When the near-death experience is terrifying instead of beautiful
Most of this book has been about the brighter side of the near-death experience. Most NDEs and most deathbed experiences are, thankfully, reports of light and love, angelic escorts, reunions with the departed, and — remarkably often — a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. If you have read the earlier chapters of this book, you already know that the evidence points toward taking the majority of these reports seriously as genuine spiritual experiences.
But there is another side to the near-death experience literature. Not every NDE is pleasant. A real and significant minority of experiencers do not come back talking about warm light and deep peace. They come back, often shaken for years afterward, describing darkness, falling, pursuing beings, mocking voices, hellish landscapes, and terror that they say was more real than anything they had ever felt while alive. Researchers call these accounts "distressing near-death experiences," or DNDEs for short.
These accounts unsettle everyone who studies them. They unsettle the secular researcher, who would rather not talk about hell. They unsettle the Christian reader, who sometimes wants every NDE to line up neatly with Sunday school categories — if it is negative, it must be a trip to hell, end of discussion; if it is positive, it must be heaven. And they unsettle the experiencer, who often buries the memory and refuses to speak of it for years.
This chapter is about sorting out those distressing experiences. The thesis is simple but important: distressing NDEs are not all the same kind of thing. They include at least five different kinds of experience, and the Christian task is not to react to all of them in the same way but to discern which is which. Some are genuine encounters with the biblical Hades — the real but temporary waiting place of the unsaved dead. Some are genuine demonic encounters. Some are the experiencer's own fear filtering an otherwise neutral or even positive encounter. Some are disciplinary experiences for believers. And some — probably rare — are fully demonic counterfeits designed to deceive and terrorize.
Learning to tell these apart is not an academic exercise. It matters for how we care for the person who has had such an experience. It matters for how we evaluate the books and testimonies that describe them. And it matters for our confidence in the larger biblical picture of the afterlife. Let's walk through it together.
For decades, the popular impression of the NDE — shaped largely by Raymond Moody's 1975 bestseller Life After Life — was that near-death experiences are overwhelmingly positive. Tunnels, light, peace, love, family reunions. Moody's early cases did include some negative content, but the emphasis of his presentation, and of the NDE literature that followed him, fell heavily on the bright side. For many readers, NDE came to mean "beautiful heavenly trip."
That impression was incomplete. Careful research over the last forty years has shown that distressing NDEs are real, are consistent, and are more common than the early literature suggested. J. Steve Miller surveys the research this way: across twelve studies involving 1,369 experiencers, 315 people — about 23 percent — reported NDEs ranging from disturbing to terrifying or despairing.1 Other studies, of course, showed lower numbers; nine studies with 459 experiencers reported no distressing NDEs at all.2 The wide gap itself tells us something important: how many distressing NDEs a researcher finds depends heavily on how the researcher looks.
Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings pushed this point hard. Based on his work with cardiac-arrest patients, Rawlings estimated that about half of the NDEs his patients reported were distressing — if he interviewed them immediately after resuscitation.3 Miller explains what seems to be going on. Patients who had just come back from a horrifying experience would describe it in vivid detail. A few days later, interviewed again, many of them could not remember any of it. Rawlings concluded that the experience was so painful that they had suppressed it. If he is right, and many researchers think there is something to it, then the real rate of distressing NDEs is higher than the 23 percent figure suggests because many experiencers never report the distressing content at all.4
Nancy Evans Bush, one of the most important researchers on distressing NDEs, draws a related conclusion from a different angle. Bush had her own distressing NDE and refused to tell anyone about it for decades.5 She understands personally why experiencers stay silent. Put yourself in their place, she urges. You have just had the most horrifying experience of your life. You might conclude that the afterlife is a horrible place, that the experience is an indictment on your character, that you are in danger of hellfire, or that you are losing your mind. You would desperately want to forget it.6 Until experiencers have time to process the event, until they trust the person asking, and until the researcher asks the right questions, they will not report it.
Deathbed experiences show a similar pattern. Researchers who interviewed 1,400 hospice patients daily in a New York hospice unit found that while over 80 percent reported deathbed visions, about 18 percent of those visions were distressing — again, about one in five.7 This roughly matches the NDE rate.
The bottom line: a reasonable working estimate is that somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of NDEs — perhaps more — contain distressing elements, in part or in whole. This is not an anomaly we can explain away. This is a regular feature of the data. Any honest Christian engagement with NDEs has to reckon with it.
Across the published NDE research, distressing NDEs appear to account for roughly 15–25 percent of all reported experiences, with some studies (notably Rawlings's interviews immediately after resuscitation) suggesting that the real rate is even higher because experiencers tend to suppress or refuse to report the painful content.
A distressing NDE — or DNDE — is an NDE marked by fear, terror, darkness, torment, menacing presences, or other distressing content, in part or in whole.8 Like pleasant NDEs, DNDEs vary. They do not all look alike. But research has identified three broad patterns that recur often enough to be useful as a first map of the territory.
The classic study is the 1992 Psychiatry paper by Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, who collected 50 cases of distressing NDEs over a ten-year period. Michael Sabom summarizes their findings in Light and Death. Three patterns emerged.9
The first pattern is what Bush later called the "inverse NDE." The experience has all the classic features of a positive NDE — separation from the body, movement through a tunnel, encounter with light, meeting with other beings — but the experience is terrifying rather than comforting. Everything is in place phenomenologically; it is just painted in dread instead of peace. Greyson and Bush suggested "loss of ego control" as the reason some people respond to these features with fear rather than love.
The second pattern is what the researchers labeled "eternal nothingness." The experiencer is thrust into what feels like absolute emptiness — no body, no light, no beings, no meaning, no time. In some reports the experiencer is mocked by unseen voices that tell them their entire life was an illusion, that nothing ever existed, that the whole world was a cosmic joke played on them. The aftermath, Sabom summarizes, leaves "a pervasive sense of emptiness and fatalistic despair."10 Bush's own NDE fit this pattern. Mocking beings told her, with crushing certainty, "You are not real. You never were real. You never existed."11
The third pattern is the "hellish" NDE proper — archetypal imagery of fire, darkness, pits, torment, and sometimes demonic beings. These are the accounts closest to what popular Christian literature means when it talks about a "trip to hell."
Margot Grey, an early researcher on distressing NDEs, described the common features this way: extreme fear or panic, emotional and mental anguish, a great sense of desolation, the brink of a pit or the edge of an abyss, a definite sense of being dragged downward by an evil force, visions of wrathful or demonic creatures, intense cold or unbearable heat, wailing sounds as of souls in torment, and fearsome noise.12 Any given DNDE might include several of these, not necessarily all.
Three brief examples from the research literature show what this looks like in the voice of the experiencer:
"It's a dusky, dark, dreary area, and you realize that the area is filled with a lot of lost souls… The feeling I got was that they were all looking downward, and they were kind of shuffling, and there was a kind of moaning. There were hundreds of them, looking very dejected."13
"I felt my body slipping down… it was cold, dark, and watery. When I reached the bottom, it resembled the entrance to a cave, with what looked like webs hanging. The inside of the cave was gray and brown in color. I heard cries, wails, moans, and the gnashing of teeth."14
"I was led [by Jesus] from a side of bliss to a side of misery. I did not want to look, but he made me look, and I was disgusted and horrified and scared. It was so ugly. The people were blackened and sweaty and moaning in pain and chained to their spots."15
Notice the last example. The experiencer is not alone. Jesus is the tour guide. The experience is distressing in content but not satanic in source — in fact the experiencer reports being shown the misery of the lost by Christ himself. This is already a clue that we cannot read "distressing" as identical with "demonic." One of the main tasks of this chapter is to untangle these overlapping categories.
