
Between Life and Death: Physician Accounts Near Savannah, Newport
What does it mean when a physician — a person who has spent years learning to trust only what can be measured, replicated, and peer-reviewed — tells you that they believe they witnessed something supernatural? It means the experience was so powerful, so undeniable, that it overwhelmed a lifetime of scientific conditioning. Physicians' Untold Stories by Dr. Scott Kolbaba is filled with exactly these testimonies, and their power lies in their reluctance. These are not people eager to believe; they are people compelled to bear witness. For the community of Savannah, Newport, Vermont, where faith and science often feel like competing worldviews, this book offers a remarkable reconciliation: the possibility that both are describing different aspects of the same magnificent reality.
Medical Fact
The "death doula" movement brings companions trained to support the dying — many report sensing presences they cannot see.
Physician Burnout & Wellness Near Savannah, Newport
The medical community in Savannah, Newport 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.
Savannah, Newport's healthcare landscape reflects broader patterns in Vermont's medical system — the pressures of modern practice, the isolation that comes from witnessing extraordinary events without a framework to discuss them, and the gradual erosion of meaning that drives so many physicians toward burnout. Yet it is precisely in communities like Savannah, Newport that the unexplained tends to surface most vividly, in moments that practicing physicians remember for the rest of their careers.
Medical Fact
Some nurses describe a physical sensation — a tingling on the skin or a feeling of being watched — when they enter a room where a patient has recently died.
Ghost Stories and the Supernatural Near Savannah, Newport, Vermont
Philadelphia's medical history, the oldest in the nation, infuses hospitals near Savannah, Newport, Vermont with a gravitas that borders on the spectral. Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, practiced in buildings whose foundations still support modern clinics. Physicians report feeling an almost oppressive weight of history in these spaces, as if the walls themselves demand a higher standard of care.
The Northeast's old charity hospitals, built to serve the poor, carry a specific kind of haunting near Savannah, Newport, 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.
Medical Fact
Some emergency physicians report an uncanny silence that descends in a trauma bay at the exact moment a patient dies, despite ongoing equipment noise.
Near-Death Experiences Reported by Physicians Near Savannah, Newport
The Northeastern tradition of grand rounds—formal case presentations before an audience of peers—has begun to include NDE cases at some teaching hospitals near Savannah, Newport, Vermont. These presentations are carefully structured to separate the subjective experience from the clinical data, but the questions from the audience inevitably drift toward the philosophical: what does it mean if consciousness can exist independently of brain function?
Neurosurgeons near Savannah, Newport, 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.
Near-Death Experience Features
Percentage reporting each feature (van Lommel et al., 2001)
Did You Know?
The term "miracle" appears in peer-reviewed medical literature more than 3,500 times.
Physician Wellness, Grief & Finding Meaning Near Savannah, Newport
The COVID-19 pandemic tested Northeast hospitals near Savannah, Newport, Vermont with a severity that will define a generation of physicians. The trauma was enormous, but so was the discovery: healthcare workers learned that they could endure more than they imagined, that communities would rally to support them, and that the act of showing up—day after day, into the unknown—is itself a form of healing.
The rhythm of healing near Savannah, Newport, Vermont follows the Northeast's four distinct seasons. Spring brings the allergy patients, summer the injured adventurers, autumn the flu shots, winter the falls on ice. This cyclical pattern gives Northeast medicine a continuity that connects today's physicians to every generation that came before. The seasons change, the patients change, but the commitment to healing remains.
Did You Know?
The oldest known hospital still in operation is the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, founded in 651 CE — nearly 1,400 years ago.

