Chapter 22

Distressing NDEs, Hades, and Hell

"In Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes." — Luke 16:23 (ESV)

A. The Question on the Table

A paramedic in Ohio told me about a call he would never forget. An older man had gone into cardiac arrest at a family dinner. The team restarted his heart within minutes. When he opened his eyes on the stretcher, his face was white and his hands were shaking. He did not describe a warm light or a welcoming presence. He described darkness. Cold. Hostile shapes in the distance. And he could barely speak the words. He whispered to the paramedic: "I was in a terrible place."

The man's wife, standing behind the gurney, started to cry. She did not know what to do with what she had just heard. Neither did the paramedic. Neither, at first, did I.

We have spent the last several chapters looking at the bright side of near-death experiences. We have seen the warm light, the loving presence, the reunions with people who had died before the person on the table.¹ And those cases are the clear majority. About 80 percent of remembered NDEs are positive, sometimes breathtakingly so. But not all of them.

About one in five remembered NDEs is frightening, dark, or outright terrifying.² Some involve an empty void where the person feels utterly alone. Some start as pleasant experiences and then twist into fear. And some include images and encounters that people can only describe as hellish. These are the distressing NDEs, and an honest book about the afterlife cannot look away from them.

This chapter faces them head-on. But I want to set a ground rule before we go further. I am not going to use these accounts to frighten you. Fear-mongering dishonors God, and it dishonors the people who went through these experiences. What I want to do instead is be honest about the evidence, careful about what it means, and faithful to what Scripture teaches about the place the Bible calls Hades (Greek hadēs, "the realm of the dead") and the place it calls Gehenna (Greek geenna, "the final place of judgment"). Those two places are not the same. Getting that distinction right will change the way we think about every distressing NDE in the research.

I have talked with grieving families, with pastors, and with people who have had these experiences. The questions they ask deserve real answers. Is this proof that the person was going to hell? Is it a punishment? A warning? Or is it something else entirely? And what do you say to someone who comes out of a cardiac arrest shaking and terrified?

So here is the question on the table: What do distressing NDEs tell us about the afterlife, and how should a careful, Bible-reading Christian weigh them?

B. The Uncomfortable Evidence in Front of Us

Most books about near-death experiences skip this part. They tell you about the light, the love, the peace, and the tunnel. And those elements are real. I found them in the clear majority of the cases I studied. But early researchers often ignored the dark cases, or explained them away as odd side-effects of drugs or fear.³ The trouble is, later research showed they were far too common to be brushed aside.

Nancy Evans Bush, one of the leading researchers on distressing NDEs, has argued that at least one in five NDEs is frightening or distressing.⁴ Some studies put the number lower, some higher. Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings, who witnessed his own patients describing hellish scenes between repeated cardiac arrests, estimated that roughly half of NDEs reported right after resuscitation were distressing. Days later, those same patients often remembered nothing bad at all.⁵ That pattern raises a disturbing possibility. The bad experiences may be even more common than we think. People suppress them, forget them, or simply refuse to talk about them.

J. Steve Miller notes that although early researchers like Moody and van Lommel acknowledged negative NDEs, they were widely ignored. This created a false impression that the dark cases were rare anomalies or hallucinations. But focused studies by Bush, Greyson, and Rommer found them in significant numbers.⁶ They cannot be waved away.

Bruce Greyson, one of the most respected psychiatrists in the field, reported similar numbers in his own sample. In his book After, Greyson found that 86 percent of his experiencers called their NDE primarily pleasant, 8 percent said it was unpleasant, and 6 percent said it was neither. But Greyson added a warning that should give every researcher pause. He wrote that he is not confident that frightening NDEs are as rare as they appear, because so many people who have them are simply unwilling to talk about them.⁷

Jeffrey Long's large-scale research through the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) offers another window. Of over 1,100 respondents, about 64 percent called their experience "wonderful," about 32 percent called it "mixed," and about 4 percent called it outright "frightening."⁸ The purely hellish cases are the smallest group, perhaps 1 percent of what NDERF receives, but they exist.⁹