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Phenomenology — what the experience looks like from the inside — is only the first step. The deeper question for the Christian is theological: what is actually happening when a person has a distressing NDE? What is the experiencer encountering? Whose fingerprints are on the experience?
I want to propose five categories. They are not airtight, and a given DNDE may mix two or more of them. But if we can hold the categories in mind, we can stop treating all distressing NDEs as the same thing. Let's take them in turn.
Scripture teaches that the intermediate state of the unsaved dead — Hades (Greek ᾅδης, hadēs; the Septuagint term that translates Hebrew שְׁאוֹל, sheol) — is a real place. It is not the same as Gehenna, the lake of fire, which is the final state after the last judgment. Hades is, rather, a conscious waiting place — a vestibule of sorts for those who die without Christ, prior to the resurrection and the final judgment. At the final judgment, according to Revelation 20:13–14, Hades itself is thrown into the lake of fire, which implies that Hades is a distinct category from the lake of fire and not identical to it.16
John Cooper's careful study of biblical anthropology traces this distinction in detail. In Greek translations of the Old Testament, Sheol became Hades, and Jewish and Christian writers continued to distinguish Sheol/Hades (the realm of the dead, containing divisions for both blessed and unblessed) from Gehenna (the place of final punishment).17 Cooper notes that "great confusion has been caused by the King James translation of both Hades and Gehenna as 'hell.'"18 When modern Christians hear the word "hell," they usually picture Gehenna — the lake of fire, the final state of the damned. But the New Testament uses Hades most often to refer to the current realm of the dead, which is both temporary and divided.
The clearest biblical picture of Hades is Luke 16:19–31, the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man dies and finds himself in Hades "in torment" (Luke 16:23, ESV). He is conscious. He recognizes Abraham. He can see Lazarus at Abraham's side. He can speak, feel thirst, and plead for relief. He retains moral awareness: he does not want his brothers to come to the same place. This is the biblical description of a person in Hades prior to the final judgment.
"The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side." (Luke 16:22–23, ESV)
Cooper notes that Luke 16 depicts "the intermediate state as visualized by the Pharisees and ordinary Jewish people in Jesus' audience," and that within Luke's own writing, Hades refers to an "interim condition" rather than the final state of punishment.19 The picture is of a conscious, real waiting place where the unsaved dead experience distress but are not yet in their final condition. They are, in effect, in the vestibule.
Now consider what this implies for NDE interpretation. If a living person has a brief, near-death encounter with the conscious realm of the unsaved dead, what would they report? They would report something that looks like the contents of Luke 16 from the wrong side of the chasm. Darkness. Distress. A sense of being among the lost. Awareness that something is wrong and that the rescue lies somewhere above or beyond where they are. This description fits a significant subset of distressing NDEs very well.
This matters for how we label these encounters. When a popular testimony reports a "trip to hell," the experiencer is usually describing what Scripture would call Hades — the conscious intermediate waiting place. Because the final judgment has not yet occurred, no living person who has a near-death experience is literally in the lake of fire in the eschatological sense of Revelation 20. The most a near-death experiencer can encounter is Hades.20 This is not a small distinction. Collapsing Hades into Gehenna confuses the biblical geography of the afterlife and can mislead readers about what an NDE actually tells us.
The English word "hell" in most older translations covers two distinct biblical categories: Hades (the conscious intermediate state of the unsaved dead) and Gehenna (the lake of fire, the final state after the last judgment). Revelation 20:14 is explicit: "Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire." Hades and the lake of fire are not the same place. When evaluating a distressing NDE that describes "hell," ask: does the description fit an interim waiting place, or a final state? Almost always, it fits the former, because the final judgment is still future.
Scripture teaches that demonic beings are real and sometimes attack humans. Satan is described as "a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8). Paul warns that "we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12). The biblical worldview takes for granted that there are fallen angels who hate God and hate humanity, and that they sometimes interact with us.21
If so, then some distressing NDEs could be genuine encounters with these beings. The experiencer crosses out of the body, moves into a spiritual realm where such beings operate, and meets them. The fingerprint of a demonic encounter in NDE literature is fairly consistent: mockery, accusation, fear-inducement, lies, and a pointed attempt to instill despair. Bush's own NDE — with taunting voices saying "You are not real. You never were real" — has the markers of this type.22
Miller points out that in the distressing NDE literature, God is almost never the distressing presence. He writes: "I've never found a distressing NDE to consist of a person coming before a mean, fearful God who is trying to scare them." The distressing content is typically delivered by something else — "lies, taunts, and attacks of evil beings" or the distress of the circumstances themselves — and often in a place where God seems absent.23 The distress looks demonic more often than divine.
George Ritchie, the University of Virginia psychiatrist whose NDE helped launch Raymond Moody's career, is a central witness here. Ritchie reported seeing both suffering human spirits and demons on the other side. In one scene, he describes watching people get drunk in a bar; when they passed out, evil entities would enter them. In other words, Ritchie's report situates demons not only in some remote afterlife region but active on earth, preying on people in moments of spiritual vulnerability.24
Psychiatrist Richard Gallagher, who has spent decades investigating possession cases for Catholic dioceses, concludes from his clinical work that demons exhibit consistent behaviors: they sow confusion, tell lies about their own nature, and delight in frightening and hurting human beings. Gallagher writes that "evil spirits habitually lie about their true nature. One of the major aims of demons is to confuse human beings, and throughout history they have repeatedly feigned being dead souls or angels, or, perhaps, the deities of pagan religions."25 Miller observes the parallel: the content of some distressing NDEs looks exactly like what clinical investigation of demonic activity tends to produce — lies, fear, confusion, a frantic effort to sow despair.26
Shaun Tabatt, from a Christian discernment angle, likewise argues that some distressing NDEs contain demonic elements — and that their purpose is the same as every other demonic activity in biblical literature: to deceive and to pull the experiencer and the hearers of the testimony away from Christ.27
The important qualification is that not every menacing figure in a distressing NDE is automatically a demon. The distress could be rooted in the experiencer's own fear — which brings us to Type 3.
A third possibility is that the experience itself is neutral or even good at the spiritual level, but the experiencer's own fear and spiritual unreadiness distort the encounter. Picture an atheist, a committed unbeliever, or a person in deep moral compromise who suddenly finds themselves out of the body and confronted with the holiness of the living God. That confrontation, in itself, is not evil — but the unprepared soul may experience it as terror rather than as love. Hebrews 12:29 says, "our God is a consuming fire." Isaiah fell on his face and cried "Woe is me!" when he glimpsed the Lord's holiness. A soul that had been running from God all its life, coming suddenly into the light, could very well experience that confrontation as something like judgment — even if the ultimate purpose of the encounter was rescue.
The clearest modern example is the NDE of Howard Storm, the atheist art professor whose account has become widely known in the NDE literature. Before his NDE, Storm was a staunch atheist, uninterested in religion, self-absorbed, and hostile to the supernatural.28 His NDE began with a dramatic descent into darkness; he was surrounded by menacing beings who mocked, taunted, and injured him. In his retelling, the darkness was only broken when, at his lowest point, he remembered a Sunday school song from his childhood and cried out to Jesus. Jesus came, rescued him, lifted him out of the darkness, and carried him into a life-review encounter with love and light. Storm's experience moved, over the course of a single NDE, from apparent hell to apparent heaven.29
How should we classify the first part of Storm's NDE? Was it a demonic encounter? A Hades encounter? Something else?
