Posted on 17 June 2024, 7:28

A heartwarming movie titled A Rumor of Angels was released in 2002 and is occasionally seen on television reruns.  The film stars Vanessa Redgrave as an elderly recluse in a small ocean-front town.  She befriends a 12-year-old neighbor boy who is grieving the loss of his mother in an auto accident.  She tells the boy about how her son had communicated with her following his death in the Vietnam War during 1974 and gives the boy her diary of spirit communication from her son.  The boy reads various entries in the diary and finds comfort in them until his stepmother and father discover the diary and conclude that the boy’s mind is being poisoned by the elderly woman and prohibit him from further visiting her.  When the elderly woman dies, she communicates with the boy from the Other Side.

Probably few people who have viewed the movie realize that it was purportedly based on a true story, although it took place in World War I, not the Vietnam War. The story, with many Hollywood modifications, came from the 1918 non-fiction book, Thy Son Liveth: Messages from a Soldier to his Mother, by Grace Duffie Boylan, a popular journalist and author of that era.  The book was initially released anonymously, but later issues carried Boylan’s name.  It was not stated that Boylan was the mother of Bob, the young soldier about whom the story revolves, but that seems to have been the implication. When the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, questioned Boylan as to the authenticity of the story, she replied, “I ask you to regard this book as truth, unaccompanied by proofs of any sort, making its own explanation and appeal.”

A more complete summary of the story is told in my book, Dead Men Talking, along with the stories of four other victims of the Great War – Raymond Lodge, Claude Kelway-Bamber, Thomas Dowding, and Rolf Little, all of whom communicated after-death messages.  Bob is given the surname “Bennett” in the book.

Bob is said to have grown up with his widowed mother in an old home on the Hudson, below Tarrytown, New York.  He went to Columbia University, where he studied electrical engineering, and soon after joining the United States Army was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent off to fight in World War I. Well before he went to college, Bob developed an interest in telegraphy and set up a wireless in his home with a large mast on the roof.  “Bob took to telegraphy as a spark takes to the air wave,” the story is told by his mother. “He was one of the first to raise a wireless mast from the top of his home, and of course, I had to study and experiment with him.  He bullied me into learning the code and being the party of the second part to take his messages.  Looking back upon this now, I am impressed with the methods that are used by the Destiny that shapes our ends.  Had it not been for that inkling of the science of telegraphy which I gained in our play, I should not have heard [from Bob].” 

After Bob’s deployment, she received several messages from him by Morse Code. The news of his death also came by wireless. “Mother, be game.  I am alive and loving you.  But my body is with thousands of other mothers’ boys near Lens.  Get this fact to others if you can.  It’s awful for us when you grieve, and we can’t get in touch with you to tell you we are all right.  This is a clumsy way.  I’ll figure out something easier.  I’m confused yet.  Bob.”

Grace realized that such communication would be difficult for most people to believe. “I have no knowledge of established psychic laws or limitations,” she wrote. “But I know what I know.” A month later, official notice of Bob’s death on the battlefield was received by Grace. She concluded that Bob’s first wireless message to her came not long after he fell.

No Horror in Death

A second wireless message read: “Attention: Get this across – there is no horror in death.  I was one minute in the thick of things, with my company, and the next minute Lieutenant Wells touched my arm and said:  ‘Our command has crossed: Let’s go.’  I thought he meant the river, and followed him under the crossfire barrage the Tommies made, up to a hillside that I had not noticed before: a clean spot and not blackened by the guns.  Lots of fellows I knew were there, and strange troops.  But they looked queer… I overtook Wells. ‘What in the deuce is the matter with me, with us all?’ I asked.  He said, ‘Bob, we’re dead.’  I didn’t believe it at first.  I felt all right.  But the men were moving, and I fell in line.

“When we marched through the German barbed-wire barricades and in front of the howitzers,” Bob continued, “I realized that the body that could be hurt had been shed on the red field.  Then I thought of you.  Sent the wireless from an enemy station in the field.  The officer in charge couldn’t have seen me.  But he heard, I guess, by the way his eyes popped.  He sent a few shots in my direction, anyway.  I am using an abandoned apparatus in a trench today, depending on relays.

“We are assigned to duty here for the present according to Wells. I don’t know how he knows.  It seems while we have no supernatural power to divert or stop bullets, we can comfort and reassure those who are about to join us. There has been much talk about the presence of one supposed to be the Savior among the dying.  I should not wonder if that were true.  The capacity for believing is enlarged by experience. But as yet I have no more real knowledge than any of the other fellows.  I will let you know as I gain information.”

Grace faithfully recorded her son’s messages, inserting the proper punctuation and apparently adding some missing words to provide the necessary flow in otherwise truncated verbiage.  In the fourth wireless message, Bob encouraged his mother to attempt automatic writing, as it was too difficult trying to get through on a wireless.  She confessed ignorance of such “occult” practices, admitting that she had always turned away from books of alleged spiritual sources because the “author souls” seemed so unadvanced intellectually, whereas she expected an all-wise, all-seeing, all-knowing angelhood. However, she slowly developed the ability to do automatic writing.

Grace had heard the skeptical theory, that the messages were all coming from her subconscious. “Well maybe they are,” she wrote.  “I cannot say that they are not.  For I do not know what subconsciousness is. What stuff it is made of.  Whence it comes or whither it goes.  Maybe it is the bridge, the link between the mortal and immortal part of man.  Maybe it is the inherent life which all scientists from first to last, have sought without finding; that invisible stumbling block over which every well-built theory of atoms and electrons takes its headlong fall.  If subconsciousness is one of these, it is more than probable that my boy is using its avenue of communication.  For they must be clear enough from his end of the road…”

Bob repeatedly stressed the need to get all of this information to other parents in order to comfort them and urged his mother to write a book. He warned his mother about mischievous spirits interfering with the messages, referring to them as “scalawags.”  He further informed his mother that those on his side knew nothing about the outcome of the war or if there was some cosmic purpose to such war, though in the great scheme of things it might not be as terrible as people in the earth life view it.

As Bob came to understand it, the earth is a preparatory planet.  “The human race is marked for an advanced existence and is brought to as high a degree of perfection as may be necessary to bring up the average,” he communicated.  “That is: The high degree of intelligence of the greater number lifts the lesser in the scale.  We begin the new existence where we left off in the old.  The more we have gained, the greater our advancement among far more favorable conditions.  That is not clear.  I’ll get a better hold on the idea.”

Near-Death Experience

In one communication, Bob told of another soldier named Cooper, who at first appeared to be “a sniveling ‘willy’ boy” who was afraid of the dark.  However, when a grenade fell in the trench, he grabbed it and jumped out of the trench, saving many others.  Cooper temporarily joined the “dead” and was very much concerned about his mother’s grief.  “Coop says he was a rotter to his mother, and he has lately heard her crying that she had been too harsh with him when he was a little boy.” Cooper returned to his physical body.  “I have permission to tell you that Cooper has, because of his understanding and compassion, been sent back home as an instructor,” Bob told his mother.  “His body, sustained by some life principle which I cannot explain, has been all this time in a reconstruction hospital back of the French lines…[He] will take up his old life on earth, and his mother will have her son. But he will not be the same. None of those who go back will be the same…”

Bob had much more to tell his mother, some of which is related in my book, but he stressed that there were many things he did not yet know about or was incapable of understanding.  “…I am not yet far enough advanced to make any definite or authoritative statement,’ he informed her.  “ I only want to start this whole propaganda of comfort, on the one sure thing:  There is no death.”

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.