A real-life story · Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 1979

The near-death experience of the man with the dentures

In late 1979, a 44-year-old man arrived ice-cold and with no pulse at a hospital in the Netherlands. To resuscitate him, a nurse took out his dentures and left them on a cart. More than a week later, according to the nurse, the man recognized him and told him where he had left the dentures. He said he had watched his whole resuscitation from above.

No. 44 in the ranking

It is one of the most famous cases in the world. The medical journal The Lancet published it in 2001, within the study by the cardiologist Pim van Lommel. Nobody ever interviewed the man. Everything he said is known through the nurse. How did the man know where his dentures were? We tell it step by step and then look at what could be checked. If you’re in a hurry, go straight to the check.

Step 1

Late 1979, at night · No pulse · Told by the nurse

Passers-by find an ice-cold man in a meadow

The man was 44 years old and lived in Ooy, a village near the city of Nijmegen. According to the nurse, he worked in steel. The articles written about the case later call him B.

One cold night, passers-by found him lying in a wet meadow. Nobody knows how long he had been there. He had no pulse and was not breathing.

The ambulance crew saw how young he was and decided to try to resuscitate him. They tried on the way, without result. They took him to the Canisius hospital in Nijmegen.

A nurse from the coronary care unit, the intensive care area for the heart, was waiting for him there.

Step 2

In the resuscitation room · No pulse · Told by the nurse

The team believes it is resuscitating a dead man

The nurse asked for his name not to be given. The articles call him T. G. That night he was leading the resuscitation team for the first time. Two student nurses were helping him, and a junior doctor was there.

According to the nurse, the man arrived as cold as ice. His skin had bluish patches, like a corpse. His pupils did not react to light, and his eyes were closed.

The nurse says that after 15 minutes they were all convinced they were working on a dead man. They looked at each other as if to say it made no sense. They went on because the man was young, and because the doctor did not dare to tell them to stop.

Step 3

As the resuscitation begins · No pulse · Told by the nurse

The nurse takes out his dentures and leaves them on the cart

So the man could get air, a tube had to go down his mouth. While doing it, the nurse saw that he still had his upper dentures in. They had not yet switched on the machine that would do the chest compressions. He took them out and left them on the crash cart, the trolley with the medicines and drips.

It was not an ordinary cart. The hospital itself had made it from a kitchen trolley of metal tubes. On top it had compartments with bottles and ampoules. Underneath it had a wooden shelf that slid out. The shelf was already pulled out, because the nurse had put the prepared syringes there. He himself says it was the only place where he could put the dentures down with ease.

He put the dentures down on the wood and carried on with the resuscitation.

He forgot about them.

Step 4

During the resuscitation · Told by the nurse

A machine pounds his chest for a long time

They gave him chest compressions, first by hand and then with a machine that pounds the chest over and over. They gave him five electric shocks to get the heart beating again.

Every now and then, the nurse opened his eyes to check his pupils. They never reacted.

After a long time, a little heartbeat and a little blood pressure came back. The man began to breathe a little on his own. They took him to intensive care, still in a coma and on a breathing machine.

The nurse’s shift ended that night. The dentures, it seems, got lost when the room was tidied up.

Step 5

The following week · In intensive care

B. wakes up and asks about his dentures

The doctors later found that B. had had a very large heart attack before he collapsed in the meadow.

Little by little, B. recovered in intensive care. At some point he asked where his dentures were. Nobody knew, because the dentures had not come with him to intensive care.

The nurse had five days off and then worked in another part of the ward. More than a week went by without him seeing B.

Step 6

More than a week later · Awake · Told by the nurse

“You know where my dentures are”

At the start of his night shift, the nurse went in to hand out medication on the recovery ward. B. was there, in his bed. The nurse was already surprised to see him looking so well.

According to the nurse, B. looked at him and said this:

B.“Hey, yes you, you know where my dentures are!”

The nurse“How do you know that?”

B.“You were there when I was brought into the hospital, and you removed my dentures from my mouth and put them upon that cart that was there. […] Yes, there were all sorts of bottles on it, and it did rattle a lot, and there was also a sliding plate upon which you put the dentures.”

The nurse was stunned. The last time he had seen B., B. was in a coma.

Step 7

More than a week later · Told by the nurse

B. says he saw it all from a corner near the ceiling

According to the nurse, B. described the resuscitation room. It was very small. To the right of the bed there was a washbasin, and also a mirror. To the left was the cart, and there was a narrow metal cabinet.

B. also described the people resuscitating him, for example what one of the nurses looked like. He said he saw himself lying on the bed from the corner where the cabinet was, floating above the team. He found it very strange.

At the same time, B. felt the nurse’s weight on him and the pain of the compression machine. According to the nurse, B. told him this:

“I saw you; you were doing the heart massage on me. And I wanted to tell you all the time: ‘Ouch, stop doing this because it hurts so much! I am still here; my heart does not stand still! I am alive!’ But you did not hear me.”