A plausible reading is this: Storm, as a lifelong unbeliever, found himself at the threshold of the unseen world without the spiritual covering of faith in Christ. In that condition, beings that are always present — and are usually kept at a distance by God's grace — became perceptible and pressing. His fear was real because the danger was real. But Jesus answered his cry for help and rescued him. The experience was, in retrospect, disciplinary and redemptive, not damning. Storm did not visit his final destination. He had a warning — a terrifying one — that drove him straight into the arms of Christ.
The same might be true of many other experiencers. Bush and Rommer both note that the most common response to a distressing NDE is what Bush calls the "conversion response." Experiencers "connect it with previous behaviors they identify as unwise or downright wrong" and then "find avenues by which to modify their lives in satisfying ways."30 Atheists convert. Religious drifters recommit. Wayward believers return home. Social worker Kimberly Clark Sharp's observation is striking: "All the people I know who have had negative experiences have become Bible-based Christians."31 Bush notes that post-DNDE, experiencers commonly move "toward a religious community, often a conservative one."32 If the fruit is repentance, faith, and a turning toward Christ, the experience — however painful — served a providential purpose.
Howard Storm's NDE began as a descent into darkness and ended as a life-review encounter with Jesus. Had he come back remembering only the darkness, we might have labeled it a simple hellish NDE. Had he come back remembering only the light, we might have classed it with the pleasant encounters. But Storm's whole experience — darkness then rescue — was the actual encounter. The distressing part was not God's last word; it was the alarm that opened his ears to the Lord's last word. His post-NDE life (atheist professor converted, later ordained as a pastor) is the fruit that confirms the experience was genuinely disciplinary and redemptive, not damning.
The Bible teaches that God disciplines those He loves. Hebrews 12:5–11 quotes Proverbs 3:11–12:
"My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives." (Hebrews 12:5b–6, ESV)
Discipline is not damnation. It is, in the biblical picture, an expression of the Father's love for His children. A fourth category of distressing NDE may be a genuinely disciplinary encounter given to a believer — perhaps a drifting believer, perhaps one who has grown hard or complacent — to wake them up, confront sin, and call them back to Christ.
This category is controversial because many Christians are tempted to assume that a distressing NDE must mean the experiencer was unsaved. But that inference goes beyond the biblical data. In Scripture, God deals firmly with His own children as well as with outsiders. The apostle Paul speaks of Christians who, through spiritual discipline, are "delivered to Satan… that their spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus" (1 Corinthians 5:5, ESV). The biblical category of covenant discipline includes severe measures for covenant members.
Barbara Rommer, in her study of three hundred distressing NDEs, identified one category in which "the person often feels he is judged by a higher power that causes an overwhelming feeling of guilt." One of her interviewees reported, "God judged me in that life review. He humbled me to my knees," and added, "It was designed to wake me up."33 Miller, summarizing Rommer, writes that "according to Rommer, we get the experience we need. Some people get the point with a gentle life review. Others need something more forceful."34 This is exactly the logic of Hebrews 12. God meets each of His children with what is appropriate for that child's condition.
Miller notes that in the Christian tradition this is not strange at all. "The great 16th century reformer Martin Luther," Miller reminds us, "spoke of Satan trying to deceive Him by reminding Him of his sins." And Luther believed, with the desert fathers and the medieval contemplatives, that the devil attacks more intensely as one advances in faith.35 If Luther, Paul, Anthony of Egypt, and Teresa of Ávila all experienced spiritual attack, a believer having a disciplinary or warfare-type NDE is not in unusual company. The New Testament even describes Jesus as experiencing spiritual confrontation (Matthew 4:1–11). Distress is not a reliable indicator of reprobation.
Finally, a smaller category: some distressing NDEs may be fully demonic from start to finish. The whole experience is a counterfeit, constructed by deceiving spirits to traumatize the experiencer, to instill lies about God, or to produce a testimony that will lead other hearers into error.
This category is real. Scripture warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14, discussed fully in chapter 7 of this book), that deceiving spirits sow doctrines of demons (1 Timothy 4:1), and that false prophets, even false signs and wonders, sometimes mimic the work of God. If Satan can counterfeit a heavenly encounter, he can certainly counterfeit a hellish one — especially if the result will be to produce a false theology, to drive the experiencer to despair, or to discredit the whole category of spiritual experience in the minds of hearers.
But this category is almost certainly rarer than many Christian commentators suggest. Most distressing NDEs are not fully demonic. The fact that a DNDE ended in repentance, or began with the experiencer's own spiritual peril and ended with rescue by Christ, or described a real spiritual geography consistent with biblical teaching — all of these weigh against a purely demonic interpretation. A counterfeit from start to finish is something we should expect to see occasionally, not usually.
We can mark Type 5 as real without making it our default assumption. The biblical command to "test the spirits" (1 John 4:1, the focus of chapter 4 of this book) cuts both ways: we test because both genuine and counterfeit are possible, and either reflex — crediting everything or dismissing everything — skips the testing.
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Having laid out the typology, the obvious question is: in a real case, how do we tell the difference? The five types overlap. A single DNDE could contain elements of several. Still, there are markers that help us sort. None of them is foolproof on its own, but together they form a useful diagnostic pattern.
One of the most useful markers is whether the distressing encounter was resolved by Jesus or by some other rescuing figure. Howard Storm's NDE began in darkness and ended in the light of Christ. In that pattern, the darkness is not the point of the story; the rescue is. Type 3 (experiencer-generated fear filtering a real encounter) and Type 4 (disciplinary encounter for a believer) are both often resolved by rescue. The whole shape of the experience is redemptive, even though its opening chapters are terrifying.
Type 1 (Hades encounter) may also involve a rescue, in the sense that the experiencer is pulled back into life before the final state arrives. Something like this may have happened to the Baptist Sunday school teacher in Maurice Rawlings's cases — a cardiac arrest patient who reported going to what he called hell, then, after prayer, had subsequent NDEs that were heavenly.36 (We will return to Rawlings's work and its credibility below.)
A DNDE that ends in rescue is usually in Types 1, 3, or 4. A DNDE that ends in despair, lies, or a continuing sense of torment with no relief is more likely to contain Type 2 (demonic encounter) or Type 5 (fully demonic counterfeit) elements.
Jesus said, "You will recognize them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16, ESV). This is a rule of discernment that applies broadly, including to spiritual experiences. What did the experiencer become in the years after the DNDE? Miller, Tabatt, and Bush agree on the data: the most common outcome of a distressing NDE, by a wide margin, is a turn toward repentance, faith, and Christian commitment. Sharp's comment — "All the people I know who have had negative experiences have become Bible-based Christians" — is extreme but not wildly off.37
When the fruit of a DNDE is a softened heart, a drawing nearer to Christ, an abandonment of unbelief or immorality, and a growing love for the things of God, that fruit strongly suggests the experience — whatever its phenomenology — served a redemptive purpose. God used it. If God used it, it is most likely a Type 1, 3, or 4 encounter, and the Christian response is gratitude.
