When Doctors Near Carmel, North Miami Witness the Impossible

In Carmel, North Miami, Florida, the graveyard shift at the local hospital carries a reputation among staff that no orientation program discusses. Experienced nurses speak of "active" nights—shifts when unexplained phenomena cluster in ways that seem to follow their own logic: call lights ring in sequence down a hallway, patients in different rooms report the same visitor, and the emotional atmosphere shifts without any change in census or acuity. Dr. Scott Kolbaba's "Physicians' Untold Stories" addresses these collective staff experiences with clinical seriousness, presenting accounts that validate what healthcare workers in Carmel, North Miami and across the country have always known: hospitals at night are different, and the differences extend beyond staffing ratios and lighting levels into territories that science has not begun to map.

Dr. Scott Kolbaba

About the Author

Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD is an internist at Northwestern Medicine in Wheaton, Illinois. He interviewed more than 200 physicians about their most extraordinary experiences.

Book cover

Physicians' Untold Stories

by Scott J. Kolbaba, MD4.5 stars (1018 reviews)

Miraculous experiences doctors are hesitant to share with their patients, or ANYONE!

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Meant to awe, instruct, and inspire — stories that will convince even the harshest skeptic. — From the introduction to Physicians' Untold Stories

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Medical Fact

The human genome contains roughly 3 billion base pairs — if printed, it would fill about 262,000 pages.

Physician Burnout & Wellness Near Carmel, North Miami

Physicians practicing in Carmel, North Miami, Florida work at the intersection of modern medicine and experiences that resist explanation. In conversations that rarely leave the break room or the on-call suite, doctors in and around Carmel, North Miami have reported encounters with phenomena that their training never prepared them for — from patients who describe verifiable details about events that occurred while they were clinically dead, to deathbed visions shared simultaneously by multiple family members, to recoveries that defy every prognostic model available.

The medical community in Carmel, North Miami includes physicians across every stage of their careers — residents navigating the exhaustion of training, mid-career practitioners balancing clinical demands with family life, and veteran physicians carrying decades of experiences that challenge the boundaries of conventional medicine. Burnout touches all of them differently, but a common thread runs through: the desire to remember why they chose medicine in the first place, and the rare but profound moments that remind them.

Physician Burnout by Specialty

Percentage reporting at least one symptom (Medscape, 2024)

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Medical Fact

The human body maintains its temperature at 98.6°F (37°C), but recent studies suggest the average has dropped to about 97.9°F.

Faith, Medicine & the Unexplained in Carmel, North Miami, Florida

The Southeast's tradition of 'dinner on the grounds'—communal church meals near Carmel, North Miami, Florida—has been adapted by healthcare programs that combine nutrition education with fellowship. Physicians who partner with churches to serve healthy meals after services reach patients who would never attend a hospital-based nutrition class. The church table becomes the treatment table, and the healing happens between bites of new-recipe collard greens.

The African American church near Carmel, North Miami, Florida has been the backbone of community health for as long as Black communities have existed in the South. The pastor who leads a diabetes prevention program from the pulpit, the deaconess who organizes blood drives, the choir director who screens for hypertension during rehearsals—these are faith-based public health workers whose impact exceeds that of many funded programs.

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Medical Fact

The body's immune system can distinguish between millions of different antigens — more variety than any library catalog.

Ghost Stories and the Supernatural Near Carmel, North Miami, Florida

Old Southern military hospitals near Carmel, North Miami, Florida were designed with wide verandas to promote air circulation in the pre-air-conditioning era. These porches are the settings for some of the most poignant ghost stories in Southern medicine: wounded soldiers rocking in chairs that creak on the wooden boards, watching the sunset, waiting for a healing that never came in life and now continues in perpetuity.

Antebellum hospitals across the Deep South were built on the labor of enslaved people, and the spirits that linger near Carmel, North Miami, Florida carry that history in their very form. Night-shift nurses have reported seeing figures in rough-spun clothing tending to patients—performing the caregiving work in death that was forced upon them in life. These aren't frightening apparitions; they're heartbreaking ones.

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Did You Know?

Hospitals are among the most haunted buildings in folklore worldwide — and the physician testimonies in this book suggest there may be a reason.

Near-Death Experiences Reported by Physicians Near Carmel, North Miami

The Southeast's tradition of storytelling—porch stories, fish stories, hunting stories—provides a cultural infrastructure near Carmel, North Miami, Florida for transmitting NDE accounts in ways that other regions lack. When a farmer in the barbershop tells his neighbors about his NDE during a tractor accident, the story enters the community's oral history and is retold with the same fidelity that characterizes Southern storytelling across generations.

Southern faith traditions create a cultural context near Carmel, North Miami, Florida where NDE reports are received with far less skepticism than in other regions. When a Baptist grandmother describes meeting Jesus during a cardiac arrest, her family doesn't question her sanity—they praise God. This cultural receptivity means that Southern physicians have access to NDE accounts that patients in more secular regions might suppress.

Near-Death Experience Features

Percentage reporting each feature (van Lommel et al., 2001)

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Did You Know?

The white coat ceremony, now held at nearly every U.S. medical school, was first introduced at Columbia University in 1993.