Cardiologist Michael Sabom found the same pattern in his Atlanta Study. He had interviewed seventy-one consecutive near-death experiencers in his first study without finding a single frightening case. In the Atlanta Study he found two, and both fit Greyson and Bush's third pattern of hellish imagery and demonic beings. One was a veteran named Jake who had attempted suicide; the other was a man named Beau who had a cardiac arrest. Sabom noted that the religious backgrounds of experiencers in the Greyson-Bush study ranged from Protestant to Catholic to Jewish to no affiliation at all. There appeared to be "no obvious relationship between religion and 'hell.'"⁵⁷ That finding deserves attention. It means we cannot sort people into "hellish" or "pleasant" camps by looking at their church membership card.

Why are people reluctant to report them? Put yourself in their place. You have just had the most horrifying experience of your life. You may fear that it says something terrible about your character. You may worry that others will judge you. P.M.H. Atwater, who has studied thousands of near-death experiences over three decades, described the problem plainly. She found that people who truly feel they journeyed to hell are "usually silent about the whole affair, fearing scorn from others." And rightly so, she added, because some researchers and even fellow experiencers were quick to declare that only bad people end up in hell. Atwater called this "the stigma of deviation."¹⁰ Bush herself refused to tell anyone about her own distressing NDE for decades.¹¹

In my own doctoral research, I found that about 20 percent of remembered NDEs were negative or distressing.¹² That means roughly one in five. This is not a tiny footnote at the back of the NDE story. It is a real and sobering part of it. And if we believe that at least some NDEs are genuine glimpses of the world beyond death, then we have to ask what these dark experiences mean.

C. The Heart of the Case

1. The 20 Percent That Frighten

When I began scoring the cases in my dissertation, I expected the dark ones to be rare. They were not. Out of more than 5,200 near-death experiences in my database, a steady share came back negative. Some were mild, the sort of unease you might feel when the world you know suddenly vanishes. Others were severe. People described pitch darkness, hostile beings, a sense of being trapped or dragged downward, and landscapes of despair.

These cases cut across lines that many people expect to matter. Good people had bad NDEs. Believers had them. People with no apparent spiritual rebellion had them. And people who had been living reckless, self-destructive lives sometimes had blissful ones.¹³ Greyson put it in striking terms in After. He has heard accounts of blissful NDEs from career criminals, including murderers serving life sentences in prison. And he has seen devout believers have terrifying ones. The data do not support a simple "good people get good NDEs, bad people get bad NDEs" story.¹⁴

Greyson also noted a parallel that some readers may find surprising. Throughout history, revered Christian mystics like Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint John of the Cross, and even Mother Teresa of Calcutta described a "dark night of the soul" as a necessary stage on the path to God. If the holiest people in the tradition passed through darkness, a distressing NDE does not automatically mean the person is wicked.¹⁵

That fact alone should make us cautious. Whatever is happening in these cases, it is not a simple score-keeping exercise. And it should protect the person who has had a distressing NDE from the cruel assumption that they must have done something terrible to deserve it.

2. The Types of Distressing NDE

Researchers have identified three broad types of distressing near-death experience. The typology comes from a 1992 study by Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, and later work by Barbara Rommer.¹⁶ It has held up well in the decades since. Bush and Greyson laid it out plainly in their chapter for The Science of Near-Death Experiences: the three varieties are the inverse, the void, and the hellish.¹⁷

The first type is the inverse experience. Here, the NDE may follow the normal pattern. The person leaves the body, enters a tunnel, perhaps meets a being or sees a light. But instead of feeling peace, they feel terror. The strangeness itself overwhelms them. Bush and Greyson give the example of a man thrown from his horse who found himself floating at treetop height, watching the medics below. He screamed, "No! This isn't right! Put me back!" Then he was shooting through darkness toward a bright light, flashing past shadowy figures. He was panic-stricken by the bizarre scene and his total inability to control what was happening.¹⁸ The experience itself was not dark, but the person read it through the lens of panic.

