Appendix B

Notable NDE Case Studies with Theological Implications

A Reference Collection of Significant Cases, Organized by What They Illustrate

Condensed Edition

A woman lies on an operating table. Her body has been cooled to sixty degrees. Her heart has stopped. Her brain waves are flat. And yet, when she wakes up, she describes the tools the doctors used and the words they spoke while she was dead by every measure. How do we make sense of that?

This appendix gathers the NDE cases that matter most for this book. Each one is chosen for what it shows us about the soul, about time, about the person of Christ, or about the shape of the dying encounter. The cases are grouped by what they best show. For each one, I give a brief summary, name the researcher who studied it, and note what the case adds to the book's case.

Two cautions before we begin. First, no single case proves a theology. But taken together, these cases form a pattern that lines up with what Scripture and careful thinking also suggest. Second, NDE research is still young. Some cases are better documented than others. Where the proof is strong, I say so. Where there are reasons for care, I say that too.¹

Veridical Observation Cases

A veridical NDE is one where the patient reports specific, checkable details from the time when their body showed no signs of being aware. These cases matter because they push hard against the idea that the mind is only the brain at work. If a patient can see and hear while the brain is shut down, something other than the brain must be doing the seeing. That points toward substance dualism: the view that the soul is a real thing, distinct from the body.² For the full case, see Chapter 8.

Pam Reynolds (1991)

Pam Reynolds may be the best-documented NDE case on record. In 1991, at age thirty-five, she had a rare surgery called hypothermic cardiac arrest at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Surgeons needed to remove a large aneurysm at the base of her brain. To do this safely, they cooled her body to sixty degrees, stopped her heart, and drained the blood from her head. Her brain stem showed no response. By every measure, Pam Reynolds was as close to dead as a living patient can be.³

Yet she later reported a detailed experience. She described floating above her body and watching the surgery from above. She described the bone saw the surgeon used. It looked, she said, like an electric toothbrush. Its case looked like the one her father kept his socket wrenches in. She also heard a female voice say that her arteries were too small. Cardiologist Michael Sabom investigated these details and confirmed them against the surgical record.⁴

The Reynolds case matters because it shows that the mind can remain aware even when the brain has been shut down. If the soul can perceive during standstill surgery, it can perceive during the act of dying.

Maria's Tennis Shoe (1977)

Maria was a migrant worker who suffered a cardiac arrest at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Her social worker, Kimberly Clark Sharp, visited her afterward. Maria told Sharp something strange. During the arrest, she had floated out of her body and risen above the hospital. There, on a third-floor window ledge, she had noticed a dark blue tennis shoe. She described it in detail: it was worn on the left side, and one of the laces was tucked under the heel.⁵

Sharp went looking. She found the shoe exactly where Maria had described it, matching every detail. Sharp later published the case, and it became one of the most frequently cited examples in the NDE literature. Skeptics have questioned whether the shoe could have been seen from ground level. But Maria described details, like the tucked lace, that would not have been visible from below.⁶

Al Sullivan (1988)

Al Sullivan underwent a cardiac bypass operation in Hartford, Connecticut. During the surgery, while unconscious and with his chest open, he reported rising above his body. He saw his surgeon, Dr. Hiroyoshi Takata, making an odd gesture: flapping his elbows out to the sides, as though trying to fly. Sullivan found this strange and mentioned it after waking up. When asked, Dr. Takata confirmed that he had a habit of pointing at things with his elbows to avoid contaminating his sterile gloves.⁷ Sabom investigated and verified the details.

The AWARE Study (2008–2014)

The AWARE study was the first large, planned, multi-hospital test of NDEs during cardiac arrest. Led by Sam Parnia of the University of Southampton, it placed visual targets on shelves near the ceilings of rooms where patients were revived. The targets were visible only from above. Over several years the study enrolled more than two thousand cardiac arrest patients at fifteen hospitals. Of those who survived and could be asked, roughly nine percent reported some awareness during the arrest. Two patients reported verified out-of-body seeing. One gave a correct, detailed account of events during a three-minute cardiac arrest, including the actions of the medical team and the sounds of the machines.⁸

The AWARE study matters for its method. Because it was planned ahead of time with hidden targets, it moves the field from case reports toward controlled science.

