Crossing Into Another Realm
When she arrived at the hospital in Pocatello, Idaho, in the spring of 1982, seven-year-old Kristle Merzlock was in a coma after spending 20 minutes at the bottom of a swimming pool. Bill Longhurst, the lanky physician who received Kristle in the emergency room, quickly summoned pediatric intern Melvin Morse, then 27, the only doctor at the hospital who had performed a significant number of resuscitations. But even Morse, with all his experience, and his outstanding academic credentials -- a medical degree from the George Washington University and a research fellowship funded by the National Cancer Institute -- was not prepared for what was about to happen.

Kristle's pupils were fixed and dilated, Morse recalls, and she had no gag reflex. A CAT scan showed massive swelling of her brain. A machine was doing her breathing, and her blood pH was extremely acidotic, a clear indication of imminent death. "There was little we could do at that point," Morse says.

So when Kristle survived, emerging from her coma three days later with full brain function, Morse was amazed. More extraordinary still, his worldview was profoundly altered when Kristle recognized him. "That's the one with the beard," she told her mother. "First there was this tall doctor who didn't have a beard, and then he came in." That was true. Morse sported a beard, while Dr. Longhurst was clean-shaven.

Kristle then described the emergency room with astonishing accuracy. "She had the right equipment, the right number of people -- everything was just as it had been that day," Morse explains. She even correctly recited the procedures that had been performed on her. "Even though her eyes had been closed and she had been profoundly comatose during the entire experience, she still 'saw' what was going on." Suddenly, everything Morse had been working on previously struck him as being "quite boring." He teamed up with Kimberly Clark Sharp, a clinical social worker in Seattle, to begin researching near-death experiences (NDEs) in children. Their work would come to be known as The Seattle Study.

Morse was entering a field that had not existed a decade earlier. The first public consideration of "near-death experience" came in 1975, when medical student Raymond Moody published a bestselling book titled Life After Life. Based on his interviews of resuscitated patients, Moody described the elements found to be common in such experiences: a sensation of serenity, separation from the body, entrance into a dark tunnel, a vision of light, and the appearance of family members who offer help.

Seven years later, The Seattle Study focused on 147 critically ill kids -- 26 of whom came close to dying -- at Children's hospital in Seattle. Their ages ranged from 3 to 17. Working with kids had clear advantages. "The adult near-death experience is cluttered by cultural references and contaminated by the need for validation," explains Morse. "But in kids, it's pure. Kids don't repress the memory or fear the ridicule that might come from talking about it."

Over the course of the study's 10-year span, Morse discovered that of the 26 children who came close to dying, all but two reported NDEs that were eerily similar to what Moody had described. Yet of the 121 patients who were less ill but still unconscious, not one reported an NDE. "That was our most important finding," Morse says. "Only those who are actually near death have near-death experiences, suggesting that these are not psychological or physiological events." Nor, it would seem, are they tied to anesthesia, medication or pain itself.

In addition, Morse stumbled upon one more twist. While Moody suggests that those crossing into another realm share similar experiences (e.g., serenity, separation from the body, going to the light), Morse found that NDEs were, in fact, quite idiosyncratic.

Eight-year-old Chris Eggleston, who had been trapped inside his family's car when it plunged into a river, recalled going into a "huge noodle" and entering an "animal tunnel," where a bee gave him honey and took him to heaven. Michelle Wilson emerged from a diabetic coma to describe finding herself aboard a rowdy school bus where two tall doctors showed her a green button she could push to wake up. Seven-year-old Chris Davis, who was rescued from a collapsed tunnel on a beach, reported that a "wizard all dressed in white came to me and said, 'Struggle, and you shall live.' "