The second type is the void or emptiness experience. The person finds themselves in a dark, featureless space. There are no beings, no light, no landmarks. Just nothing. For some people, this void feels peaceful, almost restful. For others, it is the worst thing they have ever felt. They describe it as being utterly alone, cut off from everything, with no sense that it will ever end.¹⁹ Bush has written powerfully about this category, noting that the existential dread of the void can be worse than any fire-and-brimstone imagery.

The third type is the overtly hellish experience. This is the one most people picture when they hear the phrase "hellish NDE." People report dark landscapes, threatening or demonic beings, extreme heat or cold, sounds of wailing, and a sense of being trapped in a place of punishment.²⁰ In Greyson's After, a woman named Brenda described her hellish NDE after a suicide attempt. She felt her body slipping downward on an angle, into a cold, dark, watery place. At the bottom she found something like a cave. She heard cries, wails, moans, and the gnashing of teeth. She saw beings that resembled humans but were ugly and grotesque. She stood at the entrance and said to herself, "I don't want to stay here."²¹ Greyson also recorded the case of Kat Dunkle, who was clinically dead after a car accident. She described falling into total darkness with burning pain over her entire body, hearing the screams of others, and knowing she was in hell. She felt hopeless, certain the torture would go on forever. Then she cried out to God, and the torture stopped. She was filled with a peace she said could never be described.²²

Sabom recorded a strikingly similar case in his Atlanta Study. Jake, a forty-year-old wheelchair-bound veteran, had attempted suicide by overdosing on Quaaludes and beer in the mountains of North Georgia. He recalled being in a place "like hell." It looked like a scorched valley, the ground giving off steam, the sky overcast with grayish clouds. Demons were there. He described them as something from a Bosch painting, taunting him, making fun of him, kicking him. He said the misery was unbearable. Then, in the background, chain lightning lit the sky and a voice said, "You could have had anything you wanted. You threw it away." In utter desperation, Jake fell to his knees and prayed. He came to, vomiting the pills.⁵⁸ That last detail is important. Jake's cry to God in the middle of the hellish scene was what pulled him out. His case is one of several in the literature where a distressing NDE turns on a prayer.

Long's NDERF database includes another case worth hearing. A woman named Frances Z., a pill addict, swallowed a hundred narcotic capsules with alcohol in a suicide attempt. Her son found her. As paramedics worked on her body, she watched from outside it. Then she began to fall through a dark tunnel. Demons appeared and, though she was only a spirit, went through the motions of tearing at her flesh. The pain, she said, was intense. She met her own father in that place, and he welcomed her to hell. Believing it was over for her, she heard a voice that said, "You must go back." She awoke in the hospital. Long notes that despite the horror, the experience produced lasting positive change in her life.⁵⁹

Atwater, working from her own database of more than 3,000 adult experiencers, offered a slightly different four-type model. She called the second type "unpleasant or hell-like" and described it as "inner cleansing and self-confrontational." She found it in about 15 percent of adult experiencers and only 3 percent of child experiencers.²³ Her contrast table is a useful reminder. Two people can encounter the exact same elements, beings, environment, and sensations, and one may call the experience heavenly and the other hellish. What differs is not always the experience. Sometimes it is the interpretation.

Some distressing NDEs do not fit neatly into one type. A person may begin with a void and then encounter hostile beings. Another may start with a peaceful NDE that suddenly turns dark, as if the experience were hijacked midstream. Tabatt has described cases where the person begins in warmth and light, only to have the scene shift without warning into something cold and hostile. He uses the term "hijacked" deliberately, reflecting the language the experiencers themselves reach for: something good was taken over by something dark.⁶⁰ The categories are helpful, but they are not walls. Real human experiences are messier than any typology.

Long found one more pattern worth noting. In his NDERF data, people who described their NDE as frightening were more likely to report a lower level of consciousness and alertness during the experience than those who described it as wonderful.⁶¹ That does not settle the question of what frightening NDEs are, but it adds a variable to consider. Were some of these people simply less conscious, and did that reduced awareness color their experience with confusion and fear? Or were they encountering something genuinely dark? The data do not answer the question by themselves. But they keep us honest.

