Appendix B

Notable NDE Case Studies

The Cases That Matter Most for the Moment-of-Death Thesis

Full-Length Edition

A dying woman describes a bone saw she has never seen. A man blind from birth reports colors for the first time. A college professor spends what feels like hours with Christ while his heart is stopped and the clock moves through mere minutes. A child who has never spoken a word suddenly sings hymns on her deathbed. These are not old legends. They are real reports from the last fifty years of near-death-experience and deathbed research.

This appendix gathers the cases that matter most for this book's case. It is not a full catalog. Appendix A gives the full list of NDE research works, and readers who want to go deeper should start there. What follows here is a short guide: the cases sorted by what they show, with brief write-ups, source notes, and links to the chapters where each case does its work.

I chose these cases for three reasons. First, they are well-known. Most come from published medical or academic work rather than from popular testimony alone. Second, they bear on this book's central claim: that every dying person meets the risen Christ in a felt encounter at the moment of death. And third, taken together, they form a pattern. No single case proves the claim. But the pattern across dozens of reports builds a case that is hard to set aside.

Veridical Cases: The Soul Sees What the Brain Cannot

The best proof that NDEs are real comes from veridical cases. In these reports, the person describes events, objects, or talks they could not have known about by normal means. The facts are later confirmed. These cases are the backbone of Chapter 8, which builds the full case for the soul from this data.

Pam Reynolds (1991)

Pam Reynolds was a thirty-five-year-old singer from Atlanta. Surgeons at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix needed to remove a large aneurysm deep in her brain. They used a radical procedure called hypothermic cardiac arrest: they cooled her body to 60 degrees, stopped her heart, drained the blood from her head, and flattened her brain waves. Molded ear speakers sending 100-decibel clicks were placed in each ear. Her eyes were taped shut. By every test, she was as close to dead as modern medicine allows.¹

Yet she reported a rich experience. As Sabom documents, she described the Midas Rex bone saw as looking like an electric toothbrush with interchangeable blades stored in what looked like a socket wrench case. She reported hearing a female cardiac surgeon say something about her blood vessels being too small. Dr. Murray's operative report confirms the right femoral artery was too small for the bypass cannula, and the timing of that conversation matched Reynolds's out-of-body report precisely. The surgical team confirmed every detail.²

What makes this case so strong is the medical control. Her ears were plugged with speakers that altogether eliminate the possibility of physical hearing. Her brain was flat. If the soul can see under those conditions, then the mind is not a product of the brain. This case made heart doctor Michael Sabom, a former skeptic, rethink his views.³

What it shows: The Reynolds case is the single best case for the soul in the NDE data. If the soul can see and hear when the brain is shut down, then the dying moment is a window through which the soul can meet what lies beyond. The full case lives in Chapter 8.

Maria's Tennis Shoe (1977)

Maria was a migrant worker who had cardiac arrest while visiting friends in Seattle. Afterward, she told her social worker, Kimberly Clark Sharp, that during the arrest she had floated above the hospital. She described a dark blue tennis shoe on a third-floor window ledge on the north side of the building: a man's shoe, well-worn, scuffed toe, a lace tucked under the heel. Sharp found the shoe right where Maria said it would be, with every detail confirmed. It was not visible from inside the building or from the ground.⁴

What it shows: Veridical sight during cardiac arrest. This is one of the earliest well-known cases and helped give NDE research its footing. See Chapter 6 and Chapter 8.

Al Sullivan (1988)

Al Sullivan had bypass surgery at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. He reported leaving his body and watching from above. He described his surgeon's odd "flapping" arm motion. Dr. Hiroyoshi Takata would press his arms against his body to keep his hands clean, then point with his elbows. Sullivan had never met Takata before surgery and his eyes were taped shut.⁵

What it shows: A confirmed, specific detail that no one would guess or make up. See Chapter 8.

AWARE Study Cases (2014, 2023)

The AWARE studies, led by Sam Parnia across hospitals in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Austria, are the best controlled studies to date. AWARE I (2014) studied 2,060 cardiac-arrest patients. One patient gave detailed, confirmed reports of events during three minutes of cardiac arrest. His report matched the medical record. AWARE II (2023) found that some patients had spikes of brain activity during CPR that lined up with the reports of awareness.⁶

What it shows: Planned, multi-site, peer-reviewed proof of awareness during clinical death. See Chapter 6 and Chapter 8.

