Maria's Shoe

For years this was the case people handed to skeptics as their best. A migrant worker with a heart condition, an out-of-body trip around the outside of a hospital, and a single shoe on a ledge where nobody could have seen it. Kenneth Ring and Madelaine Lawrence wrote that, assuming the account was authentic, "the facts of the case seem incontestable." The trouble lies in that assumption.

The claim

Maria, a patient at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, said that during a cardiac arrest she found herself outside the building and saw a large tennis shoe on a ledge outside a third-floor window, worn at the little toe and with its lace tucked under the heel. A social worker searched, found the shoe where Maria said it was, and became convinced that Maria's mind had left her body.

What was documented, when, by whom

The account comes from Kimberly Clark, a social worker at Harborview, who first published it in "Clinical Interventions with Near-Death Experiencers", a chapter in Bruce Greyson and Charles Flynn (eds.), The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives (Charles C. Thomas, 1984), pages 242 to 255. As later summarised by the skeptics who investigated it:

• In April 1977 Maria, a migrant worker from the Yakima area visiting friends in Seattle, had a severe heart attack and was admitted to the coronary care unit.
• Three days later she had a cardiac arrest and was quickly resuscitated.
• Later that day she told Clark she had watched the team from the ceiling, described chart paper streaming from the monitors, then described the emergency entrance: doors opening inward, a one-way road, a curve in it.
• She then described the shoe and asked Clark to look for it. Clark could not see it from the ground, went room to room on the third floor, and found it by pressing her face against a window.

I went up to the third floor and began going in and out of patients' rooms and looking out their windows, which were so narrow that I had to press my face to the screen, just to see the ledge at all.

Kimberly Clark, as quoted in Ebbern, Mulligan and Beyerstein, Skeptical Inquirer 20(4), 1996

Why it's cited

The shoe is the perfect target: a strange, unmistakable object in a place nobody looks, described in detail by someone who had never been near it. It was retold by Ring and Lawrence (1993), Susan Blackmore, and many popular books, and for two decades it stood for the whole idea of veridical perception.

The skeptical case

In 1994 Hayden Ebbern and Sean Mulligan, students of the psychologist Barry Beyerstein at Simon Fraser University, went to Harborview and talked with Clark. They published "Maria's Near-Death Experience: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop" in Skeptical Inquirer 20(4), July/August 1996, pages 27 to 33. Their findings:

• They put a running shoe of their own on the ledge Clark described, from inside one of the rooms. It was "clearly visible from various points within the room", and a patient could see it from the bed. Nobody needed to press against the glass.
• From the ground they could easily see and identify it, even though new construction forced them to view it from further away than would have been possible in 1977, when the area below was a parking lot and patient recreation area.
• A week later their shoe had been removed, so someone not looking for it had noticed it.
• Maria's room had been directly above the emergency entrance for three days, and she had been brought in through it. Inward-opening doors and a one-way approach are what any hospital entrance is likely to have.
• Despite repeated efforts, they could not find Maria, or anyone other than Clark who had dealt with her.

They also noted that Clark did not publish for seven years, kept no notes or recordings of her interviews with Maria, and never photographed the shoe on the ledge. Viewed from the angle Clark described, they had no trouble seeing the "hidden" outer side of their own shoe.

In fairness: the skeptics did not show that Maria heard about the shoe, only that she could have. Clark (writing as Kimberly Clark Sharp) replied in 2007 that Maria's limited English made it unlikely she had overheard staff talking about it.

Status

The case depends on one person's memory, recorded years later, and on a claim about invisibility that did not survive two students and a running shoe. It may have happened as told. As evidence it is thin, and it is a useful lesson in how a story can become "the best case" without anyone checking the ledge. Rating: Weak.

Sources

• Kimberly Clark, "Clinical Interventions with Near-Death Experiencers", in B. Greyson and C. P. Flynn (eds.), The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1984), 242 to 255.
• Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan and Barry L. Beyerstein, "Maria's Near-Death Experience: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop", Skeptical Inquirer 20(4) (July/August 1996), 27 to 33.
• Kenneth Ring and Madelaine Lawrence, "Further Evidence for Veridical Perception During Near-Death Experiences", Journal of Near-Death Studies 11 (1993), 223 to 229.
• Keith Augustine, "Does Paranormal Perception Occur in Near-Death Experiences?", Journal of Near-Death Studies 25(4) (2007), with replies including Kimberly Clark Sharp's.