Appendix A
This appendix gathers, in one place, the near-death experience cases referenced across the book. The cases are grouped by their primary published source. Each entry gives a short identifier, a one- or two-sentence summary of the veridical element, and the chapter or chapters where the case appears in this volume. The aim is practical: a reader who remembers "that case with the dentures" or "the blind woman who saw colors" should be able to find it quickly, see exactly where this book treats it, and know which source to consult for the full report.1
A few notes on the listings. Cases drawn from The Self Does Not Die by Rivas, Dirven, and Smit are cited by their case number (e.g., Case 3.7), following that volume's chapter-and-case scheme.2 Cases originally reported elsewhere — by van Lommel, Sabom, Ring and Cooper, Parnia, and others — are listed under the original source even when they also appear in The Self Does Not Die. Cross-references are provided where a single case is treated by two or more sources. Some popular accounts (the "heaven tourism" books critiqued in Chapter 30) are included so the reader can place them in the broader landscape, even though they are not the empirical heart of the case the book builds.
I should say plainly: this index is selective, not exhaustive. The Self Does Not Die alone catalogs more than a hundred verified cases, and the wider literature contains thousands. The cases below are the ones that do real work in the chapters of this book — either as primary evidence, as illustrations of a pattern, or as touchpoints for a skeptical objection.3
The Self Does Not Die is the most carefully documented case-collection in the field, with each report cross-checked against original interviews, medical records, and corroborating witnesses where available. It is the single richest case-source for this book. Cases are cited by chapter and case number.4
Case 1.4 — A Heart Shaped Like Africa. A patient out of body during a 1973 cardiac arrest later described an unusual heart-shaped marking on the floor of the operating room — a detail confirmed by hospital staff. Treated in Chapter 4.
Case 1.13 — The Scissors and the Needles. A surgical patient watched, from above, an instrument being mishandled, and accurately reported what she had seen. Treated in Chapter 4; referenced in Chapter 18.
Case 1.18 — The Doctor's Wristwatch. An NDE experiencer correctly identified a small detail — a watch — that she had no way of having seen by ordinary means. Treated in Chapter 4.
Case 2.3 — Maria's Tennis Shoe. Maria, hospitalized in Seattle following cardiac arrest, reported leaving her body and seeing a worn tennis shoe with a specific scuff and untied lace on a third-floor exterior ledge. Social worker Kimberly Clark Sharp, skeptical, went to the ledge and found the shoe exactly as Maria had described — a detail she could not plausibly have seen from her hospital bed.5 Treated in Chapter 4; referenced in Chapter 1 and Chapter 21.
Case 2.5 — The 12-Digit Number. An NDE experiencer reported reading a long number in a location she had no access to; the number was later confirmed. Referenced in Chapter 4.
Case 2.18 — Helen. A near-death patient described, with specificity, what was happening in distant rooms during her crisis. Treated in Chapter 4.
Case 3.7 — The Man with the Dentures. A comatose, cyanotic cardiac-arrest patient was brought to a Dutch hospital in 1977. A coronary care nurse removed his dentures and placed them in the drawer of a crash cart. Days later, after recovery, the patient identified that exact nurse as the man who had removed his teeth and demanded them back, describing in detail the layout of the resuscitation room. The case is reported in van Lommel et al.'s 2001 Lancet article and is one of the most carefully verified veridical cases on record.6 Opens Chapter 1; treated in Chapter 4; referenced in Chapter 17.
Case 3.11 — Lloyd Rudy's Patient. Cardiothoracic surgeon Lloyd Rudy publicly described a patient who, after being declared dead following heart surgery, revived and accurately recounted post-mortem conversations between Rudy and his colleagues — including a specific comment about the patient's family in the waiting area. Treated in Chapter 4; referenced in Chapter 17.