Watch Dr. Kolbaba Share These Stories

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Did You Know?

Dr. Kolbaba found that physicians who acknowledged the limits of medical science were often the most respected by their patients.

Medical Heritage in Florida

Florida's medical history is marked by its transformation from a tropical frontier plagued by yellow fever and malaria into a modern healthcare powerhouse. Dr. John Gorrie of Apalachicola invented the ice-making machine in the 1840s while trying to cool the rooms of yellow fever patients, a breakthrough that laid the foundation for air conditioning and modern refrigeration. Tampa General Hospital, established in 1927, and Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, founded in 1918, became major teaching hospitals. The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, established in 1952, became a leader in organ transplantation research.

Florida's unique demographics drove medical innovation. The Mayo Clinic's Jacksonville campus, opened in 1986, brought world-class care to the Southeast. The Moffitt Cancer Center at the University of South Florida in Tampa, established in 1986, became an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. In Palm Beach County, the Scripps Research Institute's Florida campus brought biomedical research south. Florida's large elderly population made the state a natural laboratory for geriatric medicine, and the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami, founded in 1985 after NFL player Nick Buoniconti's son was paralyzed, became the world's largest spinal cord injury research center.

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About the Book

Dr. Kolbaba completed his residency at both Rush Presbyterian-Saint Luke's Medical Center and the Mayo Clinic.

Supernatural Folklore and Ghost Traditions in Florida

Florida's supernatural folklore blends Seminole legends, Spanish colonial ghosts, and the eerie atmosphere of its swamps and coastline. The legend of the Skunk Ape, Florida's version of Bigfoot, has persisted in the Everglades since the 1960s, with sightings concentrated around the Big Cypress Swamp and a dedicated 'Skunk Ape Research Headquarters' in Ochopee. The St. Augustine Lighthouse, built in 1874, is one of the most investigated haunted sites in America, with a documented history of sightings of two girls who drowned in 1873 when a supply cart rolled into the ocean.

The Don CeSar Hotel in St. Pete Beach, a pink palace built in 1928, is said to be haunted by its builder Thomas Rowe and his lost love Lucinda, a Spanish opera singer—their apparitions have reportedly been seen walking hand in hand on the beach. The Devil's Chair in Cassadaga's Lake Helen cemetery is a brick chair where, legend holds, the Devil will appear to anyone who sits there at midnight. The town of Cassadaga itself, founded in 1894 as a Spiritualist community, remains home to practicing mediums and psychics. In Key West, Robert the Doll—a child's doll kept at the East Martello Museum—is blamed for misfortune befalling anyone who photographs him without permission.

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About the Book

Dr. Kolbaba practices internal medicine at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, Illinois.

Haunted Hospitals and Medical Landmarks in Florida

G. Pierce Wood Memorial Hospital (Arcadia): This state psychiatric hospital in DeSoto County operated from 1947 to 2002, treating patients with severe mental illness. During its operation, staff reported hearing disembodied screams from the older wards, seeing patients who had died years earlier walking the grounds, and encountering a persistent cold spot in the hallway of Building 23 where several patients had died.

Sunland Hospital (various Florida locations): Florida operated multiple Sunland Training Centers for the developmentally disabled throughout the state, including facilities in Tallahassee, Orlando, and Fort Myers. The Tallahassee location, which closed in 1983, was investigated for patient abuse and unexplained deaths. The abandoned building became notorious among paranormal investigators for reports of children's voices, wheelchair sounds rolling down empty hallways, and doors opening and closing throughout the night.

Types of Phenomena in the Book

Distribution across 26 physician accounts

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Research Finding

Bibliotherapy — prescribing books for mental health — has been shown to be as effective as face-to-face therapy for mild depression.

How This Book Can Help You

Florida's enormous and diverse medical community—spanning Mayo Clinic Jacksonville, Moffitt Cancer Center, and the University of Miami—creates a vast population of physicians who encounter the kind of inexplicable bedside moments Dr. Kolbaba documents in Physicians' Untold Stories. The state's position as a destination for aging Americans means Florida physicians routinely attend to patients at life's end, making deathbed phenomena a more common part of clinical experience here than in many other states. The cultural richness of Florida's communities, from Spiritualist Cassadaga to Little Havana's deep Catholic faith, provides a tapestry of beliefs about the afterlife that contextualizes the experiences Dr. Kolbaba describes.

Hospice workers across the Southeast near Carmel, North Miami, Florida will recognize every account in this book. They've been seeing these phenomena for years—the terminal lucidity, the deathbed visitors, the rooms that change temperature when a soul departs. The difference is that hospice workers rarely have the professional platform to publish their observations. This book gives voice to what they've always known.

Physicians' Untold Stories book cover — by Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD
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Research Finding

A single session of moderate exercise improves executive function and working memory for up to 2 hours afterward.

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Discover the Stories Medicine Never Says Out Loud

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Physicians' Untold Stories by Dr. Scott Kolbaba

Amazon Bestseller

The Stories Medicine Never Told You

Over 200 physicians interviewed. 26 true stories of ghost encounters, near-death experiences, and miraculous recoveries that will change the way you think about life, death, and what lies beyond.

By Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD — 4.5★ from 1,018 ratings on Goodreads