Darrell Pell — Sabom's Atlanta Study (1994)

Darrell Pell suffered ten cardiac arrests in a single day while waiting for a heart transplant in 1994. During at least three of those arrests, he reported rising out of his body and watching the medical team work on him. He described the people in the room, the colors they wore, and which side of the bed they stood on. He also recited Bible verses while unconscious — his nurses confirmed that he would start quoting Scripture when he felt dizzy, stop when his heart stopped, and resume further along in the passage when he came back. A spirit being he called Jesus was with him each time. Sabom documented the case in the opening chapters of Light and Death, confirming the details against the medical record.²⁹

Darrell's case adds something the other veridical cases do not. It is not a single observation but a repeated pattern — the same out-of-body view across multiple arrests in one day, with confirmed details each time. That kind of repetition is hard to explain as a lucky guess or a one-time brain event.

NDEs Among the Blind

If an NDE were only a dying brain's last flicker, we would expect its content to match what the patient has seen before. A person blind from birth has never seen a thing. So if someone born blind reports seeing during an NDE, that is very hard to explain on a brain-only model.

Vicki Umipeg (1973)

Vicki Umipeg was born blind. The cause was too much oxygen in her incubator, a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. She had never had any visual sense at all. At age twenty-two, she was in a bad car crash and suffered a head injury that left her clinically dead for a time. During that time, she reported something she had never known: sight.⁹

She described looking down at her own body from the ceiling of the emergency room. She recognized herself by her hair and her wedding ring. She then rose through the roof of the building and saw the city lights below. She entered a place filled with light. There she met figures she knew to be deceased friends and relatives. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper documented her case in Mindsight (1999), alongside more than thirty other blind NDErs. Several of them, like Vicki, were congenitally blind and had never seen before their NDE.¹⁰

Cases with Strong Christological Content

Many NDErs report meeting a being of light. In a large number of those cases, the person names the being as Jesus Christ. This is true not only for lifelong Christians but sometimes for people with no prior faith at all. These cases bear on the book's central claim: that the risen Christ meets every dying person at the moment of death. See Chapter 18.

Howard Storm (1985)

Howard Storm was an atheist art teacher at Northern Kentucky University. In 1985, while leading a student trip to Paris, he suffered a ruptured intestine and was rushed to a hospital. As he lay waiting for surgery, he found himself outside his body. What followed was one of the most dramatic NDE accounts on record.¹¹

Storm first went through what he calls a hellish phase. Shadowy figures led him away from his hospital room. They grew hostile and attacked him. Lying broken in the dark, he recalled singing "Jesus Loves Me" in Sunday school as a child. In despair, he called out to Jesus. The response, he says, was instant. A bright light appeared. A figure he knew to be Christ lifted him from the dark and carried him into a place of vast love and peace.¹²

Storm's case matters for several reasons. It shows the Christ-centered content of the encounter. It shows a hellish phase followed by rescue, which fits the book's model of a staged encounter where God sets the order of each soul's experience (see Chapter 28). And it shows time-dilation: Storm says the experience felt like it lasted many hours. He later left his teaching career and became an ordained minister.¹³

Mary Neal (1999)

Mary Neal was a bone surgeon who drowned during a kayaking accident in Chile in 1999. She was held under the water for a long time. During that period, she reports leaving her body, being met by beings of light, and meeting Christ. She felt a love so complete that she did not want to come back. She was also told during the experience that her young son Willie would die. That later proved true. Neal's medical training gives her account a level of self-awareness that many NDE reports lack.¹⁴