One pattern that shows up across all three types is the deep reluctance to talk about it afterward. People who have had blissful NDEs often want to tell everyone. People who have had distressing ones usually do the opposite. They bury it. They may fear that the experience marks them as morally defective, or that no one will understand. That silence means the true frequency of distressing NDEs is likely higher than any survey can capture.

3. Hades, Not the Final Hell

This is the single most important distinction in this chapter. When Christians hear about hellish NDEs, the first word that comes to mind is usually "hell." And by "hell" most people mean the final, permanent destination of the lost. The lake of fire. The end of the road. But that is not what Scripture describes as the place people go right after death.

In Chapter 18 we traced the biblical geography of the afterlife. Two different words get translated "hell" in English, and the difference between them matters enormously. The first is Hades (Greek hadēs), the intermediate waiting place of the dead before the final judgment. The second is Gehenna (Greek geenna), the final place of judgment, what Revelation calls the lake of fire.²⁴

These are not the same place. Hades is a holding realm, a waiting room. Gehenna is the courtroom's final sentence. The rich man in Jesus' parable of Lazarus was in Hades, not Gehenna.²⁵ His brothers were still alive on earth. The final judgment had not come. He was in the intermediate state. And the New Testament treats Hades and Gehenna differently. In Luke's Gospel and in Acts, Hades refers to an interim condition. Jesus himself entered Hades between his death and resurrection, and the Father did not leave his soul there.²⁶

Revelation 20:13–14 makes the distinction explicit. At the end of the age, "Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them." Then "Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire." Hades is not the lake of fire. Hades gives up its dead before the final judgment comes.²⁷

Why does this matter so much? Because a distressing NDE is not a verdict. An NDE occurs before a person's final death. They come back. They are still alive. And according to Christian theology, the final judgment has not yet happened for anyone now living.²⁸ A person who reports a terrifying NDE has not been sentenced to the lake of fire. They have, at most, glimpsed the dark side of the intermediate realm. And God gives good gifts to both the evil and the good (Matthew 5:45). He might choose to allow a glimpse of Hades for a reason we cannot fully understand. Miller suggests that God may give some people a look at the consequences of a life apart from him, not to condemn them but to awaken them.²⁹

Miller also makes a point that deserves careful attention. He observes that many biblical descriptions of the dark afterlife are varied and may be partly figurative. Outer darkness (Matthew 8:12). Unquenchable fire (Matthew 3:12). A furnace of fire (Matthew 13:42). A bottomless pit (Revelation 9:1). Separation from the Lord's presence (2 Thessalonians 1:9). These images point in the same direction, but they do not all describe the same scene in literal detail. When someone reports a distressing NDE that does not look like a lake of fire, that does not mean the NDE contradicts Scripture. The Bible itself gives partial and varied pictures of the dark side of the afterlife. The point of all of them is the same: there is a real consequence to a life cut off from God, and it is terrible.³⁰

I hold the final state of the lost with a light hand. My own leaning is toward a conservative, Christ-centered hope that God will in the end win every heart through Jesus. I also hold conditional immortality, the view that the final destiny of those who never repent is an end to their existence rather than endless conscious suffering, as a live and honest option. I reject eternal conscious torment. But this book does not depend on any of those views. What matters here is that Hades is not the final destination, and a distressing NDE is not the last word. On that, all three positions agree.³¹

4. Three Readings: Demonic, Warning, or Misread

If distressing NDEs are genuine encounters with the spiritual world, what kind of encounter are they? I believe we have to resist the temptation to give one single answer for all of them. Not all bright NDEs mean the same thing, and not all dark ones do either. I see at least three readings that fit different cases.