By contrast, if the fruit is despair, ongoing torment with no relief, a hardened heart, or a new embrace of false theology (for example, "I learned on the other side that there is no hope for me" or "I learned that God has rejected me forever"), we have reason to suspect Type 2 or Type 5 elements. The demonic habit, Gallagher observes, is to sow lies that create confusion and fear — especially lies that attack the sufficiency of God's love and the availability of Christ's mercy.38
Among the best discernment tools is the theological content of what the experiencer was told. Recall from the Greyson and Bush Type 2 pattern: distressing NDEs sometimes include mocking voices that teach things. "Your life was never real." "The world never existed." "It was all a joke." These are theological claims, and they contradict what the Bible teaches: that human beings and the created world are real, that our lives matter to God, that love is real, that Christ's work is sufficient. If a distressing NDE included explicit teaching contradicting Scripture, that element of the experience was likely Type 5 — or at minimum contained Type 2 elements that cannot be trusted.
Miller frames this well: even if the experience itself was a real encounter with the other side, "you don't have to believe what malevolent beings might have told you."39 The reality of the encounter does not validate the content spoken within it. Demons lie. If demons were present in an NDE, what they said is probably a lie. The distinction between the reality of the encounter and the truthfulness of what was spoken inside the encounter is crucial — it is a specific application of the experience/interpretation distinction treated fully in chapter 9 of this book.
A closely related marker is the net effect on the experiencer's relationship with Christ. Did the experience drive them to Jesus, or away from Jesus? Genuine encounters with the living God — even painful, disciplinary ones — tend to produce a deeper hunger for Christ. They make the experiencer want Jesus, want Scripture, want prayer, want forgiveness, want holiness. Demonic encounters tend to produce the opposite: despair about God, hatred of God, a sense that God is cruel or unreachable, a gravitation toward occult or New Age alternatives that promise power or peace without submission to Christ.
It is not just about what the experiencer felt during the encounter. It is about the shape of their spiritual life afterward. A DNDE that ends, years later, with someone who prays regularly, reads the Bible, attends a faithful church, and longs for holiness is almost certainly a genuine encounter, whatever else was in it. A DNDE that ends, years later, with someone who curses God, dabbles in mediums, or drifts into relativism is more suspect.
(1) Was there a rescue or resolution within the experience? (2) What is the long-term fruit in the experiencer's life? (3) Did the experience teach content that contradicts Scripture? (4) Did the experience drive the person toward Christ or away from Christ? No single marker is decisive, but taken together they give a reasonably clear picture of whether a DNDE is primarily Type 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.
Before going further, let's pause to name four common errors that Christians make when they discuss distressing NDEs. These errors tend to live in different corners of the church, but they all short-circuit discernment.
This is the wholesale skepticism error. It treats every distressing NDE as a trick of the devil — a satanic illusion with no genuine content. On this view, there is no such thing as a real encounter with Hades; every dark experience is either a bad dream, a drug reaction, or a demonic counterfeit.
The problem with this view is that it flattens the biblical data. Hades is real according to Scripture. Luke 16 describes a conscious, distressing intermediate state for the unsaved dead. If that realm is real, then we should not be astonished that some people, in the brief window of a near-death crisis, catch a glimpse of it. Moreover, as Miller and Bush both show, the most common outcome of distressing NDEs is repentance and conversion — not the fruit we would expect from a purely demonic deception.40 The wholesale skeptic has to explain why the devil's alleged deceptions keep producing new Christians.
This is the judgmental error. It assumes that a distressing NDE is simply God's way of showing a person their future final destination. On this view, if you had a dark NDE, you are reprobate; if you had a light NDE, you are saved.
The biblical data will not sustain this view either. Believers can experience spiritual distress in this life; Paul and Peter both described it. Luther, Anthony of Egypt, Teresa of Ávila, and many other Christians have described something like spiritual attack. Disciplinary distress (Hebrews 12) is given to the people God loves, not to the reprobate. The view that distressing equals unsaved is also disproved empirically: Howard Storm's NDE began as a descent into darkness and ended as a conversion to Christ. If the darkness had been God's verdict on Storm's final state, Jesus would not have come to rescue him. Distressing NDEs cannot be treated as verdicts of damnation.
Miller adds a practical point: NDEs happen at halftime, not the end of the game. They occur before final death and before final judgment. What happens in an NDE is therefore a warning, a window, or a discipline — never a sentence.41 The person still has time to repent, still has time to trust Christ. A distressing NDE is evidence about the state of the afterlife and about the experiencer's current spiritual condition — not about their eternal verdict.
This is the inverted error, found in certain revivalist corners of the church. It assumes that if God is working, it will look fearsome; a pleasant NDE, on this view, is suspicious precisely because it is pleasant. Only terror proves the presence of the holy.
This view misreads Scripture. God does work through confrontation (think of Saul on the Damascus road, Acts 9:3–6), but He also works through comfort. The angel's first word to the shepherds at Christ's birth was "Do not be afraid" (Luke 2:10). Jesus invited the weary to come to him for rest (Matthew 11:28). Paul describes God as "the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction" (2 Corinthians 1:3b–4a). The assumption that only the terrifying is genuinely divine is neither biblical nor wise. It also contradicts the overwhelming testimony of DBEs, in which the dying typically report profound peace and the presence of Christ — precisely the comfort God promises His people at the end (Psalm 23:4).
This is the naturalist error — the assumption that distressing NDEs are simply hallucinations caused by brain chemistry under stress. On this view, no spiritual content should be read into the experience; it is just neural static in the moments before clinical death.
The problem with this view is that it has to explain away too much. As chapters 5 and 11 of this book establish at length, the evidence for the veridicality of many NDEs — the documented cases where experiencers accurately reported events they could not have known by natural means — is strong. The dying-brain hypothesis has difficulty explaining why distressing NDEs show cross-cultural consistency in their imagery, why they are often reported by people who had no religious expectation of hell, and why so many of them produce the same downstream effect (sober reflection, life change, in many cases conversion).42 If distressing NDEs were simply random brain noise, we would expect them to be as varied and unpatterned as nightmares. They are not. They show the same patterns, across cultures and time periods, that we might expect if they were real encounters with a real spiritual reality.
The naturalist error, like the others, reduces a complex spiritual phenomenon to a single category when the evidence demands several. The Christian approach is to refuse every reductionism, hold multiple possibilities open, and use biblical and spiritual markers to sort them.
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Any serious discussion of distressing NDEs has to deal with Maurice Rawlings. Rawlings was a cardiologist who, in the 1970s, claimed to have stumbled upon distressing NDEs in the course of resuscitating cardiac-arrest patients. His 1978 book Beyond Death's Door and his later To Hell and Back argued that (1) a larger fraction of NDE patients report hellish content than researchers typically report, and (2) this discrepancy exists because patients suppress or forget the distressing experience unless interviewed immediately after resuscitation.43
Rawlings made a real contribution. Before his work, many NDE researchers had either not encountered distressing cases at all or had marginalized the few they did find. Rawlings was the first to insist that distressing NDEs are more common than the pleasant-only picture suggested. Miller acknowledges this directly: Rawlings alerted the research world to distressing NDEs, and the broader observation — that they are underreported — has been supported by subsequent work.44
But Rawlings's specific claims have attracted pointed criticism. Michael Sabom, also a cardiologist and a more methodologically careful researcher, engaged Rawlings's work in Light and Death and found real problems. Sabom notes that most of Rawlings's own "hellish" cases were actually gathered from persons at a time distant from their resuscitation — which contradicts Rawlings's thesis that immediate interview is the only way to recover negative NDEs.45 If Rawlings's own cases were collected days or weeks later and still produced distressing content, then his suppression-by-delay model cannot be exactly right.