Don Piper (1989)

Don Piper, a Baptist minister, was hit by a semi-truck on a bridge in Texas in 1989. Medics at the scene said he was dead. For ninety minutes, his body lay covered under a tarp. During that time, he reports entering heaven, seeing dead loved ones, and hearing music he could not fully describe. He was revived after another minister came to the scene and felt led to pray over his body.¹⁵

Piper's case is widely known through his bestselling book. A word of care is needed: his account lacks the independent medical records that cases like Pam Reynolds have. The call of death at the scene was made by medics, not in a hospital with full tracking. I include the case for its wide cultural reach and its vivid picture of Christ. But readers should hold it to a different standard than the cases with clinical controls.¹⁶

Cross-Cultural Data — The Surprising Presence of Jesus

Beyond individual cases, large-scale data support the claim that Jesus appears far more often in NDEs than any other named religious figure. J. Steve Miller studied over five thousand accounts in Jeffrey Long's NDERF database and found that eighteen percent of NDErs reported seeing Jesus. By contrast, only three out of more than five thousand reported seeing Krishna — and in each of those three cases, the person also reported seeing Jesus. Of eighty self-identified Muslims in the database, not one reported seeing Muhammad. And of twenty-nine cases mentioning Buddha, only one described seeing a living Buddha as a distinct being. Miller found more NDErs reporting aliens than reporting Krishna, Buddha, or Muhammad combined.³⁰

Long's own research confirms the pattern. In God and the Afterlife (2016), he studied the "God Study" subset of the NDERF database and found that encounters with a personal, loving God were reported across backgrounds and traditions. The experience was not limited to people who already believed. Atheists, agnostics, and people of non-Christian faiths reported the same core encounter.³¹

This data matters for the book's case. If NDEs simply mirrored each person's prior beliefs, we would expect Hindus to see Krishna, Muslims to see Muhammad, and atheists to see nothing. That is not what the data show. What they show is a pattern that points toward one figure, not many.

Time-Dilation Cases

The book's thesis depends on the claim that the dying moment can be stretched in felt time. What the clock measures as seconds or minutes, the dying person lives as hours or longer. If this is real, then there is room within the moment of death for a sustained, unhurried meeting with Christ. Several NDE cases report just this kind of time-dilation. For the full treatment of time in NDEs, see Chapter 10.

Howard Storm's account, discussed above, gives one of the clearest examples. He reports that the experience felt like it unfolded over many hours. The hellish phase alone seemed to take a long time. The meeting with Christ that followed felt unhurried and full. In medical terms, the whole episode matched a fairly brief crisis.¹⁷

Eben Alexander, a brain surgeon, published an account of an NDE during a week-long coma caused by bacterial meningitis in 2008. He described a rich experience that seemed to unfold over a vast stretch of time. It included passing through different places and meeting a being of light. His case drew major public interest but also sharp criticism. Reporters raised questions about some of his medical claims, and several peers disputed parts of his story. I include Alexander here because his case shows that time-dilation is reported even in long periods of lost awareness. But his case should be treated with care. It does not carry the same weight as the cases with clinical controls.¹⁸

Life-Review Cases

The life review is one of the most widely reported features of the NDE. People describe seeing their whole lives replayed, often with a moral edge: they feel the impact of what they did on others, sometimes from the other person's point of view. This bears on the book's model of the encounter, where the risen Christ shows the dying person who they truly are. See Chapter 11.

Howard Storm's life review is among the most detailed on record. He says that Christ showed him his whole life, not as a fast montage but as a slow, careful re-living. He felt the pain he had caused others. He saw acts of kindness he had forgotten. The review was not punitive but clarifying. It showed him the truth about himself so he could make a real choice about who he wanted to be.¹⁹

Anita Moorjani gives another striking example. In 2006, she lay in a coma in the final stages of cancer. During her NDE, she reports going through a full life review wrapped in a sense of total love. She came to see how fear had shaped her choices. She describes the review as being shown the real meaning of her life. It was not a judgment but a showing forth. After she was revived, her cancer went into rapid and medically unexplained remission.²⁰

The life review matters because it fits the biblical picture of a God who knows us fully and shows us ourselves with mercy. It is judgment in the sense of truth-telling, not of punishment. And it happens within the stretched felt time of the dying moment.