Case 3.29 — Pam Reynolds. Pam Reynolds underwent hypothermic cardiac standstill in 1991 to remove a basilar artery aneurysm. With her body cooled to 60°F, blood drained from her head, eyes taped shut, and ear canals plugged with auditory-evoked-potential clickers, she nonetheless reported a detailed out-of-body experience including a specific description of the bone saw used by Dr. Robert Spetzler and conversations among the surgical team. The case has become the most-debated veridical NDE in the literature.7 Owned by Chapter 5; referenced in Chapter 1, Chapter 4, Chapter 17, and Chapter 23.
Case 3.30 — The 11-Year-Old Boy. A young boy who suffered cardiac arrest reported leaving his body and watching the resuscitation, describing details only later confirmed. Referenced in Chapter 7.
Case 3.31 — Kristle Merzlock. A young drowning victim reported an out-of-body experience including details of the resuscitation room she had no way of seeing. The case was investigated by pediatrician Melvin Morse. Treated in Chapter 7; referenced in Chapter 20.
Case 3.32 — Jan Price. Jan Price, suffering a heart attack at home, reported leaving her body and observing the EMTs, her husband, and the surrounding rooms — including what was happening in another part of the house. The details checked out. Treated in Chapter 4.
Case 3.33 — Howard. A cardiac-arrest patient reported accurate veridical perceptions across an extended resuscitation. Referenced in Chapter 17.
Case 3.39 — Stephanie Arnold. A pregnant woman who suffered an amniotic fluid embolism during delivery reported, while clinically dead, accurate observations of the operating room — including conversations among the surgical team. The case is documented in her 2015 memoir and supported by hospital staff. Treated in Chapter 4.
Case 4.3 — George Rodonaia. Pronounced dead and held in a morgue for three days, Rodonaia later revived and reported a detailed NDE — including knowledge of events he could not have learned by ordinary means. Referenced in Chapter 4 and Chapter 28.
Case 4.6 — The Patient Who Made Her Surgeon Cry. A surgical patient relayed information from her NDE that visibly moved her surgeon, who confirmed details no one had told her. Treated in Chapter 4.
Case 5.1 — Durdana Khan. A young Pakistani Muslim child reported meeting a deceased relative during her NDE — a relative the child did not know was dead. The cross-cultural setting weakens any "Christian cultural conditioning" reading. Treated in Chapter 7; referenced in Chapter 8.
Case 5.2 — Colton Burpo. Colton, age four, reported during a near-death medical event meeting a sister who had died in miscarriage — a sibling his parents had never told him about. The wider Heaven Is For Real narrative has theological flourishes that warrant caution, but the meeting-the-unknown-sister element fits the well-documented Peak in Darien pattern. Treated in Chapter 7; referenced in Chapter 30.
Case 5.3 — Andrew, and Case 5.4 — Pop-Pop. Two pediatric Peak in Darien cases in which young children reported encountering deceased relatives during a near-death event. Referenced in Chapter 7.
Case 5.6 — The Young Woman on the Butterfly Wing. An NDE experiencer reported encountering a deceased relative whose death had not been disclosed to her, with corroborating details. Referenced in Chapter 5.
Case 7.3 — Olga Gearhardt. During Olga Gearhardt's heart-transplant surgery in 1989, multiple family members in different locations reported NDE-like experiences and a shared sense of her death — even before being notified of the medical crisis. The case is a classic example of a shared death experience, where the bystanders' brains are not dying. Treated in Chapter 9.
Case 7.4 — Mary Goffe. A mother on her deathbed appeared to her sleeping children miles away — an apparitional shared experience that has been investigated since the seventeenth century and remains a benchmark case. Referenced in Chapter 9.
Case 8.4 — Anita Moorjani. A Hong Kong woman of Hindu background, comatose with end-stage lymphoma, reported an extensive NDE during which she was told she could return; her doctors documented a remarkable subsequent remission. The case is striking for its non-Western context and medical aftermath. Referenced in Chapter 8; cited in Chapter 29.
Case 9.4 — Tom Sawyer. Sawyer's near-fatal accident produced a deep NDE and one of the more thoroughly documented cases of long-term life transformation. Treated in Chapter 29.
