A shared death experience (SDE) is a phenomenon in which a person who is not themselves dying — typically a loved one, caregiver, or bystander at the bedside of a dying individual — reports undergoing perceptions, sensations, and experiences that closely parallel or overlap with the near-death experience (NDE). The bystander may perceive the dying person's life review, accompany them partway into a tunnel or light, observe an energy or mist leaving the body, and sense the presence of other deceased relatives before returning to ordinary waking consciousness as the dying person passes.
The phenomenon was first systematically described and named by Raymond Moody in his 2010 book Glimpses of Eternity: An Investigation into Shared Death Experiences, co-authored with Paul Perry. Moody had collected cases informally for decades prior to publication, and the book presented over 100 firsthand accounts gathered from hospice workers, nurses, physicians, family members, and others who happened to be present at the moment of death. Moody proposed that the SDE represents a shared transition of consciousness at the threshold of death — one participant crossing permanently, the other returning — and argued that the phenomenon constitutes some of the most compelling evidence yet assembled for the survival hypothesis.
Unlike the NDE, which occurs during an individual's own brush with death, the SDE involves a person in full physical health at the time of the experience. There is no physiological trigger (cardiac arrest, hypoxia, anesthesia) that might conventionally explain the perceptions. This distinguishes the SDE from most neuroscientific explanations for NDEs and places it in a category that challenges even the most well-developed skeptical frameworks.
The SDE is sometimes called an empathic death experience or deathbed coincidence in earlier literature, though Moody's term has become dominant since 2010. Related phenomena include deathbed visions — apparitions of deceased relatives reported by the dying person themselves — and crisis apparitions — spontaneous veridical apparitions of a living person experienced by a friend or family member at or near the moment of that person's death at a distant location.
SDEs are not rare anecdotes. Moody's own decades of clinical and informal collection suggest they are reported across a wide range of settings: hospital wards, hospices, private homes, and even by medical professionals who are neither spiritually inclined nor previously familiar with the phenomenon. Surveys of hospice nurses and palliative care workers — whose professional exposure to death is high — consistently find that a significant minority report at least one SDE-like experience during their careers. A 2017 survey of palliative care nurses in the United Kingdom found that approximately 19% reported sharing a perception with a dying patient at or near the moment of death.
SDEs appear to occur more frequently when there is a close emotional bond between the experiencer and the dying individual, though cases are documented in healthcare workers with no prior personal relationship with the patient. The experience is not predicted by religious belief, prior knowledge of NDEs, or expectation — indeed, several of the most compelling accounts come from individuals with materialist worldviews who were deeply unsettled by what they perceived.
Moody identified seven recurring features of SDEs across his collected accounts. These elements are not always present simultaneously; most experiencers report a subset rather than all seven. The consistency of these features across culturally and geographically diverse accounts is noted by researchers as significant.
A particularly significant subset of SDE cases involves two or more bystanders at the same deathbed independently reporting the same or overlapping perceptions. If two unrelated persons in the same room simultaneously perceive a mist above the body, a change in the room's appearance, or the same luminous presence — and each reports these perceptions independently before comparing notes — the case against individual hallucination or expectation bias becomes considerably more difficult to sustain. Moody's collection includes multiple such cases, and Sharon Cooper at the University of Virginia has documented comparable multi-witness accounts.
In one illustrative case cited by Moody, three adult siblings simultaneously present at their mother's bedside each independently reported seeing a translucent mist rise from her body and the room fill with an extraordinary light. None of the three had previously encountered the NDE or SDE literature, and the eldest sibling — a physician — was described as openly skeptical of any supernatural explanation before the event.
Raymond Moody (born 1944) coined the term "shared death experience" and published the first systematic collection in Glimpses of Eternity (2010). Moody, who holds doctorates in philosophy and psychology and an MD from the Medical College of Georgia, had begun collecting SDE-type accounts as early as the 1970s but chose to publish them separately from NDE research due to what he felt was an even more radical implication: the SDE cannot be explained by any theory of the individual dying brain, since the experiencer is in full health. Moody regards the SDE as potentially the strongest empirical argument for the survival hypothesis yet documented.
