Neville's secretary, Jack Butler, died suddenly and unexpectedly at age fifty, in or around August 1948, while Neville was on a lecture tour in California; he returned to New York for the funeral, which he gave as a Catholic service in Haverstraw, New York, where Jack was buried rather than cremated. Neville recounts that some six or seven months later he experienced a vision in which Jack appeared fully restored to youth, in his twenties, and did not know he had died.