Hellish and Distressing NDEs

Not all NDEs are peaceful. A real number of people report scary or painful encounters: darkness, hostile beings, loneliness, or a place that feels like hell. These cases are just as real as the happy ones, and they matter for the book's case. See Chapter 12.

Howard Storm's case again serves as the key example. Before his meeting with Christ, he went through a long phase of darkness and attack. The beings who led him from his hospital room grew violent. He describes being torn apart. The hellish phase ended only when he cried out to Jesus. This two-phase shape, darkness before dawn, fits the book's model of a staged encounter. In the terms of Chapter 28, God may set the order so that some souls first feel the weight of being apart from him before Christ appears or is called out to.²¹

Nancy Evans Bush has done the most careful scholarly work on distressing NDEs. In Dancing Past the Dark (2012), she sorts distressing NDEs into three types. The first is the void experience, where the person drifts in featureless darkness or emptiness. The second is the hellish landscape, with fire, torment, or monstrous figures. The third is the inverse experience, where features that are usually comforting in NDEs turn frightening instead. Bush argues that distressing NDEs are underreported because people feel shame or confusion about them.²²

Maurice Rawlings, a heart doctor, published accounts of dark NDEs in Beyond Death's Door (1978) and To Hell and Back (1993). As a doctor who revived patients, he was present when some described frightening events right after coming back. Rawlings said that many patients forget dark NDEs within hours or days. That is why, he argued, they are less common in surveys done weeks later. His work is useful, but a word of care is needed: Rawlings held strong beliefs as an evangelical Christian, and those may have shaped how he ran his interviews and chose his cases.²³

Sabom found two cases of hellish NDEs in his Atlanta Study. One was a veteran named Jake who attempted suicide by overdose in the mountains. He described a scorched valley, demonic figures, and being mocked and kicked. God spoke to him — not in a voice but like a voice — saying he could have had anything he wanted and had thrown it away. He begged forgiveness and came back. The second, a man named Beau, collapsed at home and first went to a place he described as hot and uncomfortable — he called it hell — before being led upward by guardian figures he recognized as family friends. Both cases are documented in chapter 9 of Light and Death.³²

Miller, in Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (2023), devotes three chapters to distressing NDEs. He estimates that roughly twenty percent of NDEs are distressing, though the number is hard to pin down because these cases are underreported — people feel shame, and researchers have been slow to ask. Miller notes that multiple studies have found no clear link between prior religious belief and whether an NDE is hellish. He also observes that some distressing NDEs transform into positive ones — a pattern that fits the book's model of a staged encounter.³³ Long's research in God and the Afterlife likewise documents hellish encounters, drawn from the NDERF database, and finds them real but rare as a proportion of the total.³⁴

NDEs in Cognitively Impaired Persons

Some of the most striking end-of-life events involve patients whose brains should not have been able to support clear thought. Researchers now call this terminal lucidity: the return of mental clarity in patients with severe dementia or brain damage, shortly before death. If a patient with advanced Alzheimer's disease suddenly knows loved ones and speaks clearly in the final hours of life, something beyond the damaged brain seems to be at work.²⁴

J. Steve Miller presents this evidence as two of his eleven "Lines of Evidence" in Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife (2021). Line of Evidence 5 asks: since diseases like Alzheimer's destroy the brain over time, how can patients with advanced dementia suddenly regain full awareness just before death? Under a brain-only model, this should not happen. The brain tissue is gone. Yet Miller documents cases of patients who had not spoken in years, who had forgotten their own families, suddenly waking and carrying on clear conversations hours before dying. One nurse, quoted through Batthyany's research, put it this way: she had become cynical about the patients she cared for — until she saw terminal lucidity happen. After that, she said, she understood that dementia can affect the soul but cannot destroy it.³⁵