More troubling, Sabom documents that between Beyond Death's Door (1978) and To Hell and Back (1993), Rawlings appeared to have changed key details of the same case study to make the theological message fit better. The most famous example is the Baptist Sunday school teacher who experienced a hellish NDE. In the 1978 version, the man was a "staunch Christian" and "lifelong supporter of the church"; Rawlings himself found it "difficult to explain" how such a Christian had experienced a hellish NDE. In the 1993 version of the same story, the man was now said to be "one who knew he was not the Christian he should have been."46 Sabom observes that this alteration "solved Maurice's original 'problem' of how a supposed professing Christian could have had a hellish NDE — the man's Christian commitment had not been for real."47
When Sabom confronted Rawlings about the inaccuracies, Rawlings conceded them but explained that he had been "more interested in a correct Christian message than an accurate research report." Looking back, Rawlings said, "it would have been better to have just rubber-stamped the experiences from one book to the next and avoided the appearance of fish stories."48 That is a candid admission. Rawlings was sincere, but he edited his case material to fit his theological framework. That is not how careful research is done, and it damages the evidential value of his books.
The broader lesson is important: Christians should not accept Rawlings's specific cases uncritically, but we should take his core observation seriously. Distressing NDEs are underreported. Patients often suppress the memory. Immediate interviews tend to catch more distressing content. All of this is basically correct, even if Rawlings's individual case studies require careful handling.
Maurice Rawlings deserves credit for raising Christian awareness of distressing NDEs. But Michael Sabom's careful analysis shows that Rawlings revised specific case details between books in ways that served his theological agenda. Read Rawlings for the general insight that distressing NDEs are underreported. Do not rely on his specific cases as rigorously documented research without cross-checking. Sabom's Light and Death is a better model of cardiologist-as-Christian-researcher.
Sabom's own Atlanta Study is instructive by contrast. Sabom set out looking for distressing NDEs, interviewed 71 consecutive near-death experiencers, and found none in the first study. In the Atlanta Study, he found only two clear cases of hellish content. Both fit Greyson and Bush's third pattern (hellish imagery with demonic beings). One, named "Jake," was a Vietnam veteran who had attempted suicide by overdose; his NDE featured a scorched valley, demonic beings "like in a Bosch painting," and God's voice telling him "You could have had anything you wanted — you threw it away."49 The second, "Beau," was a grocery store owner whose experience began in a hot, uncomfortable place he called hell, where he met a deceased brother-in-law, but guardian angels (whom he seemed to know) told him a mistake had been made and he was "going to move up." He was then taken upward to meet his deceased relatives and was eventually sent back.50
Sabom's cases show two features worth noting. First, distressing NDEs are genuinely harder to find than the more common pleasant ones — George Gallup's nationwide survey found only about one percent reporting "a sense of hell or torment," and Greyson and Bush collected only 50 cases over a decade.51 Second, both Sabom's distressing cases fit the third (classically hellish) pattern, and both are bound up with specific life circumstances — suicide attempt in Jake's case, a lifetime of moral indifference in Beau's — that make sense of the distressing content without requiring us to say the experience was fake or demonically manufactured.
Sabom also notes the well-documented association between suicide attempts and hellish NDEs. Rawlings had observed it, and Greyson and Bush's classic paper found that two of the three third-pattern cases occurred during suicide attempts.52 This has obvious pastoral importance, which we will return to below.
Any chapter on distressing NDEs has to say something about Bill Wiese's 23 Minutes in Hell, because it is among the most widely read popular books in the genre. Wiese, a California real estate broker with no prior interest in hell or in afterlife topics, reported a dramatic experience in 1998 in which he claims to have been taken by God to hell for twenty-three minutes and shown the torments of the damned. The account is vivid: intense fire and heat, unbearable thirst, demonic beings, crushing darkness, a bottomless pit, the screams of tormented souls, and a pervasive sense of total separation from God. The book has sold widely and has motivated many readers to take the possibility of eternal judgment seriously.
How should we evaluate Wiese's testimony using the framework of this chapter? Several observations:
First, Wiese does not present his experience as a standard clinical-death NDE. He describes it as a vision or visitation — a time when the Lord, for reasons of his own, took Wiese in the spirit to see hell. This is a different category than a cardiac-arrest NDE, and the discernment standards are somewhat different. (Tabatt calls this broader category of Holy-Spirit-led trips to heaven or hell a "Spiritual Transformative Experience" or STE, and urges appropriate caution about them.53)
Second, the broad content of Wiese's account is consistent with biblical descriptions of conscious suffering in Hades. Fire, thirst, darkness, the presence of menacing beings, the overwhelming sense of being cut off from God — all of these are within the range of what Scripture suggests about the intermediate state of the unsaved dead. In that sense, Wiese's account does not flatly contradict the biblical picture.
Third, the terminology is where the account risks confusion. Wiese consistently calls the place he experienced "hell." In popular English usage, "hell" most often means the lake of fire, the final state of the damned after the last judgment. But as we have seen, the final judgment has not yet occurred; no living person who returns from a near-death or visionary experience has actually seen the lake of fire in its final-judgment sense. The most such a person can see is Hades — the conscious waiting place. Wiese's description fits Hades better than it fits Gehenna. Using the single English word "hell" for both conflates two biblical categories.
Fourth, the fruit of Wiese's experience has been urgent evangelism. Since his experience, Wiese has dedicated himself to warning others about the reality of eternal judgment and calling people to faith in Christ. That fruit is, as far as public evidence goes, consistent with the experience having served a real spiritual purpose — whatever we decide about specific details.
A charitable assessment would treat Wiese's experience as most plausibly Type 1 (an encounter with the biblical Hades) with the label-confusion caution noted above. Some specific elements warrant further evaluation (specific theological claims he makes about hell's structure, the duration issue, certain descriptive details that go beyond biblical teaching), and readers should weigh those elements against Scripture rather than accept them automatically. But the broad shape of the account is not incompatible with biblical teaching, and the fruit of the experience argues against a demonic-counterfeit reading.
The discernment posture for this kind of testimony is a charitable reading with questions. Affirm what aligns with Scripture. Note where terminology is imprecise. Hold specific details loosely. Do not build doctrine on one person's visionary testimony when Scripture is the final authority (a point established fully in chapter 8).
Popular Christian testimonies of trips to hell (Wiese, Ivan Tuttle, Mary Baxter, and others) vary widely in quality and reliability. The general phenomenon — distressing visionary experiences that move people toward Christ — is biblically plausible. But each account should be weighed carefully: does it match biblical categories, does it conflate Hades and Gehenna, does it teach doctrines not found in Scripture, and does it drive readers toward or away from Christ? Readers should never let such accounts override Scripture itself, and should be especially wary of detailed cosmological claims (specific levels, specific demons by name, specific durations) that go beyond the biblical text.
· · ·
It is worth spending a moment with Nancy Evans Bush's own distressing NDE and her interpretation of it, because she is the single most important researcher in this area and because her theological conclusions show how carefully Christians must navigate.
Bush's experience fit the "eternal nothingness" pattern. Mocking beings taunted her with the claim that her life had never been real — that existence itself was a joke.54 She refused to speak of the experience for decades, during which she worked tirelessly to gather other distressing NDEs and give voice to experiencers who felt silenced.
But Bush's theological conclusions move in a direction this book cannot follow. She has argued, drawing on Jungian psychology, that distressing NDEs might be real visionary experiences whose source is the experiencer's own psyche rather than any actual encounter with hell or demons. She suggests that the imagery erupts from deep mythic layers of the self and that "comprehension of these visions can turn the visionary experience into a step in growth."55 On her view, hell is not a real place and the demons are not real entities; they are archetypes, and the experience is a psychological encounter with the dark side of the self.