About Dr. Scott Kolbaba
Internist at Northwestern Medicine. Mayo Clinic trained. Interviewed 200+ physicians for this Amazon bestseller.
"I shivered. I cried. I read some out loud to the spouse. Please write more." — Amazon Review
Did You Know?
The most-read chapter of Physicians' Untold Stories is about a woman with MS who made an inexplicable, complete recovery.
Watch the Stories
About the Book
The book has been discussed in medical ethics courses as an example of physicians' inner lives beyond clinical practice.
Supernatural Folklore and Ghost Traditions in Vermont
Vermont's supernatural folklore reflects its remote Green Mountain landscape and tight-knit communities. The ghost of Emily's Bridge in Stowe—Gold Brook Covered Bridge—is one of the state's most famous haunted locations. According to legend, a young woman named Emily hanged herself from the bridge in the 19th century after being jilted by her lover, and her ghost scratches cars that pass through at night, leaving claw marks on roofs and doors. Visitors report hearing a woman's screams and the sound of a rope creaking.
The Green Mountain State also has a rich tradition of phantom hitchhiker stories, particularly along Route 100 through the mountain passes. Drivers report picking up a young woman who directs them to a house and then vanishes from the back seat; upon reaching the house, they are told the woman has been dead for years. Eddy House in Chittenden was the 19th-century home of the Eddy Brothers, William and Horatio, who conducted séances that attracted national attention—journalist Henry Steel Olcott investigated in 1874 and documented materializations that he claimed to have witnessed, later publishing them in "People from the Other World," which helped launch the Spiritualist movement in America.
About the Book
Dr. Kolbaba is a board-certified internist who has maintained an active clinical practice throughout his writing career.
Death, Grief, and Cultural Traditions in Vermont
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.
Physician Burnout by Specialty
Percentage reporting at least one symptom (Medscape, 2024)
Research Finding
Reading narrative-based accounts of patient experiences has been shown to improve physician empathy scores by 15-20%.
Haunted Hospitals and Medical Landmarks in Vermont
Brattleboro Retreat (Brattleboro): Founded in 1834 as the Vermont Asylum for the Insane, the Brattleboro Retreat is one of the oldest psychiatric facilities in New England. The historic campus, with buildings dating to the Civil War era, is associated with reports of apparitions in the older dormitory wings, particularly a woman in Victorian dress seen in the former women's ward. Staff have described hearing whispered conversations and footsteps in corridors that are empty and locked.
Vermont State Hospital (Waterbury): The Vermont State Hospital for the Insane in Waterbury operated from 1891 until it was severely damaged by Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. Before its destruction, staff reported numerous paranormal experiences including doors that opened on their own, cold spots in patient rooms, and the silhouette of a man seen standing in windows of unoccupied wards. The hospital's patient cemetery, with over 400 burials, was said to be particularly unsettling after dark.
Research Finding
Art therapy in healthcare settings has been associated with reductions in depression, anxiety, and pain across multiple studies.
How This Book Can Help You
Vermont, where the Larner College of Medicine trains physicians for rural New England communities and the state's progressive approach to death includes both green burials and home funerals, offers a setting where the natural dying process is more visible and intimate than in any urban medical center. Dr. Kolbaba's Physicians' Untold Stories speaks to the experiences of doctors who are present for the full, unhurried arc of dying—the kind of presence that Vermont's rural physicians, serving small communities where doctor and patient are often neighbors, embody. This mirrors Dr. Kolbaba's own philosophy, developed through Mayo Clinic training and Northwestern Medicine practice, that physicians must be willing to witness and acknowledge what happens at the threshold of death.
The Northeast's medical ethics community near Savannah, Newport, Vermont will find in this book a practical challenge: how should ethics committees handle cases where a patient's treatment decisions are influenced by an NDE or a ghostly encounter? These aren't hypothetical scenarios. They happen in real hospitals, and the current ethical frameworks aren't equipped to address them.

“Dreams foretelling future events, apparitions, and other miraculous experiences come to life within the pages of Physicians' Untold Stories.”
— Physicians' Untold Stories

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Over 200 physicians interviewed. 26 stories that will challenge what you believe about life, death, and everything in between.
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