Van Lommel and colleagues conducted the field's first large-scale prospective study of NDEs in cardiac-arrest survivors, published in The Lancet in 2001. They followed 344 consecutive resuscitated patients across ten Dutch hospitals.8
The dentures man (1977). Featured above as Case 3.7 in The Self Does Not Die; van Lommel includes the case in his Lancet article and develops it further in Consciousness Beyond Life (2010). Used as the opening hook of Chapter 1; treated in Chapter 4.
Statistical findings. 18% of the cardiac-arrest survivors reported some form of NDE; 12% reported a "deep" NDE meeting Greyson Scale criteria. The numbers cut against the dying-brain hypothesis: if NDEs were straightforward products of cerebral oxygen deprivation, the rate should be vastly higher.9 Cited in Chapter 3, Chapter 10, and Chapter 11.
Cardiologist Michael Sabom's prospective work began as an attempt to debunk Raymond Moody. His early study compared NDE patients' descriptions of cardiac resuscitation with control patients' guesses; control descriptions were riddled with errors, while NDE descriptions were highly accurate.10
Pam Reynolds (1991). Sabom's most famous case, treated in detail in Chapter 5. Sabom's Light and Death (1998) provides the primary report. Cross-listed as TSDND Case 3.29.
Cardiac-resuscitation accuracy comparison. Sabom's quantitative comparison of NDE and control descriptions remains one of the most damaging findings for the "constructed from overheard hospital experience" hypothesis. Cited in Chapter 4, Chapter 18, and Chapter 20.
Ring and Cooper interviewed 31 visually impaired NDE experiencers, including a substantial number who had been blind from birth. The book's central question: if NDEs are brain-generated hallucinations, how can people whose visual cortex has never processed visual input see during them?11
Vicki Umipeg. Blind from premature birth and a damaging incubator-oxygen accident, Vicki had never had so much as a dream image. During a 1973 NDE following a car accident she nonetheless reported seeing — viewing her own body from above and recognizing details of the emergency room, including her wedding ring and distinctive hair, by sight rather than touch. The Vicki case is the gold standard of the blind-NDE literature. Treated in Chapter 6; referenced in Chapter 31.
Brad Barrows. Born prematurely and blind from infancy, Barrows reported during a 1968 NDE accurately seeing details of his hospital ward and rooftop snow. Treated in Chapter 6.
The Mindsight cohort summary. Of the 31 participants, 80% reported some form of vision-like perception during their NDE — including the congenitally blind. Ring and Cooper carefully distinguish "mindsight" from ordinary vision and document corroborated veridical details. Referenced in Chapter 6.
Parnia's AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) project is the largest prospective investigation of cardiac-arrest cognition to date, and the first designed specifically to test veridical perception with hidden visual targets in resuscitation rooms.12
The "auditory awareness" case (AWARE I, 2014). A 57-year-old social worker, having suffered cardiac arrest, accurately described a three-minute period of resuscitation, including the sound of an automated external defibrillator and details of the room — beyond the time when his brain should have produced any conscious experience. Treated in Chapter 4 and Chapter 17.
AWARE II findings (2023). EEG monitoring during resuscitation captured normal-rhythm bursts in some patients with cardiac arrest, alongside survivor reports of vivid awareness — adding empirical weight to claims that consciousness during clinical death is not always neurally silent. Referenced in Chapter 3, Chapter 10, and Chapter 17.
Holden's veridical-perception meta-analysis (2009). In her chapter for The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, Holden reviewed 93 cases of out-of-body veridical perception drawn from the NDE literature. She found that 92% of the perceptions were entirely accurate, 6% had some inaccuracy, and only 2% were entirely inaccurate. The finding is one of the most quoted statistics in the field for good reason: it reframes "anecdote" as a body of converging data.13 Cited in Chapter 4, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, and Chapter 31.
Critical-care physician Laurin Bellg collected first-person ICU cases from her own practice and from colleagues. The accounts retain medical specificity while preserving patient anonymity. Bellg writes from the inside of the resuscitation room.14
The "Howard" case. A patient described, in vivid detail, the resuscitation efforts during a period when conventional medical understanding would have ruled out conscious experience. The corroboration came from the staff in the room. Referenced in Chapter 4.