Miller responds to Bush carefully, and his response is worth repeating. He acknowledges that Bush has thought the material through more deeply than almost anyone else and that her Jungian reading is not silly. But he notes that it does not match the prima facie interpretation of the experiencers themselves, who overwhelmingly tend to experience the content "as being in a real place."56 The Jungian move is a sophisticated demythologization; it imposes a framework on the data that the data itself does not ask for.
Bush's case illustrates a recurring pattern in NDE research (treated fully in chapter 22): a researcher whose empirical observations are careful and whose theological conclusions run against the grain of the experiencers' own reports. Christians can draw on Bush's research — the patterns, the rates, the typology — while respectfully disagreeing with her theological interpretation. Her data is genuinely useful. Her framework is not binding on Christian readers.
A word is needed on how distressing NDEs relate to the doctrine of hell. Miller approaches this question carefully and his framing is worth absorbing. The Bible, he notes, gives diverse descriptions of postmortem punishment. Matthew 8:12 speaks of "outer darkness." Matthew 3:12 describes "unquenchable fire." Matthew 13:42 depicts a "furnace of fire." Second Thessalonians 1:9 speaks of being "apart from the presence of the Lord." Revelation 9:1 mentions a "bottomless pit." Revelation 19:20 describes a "lake of fire." Revelation 22:15 places the wicked "outside" the gates of the New Jerusalem.57
Miller raises a simple exegetical question: are the wicked in fire (which generates light), or in outer darkness (no visible fire), or in a lake (burning water), or a pit (hard to picture as a lake at the same time), or simply outside of a city? These descriptions cannot all be literal at once. Most careful commentators, both conservative and liberal, treat at least some of them as figurative — using diverse images, drawn from apocalyptic literature, to communicate a spiritual reality that exceeds any single earthly metaphor.58
The fact that distressing NDE reports do not uniformly feature a lake of fire is therefore not, by itself, an argument against their authenticity or against the biblical doctrine of hell. The Bible itself does not uniformly describe hell with a single image. Miller's summary is that "the picture of hell I get from the Bible is that it exists and should be avoided at all costs," but that the specific imagery is diverse and probably partly figurative.59
This allows for the possibility — which many Christian thinkers have embraced — that the intermediate state of the unsaved dead is not uniform either. Different souls in Hades may be in different conditions, some closer to the flame and some further, some more afflicted and some less, perhaps corresponding to the Bible's teaching that judgment takes into account the deeds done in the body. Miller follows this reasoning toward what he calls a "vestibule" model, where distressing NDEs may be encounters with different regions or intensities of that intermediate waiting place.60
For this book's purposes, the key point is this: a distressing NDE that reports darkness, thirst, a pit, moaning, cold, or fire is not disproved by the fact that it fails to match every biblical image. It may well match the biblical picture of Hades more faithfully than the popular caricature of hell allows.
Confusion about hell has caused needless suffering for Christians who have had distressing NDEs. If you are one of them, remember: a near-death experience is a halftime glimpse, not a final verdict. The biblical teaching on the intermediate state includes real suffering for the unsaved, but suffering in Hades does not mean the person is finally condemned. The final judgment has not yet occurred. Christ still calls. Repentance is still open. And, for the author's tradition, even the question of what happens at the last judgment is a matter of ongoing pastoral reflection. What is not in doubt is that God's arms are still open, and Christ is the way home.
· · ·
This book is a handbook, not just a study. At some point most of us will meet someone — a family member, a friend, a patient in a hospital room, a new acquaintance at church — who has had a distressing NDE and who does not know what to do with it. How should we walk with them?
The first instinct, especially among Christians skeptical of NDEs, is to dismiss. "That was just a bad dream." "It was the medications." "It didn't mean anything." This is usually wrong and usually harmful. The experiencer knows, with a clarity that is almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn't had such an experience, that what happened was more real than the room they are sitting in now. To tell them otherwise, especially in the early days when they are still trying to process the event, is to slam the door in their face. Dismissal is not faithful to Scripture (which grants reality to the spiritual realm) and not useful to the experiencer (who already knows something real happened).
The second instinct is the opposite: to leap in with explanations, typologies, Bible verses, and the full apparatus of a theology of Hades. This can also harm. An experiencer who is still shaking does not need a lecture. They need presence, patience, and honest listening. The theological framework comes later, when they are ready.
The five-type framework of this chapter is diagnostic, not a label you slap on a person's experience in the first conversation. You do not know, without careful conversation over time, whether you are hearing about a Type 1 (Hades) encounter, a Type 3 (fear-filtered) encounter, or something else. Hold the categories open. Ask good questions. Let the story unfold.
Good questions include: What did you see? What did you hear? Was there a resolution, or did the distress continue the whole time? Was anyone there to help? Did anyone speak to you? What did they say? Did you sense where you were in relation to other beings — above you, below you, around you? Has the experience changed your sense of God? Has it changed how you pray?
These questions are not interrogation. They are invitations. They let the experiencer put words to something they may never have articulated before. Over time, the answers help both of you understand what kind of experience it was.
Remember the fruit test. The long-term effect of the DNDE on the experiencer's life is often the most revealing marker of what the experience was. An experience that drives someone toward Christ is likely redemptive. An experience that drives someone into despair, into occult exploration, or into a hatred of God calls for a different response — probably gentle prayer, possibly church-based deliverance ministry, and certainly ongoing spiritual companionship.
The worst thing you can do is pronounce a verdict. "You went to hell" or "You were just hallucinating" are both presumptive and both damaging. The best thing you can do is offer pastoral care: presence, prayer, Scripture (especially Scripture that grounds the experiencer in God's love in Christ), time, and patience. Walk with them. Let the Holy Spirit do the heavy work of interpretation.
Sabom and Rawlings both note the pattern: suicide attempts often produce distressing NDEs. If you are walking with someone who had a DNDE in the course of a suicide attempt, this carries specific pastoral weight. The distress is often inseparable from the act itself — a confrontation with the gravity of what they almost did. Many experiencers report being told, in some way, that they were not meant to take their own life. Jake, in Sabom's study, heard God's voice saying, "You could have had anything you wanted — you threw it away." The experience, as hard as it was, moved him toward life.61
For a reader who has had such an experience — or who walks with someone who has — the pastoral word is this: the distressing NDE you had after a suicide attempt was almost certainly not God's final word on you. It was, more likely, a severe mercy that pulled you back into life. Christ is still near. His arms are still open. The fact that you are here to remember it is itself evidence that your story is not finished.
Note: if you are reading this and currently struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, this is a serious and sensitive topic. You do not have to carry it alone. A trusted pastor, a counselor, or a mental health professional can walk with you through the weight of what you are experiencing.
Do not dismiss. Do not rush to explain. Do not assume you know the type. Ask gentle, clarifying questions. Watch for the fruit over time. Offer pastoral care, not verdicts. These are the same rules one might apply to any deep spiritual experience, but with distressing NDEs the stakes are higher because the experiencer is often ashamed, afraid, and silenced.
· · ·
We close with a theological reflection that often surfaces when Christians think about DNDEs. If God is good and loving, why would He allow anyone — especially a seeker, or a believer — to have such a terrifying experience?
The biblical answer is that distressing experiences are not incompatible with God's goodness. They are, in a fallen world, often part of how God works. Miller walks carefully through several possible reasons God might permit a distressing NDE.62
First, some distressing NDEs function as wake-up calls for those whose lives are drifting toward destruction. "Often people wasting their lives in selfish and destructive behavior indeed report hellish experiences, which basically scare the hell out of them," Miller observes, and the typical outcome is radical change.63 A distressing NDE may be, in that case, the most gracious thing God could have done for them — a last-minute diversion from the path they were on.