B., as the nurse told it in a 1994 interview

In another account, the one The Lancet published in 2001, B. asked for the opposite. He wanted them to keep resuscitating him, because he was afraid of dying. In 2008, the nurse explained that B. wanted both things, at different moments of the resuscitation.

Step 8

The following weeks and years · Told by the nurse

B. goes home and the nurse loses track of him

According to the nurse, B. told it all plainly, without being amazed by any of it. He did not strike the nurse as someone with a wild imagination.

B. went home four weeks after arriving at the hospital. The nurse never spoke to him again and regrets not having kept in touch. He saw him once more, from a distance, at a check-up. B. looked very ill with his heart.

A few years later, the nurse read in the newspaper the death notice of a man from Ooy with the initial B.

Nothing of what B. told was written in his medical record. In those years, such things were not written down.

Step 9

From 1991 to 2010 · Told by the researchers

The story goes around the world without anyone asking B.

The nurse told his colleagues, who shrugged it off. One of them took the story to a researcher, who published it in a Dutch magazine in 1991. In 1994, an interviewer from the Dutch association that studies these experiences spoke at length with the nurse. And in 2001, the case appeared in The Lancet.

By then it was no longer possible to talk to B. In 2008, the researcher Rudolf Smit tracked down the nurse, and Titus Rivas did a long interview with him. The nurse repeated the essentials. An anesthesiologist, Gerald Woerlee, proposed a medical explanation, and Smit and Rivas answered him. We tell that investigation and its debate on another page, “The dentures case.”

The question from the beginning remains: how did B. know where his dentures were? Let’s see what could be checked.

What does the evidence say?

What can be checked

We ask every story the same five questions. They don’t tell us whether someone is telling the truth. They tell us what can be shown today. Here we ask them about the dentures. According to the nurse, the man knew that he had taken them out and left them on the wooden shelf of the cart.

1.5 of 5

Yes
Unconfirmed
No data

Did anyone tell the man where his dentures were before he told the nurse?The nurse says nobody could have told him, but this cannot be fully guaranteed. According to the nurse, nobody in intensive care knew where the dentures were, and the man told him as soon as he saw him. What the man said is known only from the nurse’s memory. It was first written down 12 years later. A colleague of the nurse told a researcher, who published it in an article. Later, the nurse told it himself in interviews in 1994 and 2008.
Is it known what time the man with the dentures reached the hospital and how long his resuscitation lasted?Unknown. According to the researchers Rudolf Smit and Titus Rivas, the hospital records were destroyed over the years. Not even the exact date is left: it was in late 1979. The accounts don’t agree on how long the resuscitation lasted: some say three quarters of an hour, others more than an hour and others an hour and a half.
Is it known at what moment of the resuscitation the nurse took out the man’s dentures?Unknown. It is not known for sure, and no time was written down. In a 2008 text, the nurse says he took them out before the compression machine was switched on, when the man had no circulation. In an interview that same year he told it the other way around: first the machine, then the dentures.
Does anyone else confirm what the man said about his dentures?Only the nurse who took out the dentures confirms it. He says he left them exactly where the man said, on the wooden shelf of the cart. But the nurse is also the only source for what the man said, and he told it years later. The two student nurses and the doctor who were there that night have not given their account.
Could the man with the dentures have known in a normal way where they were?It cannot be fully ruled out. The nurse believes not, because the man arrived with no pulse, with pupils that did not react and with his eyes closed. But the articles on the case point to three normal ways. The man already knew he had lost his dentures in the hospital, because he had asked about them before seeing the nurse. The nurse says he has a voice that is very easy to recognize, so the man could have recognized him by his voice. And the nurse accepts that the shelf was the easiest place to put them. The anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee adds that the man felt the pain of the compression machine, and he believes that shows he was partly conscious. No article says that the man used any of these ways.

Why we ask each question

When did each thing happen?

There are no times. According to the researchers Rudolf Smit and Titus Rivas, the hospital records were destroyed over the years. Only the nurse gives the order, and he told it in two ways:

In a 2008 text, the nurse answered Woerlee. He said he first took out the dentures and put on the mask to give him air. Only then did they switch on the compression machine. According to that text, more than a minute went by without compressions and without circulation. In that time they moved B. onto the bed and set up the machine. Within that same time, the nurse took out the dentures.
In a 2008 interview with Titus Rivas, the nurse told it the other way around. First they put the machine on, and it may have given some circulation. Then he took out the dentures. In 2019, Rivas, Smit and Anny Dirven published a book of cases. There they explain that, in that interview, the nurse listed the steps without paying attention to their order.

If the dentures came out before the machine, B. had no circulation at that moment. If they came out after, the machine may have given him some circulation, and with it some blood to the brain.