Line of Evidence 6 goes further still. It documents cases of people who were cognitively disabled from birth — not through disease but through lifelong impairment — who became lucid, clear thinkers at the time of death. If the brain was never able to support normal thought during life, then the return of normal thought at death points to a source of mental life that is not the brain. Miller and his dissertation note that this phenomenon has been documented across more than eighty cases in the medical literature spanning two hundred and fifty years.³⁶

Full NDE reports from such patients are limited. But terminal lucidity supports the view of the soul that this book depends on. If the soul is distinct from the brain, then a damaged brain does not mean a damaged soul. At the moment of death, when the soul begins to part from the body, the soul's own powers may come back to life. This is just what the book's thesis predicts. The meeting with Christ at the moment of death does not depend on the state of the brain, because the meeting happens to the soul. See Chapter 31.²⁵

Children's NDEs

Children's NDE accounts are useful for a special reason: young children carry less cultural shaping than adults. A three-year-old who describes meeting Jesus in a place full of light is drawing on very little prior teaching. This makes children's cases a helpful test of the claim that NDEs are just cultural ideas projected onto the dying mind.²⁶

Melvin Morse, a children's doctor, published the first planned study of children's NDEs in Closer to the Light (1990). Among his cases is Katie, a seven-year-old who nearly drowned in a pool. She was without a heartbeat for nineteen minutes. After she was revived, she described meeting a figure she called Jesus, seeing dead loved ones, and being given the choice to go back. She spoke of people and places she could not have known about by normal means.²⁷

P. M. H. Atwater expanded the study of children's NDEs in The New Children and Near-Death Experiences (2003). She talked with hundreds of child NDErs and found patterns that match the adult NDE in its core features: the out-of-body view, the being of light, dead loved ones, and the life review (though the review tends to be shorter in children, for clear reasons). She also found lasting changes: shifts in personality, greater sensitivity, and new sense of purpose.²⁸

Miller adds a further line of argument in Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife (2021). His Line of Evidence 11 asks: if deathbed visions are just projections of what the dying person expects, then why do young children — who do not know they are dying and have no mature theology of heaven — report the same core features as adults? They describe light, loving figures, and deceased relatives they sometimes never knew. The simplest explanation is that the children are seeing something real, not something built from expectations they do not yet have.³⁷

Children's NDEs matter for this book in another way. Chapter 30 asks what happens to babies and children who die. If even young children report meeting Christ during an NDE, that gives real-world support for the claim that God's love reaches children at the edge of death just as it reaches adults.

What the Cases Show Together

No single NDE case proves this book's thesis. But taken together, the cases in this appendix form a pattern that points in one clear direction. Veridical cases show that the soul perceives apart from the brain. Blind NDEs press the point further: sight occurs where the brain cannot explain it. Time-dilation cases show that the dying moment holds more felt time than the clock records. Life reviews show that the encounter includes moral clarity and self-knowledge. Christ-centered cases show that many people meet a figure they name as Christ — and large-scale data confirm that Jesus appears far more often than any other named figure, across cultures and traditions. Hellish NDEs show that the encounter can include a dark phase before rescue. Terminal lucidity — documented across centuries of medical literature — shows that a damaged brain cannot stop the soul from waking. And children's cases show that the encounter is not limited to those who have been taught to expect it.

Each of these threads is suggestive on its own. Together, they sketch a picture that matches the book's model: a real soul, surviving clinical death, meeting the risen Christ in stretched felt time, receiving a life review that shows the truth about itself, and responding in real freedom. That is the picture this book is built on. The cases do not demand it. But they fit it better than any other account I know.