William Peters, a palliative care social worker and founder of the Shared Crossing Research Initiative (SCRI) in Santa Barbara, California, has conducted the most sustained dedicated research programme on SDEs since Moody's initial publication. Peters, who had his own SDE while working with a dying friend in 1996, established SCRI in 2012 and has since gathered and analysed several hundred SDE accounts using structured interview methodology. Peters has proposed a working typology distinguishing SDEs (involving direct co-experience of another's dying) from related phenomena including shared crossings (broader category of anomalous deathbed and grief phenomena) and empathic NDEs (cases where the bystander's experience is indistinguishable from a full NDE).
Peter Fenwick, a British neuropsychiatrist and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, has been among the most prominent researchers of end-of-life experiences in the United Kingdom. Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth Fenwick co-authored The Art of Dying (2008) and The Truth in the Light (1995), and Fenwick has published research on deathbed visions, terminal lucidity, and SDE-type phenomena across hundreds of palliative care settings. Fenwick has argued that the consistent features of these experiences — including features that cannot be attributed to the dying person's state of mind, since the dying person is often unconscious — point toward a model in which consciousness is not entirely bounded by individual brains.
Janice Miner Holden, professor of counselling at the University of North Texas and editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, has contributed to SDE research through her work on veridical perceptions in NDEs and related phenomena, and has served on the editorial and research advisory boards that shape empirical standards in the field.
Penny Sartori, a former intensive care nurse turned researcher at Swansea University, documented SDE-like phenomena among nursing colleagues during her prospective five-year study of NDEs in an ICU in Wales (2006). Sartori reported multiple cases in which nursing staff independently described seeing a mist or light above a patient at the moment of death, and found that these experiences were common enough to warrant dedicated investigation distinct from the NDE literature.
Carla Wills-Brandon, a licensed marriage and family therapist and researcher, published One Last Hug Before I Go: The Mystery and Meaning of Deathbed Visions (2000) and has contributed case collections and analysis of shared and deathbed phenomena across clinical and pastoral settings.
Deathbed visions (DBVs) — apparitions of deceased persons, luminous beings, or transcendent environments perceived by the dying in their final hours or days — constitute a closely related and historically rich body of evidence. While technically distinct from SDEs (which involve the living bystander rather than the dying person), DBVs form the evidentiary and phenomenological backdrop against which SDEs must be understood, and the two phenomena frequently co-occur at the same deathbed.
Sir William Barrett, a Fellow of the Royal Society and professor of experimental physics at the Royal College of Science, Dublin, published Death-Bed Visions (1926) — the first systematic monograph on the phenomenon. Barrett was alerted to the subject by his wife, Lady Florence Barrett, a consulting obstetric surgeon, who described a dying patient's sudden radiant vision of her deceased father and — significantly — of her deceased sister, a death the patient had not been told about, excluding the possibility of anticipatory grief as an explanation. Barrett collected cases from physicians, nurses, and families across Britain and concluded that the consistency and evidentiality of the accounts warranted serious scientific investigation.
Karlis Osis (American Society for Psychical Research) and Erlendur Haraldsson (University of Iceland) conducted the most extensive cross-cultural quantitative study of DBVs, surveying over 1,000 physicians and nurses in the United States and India. The results, published in At the Hour of Death (1977), found that DBVs were reported consistently across both cultural and religious settings; that the figures encountered were overwhelmingly deceased persons rather than living ones; and — crucially — that the visions frequently predicted the imminent death of patients who had been expected to survive, suggesting the perception was not wish-fulfillment or hallucination driven by prior knowledge of prognosis.
The "peak in Darien" cases — named after the Keats poem invoked by Myers and Gurney — constitute a particularly significant subset of DBVs. In these cases, the dying person reports seeing a deceased relative whose death was unknown to both the patient and all persons in the room at the time. The person (often a sibling or parent) had died recently, and the news had been withheld. The dying person identifies this figure among other expected deceased relatives, displaying apparent acquisition of information through channels other than normal sensory perception. Barrett's original monograph contained several such cases; later researchers including Osis and Haraldsson found additional examples, and Moody has discussed further instances in the SDE context.
