Chapter 21

Distressing NDEs — Hades, Demonic Deception, and What the Bible Really Teaches About Hell

This is one of the hardest chapters in this book to write, and it may be one of the hardest to read. Most of what we have studied so far has been beautiful — light, love, reunions, the welcoming presence of Jesus. But the research is honest about something else, too. A small but very real minority of near-death experiencers come back not radiant but shaken. They report darkness. Cold. The smell of smoke. Mocking laughter. Beings that seem to want to harm them. A sense of being alone and lost forever. Some call it hell. Some can barely speak of it for years. We cannot pretend these accounts do not exist. They do, and they demand a careful biblical response.¹

I want to make my thesis clear up front. Distressing near-death experiences are real spiritual experiences. They correspond to Hades — the temporary intermediate state of separation from God — not to Gehenna, the final lake of fire after the last judgment. Some of these experiences appear to be genuine glimpses into a real but temporary realm. Others appear to involve demonic interference, where evil spirits twist what God may have intended for good. And remarkably, the long-term outcome of distressing NDEs is overwhelmingly positive — they tend to produce repentance, seeking, and faith. None of this fits a simple "they're all hallucinations" answer or a simple "they're all demonic" answer. The truth is more careful and more biblical than either of those slogans.

What the Research Actually Shows

Most NDEs are positive. Researchers like Jeffrey Long estimate that only about 1 percent of NDEs reported on the NDERF website contain hellish content, and Long is quick to add that hellish NDEs are probably underreported because of shame and fear of judgment from others.² But "rare" is not the same as "nonexistent." Four researchers in particular have done the careful work of studying these difficult experiences, and we should walk through their findings together.

Nancy Evans Bush wrote the standard scholarly treatment of distressing NDEs in her 2012 book Dancing Past the Dark. Bush is not a Christian apologist; she is a careful researcher who happens to have had a distressing NDE herself. She identifies three patterns. The first is the inverse NDE — the same features as a typical positive experience (out-of-body, tunnel, light, beings) but felt with terror instead of peace. The second is the void — a sense of dark emptiness, isolation, and nothingness, sometimes with the cruel message that the experiencer's whole life has been a meaningless joke. The third is the hellish NDE proper — fire, darkness, torment, and demonic-looking beings.³

Barbara Rommer, a medical doctor, devoted an entire book to the topic — Blessing in Disguise (2000). Her four categories are slightly different. She distinguishes (1) misinterpreted positive NDEs, where the person was simply frightened by the strangeness of the experience; (2) the void; (3) hellish landscapes; and (4) NDEs with explicitly demonic elements.⁴ The title of her book hints at her most striking finding, which I'll come back to: these experiences, terrible as they are, often turn into a blessing in the long run.

Maurice Rawlings was a Christian cardiologist and one of the first to push back against the early Moody-era assumption that NDEs are uniformly blissful. In Beyond Death's Door (1978) and To Hell and Back (1993), Rawlings argued that distressing NDEs are far more common than other researchers found, but that experiencers tend to suppress the memory quickly. Interview them at the bedside, he said, before they have had time to forget — and the picture changes.⁵ Rawlings' specific numbers are debated, but his general point about suppression is well-supported.

J. Steve Miller devotes several chapters of Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (chaps. 7–12) to distressing experiences and their theological meaning. Miller is careful and balanced. He notes that the imagery in distressing NDEs — fire, pits, darkness, wailing — does not contradict Scripture, even though it doesn't perfectly match every detail of every biblical hell-description either. He also emphasizes that both pleasant and unpleasant NDEs tend to produce a single common outcome: people who have them start seeking God.⁶

And we should not forget Michael Sabom's careful Christian work in Light and Death. Sabom, a Presbyterian elder and cardiologist, deliberately looked for hellish NDEs in his Atlanta Study and managed to document two clear cases — both of which involved suicide attempts. Sabom's case of "Jake," a wheelchair-bound veteran who tried to kill himself in the Georgia mountains with Quaaludes, is sobering: a "place like hell" with a scorched valley, demons "like in a Bosch painting," and the voice of God saying, "You could have had anything you wanted — you threw it away."⁷ Jake prayed in desperation, threw up the drugs, and woke up. He's still alive today.

Read across all this research and a fair picture emerges. Distressing NDEs are real. They are varied. Their imagery overlaps biblical descriptions of judgment in some ways but not in every way. And the people who have them are not random — they include atheists, lapsed believers, people in crisis, and even some seemingly devout Christians.