Blind NDErs: Sight Without Eyes

If NDEs were brain-made visions, blind people should have non-visual NDEs. A person who has never had visual input should not be able to produce visual images through brain failure. But that is not what the data shows.

Vicki Umipeg

Vicki Umipeg was born early in 1950 and lost her sight from too much oxygen in her incubator. She had never seen anything. In 1973, she was in a car crash and went into cardiac arrest. During her NDE, she reported seeing for the first time: her own body from above, a ring she wore, the hospital room, and later trees, flowers, light, and people. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper studied her case in Mindsight (1999), alongside thirty other blind and sight-impaired NDErs. Blind subjects reported visual events at rates close to sighted NDErs.⁷

What it shows: Vicki had no stored visual data. If her sight was real, then the soul sees through powers that do not rely on the body's senses. This matters for the book's claim that the dying soul can see Christ even when the brain is failing. See Chapter 8.

Cases with Strong Christ-Encounter Content

Many NDEs include a meeting with a being of great light, love, and knowledge. Some name this being as Christ. Others describe traits that match the Christian picture of Christ without using the name. The meaning of these cases is worked out in Chapter 18.

What may surprise readers is how often Jesus appears. J. Steve Miller studied 141 consecutive cases from the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation's database. Out of the 100 that passed his quality filter, eighteen percent reported seeing Jesus. This rate puts Jesus encounters alongside elements researchers treat as core: seeing deceased persons runs at roughly thirteen percent, and the life review at seventeen to twenty-two percent. The finding was not what Miller set out to look for; he was studying whether NDEs contained anti-Christian content. The frequency of Jesus was a surprise.⁸

Nor do these encounters belong to Christians alone. Miller found Jewish NDErs who reported meeting Jesus without expecting to. Yale pediatric oncologist Diane Komp reported a four-year-old Chinese boy, whose family had never had contact with Christians, who after a drowning accident identified the man who had pulled him out of the water as Jesus.⁹

Howard Storm

Howard Storm was an art professor and a firm atheist. In 1985, his heart stopped in a Paris hospital. His NDE began in horror: hostile beings drew him into darkness, clawed and bit at him. In despair, he cried out to Jesus. The darkness broke. A being of light appeared, and Storm reported a long meeting that included a life review, deep talk, and clear teaching. He said it lasted hours. He later became a pastor.¹⁰

What it shows: Storm's case covers three themes at once: a hellish-to-heavenly NDE (Chapter 12), strong Christ content (Chapter 18), and clear time-stretching (Chapter 10).

Don Piper

Don Piper, a Baptist pastor, was in a car crash in 1989 and was said to be dead at the scene. He reports a heaven experience with deceased family, music, and light. His bestselling 90 Minutes in Heaven (2004) made his story one of the most widely read NDE accounts in the church. I include it with a caution: his account is a personal memoir, not a case studied by medical teams. Its value lies in its wide reach, not as clinical proof.¹¹

Mary Neal

Mary Neal, a bone surgeon, drowned in a kayaking crash in Chile in 1999. She reports a rich NDE in which she met Christ, was shown parts of her future life, and was told she had to return. Her book, To Heaven and Back (2012), stands out because she is a trained doctor who feared going public would hurt her career.¹²

Time-Stretching Cases

This book's central claim rests on the idea that the dying moment can hold far more felt time than the clock would suggest. The full treatment lives in Chapter 10, and the case-by-case study is in Appendix J.

Storm's case, already described, is a strong example. His clinical event was brief, but his account reads like hours, not minutes.