Contemporary clinical confirmation of DBVs has been provided by studies such as Christopher Kerr and colleagues at Hospice Buffalo (now Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo), who published "End-of-Life Dreams and Visions" in the Journal of Palliative Medicine (2014). This prospective study of 59 terminally ill patients found that 88% reported at least one comforting dream or vision of deceased relatives in the days before death; these experiences were universally described as more real than ordinary dreaming and were associated with significantly reduced terminal distress.
Crisis apparitions are spontaneous veridical hallucinations of a living person perceived by a geographically distant observer at or near the moment of that person's death. The Society for Psychical Research's landmark Phantasms of the Living (1886), compiled by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore, catalogued 702 cases of apparitions, the majority crisis apparitions, from thousands of submitted accounts. Statistical analysis showed that the rate of apparitional coincidences with a percipient's death far exceeded chance expectation.
The 1889 Census of Hallucinations, coordinated by Henry Sidgwick across 27,329 respondents in multiple countries, found that approximately 10% reported a vivid and realistic hallucination at some point in their life; of hallucinations of known persons, 80 occurred at or within twelve hours of that person's death — a rate 440 times the chance baseline. This data was published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1894) and remains one of the largest systematic surveys of spontaneous anomalous experience in the nineteenth-century literature.
One of the most-cited cases in Moody's Glimpses of Eternity involves a physician who was present at the deathbed of his wife. At the moment of her death, he reported that the room appeared to change shape and expand, a brilliant light entered, he perceived a replay of events from his wife's life — including scenes he had no prior knowledge of and which were later corroborated by her surviving relatives — and he accompanied her a short distance toward the light before "being turned back" by a barrier or force. He described the experience as far more real than ordinary reality and said it fundamentally altered his previously materialist worldview. He declined to be identified by name but agreed to Moody's use of the case in full descriptive detail.
Three adult children were present at their mother's deathbed. Independently (without prior comparison), all three reported seeing a mist rise from the body and experiencing a sudden, pervasive warmth and light in the room. The eldest sibling, a surgeon with a declared materialist philosophy, described the experience as "the most shocking thing that has ever happened to me and I have no framework for it." The three accounts, collected separately by Moody, described the same spatial sequence of perceptions to a degree he considered inconsistent with coincidental confabulation.
Lady Florence Barrett described a patient dying of puerperal fever who, in her final conscious moments, exclaimed at the apparition of her recently deceased father — and then, unexpectedly, called out the name of her sister Vida, saying "Vida is with him." Vida had died three weeks earlier; this information had been withheld from the dying woman. Lady Barrett and the patient's mother, who were both present, had not mentioned Vida's death. The case, corroborated by multiple witnesses and recorded in contemporaneous notes, became one of Barrett's central examples of a "peak in Darien" case.
Peter Fenwick's surveys of palliative care nurses in the United Kingdom gathered multiple accounts of nursing staff perceiving luminous phenomena at the moment of a patient's death. In one account, a night-shift nurse described a bright mist rising from a patient's body at the precise moment the cardiac monitor flatlined. A colleague in the same room confirmed seeing an anomalous light. Both were experienced ICU nurses who had no prior interest in paranormal phenomena and were initially reluctant to report the experience. Penny Sartori's five-year prospective study at the Morriston Hospital intensive care unit in Swansea included several comparable cases from nursing staff, recorded as part of her prospective documentation protocol.
William Peters, who founded the Shared Crossing Research Initiative, documented his own SDE during the dying process of a close friend in 1996. Peters reported that during his friend's final moments, he perceived the room transforming, experienced profound love and peace, and felt himself briefly accompanying his friend toward a luminous space before "returning." This experience, which Peters initially attempted to dismiss as a grief reaction, persisted in vivid clarity and prompted his subsequent career shift from conventional social work to end-of-life research. Peters has since gathered several hundred SDE cases through SCRI, many from individuals with no prior knowledge of the phenomenon.
