200+ Physicians Share What They Witnessed Near Burlington

Vermont's death customs are shaped by its Yankee independence and back-to-the-land ethos. The state was an early leader in the green burial movement, with natural burial grounds like the one at the Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve in Newfield allowing families to bury their dead without embalming, in biodegradable shrouds or simple wooden boxes. Vermont also allows home funerals without a funeral director present, and many families take advantage of this right, washing and dressing the body themselves and holding vigils at home. In the state's Franco-American communities in the Northeast Kingdom, Catholic funeral traditions—including rosary wakes and requiem masses at parishes like St. Mary's in Newport—remain central to mourning, with the post-funeral meal featuring pork pies (tourtière) and sugar pie.

Vermont's medical history is anchored by the University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine, established in 1822, making it the seventh-oldest medical school in the nation. The medical school's early faculty included Dr. John Pomeroy, who championed anatomical dissection at a time when it was controversial and illegal in many states. The University of Vermont Medical Center (formerly Fletcher Allen Health Care) in Burlington serves as the state's only academic medical center and tertiary referral hospital, treating patients from Vermont and northern New York. Vermont was a pioneer in establishing community health centers; the state's network of federally qualified health centers ensures access in isolated rural communities.

Vermont holds a dark chapter in American eugenics history. The Vermont Eugenics Survey, conducted from 1925 to 1936 under the direction of Henry Perkins at UVM, targeted the Abenaki people and French-Canadian families deemed "unfit" for forced sterilization. This program contributed to the near-erasure of Abenaki identity in the state. Brattleboro Retreat, established in 1834, was one of New England's first private psychiatric hospitals and initially embraced the progressive "moral treatment" philosophy of care. The state's commitment to mental health reform continued when Vermont became an early adopter of community-based mental health services, largely dismantling its institutional system.

The United States has been at the forefront of medical innovation since the 18th century. Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston performed the first public surgery using ether anesthesia in 1846 — an event known as 'Ether Day' that changed surgery forever. The 'Ether Dome' where it occurred is still preserved.

Bellevue Hospital in New York City, established in 1736, is the oldest public hospital in the United States. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota — where Dr. Scott Kolbaba trained — was founded by the Mayo brothers in the 1880s and pioneered the concept of integrated, multi-specialty group practice that became the model for modern healthcare.

The first successful heart transplant in the U.S. was performed in 1968, and American institutions have led breakthroughs in everything from the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, 1955) to the first artificial heart implant (1982). Today, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world's largest biomedical research agency.

The United States has one of the world's richest ghost story traditions, rooted in a blend of Native American spirit beliefs, European colonial folklore, and African American spiritual practices. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow — immortalized by Washington Irving in 1820 — to the restless spirits of Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg, American ghost lore reflects the nation's turbulent history.

New Orleans stands as the undisputed spiritual capital of American ghost culture, where West African Vodou merged with French Catholic mysticism to create a tradition where the boundary between living and dead remains permanently thin. The city's above-ground cemeteries, known as 'Cities of the Dead,' are among the most visited supernatural sites in the world. Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, is said to still grant wishes to those who mark three X's on her tomb.

Appalachian ghost traditions draw from Scots-Irish folklore, with tales of 'haints' — restless spirits trapped between worlds. In the Southwest, Native American traditions speak of skinwalkers and spirit animals, while Hawaiian culture reveres the Night Marchers — ghostly processions of ancient warriors whose torches can still be seen along sacred paths.

The United States has documented numerous cases of unexplained medical recoveries. In Dr. Kolbaba's own book, a physician describes a patient declared brain-dead who suddenly recovered after family prayer. The Lourdes Medical Bureau has certified one American miracle cure. Cases of spontaneous remission from terminal cancer have been documented at institutions including MD Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering. The National Library of Medicine contains over 1,000 published case reports of 'spontaneous remission' across various cancers and autoimmune diseases — recoveries that defy current medical explanation.

The Northeast's tradition of interfaith Thanksgiving services near Burlington, Vermont has a medical parallel: the interfaith healing service, where clergy from multiple traditions gather at a patient's bedside to offer prayers, blessings, and presence. These services, increasingly common in Northeast hospitals, acknowledge that healing has a communal dimension that transcends individual belief.