Hades, Not Gehenna: The Critical Biblical Distinction

Here is where careful biblical thinking really matters. The Bible does not use one word for "hell." It uses several, and the differences are not optional theological niceties — they are key to understanding what NDErs are actually seeing. As we explored more fully in Chapter 19's treatment of afterlife geography, the New Testament distinguishes between Hadēs (ᾅδης), the present temporary holding place of the unsaved dead, and Geenna (γέεννα), the final state of the irredeemably wicked after the last judgment.⁸

Revelation 20:11–15 is the decisive passage, and it belongs to this chapter. Here it is in full:

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire (ESV).

Notice three crucial details. First, this judgment is future. The great white throne has not yet happened. Second, Hades and the lake of fire are two distinct things. Hades is emptied of its dead at the judgment, and only after that is Hades itself thrown into the lake of fire. Third, the lake of fire is called "the second death" — a separate, final reality that comes after the present age and after the resurrection. The Greek text places Hadēs and limnē tou pyros (λίμνη τοῦ πυρός, "lake of fire") side by side specifically to distinguish them.

This single distinction does enormous theological work. It explains why the imagery in distressing NDEs is partial and varied — sometimes fire, sometimes cold, sometimes a void, sometimes mocking voices — rather than uniform and final. Miller makes a similar observation, noting that even biblical descriptions of hell are themselves varied and sometimes figurative: outer darkness in Matthew, unquenchable fire elsewhere, a bottomless pit in Revelation, separation from God's presence in 2 Thessalonians.⁹ The Bible doesn't promise us a tour photograph; it gives us snapshots and warnings.

And here, as a believer in conditional immortality with openness to a postmortem opportunity, I want to be clear about something. The reality of Hades does not mean the reality of eternal conscious torment in the lake of fire. Whatever the lake of fire ultimately is — the "second death" language is suggestive — Scripture treats it as final and as something distinct from the present misery of the unsaved dead. And the present misery, real as it is, is the misery of those who have not yet faced their final state. The NDE is not the verdict. The verdict comes at the throne.

Demonic Hijacking and the Question of Cause

Some distressing NDEs, however, do not look like glimpses of Hades. They look like attacks. The full theological framework for what Shaun Tabatt calls Satan's "hijacking" of NDEs is developed in Chapter 25, and I won't reproduce it here. But the basic logic is straightforward: if God is genuinely revealing Himself through near-death experiences — and I believe He often is — then we should expect, on biblical grounds, that the enemy will try to corrupt that channel.¹⁰ Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). His strategy from Genesis 3 onward has been to twist what God intends for good. We see counterfeit welcoming committees in some NDE reports, beings that seem at first to be friendly guides but turn out to be deceivers (Tabatt's discussion of Bryan Melvin's case is the standard example, taken up in Chapter 25). We see beings who introduce false theology — "all paths are one," "you have lived many lives," "there is no judgment." We see explicit demonic encounters, like Bush's interview subjects who heard mocking voices telling them their entire life had been a meaningless illusion.¹¹

This is why I refuse to flatten distressing NDEs into a single explanation. There is real theological danger in saying, "All distressing NDEs are demonic." That collapses the categories the Bible itself keeps distinct. There is also real danger in saying, "All distressing NDEs are direct visits to hell from God." That ignores both the spiritual warfare dimension Scripture clearly affirms and the suppression-and-fear dynamics the researchers have actually documented.

I think the best biblical conclusion is that distressing NDEs are a mixed category with at least four overlapping causes:

(1) Some are genuine glimpses of Hades — the temporary state of separation from God — granted as a sober warning. (2) Some involve real demonic interference, where the enemy is seizing a moment of spiritual exposure to deceive or terrify. (3) Some appear to be God's gracious wake-up calls, allowed precisely so that the experiencer will come back changed. (4) And some, as Rommer and Bush have argued, are misinterpreted positive experiences — moments where the strangeness of the encounter itself produces fear, even when the underlying reality may not have been malevolent at all.¹² Each case calls for individual evaluation. We need biblical wisdom, not a one-size-fits-all answer.

The Strange Fruit of Distressing NDEs: Howard Storm's Story

Here is the most counterintuitive finding in the entire literature on distressing NDEs, and it deserves a section of its own. We might expect that a terrifying glimpse of darkness and demons would produce despair, atheism, or psychological collapse. Instead — overwhelmingly — these experiences produce conversion.¹³ Bush, who is not a Christian and is in fact suspicious of evangelical readings of NDEs, nonetheless concludes that the consistent long-term outcome of a distressing NDE is becoming a humble seeker.¹⁴ Rommer found the same thing. Miller found it. Rawlings was a vocal Christian advocate of distressing NDEs precisely because he saw so many of his patients led to faith through them.