In Osis and Haraldsson's cross-cultural survey, multiple Indian physicians and nurses described cases in which dying patients reported apparitions of persons subsequently confirmed to have recently died but whose deaths were unknown to the patient or medical staff. In one case, a dying man called out a deceased friend's name, insisting the friend had "come for him." The friend, who had been ill but whose death had not yet been communicated to anyone in the family network, was confirmed to have died that morning. Osis and Haraldsson documented six such cases with independent corroboration across their Indian cohort.
Among the SCRI case archive, Peters identifies a subset of approximately 15% of SDEs as "empathic NDEs" — experiences in which the healthy bystander reports a full NDE-type sequence (OBE, tunnel, light, life review, border, return) indistinguishable from the experiences of those who clinically died. These cases are particularly significant because they occur in physically healthy individuals with no physiological trigger and are associated with the same long-term aftereffects (reduced fear of death, increased spirituality, altered values) documented in NDE survivors by Greyson, Ring, and van Lommel.
The Shared Crossing Research Initiative, founded by William Peters in 2012 and based in Santa Barbara, California, is the first dedicated research programme focused exclusively on SDEs and related end-of-life phenomena. SCRI employs structured qualitative interview protocols developed in consultation with researchers at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, and has gathered several hundred accounts from individuals across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
SCRI's research methodology distinguishes four categories of shared crossing experience:
SCRI also operates the Shared Crossing Project, an educational and support programme for individuals who have had SDEs and find themselves unable to discuss the experience within conventional medical or grief support frameworks due to stigma or lack of understanding.
After-death communications are spontaneous (unsolicited) experiences in which a bereaved person perceives contact from a recently deceased individual. ADCs are reported across all cultures and constitute one of the most common anomalous experiences in the general population. Research by Bill Guggenheim and Judy Guggenheim, who conducted the largest dedicated survey of ADCs in the 1990s (published as Hello From Heaven!, 1995), found that of approximately 2,000 respondents, 42% of widowed persons reported at least one ADC in the year following bereavement.
ADCs take multiple forms, including:
The evidential significance of ADCs varies considerably. Most are comfort experiences without verifiable content. However, a meaningful subset involve transmission of previously unknown information that is subsequently verified — placing them in the same category as veridical NDE perceptions and peak-in-Darien DBV cases. These veridical ADCs are documented by the Guggenheims, by Fenwick, and by researchers at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, and form part of the broader empirical case for post-mortem consciousness.
Induced After-Death Communications (IADCs) are a therapeutic technique developed by psychologist Allan Botkin, a former VA clinical psychologist, in which a modified form of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is applied to bereaved patients with traumatic grief. Botkin discovered in 1995 that a subset of patients, during EMDR sessions focused on grief, reported experiencing vivid and emotionally compelling communications from the deceased person — typically described as feeling entirely real, loving, and distinctly different from ordinary memory or imagination.
Botkin reported IADCs in over 80 cases in his initial publication (Induced After-Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma, 2005) and found that the experiences consistently resolved traumatic grief, regardless of whether the patient attributed them to genuine contact or internal psychological process. The therapeutic efficacy of IADCs has been replicated in several independent settings, and the technique is now used by a small network of trained therapists. The question of whether IADCs represent genuine post-mortem contact or a therapeutically powerful form of guided imagery remains open.
Parting visions (a term used by Moody and Fenwick interchangeably with "deathbed visions" in some contexts) refers to visions, auditory experiences, or communications reported by the dying in the hours or days before death that appear to reflect a transitional state between physical and non-physical modes of existence. These are distinct from terminal delirium or medically understood confusional states and are characterised by their coherence, calm quality, and the reported clarity with which dying individuals communicate them.
Hospice workers across multiple cultures and institutional settings consistently report that dying patients describe visitors who are not physically present — invariably deceased relatives rather than living persons — with varying degrees of explicitness. The patients are often non-delirious, lucid between episodes, and describe the visions as comfort and assistance rather than threat or confusion. In Kerr's Hospice Buffalo study, 88% of patients reported this class of experience, and nursing staff assessed the vast majority as exhibiting full lucidity during the reports.