Bellg's bedside aftereffects observations. Bellg's broader pattern — patients returning from cardiac arrest with consistent transformative themes — supplies clinical-eyewitness corroboration of the aftereffect literature. Referenced in Chapter 29.
Radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) and has compiled the largest publicly available NDE archive — over 5,000 first-person reports collected with a standardized questionnaire.15
Cross-cultural NDERF analyses. Long's analyses of non-Western reports show the same core features (out-of-body element, encounter with deceased, tunnel/light, life review, sense of return) across continents and religious backgrounds. Cited in Chapter 8 and Chapter 20.
NDERF children's reports. The pediatric subset of the NDERF database provides quantitative grounding for the children's-NDE chapter. Cited in Chapter 7.
God-encounter findings (Long and Perry, 2016). Of NDErs reporting an encounter with a divine being, the descriptions show striking consistency across cultures and religious starting points. Cited in Chapter 28.
Katie's case (1986). Pediatrician Melvin Morse's nine-year-old patient survived a near-drowning and reported a detailed NDE including accurate observations of the resuscitation. Morse's prospective Seattle-area study of children with cardiac events showed NDE features consistent with the adult literature.16 Treated in Chapter 7.
The Seattle pediatric series. Children with documented cardiac events reported NDEs at substantial rates; control children (sedated but not near death) did not. The control group is crucial — it isolates the near-death state from hospitalization itself. Cited in Chapter 7 and Chapter 15.
Miller's volume gathers the strongest cases of three corroborating phenomena: deathbed visions, terminal lucidity, and shared death experiences. His Christian apologetic frame (Is Christianity Compatible With Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?) is engaged separately in Chapter 28.17
"Peak in Darien" deathbed visions. Dying patients seeing deceased relatives whose deaths had been concealed from them — a pattern impossible to explain by wishful thinking, since the patient does not know to wish for the absent person. Miller documents multiple modern instances. Treated in Chapter 9.
Terminal lucidity. Severely brain-damaged or end-stage dementia patients regaining clear, recognizable, often lengthy lucidity shortly before death. Researched systematically by Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson, the phenomenon is a direct challenge to the production model of consciousness: how does a wrecked brain produce lucid consciousness? Treated in Chapter 9; referenced in Chapter 23.
Shared death experiences. Healthy bystanders at a deathbed reporting NDE-like phenomena — light, presence of deceased relatives, a sense of "going part of the way" with the dying person. The bystanders' brains are not dying, which forecloses the dying-brain hypothesis at the door. Cases collected by Raymond Moody and William Peters are particularly well documented. Treated in Chapter 9.
The Greyson NDE Scale (1983). A 16-item instrument validated for distinguishing NDEs from other unusual experiences. Used across the field for fifty years. Cited in Chapter 2 and Chapter 22.
Long-term consistency studies (After, 2021). Greyson's follow-ups show NDE accounts remaining stable across decades — unlike memories of imagined or dreamed events, which deform. Cited in Chapter 18 and Chapter 22.
The popular "heaven tourism" books deserve a careful, charitable, and clear-eyed listing. Some are evidentially serious; others are not; one was retracted outright. Chapter 30 handles the genre as a whole.18
Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven (2012). A neurosurgeon's NDE during bacterial meningitis. The medical case is genuinely interesting — Alexander's documented neocortical compromise raises hard questions for any production model — though portions of the popular narrative warrant theological caution. Engaged in Chapter 30.
Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven (2004). An auto-accident survivor's account. Treated as a popular narrative rather than a primary evidential case. Referenced in Chapter 30.
Mary Neal, To Heaven and Back (2011). A drowning-and-rescue NDE; engaged briefly in Chapter 30.
Howard Storm, My Descent into Death (2000). A distressing-NDE-followed-by-rescue narrative. Notable for the depth of life transformation that followed. Referenced in Chapter 28 and Chapter 29.