The clearest illustration I know of is Howard Storm. Storm was an art professor at Northern Kentucky University, an atheist, openly hostile to Christianity, and by his own later admission a bitter and self-centered man. In 1985, while traveling in Paris, his stomach perforated. As he lay in agony in a Paris hospital waiting for emergency surgery, he died. What he reports next has been told in his book My Descent into Death and retold in John Burke's Imagine Heaven. He found himself out of his body, watching his wife next to his hospital bed. Voices called him from the corridor. He followed them into a darkening fog. The voices grew nasty. The beings around him began to attack — biting him, tearing at him, mocking him. He realized that he was being torn apart by creatures who had only wanted him to come close enough to be hurt. There was no light. There was no love. There was only cruelty and the sense that this was forever.¹⁵

And then, somewhere in the wreckage of his pride and his confidence, an old Sunday school song surfaced — "Jesus loves me, this I know." Storm — the atheist art professor — cried out for Jesus. A pinpoint of light appeared in the darkness, came nearer, and resolved into a Person of overwhelming brightness and love. The Being lifted him out. Storm wept while Jesus held him "like a father with a child," he said, and reassured him that he was loved exactly as he was. Storm was carried upward toward a distant city of light — what he later identified, after reading Revelation, as the New Jerusalem.¹⁶

Storm came back. He converted. He left his university position, attended seminary, and became a pastor in the United Church of Christ. He has spent the decades since telling his story honestly — both the descent into the dark and the rescue by Christ.

Can Christians Have Distressing NDEs?

Yes. And we should be careful pastorally about this. Some sincere Christians have reported distressing elements in their experiences, and well-meaning believers have sometimes responded with the cruel suggestion that this proves the person was never really saved. The Bible does not support that conclusion.

Faithful believers are still subject to spiritual attack. Paul carried "a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me" (2 Corinthians 12:7, ESV) — and Paul was an apostle. Job's suffering was not because Job was secretly wicked but precisely because he was righteous, and Satan was permitted to test him. Even our Lord Jesus, in Gethsemane, "began to be greatly distressed and troubled" (Mark 14:33, ESV). The Greek verb behind "greatly distressed" is ekthambeisthai (ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι), suggesting overwhelming, almost shuddering anguish. If Christ Himself entered into deep darkness in His final hours, it should not surprise us that some of His servants taste shadows of that darkness in their dying moments. A distressing element in a Christian's NDE may be a test, an attack, or a refining — not a verdict.

Do These NDEs Match Biblical Imagery?

Let me address one more piece honestly. Critics sometimes claim that distressing NDEs cannot be biblical because they don't match the lake of fire imagery exactly. But that argument cuts both ways. The Bible itself offers a remarkable variety of images for the realm of the lost: outer darkness (Matthew 8:12), unquenchable fire (Mark 9:43), a furnace (Matthew 13:42), separation from the Lord's presence (2 Thessalonians 1:9), a bottomless pit (Revelation 9:1), and outside the gates of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 22:15).¹⁷ Some of these images are explicitly apocalyptic and figurative. None pretends to be the whole picture.

NDE reports show similar variety: dusky landscapes filled with shuffling, dejected souls; outer darkness with fire elsewhere; cold and watery caves with the sound of weeping; pits and abysses; mocking voices in a featureless void.¹⁸ This variety is not evidence against authenticity. It is what we should expect if NDErs are getting partial glimpses of a real but vast intermediate realm — and if some of them are also encountering demonic deception laid over the experience. The biblical picture is partial, varied, and grave. The NDE picture is partial, varied, and grave. The two pictures are not identical, but they are recognizably describing the same kind of reality.

Pastoral Conclusion

I want to close with a word that is more pastoral than scholarly. Distressing NDEs are not a curiosity. They are a warning, a mercy, and an invitation. A warning, because they show that separation from God is real and conscious. A mercy, because they are temporary glimpses given to people who are still alive and still able to respond. And an invitation, because their consistent long-term effect is to send people seeking — and seekers, our Lord promised, will find (Matthew 7:7). Hades is real but not final. The lake of fire is future, not present. And Jesus stands ready, even at the bottom of the darkest pit a person can fall into, to hear the cry "Jesus, save me" and to lift them out — exactly as He did for Howard Storm. That is the gospel, even in the shadows.