The African Methodist Episcopal churches near Burlington, Vermont have served as healthcare access points for Black communities since Reconstruction. When physicians earn the trust of AME congregations, they gain access to patients who have every historical reason to distrust medical institutions. The church becomes the bridge between a community's faith and its physical health.

The Northeast's old charity hospitals, built to serve the poor, carry a specific kind of haunting near Burlington, Vermont. These weren't ghosts of the privileged seeking to maintain their earthly comforts. They were the desperate, the forgotten, the ones who died without anyone knowing their names. Their apparitions don't speak or interact—they simply stand in doorways, as if still waiting to be seen.

Boston's medical district, one of the oldest in the nation, has accumulated centuries of ghostly lore that physicians near Burlington, Vermont inherit whether they want to or not. The ether dome at Massachusetts General, where anesthesia was first publicly demonstrated in 1846, is said to echo with the moans of patients who went under and never fully came back—at least not in the conventional sense.

Neurosurgeons near Burlington, Vermont encounter NDEs in a context that's particularly hard to dismiss: patients undergoing awake craniotomies who report out-of-body experiences while their brain is literally exposed and being monitored in real time. The surgeon can see the brain. The monitors show its activity. And the patient reports floating above the table watching the whole procedure. The disconnect is absolute.

Emergency physicians in Burlington, Vermont are trained to focus on measurable outcomes: return of spontaneous circulation, neurological function scores, survival to discharge. But the NDE research emerging from Northeast institutions suggests an additional outcome that matters to patients—the quality of their experience during the liminal period when their hearts weren't beating. Medicine measures survival; patients measure meaning.

The concept of the "empathic NDE" — in which a healthcare worker or family member has an NDE-like experience while caring for a dying patient, without being physically near death themselves — has been documented by researchers including Dr. William Peters and Dr. Raymond Moody. These empathic NDEs share the core features of standard NDEs — out-of-body perception, the tunnel, the light, encounters with deceased individuals — but occur in healthy people whose only connection to death is their proximity to someone who is dying.

Empathic NDEs are documented in several accounts in Physicians' Untold Stories, where physicians and nurses describe having NDE-like experiences while attending to dying patients. These accounts are extraordinarily difficult to explain through neurological mechanisms, since the healthcare worker's brain is functioning normally. For physicians in Burlington who have had empathic NDE experiences and have been carrying them in silence, Dr. Kolbaba's book provides validation and community. And for Burlington readers, empathic NDEs expand the NDE phenomenon beyond the dying person, suggesting that death involves a perceptible transition that can be accessed by those who are present at the moment of passing.

Dr. Bruce Greyson's four-decade career at the University of Virginia has been instrumental in establishing near-death experience research as a legitimate field of scientific inquiry. Greyson's contributions include the development of the NDE Scale (the standard measurement instrument for NDEs), the documentation of NDE aftereffects, the investigation of veridical perception during NDEs, and the establishment of the Division of Perceptual Studies as a world-leading center for consciousness research. His work, published in over 100 peer-reviewed papers and summarized in his book After (2021), represents the most comprehensive scientific investigation of NDEs by any single researcher.

For physicians in Burlington who encounter NDE reports in their clinical practice, Greyson's work provides an essential reference. His NDE Scale offers a validated tool for assessing the depth of an NDE; his research on aftereffects helps physicians understand the lasting changes they may observe in NDE experiencers; and his theoretical framework — that consciousness may be "brain-independent" — provides a scientifically grounded perspective on what these experiences might mean. Physicians' Untold Stories complements Greyson's research by adding the physician's personal perspective, creating a bridge between academic research and clinical practice that is accessible to both professionals and lay readers in Burlington.

Dr. Sam Parnia's concept of 'Actual Death Experiences' (ADEs), published in his 2013 book Erasing Death, reframes NDEs as experiences that occur during actual death rather than 'near' death. Parnia argues that modern resuscitation has blurred the line between life and death — patients who would have been considered dead a generation ago are now routinely revived, sometimes after extended periods of cardiac arrest. The experiences they report during this period are not 'near' death; they are death. For physicians in Burlington who perform CPR and manage cardiac arrest, Parnia's reframing has practical significance: the patient on the table may be experiencing something profound even while their heart is stopped and their EEG is flat. This understanding may change how resuscitation teams communicate in the room, recognizing that the patient may be aware of everything being said.