Eben Alexander

Eben Alexander, a brain surgeon, came down with a rare form of bacterial meningitis in 2008. His higher brain was badly damaged for seven days. He reports an NDE that felt like days or weeks. His book, Proof of Heaven (2012), describes several phases: an underground space, a bright gateway, and a meeting with a being of light. His account has faced pushback, and it is a single-source story. But even with those limits, it adds to the pattern of felt time far beyond the clock.¹⁴

George Ritchie (1943)

George Ritchie was a twenty-year-old Army private who got pneumonia at Camp Barkeley, Texas. He was said to be dead and placed in a room to wait for the morgue. He came back and reported a long NDE that included meeting a being of light he called Christ and being shown visions of life after death. His book, Return from Tomorrow (1978), is one of the earliest modern NDE accounts, said to have inspired Raymond Moody to begin his own work.¹⁵

What it shows: Time-stretching reports are not a recent trend. They go back to the start of modern NDE study. See Chapter 6 and Chapter 10.

Life-Review Cases

The life review is one of the most common and most meaningful parts of the NDE. In it, the person re-lives parts of their whole life, often from the view of the people they affected. The meaning is worked out in Chapter 11, and its value as a window into felt time is the subject of Appendix K.

Storm's life review was hard. He felt what other people felt when he had been cruel or selfish. The review was not a sentence. It was a clearing. It happened in the light of the being, who did not condemn but showed.

Anita Moorjani, a woman of Indian heritage living in Hong Kong, fell into a coma in 2006 as her organs failed from cancer. During her NDE, she saw her whole life and grasped the fears that had shaped her. Her book, Dying to Be Me (2012), describes the review as full self-knowledge in the arms of total love. She made a fast recovery that stunned her doctors.¹⁶

What it shows: The life review acts as judgment, cleansing, and grace in one event. This echoes the biblical picture of krisis in John 3:19–21. See Chapter 11 and Chapter 19.

Hellish and Distressing NDEs

Not all NDEs are peaceful. Some people report fear, darkness, hostile beings, or what they call hell. These cases matter because they show that the meeting can begin in darkness. The full treatment is in Chapter 12, and the framework for the ordered encounter is in Chapter 28.

Storm's case has already been described. Its value here is that his NDE began in sustained, vivid terror. Christ did not leave him in the dark. Christ came when Storm was ready to ask.

Nancy Evans Bush, a scholar linked to IANDS, has done the most careful study of dark NDEs. Her book Dancing Past the Dark (2012) sorts these cases into three types: NDE elements felt as scary rather than comforting, a void or emptiness, and vivid hellish images.¹⁷

Maurice Rawlings, a heart doctor, published To Hell and Back (1993), a set of hellish NDE reports. He argued that many more people had such NDEs than reported them, because the events were so painful that people pushed them out of memory. But it comes with a caution: Rawlings was an evangelical with a clear agenda, and his case methods do not meet later academic standards.¹⁸

What it shows: The dying moment is not always gentle. The darkness is not God's absence. It may be the needed first stage of a meeting that ends in light. See Chapter 12.

Deathbed Visions and Terminal Lucidity

The cases above are near-death experiences: the patient nearly died and came back. Deathbed experiences are different in a way that matters. These patients actually die. There is no return. What they describe in their final hours is a one-way window into the dying moment itself, making deathbed visions a direct test of this book's claim. The full treatment lives in Chapter 5, with further development in Chapter 30 and Chapter 31.

Anna Katharina Ehmer

Käthe Ehmer lived in Hephata, a large mental health facility in Germany. From birth, she was severely impaired. She had never learned to speak a single word. She stared for hours, then fidgeted for hours. She showed no sign of noticing her surroundings. Then, as she lay dying, the chief physician called the pastoral director, Friedrich Happich, to come at once. Käthe was singing. She sang a hymn whose words translate: "Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace, peace, heavenly peace!" Her face, which had always been blank, was changed and full of light. She sang for half an hour. Then she quietly died. The physician, the nurse, and Happich all had tears in their eyes.¹⁹

What it shows: A woman who had never spoken sang hymns as she died. Her brain had never worked well enough to learn speech. If the brain alone produced the mind, this could not happen. The case directly supports the claim that even the most impaired mind cannot keep the soul from its meeting with God. See Chapter 31.