Some distressing NDEs involve demonic interference. We explored this in Chapter 20. The Bible warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). If the enemy can twist a bright experience, he can also manufacture a dark one. In some accounts, beings heckle and mock the person. They tell lies designed to produce despair. Bush describes her own experience of beings who told her with cold authority that her life had never been real, that nothing had ever existed, that the whole thing was a cruel joke.³² That does not sound like the voice of God. It sounds like the voice of a liar. As Miller points out, if you believe the Bible's teaching about personal evil, then you should not accept everything a hostile being tells you during a distressing NDE, any more than you would accept everything a stranger tells you in a dark alley.³³ Miller draws a striking comparison to the way Martin Luther described Satan's attacks. Luther believed that the devil tries to produce despair by reminding people of their sins and telling them God cannot save them. That is remarkably similar to what some distressing NDEs report. The pattern is familiar to anyone who reads Scripture: the accuser lies, and the lie always aims at the same target. He wants you to believe that God has abandoned you.

Some distressing NDEs may be genuine warnings. Bush notes that the most common response to a distressing NDE is what she calls "the conversion response." People connect the experience to choices they know were wrong. Atheists begin to believe. People who had drifted from faith recommit themselves. As Bush puts it, the experience "scared the hell out of them," and they changed course.³⁴ Peter wrote that the Lord "knows how to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment" (2 Peter 2:9, ESV). If Hades is a real place, and if God sometimes allows a person to see it, a warning is not cruelty. It is mercy dressed in frightening clothes.

Some distressing NDEs may be genuine experiences misread through fear. This is the first type in the Greyson-Bush typology. The experience itself may not be hostile at all. But the person, overwhelmed by the strangeness of being outside their body or by features they do not understand, panics and interprets the whole thing as threatening. Not every dark reading is a dark reality.³⁵

The honest position is to hold all three readings and test each case on its own terms. I refuse to flatten every distressing NDE into one explanation. That would be the same mistake people make when they treat every bright NDE as proof that God approves of everything. Real discernment means weighing each account against Scripture, against the evidence, and against the character of God as the Bible reveals it.

5. The Pastoral Response

If you are reading this chapter because you or someone you love has had a frightening NDE, I want to speak to you directly.

First: a distressing NDE is not a sentence. It is not God's final word about you or about anyone. No NDE, bright or dark, happens after the final judgment. It happens before a person's final death, and they come back. There is still time. There is still grace.

Second: you do not have to believe everything you were told during the experience. Miller makes this point with care: if you encountered hostile beings on the other side, and those beings told you that you were doomed, that God could not help, that nothing you did would ever matter, those claims deserve to be tested against what God actually says.³⁶ And what God says is this:

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." — John 3:16 (ESV)

If a voice told you that God cannot save you, that voice was lying. Test it against Jesus' own promise. The promise wins.

Third: the people around someone who has had a distressing NDE need to respond with care, not judgment. The worst thing you can say to a person who just came back from a terrifying experience is, "Well, you must have done something wrong." The data do not support that. Good people have bad NDEs. Long's research confirms that a person's moral life does not reliably predict whether their NDE will be positive or negative.³⁷ Sit with the person. Listen. Pray. Do not rush to explain what you do not understand. And point them, gently, toward the God who meets us even in the darkest valley.

Fourth: do not assume that God does not love someone who had a bad NDE. Miller asks us to consider the larger picture. God allows many kinds of suffering in a fallen world. He allows cancer, car accidents, grief, and addiction. Miller himself reports having a vision-like experience in which an evil entity tormented him, and his prayers seemed powerless. He was not rebelling against God at the time. He was a Christian in ministry, doing his best to serve Jesus. Looking back, he believes it was an attack of the enemy, not a sign that God had rejected him.³⁸ His personal honesty on this point is worth hearing. If someone with Miller's faith and calling can have a dark spiritual experience, then a distressing NDE says nothing automatic about a person's standing before God.

"If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!" — Psalm 139:8 (ESV)

The psalmist did not say that God is only in the bright places. He said God is even in Sheol (Hebrew she'ol, "the realm of the dead"). And Jonah, from inside the belly of the fish, cried out, "I called out to the Lord, out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice" (Jonah 2:2, ESV).³⁹ Even in the dark places, God hears.