Second, some distressing NDEs appear to function as disciplinary encounters for drifting believers. God's discipline is an expression of His love, and in rare cases it may include something as severe as a spiritual ordeal at the edge of death. The believer's response is not to protest but to receive the discipline and bear its peaceful fruit (Hebrews 12:11).
Third, some distressing NDEs are occasions for spiritual attack, which God permits for purposes we cannot fully comprehend — as He permitted the attacks on Job, on the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 12:7–10), and even on His own Son in the wilderness. An attack from the enemy does not prove God has abandoned the one attacked; it often means the opposite.
Fourth, some distressing NDEs may simply be what honest encounter with spiritual reality looks like for an unprepared soul. Isaiah 6 shows what happens when a believing prophet sees the Lord's holiness: terror, then cleansing, then commission. For the unbelieving, unready soul, the initial taste of the unseen world may be even more terrifying, precisely because there has been no preparation.
Miller adds a pastoral note that is worth lingering over: God allows "even the best of people to get cancer, get hit by drunk drivers, suffer from addictions, and from all indications, yes, have distressing dreams, visions and NDEs."64 The problem of evil is large; distressing NDEs are one instance of it. What the Bible promises is not freedom from all distress but the presence of Christ in the distress and the final outcome, when all will be seen in its proper light. "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18, ESV).
And the capstone of Paul's reflection is the right note on which to close this section:
"For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38–39, ESV)
Neither a distressing NDE, nor the memory of one, nor the voices that may have spoken lies within it, nor the darkness that may have been seen — none of these can separate the one in Christ from the love of God. That is the word the experiencer most often needs to hear, and it is the word that should frame every Christian pastoral response to this difficult territory.
· · ·
One of the earliest and most theologically rich distressing NDE accounts in the modern literature belongs to George Ritchie, the University of Virginia psychiatrist whose NDE — described in his book Return from Tomorrow — was the experience that first drew the young Raymond Moody into the study of near-death experiences. Ritchie's story is worth a closer look because it illustrates how a single NDE can contain elements of several of our five types, laid end to end.
Ritchie's NDE occurred in 1943, while he was a young army private stricken with double pneumonia in Texas. He was pronounced dead, then resuscitated. During the time his body was unresponsive, he reported an extended experience that opened with standard features of the NDE — separation from the body, movement through walls and space — and then moved into a guided tour of several realms by a figure he identified, with absolute certainty, as Jesus Christ.65
Ritchie's encounter with Christ was overwhelmingly positive, but the tour included distressing sections as well. Jesus showed him, he said, regions of the afterlife where deceased souls were trapped in earthly obsessions — bars, casinos, bedrooms — unable to touch or influence the physical world but still locked into their former desires. He showed him a region of what appeared to be combative, hating, destructive spirits, whom Ritchie took to be human souls so consumed by malice that they were continually tormenting each other. And he showed him demonic beings interacting with living human beings who had opened themselves, often unwittingly, to such influence — the famous scene of drunk patrons in a bar being entered by demonic spirits as they passed out from alcohol.66
How do we sort Ritchie's experience using the typology of this chapter? It does not fit any single category neatly. The distressing portions look like a genuine tour of Hades-like regions (Type 1), but they also include demonic beings (Type 2) interacting with human souls who have shaped their own suffering by their earthly habits — which has overtones of Type 3 (experiencer-generated distortion, though here it is the observed souls' distortion, not Ritchie's). Ritchie himself was not being disciplined so much as being shown, which adds a dimension to Type 4: Jesus was teaching him, and the teaching was severe but loving. What is notably absent is Type 5: there is no evidence of demonic counterfeit in Ritchie's report. The tour guide is Christ, the fruit is conversion and lifelong ministry, and the content is consistent with biblical categories of afterlife reality.
Ritchie's post-NDE life confirms the redemptive character of the experience. Before his NDE, he was nominally religious but not a committed Christian. Afterward, he became a deeply devoted follower of Jesus, reading his Bible seriously, forgiving old grudges, and reorienting his life around love of Christ and love of neighbor. When Raymond Moody later asked Ritchie if he could dedicate Life After Life to him, Ritchie replied, "I appreciate that, but I would rather you dedicate it to Jesus Christ because he is the one who gave me this experience."67 That single sentence captures what we should hope to find at the end of every distressing encounter: not a damaged soul turning inward in fear, but a transformed soul turning outward in gratitude.
Ritchie's account also illustrates an important nuance. The distressing elements of his NDE were not caused by spiritual danger to Ritchie himself. He was not in peril; Christ was showing him other people's peril. For the Christian reader, this is a reminder that being witness to distress in an NDE is not the same as being the object of it. Many NDErs report seeing suffering souls or dark places while themselves being protected, accompanied, or even comforted throughout. The distressing content does not necessarily mean the experiencer was in that condition. They may have been given a window into the broader afterlife geography precisely so that, on their return, they could testify to it.
Alongside the careful research of Bush, Rommer, and Sabom, Christians encountering the distressing NDE literature will also run into a large body of popular testimony — books, YouTube videos, podcasts, conference talks — in which Christians describe dramatic visits to hell. Bill Wiese's 23 Minutes in Hell, discussed above, is one prominent example. Ivan Tuttle's story is another, frequently cited in the charismatic and evangelical spaces that have embraced the discernment-of-NDEs project.
Tuttle's account, shared widely in interviews and a related book, reports a dramatic distressing NDE during a near-fatal cardiac event in the 1970s. He describes being taken to a place of burning heat, tormented souls, and demonic beings; being given a tour by Jesus; and being returned with a commission to warn others. The experience moved him into urgent evangelism, and his testimony has drawn many hearers to consider the claims of Christ.68
Applying the framework of this chapter to Tuttle's account, we can make several charitable observations. First, as with Wiese, Tuttle's experience is best classified primarily as Type 1 — a genuine encounter with an intermediate-state realm that Scripture calls Hades. Second, the fruit of his experience (four decades of consistent evangelism and a steady invitation to faith in Christ) argues strongly against a Type 5 reading. Third, Tuttle's prayer to receive Christ, which he invites hearers to pray at the close of his interviews, is theologically straightforward and evangelically sound — a plea for forgiveness, acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Savior, and a commitment to change life direction.69 Tabatt in The NDE Conspiracy quotes this prayer approvingly at the close of his own book's invitation to faith.70
As with Wiese, the appropriate cautions apply. The terminology "hell" is typically used without distinguishing Hades from Gehenna. Specific cosmological details (the layout of the place, the identification of particular demonic figures, the precise mechanics of torment) should be held loosely, since Scripture does not give us that level of detail and we cannot verify one person's visionary description against another. But the heart of Tuttle's testimony — that the intermediate state for the unsaved is real and terrible, and that only Christ rescues — is fully consistent with biblical teaching.
This is an important pastoral balance. Some Christians are tempted to reject all popular trip-to-hell testimonies as unreliable or even demonic. That reflex is too sweeping. Other Christians are tempted to accept every detail of every such account as literally accurate. That too is too sweeping. The discerning reader treats these accounts the way they treat any personal testimony: affirming what accords with Scripture, noting where terminology or detail outruns the biblical text, and always letting Scripture judge experience rather than the other way around. This is a specific application of the sola scriptura principle developed fully in chapter 8 of this book.
