Book Review: Spirit Walking by Everett Stone

Book Review: Spirit Walking by Everett Stone

Review by Bob Peterson

I recently finished reading the book Spirit Walking: True Tales of Out of Body Experiences by Everett Stone, and here are my thoughts.

I've always loved narrations of other people's out-of-body experiences. It was Robert Monroe's narrations that first got me interested in OBEs. It was the narrations in Robert Crookall's books that propelled me forward and taught me a lot about OBE, its potential for exploration, and some of the theories regarding the reports. So I have a soft spot for reading them. So I dove into this book with a certain sense of excitement. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations.

First I'll tell you what I liked about the book: the stories themselves. Many of them were interesting. Now for what I didn't like:

First of all, that's all it is: just OBE narrations. There is no commentary, no conjecture, no information; it's just a bunch of OBE stories from anonymous people. Books like Monroe's and Crookall's used the stories to formulate theories and ignite ideas. This one does not.

Second, there are all kinds of grammatical problems. When you're using someone else's stories, I know it's tempting to present the material "as is" because it's their story, their writing, not yours. Still, these seem to be completely unedited, and as such, it's loaded with mistakes that would make any editor cringe. The author should have taken the time to proof-read these stories and at least fix the grammar and spelling. I know I'm a "grammar nazi" but there's no excuse for sentences that don't even end with a period.

Many of the narrations in the book, in my opinion, aren't even out-of-body experiences. Several of them could be easily classified as completely different phenomena, like deja vu or precognition.

Like many of the books I've read recently, the book was also too short.
It's only 79 pages, and the type is very big, so it's much too short.
That was a tip-off that I'm the wrong audience for this book. The book was probably targeted toward teens or grade-schoolers.

Six of those pages just say "One" through "Six". I wasn't sure if they were chapter numbers or what. They seemed more like "Part One" type headings, but there was no explanation, no logical grouping, nothing to set them apart. There was absolutely nothing to distinguish the stories in "One" from those in "Six" so why even bother with this? It would have been nice if the stories were grouped in some way: "Five: OBEs in which the experience had these features" or some such, but there was no explanation.


I'm sorry, but I can't recommend this book for anyone serious about OBEs. You'd be much better off picking up one of Robert Crookall's books; they're a lot more informative, there's a lot more content, and the grammar and spelling are better. It might be a good way to get your pre-teen interested in the topic though.

2013 June 4