Daisy Dryden (1879)

Daisy Dryden was ten years old and dying of fever in San Jose, California. For her last three days, she was fully conscious and spoke clearly about what she saw on the other side. She described meeting her brother Allie, who had died seven months earlier. She reported seeing angels and was surprised that they had no wings. When a neighbor read the Bible passage about "many mansions," Daisy said she did not see houses, but places where people met. She described things that did not match what her parents or her culture had taught her to expect. At half past eight that evening, she told her father that at half past eleven Allie would come for her. Just as the clock hands reached that time, she lifted both arms, said "Come, Allie," and died.²⁰

What it shows: A child whose reports contradicted her own expectations, whose prediction of the time of death proved accurate to the half hour. See Chapter 5 and Chapter 30.

Diane Komp's Pediatric Cases

Diane Komp spent a career treating children with cancer at Yale. She began as a self-described agnostic. Seven-year-old Hannah, dying of leukemia, sat up in her hospital bed and said the angels were beautiful. She asked her mother if she could hear their singing. Then she lay back and died. In another case, a four-year-old boy who had seen a vision of an angel called the hospital staff into his room, thanked each of them, said goodbye, and died. He was perfectly calm. There was not a dry eye on the floor. These children had not been told they were dying. Their reports changed Komp from a skeptic to a believer in a personal God.²¹

NDEs in Persons with Mental Limits

If the book's thesis is true, every dying person meets Christ. That includes those whose minds have been impaired by illness or injury. The data is thin. Most NDE research relies on people who can describe their experience afterward, which rules out many impaired persons. But terminal-lucidity cases, such as Käthe Ehmer's above, offer suggestive evidence. Hospice workers have described patients with severe dementia who show sudden, startling clarity in the hours before death. Some speak clearly for the first time in years. Some know family members they had long forgotten.²²

What it shows: Terminal lucidity hints that the soul's power to know may not be bound by brain damage. If a person with advanced dementia can suddenly speak and know and love moments before death, something beyond the brain is at work. The full treatment is in Chapter 31.

Children's NDEs

Children's NDEs matter for a simple reason: children have less culture to draw on. If NDEs were built from what people expect, children should report very different events from adults. But that is not what we find.

Melvin Morse published Closer to the Light in 1990. He studied children who had survived cardiac arrest, near-drowning, and other close calls. Children reported the same core elements as adults: leaving the body, a tunnel, a being of light, dead family members, a border. They used simpler words. A child might call the being of light "the bright person" rather than Christ. But the shape of the event was the same.²³

P. M. H. Atwater built on this in The New Children and Near-Death Experiences (2003). She found that children reported time-distortion at rates close to adults.²⁴

What it shows: Children who have never heard of NDEs report the same core elements as adult survivors. This gives strong support to the claim that the NDE is a real event, not a cultural script. See Chapter 30.

Reading the Pattern

Taken one at a time, each case can be picked apart. Reynolds might have heard something past the ear plugs. Maria's social worker might have recalled wrong. Storm might have been filling in gaps. Any single case can be set aside if you try hard enough.

But the pattern is harder to dismiss. Across fifty years, across cultures, across age groups, across medical settings, the reports line up. The soul leaves the body. It sees the world truly. It meets a being of great love. It reviews its life. It feels time in a way the clock cannot measure. And in many cases—roughly one in five, by Miller's count—it names the being of light as Christ.

The deathbed cases deepen this pattern. They show us something the NDE cases cannot: what happens when there is no return. Children who were never told they were dying see angels and say goodbye. A woman who never spoke sings hymns of peace. A ten-year-old predicts the hour of her own death and calls for her dead brother when it comes. These are not round trips. They are one-way crossings. And what the dying describe on the way across matches what the NDErs describe on the way back.

This book does not say NDEs or deathbed visions are perfect truth. They are not. They are human events, filtered through human minds, and they carry the limits of any human report. But the way they line up is striking. And what they line up with is what the Christian tradition has said about the soul, about Christ at the border of life and death, and about the love of God that comes for every person.

The cases here form the empirical layer of the book's case. The biblical layer lives in Chapters 20–24. The time-and-mind layer lives in Chapters 13–15 and Appendices F–O. The full case comes together in Chapter 28. Together, these layers build the claim that the dying moment is not the end. It may be the start of the most important meeting of a life.