The appropriate posture toward popular distressing NDE testimonies (Wiese, Tuttle, Baxter, and others) is a charitable reading with questions. Affirm biblical alignment; note terminology confusion between Hades and Gehenna; hold specific cosmological details loosely; evaluate by the fruit; let Scripture, not the testimony, be the final authority. Such books can serve the kingdom when read discerningly. They can mislead when read as authoritative revelation beyond what Scripture teaches.
Almost everything in this chapter so far has focused on distressing near-death experiences. A brief but important note is needed on distressing deathbed experiences (DBEs). These are not the same category, and they behave differently.
As established in chapter 3 and chapter 12 of this book, DBEs are visions at the doorway of death — usually in the hours, days, or weeks before actual physical death. They are reported by the dying person themselves, or observed by loved ones and hospital staff as visible interactions the dying are having with unseen presences. The research on DBEs suggests they are more reliable than NDEs in several ways: they occur during a prolonged dying process rather than a sudden medical crisis; they are often repeated and consistent over days; they are frequently witnessed by others; and they show remarkably little of the theological novelty or confusion sometimes found in NDE literature.
Distressing DBEs exist, but they are a smaller fraction of the DBE literature than distressing NDEs are of the NDE literature. The New York hospice study of 1,400 patients found distressing content in about 18 percent of deathbed visions — roughly comparable to the NDE rate.71 But two features of distressing DBEs distinguish them from distressing NDEs.
First, distressing DBEs are typically shorter and more episodic. They may come in waves over the course of the dying process, interspersed with peaceful or comforting visions. A dying person may have a few hours of anxious, distressing content and then settle into deep peace in the final hours. This is different from the sudden, intense, event-shaped character of an NDE.
Second, distressing DBEs more frequently resolve — in the person's last hours or days — into peace. Miller offers a moving example from his own circle: a woman named Jean, whose final weeks of life included both comforting and distressing deathbed experiences. The distressing experience humbled her and led her to reach out to friends to make sure she had left nothing undone spiritually before death. Two days later, she died with her last words being that she was at peace.72 Her distressing DBE had the shape not of condemnation but of conviction — a final prompt to settle accounts with God.
This pattern — distressing DBE leading to spiritual resolution and peaceful death — is not universal, but it is common enough to be pastorally significant. Families sitting vigil with a loved one who is having distressing deathbed experiences should not despair. The very distress may be the occasion God is using to draw the dying person deeper into His care. Prayer, Scripture reading, gentle presence, and the ministry of a pastor or chaplain who understands this territory are all appropriate and often effective.
If a loved one is having distressing deathbed visions, do not assume the worst. The pattern in the research and in pastoral experience is that such visions often precede — and seem to prompt — a deeper spiritual resolution in the days or hours before death. Continue to pray for the dying one, to read them Scripture (especially Psalm 23, Psalm 91, Romans 8, and the Gospel of John), and to speak the assurance of Christ's welcome to all who come to Him. Many have ended in peace after difficult beginnings.
Of the three Greyson-and-Bush patterns, the second — the "eternal nothingness" type — deserves a closer look because it is especially painful and because it does not fit neatly into traditional Christian categories of hell.
In this pattern, the experiencer reports being thrust into absolute emptiness. There is no body. There is no light. There is no place. There is no time. Sometimes there are mocking voices delivering a crushing, nihilistic message: you never existed, your life was a joke, nothing you cared about was real. The affective signature is not the fire-and-torment of the classical hellish NDE but a bottomless metaphysical despair.
What are we to make of this pattern? It does not match the biblical picture of Hades very cleanly — Hades in Luke 16 is a place of conscious bodily-seeming suffering, not of total absence. It does not match the biblical picture of Gehenna either, which features fire, darkness, outer exclusion, and the presence of other condemned beings. So what is being encountered?
Several readings are possible. One possibility is that the eternal-nothingness pattern is a demonic counterfeit — Type 5 — in which the devil mimics something like Hades with the specific theological weapon of nihilism. The lie ("you never existed") is not a biblical claim but a purely destructive denial of the goodness of God's creation and the reality of the experiencer's life. That lie has a demonic signature.
A second possibility is that the eternal-nothingness pattern represents Type 3 — the experiencer's own deep psychological terror filtering what was in fact a neutral or even protective encounter. For an experiencer whose worst unspoken fear is that life has no meaning, the intense solitude of transition through the veil could get interpreted through the lens of that fear and come out as a crushing message about nothingness. On this reading, the "voices" speaking lies are the experiencer's own anxiety personified.
A third possibility, suggested in some of Bush's work, is that the nothingness experience is a real confrontation with the abyss that self stands over when self is separated from God — a taste of what Dante called the freezing center of hell, or what C. S. Lewis called the grayness of the self turned in on itself. On this reading, the eternal-nothingness type gives its experiencer a glimpse of what it would mean to persist as a conscious being with no God, no others, and no ground — and that glimpse, terrifying in itself, may be precisely the warning that drives them to faith.
The Christian response to an eternal-nothingness NDE is especially important because the despair it leaves behind can be deep and long-lasting. Bush's own decades of silence about her experience shows how heavy the aftermath can be. Pastoral care needs to emphasize the opposite of what the voices said: your life is real; God loves you; Christ made you; you are known; you are not alone. These are not platitudes. They are the basic content of the Christian gospel, and they are exactly what a sufferer of this kind of DNDE most needs to hear. Over time, often years, the lies spoken in the distress give way to the truth spoken in Scripture. This is the ordinary rhythm of Christian healing, and it works for this kind of wound as it works for any other.
Distressing NDEs are a minority phenomenon in the near-death experience literature, but they are a real one. The research suggests that roughly 15–25 percent of NDEs contain distressing elements, and the true rate is likely higher because of suppression. Their existence is not an embarrassment for the Christian view of the afterlife. It is, in many ways, a confirmation of the biblical picture: the unseen world is real, the unsaved dead are conscious in Hades, demonic beings exist and sometimes interact with human beings, and God disciplines those He loves. Distressing NDEs are exactly what we might expect if the biblical cosmology is true.
The Christian task is not to react to every distressing NDE in the same way. Wholesale skepticism and credulous acceptance are both errors. The careful reader learns to sort: Is this a genuine encounter with the biblical Hades, a demonic encounter, a real experience filtered through the experiencer's fear, a disciplinary encounter for a believer, or a fully demonic counterfeit? Four markers help: the presence or absence of rescue, the long-term fruit, the theological content of what was spoken, and the experiencer's trajectory toward or away from Christ.
The pastoral task is not to dismiss, explain, or pronounce verdicts. It is to walk with the experiencer, ask good questions, point to Scripture, and trust the Holy Spirit to do the interpretive work over time. The larger theological task is to hold open the biblical distinctions — between Hades and Gehenna, between halftime and final judgment, between experience and interpretation — so that we do not collapse the richness of what Scripture teaches about the afterlife into any single image or testimony.
The larger pastoral message is this: distressing NDEs are not, in most cases, God's final word on the experiencer. They are often His most urgent word — the word that pulls someone back from the brink, that shakes a drifting believer back to their senses, that drives an unbelieving soul into the arms of Christ. Read them that way, and much of their terror gives way to gratitude. The darkness they describe is real, but the light of Christ is more real, and it is the light that has the last word.
The next chapter takes up a related but distinct puzzle: the pattern of NDErs whose theology, in the years after their experience, no longer matches what they originally reported seeing. Some of these are cases where a genuine encounter was reinterpreted over time through a non-Christian framework; some are cases where the experiencer resisted the uncomfortable implications of what they encountered. Either way, the experience-interpretation distinction continues to be central, and the discernment task continues.
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