. Then, she quietly passed away.[/i][/i]

https://www.researchgate.net/publication...l_Lucidity

Sceptics feel free to disregard it but surely it must mean something.

Yup, the brain does remarkable things. On a forum such as this when one writes; it must mean somethingthey typically are asking a question with metaphysical intent presuming a metaphysical answer. Are you? Btw. It's difficult at best to evaluate this case because she died 97 years ago and only testimonials to go by.

The case Anna Katharina Ehmer, a 26-year-old woman with severe mental disorders/disabilities who had allegedly never spoken a single word during her entire life. She was reported to have sung 'dying songs' for a half hour before she died. The case was reported by the head of the Hephata Psychiatric Institution in Kurhessen-Nassauis (Prussia /Germany)

Another article on this case.

https://the-formula.org/terminal-lucidit...the-ehmer/

That one includes a version of the song which it is said she sang.
Duo Transeamus Wo findet die Seele
Of course its not likely that she sang as sweetly as this. But the words of the hymn are deeply appropriate for the circumstances of someone who knows they are dying.

A rendition in English.

1 O where is the home of the soul to be found?
Who knows its true shelter where comforts abound?
What city of refuge will offer a place
That sin cannot enter, the soul to disgrace?
Nowhere, nowhere do we behold
On earth such a city of blessings untold.

2 So leave this poor earth if yon home thou wouldst see,
The home of the sainted from sorrow made free.
Jerusalem yonder, resplendent in gold,
Wilt thou to the soul all thy beauties unfold?
Truly, truly, no more to roam,
My soul with the Savior shall there be at home.

3 How blissful to dwell in those regions of light,
Where death, sin and sorrow our joys cannot blight!
The sounding of harps by that heavenly throng
Will welcome the soul to glad music and song.
Sweet rest, deep rest, thou wilt be mind
When I in the arms of my Savior recline.

Elsewhere I came across a reference to a German tradition where those present at a funeral sing as the casket is lowered into the grave, this being an example of such a song. That idea of visualising one's own body entering the grave is even more poignant.

That is, if we take the account as having some accuracy, then Käthe was deeply aware of her situation and the relevance of that song, rather than say reciting nursery rhymes or something more random.

That is, if we take the account as having some accuracy, then Käthe was deeply aware of her situation and the relevance of that song, rather than say reciting nursery rhymes or something more random.

I agree, Typoz! And that absolutely should not have ocurred, but it obviously did. I would urge everyone to look at this case and read the details because it makes 
no sense from a physiological perspective.

Incidentally, the original German lyrics of that song were not entirely philosophical musings but based upon hard personal experience. In the German wikipedia (I know!) it is said that the author Franz Ludwig Jörgens  eventually took his own life, having found no peace on this Earth.

[Laird]

Here's a related, recent article that updates the status of the ongoing research:

Why Do Some Dementia Patients ‘Return’ Just Before They Die? (archival link)
July 14, 2026
Billy Brennan
New York Times Magazine

He worked with colleagues to send out surveys, seeking cases from the modern era. Soon he had collected more than 60 reports, most of them relating to people living with dementia. In story after story, Batthyany’s respondents described elderly people who suddenly reached for a loved one’s hand; made amends for past wrongs; offered thanks; or simply seemed, through a shift in their eyes, to become present again.

In 2014, Batthyany’s initial findings were presented at the annual conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. An article that came out after the conference caught the attention of Basil Eldadah, a program officer at the National Institute on Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

Eldadah secured funding for a two-day workshop where researchers could discuss what was known about the lucidity phenomenon and how best to study it. In June 2018, nine experts in nursing, geriatrics, neuroscience, psychology, patient care and linguistics assembled in a conference room at the N.I.A. office in Bethesda, Md.

In 2018, when Eldadah convened the workshop, the Alzheimer’s field was going through a shift, as decades of research into treatments had come up frustratingly short. The atmosphere — and a recent funding increase at the N.I.H. — meant there was more willingness, as Eldadah put it, to “take a risk.” The year after the workshop, the N.I.A. began a $10 million initiative to study lucidity in people with late-stage dementia.

When Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi, an associate professor in emergency medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, saw that the N.I.A. was interested in video research on lucid episodes, she knew one way to approach the problem. Her past work had involved filming people with dementia during interactions with nursing staff and then meticulously analyzing the videos, second by second, to assess which types of care affected patients’ behavioral symptoms. She proposed retooling those video methods to study lucidity.

When the N.I.A. announced the funding for research into paradoxical lucidity in 2019, the potential to explore these questions also caught the interest of Sam Parnia, a brain and consciousness researcher at New York University who now leads one of the N.I.A. studies.

The U.W. team published its findings last August in The Gerontologist, one of the top journals in the field. In evaluating the phenomenon, the study didn’t just rely on how the nurses and caregivers responded. The video recordings offered the U.W. team something no one had ever seen before: the first objective data on the way people experiencing episodes of lucidity communicate.

In each of the three people who had lucid episodes captured by the study, the team found significant shifts in communication and behavior.

See also these other PQ threads, about Alexander Batthyány's book:

• Threshold: Terminal Lucidity and the Border of Life and Death by Alexander Batthyány
  
• Terminal Lucidity book: Threshold
  
• Threshold: New book on terminal lucidity