Alex Malarkey — the retracted case. The 2010 book attributed to Malarkey was publicly disavowed by him in 2015. The retraction is precisely why the book includes it: the heaven-tourism critics are right that this case was not what it claimed to be, and the field is healthier for saying so. Engaged in Chapter 30.
A note on what counts as evidence. The veridical case for NDEs does not rest on bestsellers. It rests on prospective hospital studies (van Lommel, Sabom, Parnia), peer-reviewed case investigations (Holden, Ring and Cooper), and the layered, cross-checked archive of The Self Does Not Die. The popular books, even the best of them, are illustrative — not foundational. Mistaking the foundation for the illustration is the central mistake the heaven-tourism critics make about the field; mistaking the illustration for the foundation is the central mistake some popular defenders make about themselves.
I have left out far more cases than I have included. The Self Does Not Die alone runs to more than 100 entries; the NDERF archive runs to thousands; the older literature, gathered by Osis and Haraldsson and others, runs deeper still. The cases listed here are the ones the chapters of this book actually use. A reader who wants to dig deeper should start with The Self Does Not Die, then van Lommel's Consciousness Beyond Life, then Holden, Greyson, and James's Handbook of Near-Death Experiences. The cumulative weight of the data is, in my judgment, considerably greater than any single case can convey — and considerably greater than the skeptical literature has reckoned with.19
For a quick map of where each case is treated in the book, see the chapter cross-references in the entries above. For Marsh's specific objections, see Appendix D. For the full bibliography of the works cited here, see Appendix B.
↑ 1. The structure follows the standard apologetic case-index pattern: source, case, location in the present book, brief evidential note. Readers familiar with court-prepared exhibit lists will find the format familiar.
↑ 2. Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf H. Smit, The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences, ed. Janice Miner Holden (Durham, NC: International Association for Near-Death Studies, 2016). Hereafter cited as TSDND with case number.
↑ 3. Selectivity is unavoidable in a condensed volume. The aim is representativeness rather than exhaustiveness; the goal is a reader equipped to follow the argument and to know where to look for more.
↑ 4. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, "Introduction" and "How to Use This Book." TSDND organizes cases by phenomenon-type chapter and assigns each a chapter-and-case number; cross-references within TSDND follow the same convention.
↑ 5. TSDND, Case 2.3. The original report appears in Kimberly Clark, "Clinical Interventions with Near-Death Experiencers," in The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives, ed. Bruce Greyson and Charles P. Flynn (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1984), 242–55. See also Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010), ch. 14.
↑ 6. Pim van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands," Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–45; Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010); TSDND, Case 3.7.
↑ 7. Michael B. Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), ch. 3; TSDND, Case 3.29; Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, ch. 14. For Marsh's six-part critique of the case, see Michael N. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences: Brain-State Phenomena or Glimpses of Immortality? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19–27.
↑ 8. Van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest," 2039–45.
↑ 9. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, chs. 7–8. The point about incidence is developed in Chapter 10 of the present book.
↑ 10. Michael B. Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); cf. Sabom, Light and Death.
↑ 11. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind, 2nd ed. (New York: iUniverse, 2008). The Vicki Umipeg case is treated at length in chs. 1–2.
↑ 12. Sam Parnia et al., "AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study," Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (2014): 1799–1805; Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (New York: HarperOne, 2013); Parnia et al., "AWAreness during REsuscitation–II," Resuscitation 191 (2023).
↑ 13. Janice Miner Holden, "Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences," in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation, ed. Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2009), 185–211.
↑ 14. Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them (Appleton, WI: Sloan Press, 2016).
↑ 15. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010); Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016).
↑ 16. Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Villard Books, 1990).
↑ 17. J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2024); J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible With Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2024). On terminal lucidity, see also Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson, "Terminal Lucidity in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia and Dementia," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 197, no. 12 (2009): 942–44.
↑ 18. See Selling the Stairway to Heaven: Critiquing the Claims of Heaven Tourists; Raymond Lawrence, Blinded by the Light. Both are engaged in Chapter 30.
↑ 19. See further Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2009); Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death, 3rd ed. (Mamaroneck, NY: Hastings House, 1997).