Deathbed coincidences is the term used by Fenwick for the broader category of anomalous events reported by bystanders at the moment of death — including clocks stopping, lights flickering, animals behaving unusually, and objects falling — many of which are independently reported by multiple witnesses. While individually explicable as coincidence or confirmation bias, the aggregate frequency and cross-cultural consistency of these reports has led researchers including Fenwick to suggest they may reflect a genuine but unexplained perturbation of the physical environment at the moment of consciousness's departure from the body.
The evidentiary status of SDEs and related phenomena differs from that of NDEs in one crucial respect: the SDE experiencer is in full physiological health. This removes the primary class of conventional explanations — hypoxia, hypercarbia, endogenous opiates, REM intrusion, anaesthetic agents, temporal lobe activity — that have been applied with varying degrees of success to the individual NDE. A healthy person standing at a bedside cannot be experiencing hypoxic hallucination or drug-induced altered states. The SDE, therefore, either demands a qualitatively different neurological explanation (currently without a candidate mechanism) or points toward something other than individual brain dysfunction.
The subset of SDEs involving multiple simultaneous independent witnesses is particularly resistant to individual psychological explanation. If two or three observers with no prior collusion independently report the same perceptions — the mist, the light, the transformed geometry of the room — at the same moment, explanations based on individual expectation, grief, cultural priming, or confirmation bias become untenable without also positing a shared hallucination, for which no mechanism is proposed in conventional neuroscience.
The life review component of some SDEs presents an additional evidential challenge: bystanders who perceive a panoramic replay of a dying person's life — including specific scenes, emotions, and events unknown to the bystander and later verified from the deceased's history — appear to have acquired information through non-standard channels. This places the SDE in the same evidentiary category as veridical NDEs and "peak in Darien" deathbed vision cases.
No consensus theoretical model of the SDE exists, and formal empirical research remains limited. Current theoretical positions include:
The SDE is best understood in direct dialogue with the NDE literature rather than in isolation. The phenomenological overlap is extensive: the same core elements (mist, light, tunnel, deceased relatives, life review, border, return) appear in both, and the same transformative aftereffects (reduced fear of death, increased compassion, altered values) are consistently reported by SDE experiencers. This parallel structure is taken by Moody, Peters, and van Lommel as evidence that both phenomena are encountering the same underlying reality from different vantage points — one from inside the dying process, one from immediately adjacent to it.
The progressive convergence of NDE and SDE research, together with the deathbed vision and crisis apparition literature, the mediumship research of the Windbridge Institute and the University of Virginia, and the broader parapsychological evidence base, constitutes what Moody has called "a cumulative case" for the survival hypothesis — no single strand definitive, but the aggregate weight of consistent, cross-source, cross-cultural evidence considerable.
Formal academic research on SDEs remains at an early stage relative to the NDE literature, which has a fifty-year publication history and a dedicated peer-reviewed journal (Journal of Near-Death Studies). The primary institutional home for SDE research is the Shared Crossing Research Initiative; related work is conducted within the broader end-of-life and parapsychology frameworks at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, the Society for Psychical Research, and the Parapsychological Association.
Peer-reviewed publications specifically focused on SDEs are limited; the majority of rigorous case-study work appears in Moody's monograph (2010) and SCRI's ongoing case archive. However, SDE-adjacent evidence (DBVs, crisis apparitions, ADCs) has a substantial peer-reviewed literature spanning the Journal of Near-Death Studies, the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying, and the Journal of Palliative Medicine.
The primary methodological challenge for SDE research is the difficulty of prospective or controlled study of a phenomenon that occurs spontaneously at the unpredictable moment of death. The AWARE study's approach of placing hidden visual targets near ceilings in resuscitation rooms offers a partial model, but no equivalent has been designed for the SDE context. Peters has proposed that prospective studies in hospice settings — with structured pre-experience briefing and immediate post-experience independent interview of multiple witnesses — would yield the most evidentially robust data. Such a programme has not yet been funded or implemented at scale.
This page presents documented research, reported phenomena, and peer-reviewed findings. No claims about ultimate mechanism or metaphysical validity are made by this archive. Anecdotal accounts are included for evidential and phenomenological documentation purposes alongside controlled research findings.