6. Comfort and Sobriety Together

This chapter holds two things at once. I will not let go of either one.

On one hand, distressing NDEs are real. They are too common to dismiss, too consistent to write off as bad dreams, and too similar to biblical descriptions of the dark side of the afterlife to ignore. The Bible teaches that the unrighteous dead await judgment in Hades, and that Hades is a place of conscious awareness, not a dreamless sleep. Jesus told the story of the rich man in Hades lifting up his eyes in torment (Luke 16:23). That is sobering. We should let it be sobering.

On the other hand, sobriety is not despair. A distressing NDE is a glimpse of the intermediate state, not a window into the final judgment. Hades gives up its dead before the end (Revelation 20:13). The person who had the experience is still alive, still able to turn to God, still held in the reach of grace. And many of the people who have had the most terrifying NDEs describe them, in the long run, as the turning point that brought them to faith.⁴⁰

I want to hold warning and mercy together. The Bible does both, and so should we. There is a real dark side to the afterlife. Jesus said so. And the NDEs that report it should not be swept under the rug. But the God who warns is the same God who rescues. The God who shows a person the darkness of Hades is the same God who calls, "Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).

D. What the Researchers and Scholars Say

The scholarly conversation about distressing NDEs has grown slowly. For years the topic was largely ignored. The early NDE researchers focused on the positive cases, and some actively resisted the idea that dark experiences were genuine NDEs at all.⁴¹

Bruce Greyson, one of the most respected names in NDE research, co-authored the foundational 1992 study with Nancy Evans Bush that established the three-type classification. They studied fifty distressing NDEs and documented the inverse experience, the void, and the overtly hellish encounter.⁴² In After, Greyson returned to the subject with further honesty. He admitted that when he first began studying NDEs in the late 1970s, the accounts he heard were overwhelmingly peaceful. It was only over the years that he found more people who had not had pleasant experiences. He observed that reluctance to face frightening NDEs may lead to long-lasting emotional trauma, and that distressing NDEs are often interpreted as a message for the experiencer to turn their life around.⁴³ In a later article with Bush, he reported that distressing NDEs may occur as often as one in five cases and that both external and internal barriers make them under-reported.⁴⁴

Atwater brought a different perspective. She encountered her very first NDEs in the 1960s at a hospital in Boise, Idaho, and they were of the hellish type. A woman who had suffered a heart attack described being in a colorless world filled with nude, zombie-like people standing elbow to elbow, staring at her. Atwater was among the first to push back against the idea that all NDEs were beautiful. When she sought advice from other researchers in the late 1980s about how to handle the dark cases, she was told to "forget about it." Most researchers, she found, refused to believe such cases could even happen.⁴⁵ Her insistence that the research was incomplete without the dark cases was one of the forces that eventually opened the field.

Nancy Evans Bush went on to write Dancing Past the Dark, the most sustained treatment of distressing NDEs in the literature. She argues that one in five NDEs is distressing, that they are badly under-reported, and that researchers do a disservice to the people who have them by pretending they do not exist.⁴⁶ Barbara Rommer, a physician, produced some of the most detailed clinical accounts of distressing NDEs in her book Blessing in Disguise. Rommer documented accounts that ranged from mild unease to graphic horror. Long notes that Rommer found frightening NDEs often resulted in substantial positive life changes and a greatly reduced fear of death. Some experiencers came to view the event as a gift and perhaps the most important experience of their life.⁴⁷

Sabom brought a cardiologist's eye to the data and added something the other researchers did not: a critical check on the weakest claims. He visited Maurice Rawlings in Chattanooga to review the cases in Rawlings' two books, Beyond Death's Door and To Hell and Back. What he found was sobering. In one key case, a Baptist Sunday school teacher who had suffered three cardiac arrests, Rawlings had changed important details between the two books. In the first, the man was described as a "staunch Christian" who went to hell; in the second, published fifteen years later, the same man was presented as someone "who knew he was not the Christian he should have been." Sabom concluded that Rawlings had altered the story to fit a preconceived agenda linking hellish NDEs exclusively to non-Christians.⁶² This matters because sloppy handling of distressing NDE cases discredits the whole topic. Good data demands honest reporting. Sabom showed that you can take hellish NDEs seriously and still insist on rigorous standards.