What is hard to explain

B. recognized the nurse the first time he saw him while awake, more than a week later.
He described the cart, which was unique in the hospital, and the wooden shelf where the dentures were. According to the nurse, what was on top of the cart could not be seen from the bed.
According to the nurse, B. arrived with no pulse, with pupils that did not react and with his eyes closed, and gave no sign of being conscious.
The nurse told the essentials the same way in 1994 and in 2008, and says it is the most extraordinary case he has ever come across.

What remains unresolved

Nobody interviewed B. Everything he said is known through the nurse, who told it in 1994 and in 2008, 15 and 29 years later.
B. had already asked about his dentures before seeing the nurse, so he already knew the dentures had stayed in the hospital.
The nurse says he has a voice that is very easy to recognize. He also opened B.’s eyes to check his pupils. For Woerlee, B. could have recognized him that way.
The nurse himself accepts that the shelf was the easiest place to put the dentures.
B. felt the pain of the compression machine. For Gerald Woerlee, that shows he was partly conscious. Smit and Rivas admit they have no clear explanation for that pain.
The nurse told the order of the dentures and the machine in two ways.

How do experts rate cases like the dentures case?

B. is not a unique case. Other people say that, during their experience, they saw something that was later checked.

In 2025, thirteen researchers of these experiences created a scale. It measures how far each case supports the idea that the person saw something they could not have known. They then used it themselves to rate 17 cases published in scientific journals. One was the dentures case, as Smit told it in 2008.

Eleven of those experts rated the dentures case, and 6 said “strong.” Three artificial intelligence programs rated it too, and all three said “strong.”

How the 17 cases came out, according to what most of the experts said (Greyson and others, 2025)
Level	Cases
Strong, including the dentures case	4
Between strong and moderate	1
Moderate	7
Low	3
Very low	2

What these figures don’t tell

The cases are not random. Two of the authors chose them from cases published in scientific journals.
The experts did not always agree. For the dentures case, 6 of 11 said “strong,” just over half.
Who does the rating matters too. The authors themselves admit it. An expert convinced that consciousness can work without the brain may give a case more points than it deserves. Van Lommel himself was among the authors.
The scale rates the case as it was published. It values how credible the witness is, but does not ask whether anything was written down at the time.

So this scale does not say these cases are proof, or that they are not. There is more on this in What does science say?

Frequently asked questions

Who was the man with the dentures?

He was a 44-year-old man from Ooy, a village near Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. The articles only call him B. He was resuscitated in late 1979 after being found ice-cold and with no pulse in a meadow. The nurse who treated him read, years later, the death notice of a man from Ooy with his initial.

Is the story of the man with the dentures true?

The nurse who took out the dentures has told the essentials the same way for years. But nobody interviewed the man, and nothing was written down at the time. So it cannot be fully checked. We explain it on the page “The dentures case.”

Where this story comes from

Studies

Pim van Lommel and others (2001), The Lancet 358:2039-2045View in the journal (free with registration)
Rudolf Smit (2008), the 1994 interview with the nurse and what he said in 2008, Journal of Near-Death Studies 27(1):47-61Read for free
Gerald Woerlee (2010), Journal of Near-Death Studies 28(4):181-191Read for free
Rudolf Smit and Titus Rivas (2010), with the nurse’s 2008 text, Journal of Near-Death Studies 28(4):193-205Read for free
Greyson and others (2025), the scale for checked cases, Frontiers in Psychology 16:1661390Read for free

Books

Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven and Rudolf Smit, El yo no muere (2019), the Spanish edition of The Self Does Not Die, case 3.7, with the 2008 interview. We cite the first Spanish edition. The link goes to the English edition, where the case numbers may differ.Buy the book

To understand more

The dentures case: Smit’s investigation and his debate with WoerleeRead
Van Lommel: 344 resuscitated people in ten hospitalsRead
What does science say about these experiences?Read

Our archive

Our assessment of the case with the five questions of the check, as of October 23, 2026

Keep reading

Hartford, 1985

The red shoe patient

In 1985, a woman resuscitated in a Hartford hospital said she saw a red shoe from above the roof. According to the nurse, a skeptical doctor went up and found it.

2 of 5

Texas, 1943

George Ritchie

In 1943, George Ritchie, a 20-year-old soldier, was pronounced dead in an army hospital in Texas. He said he flew to a city by a river and saw a cafe that he recognized months later in Vicksburg.

1.5 of 5

California, United States, 1987

John Davis

He says that in 1987 his heart stopped for seven minutes. He says a guide showed him the afterlife, with a library of soulmates and a planetarium with millions of worlds. At the end he heard: “There is no death.”

Does not apply

See all NDEs

Reincarnation: The top 5 people who remember past lives

We asked them the same five questions as this story. A 32-page PDF, free in your inbox.