ABSTRACT
One of the most remarkable and widely cited cases within neardeath literature concerns one ‘Maria’, whose NDE began after she was rushed to Harborview Hospital in Seattle suffering from a heart attack and subsequent cardiac arrest. In an experience that has been extensively quoted since its initial appearance in 1984, Maria, having apparently separated from her body during her arrest, claimed not simply to have witnessed the resuscitation attempts that were being made upon her but also to have floated during this time outside the hospital altogether. Taking full advantage of the sudden freedom which her temporary out-of-body condition afforded her, she continued to float up until she reached the third floor of the North Wing of the building. There, resting on a ledge outside one of the windows, she spied a single tennis shoe. Having been resuscitated Maria remembered, as she later described it, her ‘eyeball to shoelace’ encounter, and when the opportunity presented itself told the full story of her experience to Kimberly Clark, her critical care social worker. In doing so, she also asked Clark to find the shoe in order to confirm that she had, indeed, left her body at the time of her experience. Clark followed Maria’s instructions as to the location of the shoe, later recalling:
With mixed emotions I went outside and looked up at the ledges but could not see much at all. I went up to the third floor and began going in and out of patients’ rooms and looking out their windows, which were so narrow that I
had to press my face to the screen just to see the ledge at all. Finally I found a room where I pressed my face to the glass and saw the tennis shoe! My vantage-point was very different from what Maria’s had been for her to notice that the little toe had worn a place in the shoe, and that the lace was stuck under the heel and other details about the side of the shoe not visible to me. The only way she would have had such a perspective was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.
