Last night, in honor of Memorial Day, my wife and I watched George C. Scott in Patton. It’s been decades since I’ve seen the movie, and I enjoyed it.
I also finished reading O’Reilly and Dugald’s book Killing Patton, which I likewise very much enjoyed.
Here’s an arresting item from the end of that book:
General Patton had two daughters, Beatrice (named after her mother) and Ruth Ellen, as well as a son, George Patton IV.
In a memoir entitled The Button Box: A Daughter’s Loving Memoir of Mrs. George S. Patton, Ruth Ellen says that, at the moment of her father’s death, she awoke from sleep and distinctly saw him standing, in full uniform, at the foot of her bed: “I sat up in bed — I could see him plainly. When he saw I was looking at him he gave me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen.”
In the morning, Ruth Ellen called her sister, Beatrice, who reported a strange experience of her own:
“She said she had been fast asleep when the phone by her bed rang. She picked it up and there was a lot of static, as if it were an overseas call, and she heard Georgie’s voice [Georgie being a familiar nickname for the intimidating General Patton] ask, ‘Little Bee, are you alright?'”
Then the call evidently broke off.
So she called the overseas operator, who told her that there had been no call.
I find such accounts intriguing. And there are many of them. I’m aware of several involving similar telephone calls that seemed to be from a (newly) deceased person. And bedside appearances of the dead at or near the time of their deaths are remarkably widely reported.
Make of them what you will.
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