Do NDE Experiencers Only See Dead People? We Checked 8,000 Accounts.

It started with a Reddit comment. A user in r/afterlife noticed something that has puzzled NDE researchers for decades:

"I have wondered how many people who have experienced death-bed visions or NDEs see people who are still alive rather than, or as well as, people who have passed."

It's a deceptively simple question. If NDEs were purely hallucinations or wish-fulfillment fantasies, you'd expect the brain to conjure up whoever matters most to you, alive or dead. Your living spouse. Your children. Your best friend.

But that's not what the data shows. We decided to investigate this question systematically using our database of 8,000+ analyzed experiences.

Our Methodology

This wasn't a simple keyword search. We used a multi-layered approach to answer this question rigorously:

1. Structured Entity Analysis (Primary Method)

Every experience in our database has been processed through a 6-pass AI analysis pipeline using GPT-4o. Pass 5 specifically extracts entity encounters, classifying each being into one of 14 categories including deceased relative, deceased friend, deceased unknown, being of light, angel, guide, and other.

For each entity, the AI extracts:

• Type (deceased relative, spiritual being, etc.)
• Description (how they appeared)
• Relationship to the experiencer
• Communication method and content
• Emotional impact of the encounter

2. Greyson Scale Cross-Reference

We cross-referenced entity data against the Greyson NDE Scale's "deceased spirits" item (scored 0-2), which independently measures whether the experiencer sensed or saw deceased individuals.

3. Full-Text Narrative Search

We searched all 8,026 narratives for phrases like "still alive," "was alive," "living person," "living relative," "hadn't died," and "alive at the time" to find any mentions of encountering living people.

4. Unclassified Entity Inspection

We manually reviewed all 739 entities classified as "other" (those that didn't fit standard categories) to check whether any represented living people.

The Results: A Striking Pattern

Across 8,026 experiences, we cataloged 11,558 individual entity encounters. Here's what we found:

Entity Type Distribution

When we group these into broader categories:

• Deceased persons: 4,385 (37.9%)
• Non-human/spiritual entities: 6,434 (55.7%)
• Unclassified: 739 (6.4%)

The crucial observation: there is no "living person" category because the AI almost never needed one. Across 11,558 entities, every identifiable human person encountered was classified as deceased.

What About the "Other" Category?

The 739 "other" entities were the most important to investigate. These are entities that didn't fit neatly into deceased or spiritual categories. Could living people be hiding here?

We programmatically inspected every one, searching for indicators like family relationship terms ("mother," "daughter," "friend") without deceased markers. Out of 739, only 46 showed any indicators of potentially being a living person. On closer inspection, the vast majority turned out to be:

• Medical personnel observed during the out-of-body phase ("medical personnel running into the room")
• Unknown gatekeepers or guides ("a person at the gate came back and said it was my time to go back")
• Unidentified children in otherworldly settings ("children laughing and playing")
• Ambiguous figures that were spiritual in nature despite family relationship terms

The Narrative Search: Digging Deeper

Our full-text search across all narratives found 192 experiences that contained phrases about people being "still alive." But context is everything. Most of these were:

• Experiencers expressing relief at being alive themselves ("I couldn't believe I was still alive")
• Background context about family ("my grandmother, who is still alive, lived nearby")
• Post-NDE reflections, not encounter descriptions

However, we did find a small number of genuinely fascinating cases:

Case 1: The Living Brother in the Tunnel

"My brother, who was still alive, said, 'It took this for us to be together.' With him was my father, who looked sad and was covered with sores."

In this ADC (After-Death Communication), the experiencer encountered both her living brother and her deceased father in the same space. The brother, who suffered from mental illness and had been estranged from the family, appeared alongside the father who had "hated" him in life. The experiencer explicitly noted her brother was alive at the time.

Read the full account

Case 2: The Living Friend with Cancer

"I saw my friend's friend (who is still alive). In my OBE, my mum's friend Faye had just been told she was very very ill. In the OBE her husband was with her."

During an out-of-body experience, this experiencer saw a living person, Faye, who was later diagnosed with cancer. This is particularly interesting because it combines seeing a living person with a veridical (verifiable) element.

Read the full account

Case 3: A Child's Voice

"As I was leaving, my little girl who was five at the time laughed outside of the bathroom window. I stopped ascending."

During an NDE, this experiencer heard her living daughter laughing, which caused her to stop ascending and decide to return. Notably, this occurred during the out-of-body phase near the physical body, not in an otherworldly realm.

Read the full account

The Greyson Scale Confirms It

The Greyson NDE Scale independently measures whether experiencers encountered deceased spirits, scored from 0 (none) to 2 (clearly saw deceased). Across our dataset:

One-third of all experiencers sensed or clearly saw deceased individuals. The Greyson Scale, designed decades before our AI analysis, specifically asks about deceased spirits because the researchers who developed it observed this same pattern: it's always the dead, almost never the living.

Why This Matters

This finding is one of the most significant challenges to the "hallucination hypothesis" of NDEs. If near-death experiences were simply the brain generating comforting imagery as it shuts down, we would expect to see:

1. Living loved ones appearing frequently — your brain should conjure whoever you love most
2. Random mixing of living and dead — dream-like confusion about who is alive or dead
3. Cultural figures and celebrities — wish-fulfillment imagery from media consumption

Instead, we observe:

1. Almost exclusively deceased individuals in person-encounters
2. Clear distinction maintained between living and deceased
3. Verified "Peak in Darien" cases where experiencers met people they did not know had died

The "Peak in Darien" phenomenon is particularly compelling. Named after a 19th-century collection of such cases, these are experiences where someone encounters a person during their NDE and only learns afterward that the person had died. Our data contains reports of veridical claims across 4,033 experiences (50.2% of our dataset), though not all of these are specifically about deceased encounters.

Limitations and Honesty

We want to be transparent about what this analysis can and cannot tell us:

What we can say:

• Across 8,026 experiences and 11,558 entity encounters, identified human persons are overwhelmingly classified as deceased
• The handful of possible living-person encounters are ambiguous, rare (approximately 0.4%), and tend to occur during OBE phases rather than in otherworldly settings
• This pattern is consistent with decades of published NDE research

What we cannot say:

• Our AI classification is not infallible. It reads narratives and makes judgments. Some deceased classifications could be wrong, and some "other" entities could be undetected living people
• The absence of "living person" as an explicit category in our classification schema could create a blind spot. We didn't instruct the AI to look for living people specifically, which means the finding emerges from the data rather than being directly measured
• We're analyzing self-reported accounts, not controlled observations. Experiencers may selectively remember or emphasize encounters with deceased individuals
• The sample is predominantly English-language accounts from NDERF, OBERF, and ADCRF databases, which may not represent all cultural contexts

What Comes Next

Based on this analysis, we're considering adding a "living person" entity type to our classification schema. This would allow us to directly measure the frequency of living-person encounters rather than inferring their absence. We'd then need to re-process a sample of experiences with the updated schema to validate these findings.

We're also interested in comparing this pattern across experience types: NDEs, OBEs, and ADCs may show different rates of living-person encounters, particularly since OBEs often occur closer to the physical world.

Explore the Data

All of the experiences referenced in this post are available for you to read:

• Browse entity encounters across all experiences
• Search for "Peak in Darien" cases
• View the 3D Consciousness Map

This analysis was conducted on 8,026 experiences using our v3 multi-pass AI analysis pipeline (GPT-4o). Entity classification, Greyson Scale scoring, and narrative extraction were performed independently for each experience. Full-text search was conducted using PostgreSQL pattern matching across all narratives. The analysis script is available in our codebase for reproducibility.