In Hagan's medical volume The Science of Near-Death Experiences, Bush and Greyson identified three common responses people have after a distressing NDE. Some adopt the "I needed that" response: they connect the experience to wrong choices and change course. Others use what Bush and Greyson call reductionism: they explain the NDE away as a hallucination or a drug reaction. A third group struggles for years trying to understand why it happened and often commits to long-term therapy that rarely helps.⁴⁸ That third pattern is one reason this chapter matters. People who have no framework for making sense of a distressing NDE can carry its weight for decades.

Miller takes the Christian theological dimension further than the secular researchers. He argues that some distressing NDEs may involve demonic beings whose lies should be tested, not accepted. He also stresses that a distressing NDE does not guarantee a bad afterlife, any more than a positive NDE guarantees a good one. The person is still alive; their story is not over. And Jesus' promise of eternal life applies to everyone who trusts in him, including those who have seen the darkness.⁴⁹

Shaun Tabatt, drawing on both his own interviews and the NDE literature, raises the possibility that some distressing NDEs are cases of spiritual hijacking. As he and Randy Kay note, in the distressing NDE the "heavenly and redemptive" themes of most NDEs are replaced by "hellish and damnation" imagery. The aftermath is often devastating, requiring years to process.⁵⁰ Tabatt's framework rests on a biblical principle: throughout Scripture, when God moves, the enemy tries to counterfeit or distort what God is doing. Moses performed signs before Pharaoh, and the magicians mimicked them. The early church received genuine spiritual gifts, and Paul warned about false ones. If NDEs are sometimes genuine encounters with the spiritual world, Tabatt argues, it would be strange if the enemy simply ignored them.⁶³ In my own doctoral research, I found that while about 71 percent of NDEs overall and 87 percent of scholarly cases scored as highly or moderately compatible with biblical teaching, a significant minority carried clearly unbiblical content. Of the qualitative cases with enough theological data to score, over 19 percent involved hellish or negative interactions with what appeared to be demonic elements.⁶⁴ That is not a number anyone can wave away. It fits the pattern Tabatt describes: the enemy is active in this space, and discernment is not optional.

E. Counter-Objections

Objection 1: A Loving God Would Never Allow a Terrifying NDE

This is the objection that comes up first, and I feel its force. If God is love, why would he let anyone go through something so terrible?

But this is really the problem of suffering in a smaller package. God allows cancer. He allows earthquakes. He allows people to walk through seasons of darkness that test everything they believe. The question is not whether God allows suffering. He clearly does. The question is whether he has good reasons, even when we cannot see them. A father who warns a child that the stove is hot is not being cruel. And if God sometimes allows a person to glimpse the reality of a life cut off from him, that warning may be the most loving thing he could do.⁵¹ Miller also points out that some distressing NDEs may not be directly sent by God at all. They may be attacks by the enemy, allowed rather than caused, for reasons we do not fully grasp.⁵²

Objection 2: These Are Just Bad Trips or Fear-Driven Brain States

Some critics argue that distressing NDEs are nothing more than the brain's response to physical or emotional distress: oxygen deprivation, drug reactions, or panic. This is the same family of naturalistic explanations we examined in Chapter 24.

The problem is the same one those explanations face with positive NDEs. Brain-based theories predict confusion, fragmented imagery, and loss of coherence. But many distressing NDEs are vivid, ordered, and hyper-real, just like the positive ones. Some include confirmed perceptions of real events in the room.⁵³ And the theory that suppressed guilt or fear causes them does not hold up under examination. Bush points out that "a century of psychology indicates the likelihood that everyone has deeply suppressed guilt, fear, and anger." If suppressed guilt produced hellish NDEs, we would expect far more of them. And many people expecting judgment report blissful experiences instead.⁵⁴

Objection 3: You Are Scaring Vulnerable People

This is a concern I take seriously. I do not want to frighten anyone, and I have tried to write this chapter without sensationalism. But the alternative to honesty is not safety. It is ignorance. If distressing NDEs are real, and I believe some of them are, then pretending they do not exist leaves people who have had them completely alone. It also leaves pastors, counselors, and friends without any framework for helping them.

I have heard from pastors who had no idea what to say when someone in their congregation described a terrifying NDE. They had read books about heaven tourism but nothing about the dark cases. The person with the experience felt ashamed. The pastor felt helpless. Both of them needed better information, not less.

Hiding the evidence does not make it go away. It just makes the people who need help most afraid to ask for it. And silence about the dark side of the NDE literature leaves a vacuum that fear-mongers and sensationalists are only too happy to fill. Careful, sober honesty is not the same thing as scaring people. It is the only way to protect them from worse voices.

Objection 4: If Hellish NDEs Are Real, Your Hope for Universal Salvation Collapses

Some readers will press this question: if distressing NDEs show that Hades is real, and that people truly suffer there, how can I still lean toward the hope that God will someday win every heart?

The answer rests on the distinction I have drawn in this chapter. Hades is not the final state. It is the intermediate realm. Even Revelation says that Hades gives up its dead and is itself thrown into the lake of fire at the end (Revelation 20:13–14). The question of what God does at the final judgment is a different question from what happens in the waiting place before it. I hold my leaning toward universal hope lightly, and I hold conditional immortality as a real option. But neither view is threatened by the reality of Hades. Hades is temporary. The final state, whatever it looks like, lies beyond it. The data in this chapter confirm the intermediate state. They do not settle the final-state debate.⁵⁵

F. Conclusion and Pastoral Application

Distressing NDEs are the part of the story that most people would rather skip. I understand that. But a book that claims to tell the truth about death and the afterlife cannot afford to leave these cases out. They are too common, too consistent, and too similar to what Scripture describes to be ignored.

Here is what I believe this chapter has shown. First, about one in five remembered NDEs is distressing, and the real number may be higher because people suppress and forget the dark experiences. Second, distressing NDEs come in at least three forms: the unfamiliar-turned-frightening, the void, and the overtly hellish. Third, these experiences, if genuine, correspond to Hades, the intermediate realm of the dead, not to Gehenna, the final state after the last judgment. No NDE is a final verdict. Fourth, not all distressing NDEs mean the same thing. Some may involve demonic deception. Some may be genuine warnings from God. Some may be ordinary experiences misread through fear. Each case must be weighed on its own.

And fifth, warning and mercy are not opposites. They belong together. The God who warns is the God who rescues. The psalmist said, "If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:8). Even in the darkest place a person can go, God has not left them.

If you have had a distressing NDE, hear this: you are not condemned. You are still alive. You are still within the reach of the God who loves you. Whatever you saw, whatever you felt, it was not the end of your story. Jesus told a thief on a cross that he would be with him in paradise that very day (Luke 23:43). If grace could reach that man in his final hour, it can reach you in yours. And if someone you know has had a distressing NDE, be the person who sits with them, listens without judging, and gently points them to the promises of Jesus.

I think of that paramedic in Ohio, and the man on the stretcher who whispered about a terrible place. What that man needed in that moment was not a theology lecture. He needed someone to tell him the truth: that what he saw was real enough to take seriously, but not final. That God had not abandoned him. That the fact that he came back was itself a mercy. And that the same Jesus who descended into Hades and rose again holds the keys of death and the realm of the dead (Revelation 1:18).

In the next chapter we will pull together a practical framework for testing any NDE, positive or negative, against Scripture. The tools of Chapter 20 and Chapter 21 come together there in a field guide you can use with any account you encounter. For now, let the sober evidence of this chapter sit alongside the bright evidence of the chapters before it. Both are real. Both matter. And only the God who holds both light and darkness in his hand can make sense of them all.⁵⁶