Chapter 20

Distressing NDEs and Frightening Deathbed Experiences — What They May (and May Not) Mean

Frank was sixty-eight years old when he finally told someone. He had carried the secret for thirty years.

He sat across from his pastor in a small office on a Tuesday afternoon, a cup of coffee cooling in his hands. His wife had urged him to come. She did not know what he was going to say. Neither did Frank, really. He had rehearsed it many times over the years and never managed to say it out loud.

"Pastor," he began, and then he stopped. He looked at the floor. He started again. "When I was thirty-eight, I had a heart attack at work. They said I was gone for almost three minutes. And while I was gone…" He swallowed. "While I was gone, I went somewhere. And it wasn't good."

The pastor waited. Frank kept his eyes on the carpet.

"It was dark. I was falling. There were things there — figures — and they were not friendly. I was alone in a way I had never been alone before. I thought, This is it. This is what I am. I thought I was lost forever."

He looked up. His eyes were wet.

"I have been a Christian since I was twelve. I love Jesus. I have served in this church for twenty-five years. And I have never told anyone what I saw, because I was afraid of what they would think. I was afraid of what God thought. I was afraid that experience meant something about me — something true — and that the rest of my Christian life has been a kind of pretending."

The pastor leaned forward. He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said the only thing Frank needed to hear in that moment: "Frank, I believe you. Tell me everything."

What Distressing NDEs Are

For most of the popular books on near-death experiences, the picture painted is one of light, peace, beautiful gardens, and tender reunions with deceased loved ones. That picture is real, and most NDEs really do involve those features. But it is not the whole picture.¹

Researchers Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush have spent decades studying the minority of NDEs that are not luminous but distressing. Their best estimates, drawn from multiple studies over more than forty years, suggest that somewhere between roughly one in twenty and one in five NDEs include some distressing element. The exact figure is hard to pin down because distressing experiences are vastly underreported.² Older studies of resuscitated patients interviewed soon after the event have sometimes turned up much higher percentages, suggesting that many distressing experiences are quietly buried by the experiencer in the days that follow.³

Greyson and Bush, in their landmark study of fifty distressing NDEs, identified three broad types. Knowing these categories helps a pastor or family member sit more wisely with someone who has had one.⁴

The first type is sometimes called the inverse NDE. The features are the same as the typical pleasant NDE — a tunnel, a light, a sense of leaving the body, a being of light. But every feature is felt as menacing rather than peaceful. The light feels harsh and exposing rather than warm. The tunnel feels like a trap. The being feels like a judge or a captor. The same elements appear, but the emotional tone is fear instead of peace.

The second type is the void NDE. Here the experiencer feels caught in a vast emptiness — abandoned, isolated, "condemned to a featureless void for eternity," as Greyson and Bush describe it.⁵ There is often no torment in this type, only the deep ache of being utterly alone, with no God, no love, no future. For some people, the void is the worst experience of their lives.

The third type is the hellish NDE. This is what most readers picture when they hear the phrase "bad NDE." There is darkness, fire, pits, demonic figures, taunting voices, sometimes scenes of suffering souls. Hellish NDEs are the rarest of the three categories. Jeffrey Long's NDERF database puts them at roughly one percent of all NDEs reported.⁶ They are real cases, documented in peer-reviewed research, and they cannot be honestly waved away.

Frightening deathbed experiences are also real, though much less studied. Christopher Kerr's Hospice Buffalo study of more than 1,400 dying patients found that around eighteen percent of end-of-life dreams and visions were distressing rather than comforting.⁷ Most of those distressing visions did not involve hell-imagery. Many involved unresolved relationships, old traumas, or the dying person's own anxiety about death itself. Some distressing DBEs settled into peace as the dying person's family or chaplain helped them name what they were seeing.

Why These Experiences Stay Hidden

Frank carried his secret for thirty years. He is not unusual.

People who have distressing NDEs often hide them — sometimes for decades, sometimes for the rest of their lives. The reasons are not hard to understand. There is shame. There is the fear that the experience means something terrible about who they really are. There is the worry that family members will be frightened, or that fellow church members will draw cruel conclusions ("So, what did you do to deserve that?"). There is the simple ache of having no language with which to describe it.⁸

Researchers note that the very stereotype many Christians carry — that good people have heavenly NDEs and bad people have hellish ones — is one of the main reasons distressing NDEs stay hidden. It is also the very stereotype the research consistently fails to support. Many people who have lived deeply selfish lives report luminous, joyful NDEs, while devout believers occasionally report distressing ones.⁹ The neat moral arithmetic we sometimes want to apply does not hold.

For pastors and family members, the practical lesson is simple and important: the church must be a safe place to bring a difficult experience. If the only stories of NDEs we will hear without flinching are the beautiful ones, then the people in our pews who have had frightening ones will go to their graves carrying their secret. We do not have to know what every distressing experience means. We do have to be willing to sit with them.

One Story That Changes the Picture: Howard Storm

The story of Howard Storm is widely known among NDE researchers, and it deserves a brief mention here, because his experience changed how many Christians think about distressing NDEs.¹⁰ Storm's case is treated more fully in Chapter 13, in connection with postmortem opportunity. Here we note only what is essential for our pastoral question.

Howard Storm was an atheist art professor at Northern Kentucky University. In June 1985, while traveling in Paris, his stomach perforated. As he lay in the hospital expecting to die, he found himself out of his body, then drawn down a long corridor by figures who seemed friendly at first and then became menacing. They began to attack him. The experience grew darker and more violent. Storm was, by his own account, in something very like hell.

In his desperation, a single childhood Sunday school song came back to him: Jesus loves me, this I know. He cried out to Jesus. And Jesus came.

The being of light Storm encountered was identifiable to him as Christ. Storm was lifted out of the darkness, comforted, given a life review, and shown a glimpse of the heavenly city. He returned to his body a different man. He left his career as a tenured professor, attended seminary, and became a pastor in the United Church of Christ. He is still pastoring decades later.¹¹

Storm's case does not prove anything about the final destiny of every soul. But it does something pastorally enormous. It shows that even an experience that begins in real darkness can be a moment of God's pursuit, not God's abandonment. The frightening part of Storm's NDE was not the end of the story. It was the prelude to a rescue.

Researchers Barbara Rommer and Nancy Evans Bush have both noted that this pattern is not unique to Storm. Many distressing NDEs end in turn — sometimes through a cry to Jesus, sometimes through a sudden awareness of God's presence, sometimes through an unexpected return to peace.¹² When NDEs have both frightening and pleasant parts, it is far more common for the frightening part to come first and the pleasant part to follow.¹³

What Distressing Experiences Are Not

Here is where pastoral care has to be both gentle and very careful. Bad theology about distressing NDEs has hurt many people. Frank was hurt for thirty years partly because he assumed his experience meant things it did not necessarily mean.

A distressing NDE is not proof that the experiencer is damned. The experiencer is, by definition, not dead. They have come back. They have time. They have breath in their lungs and a future in front of them. Whatever the experience meant, it did not seal a verdict.

A distressing NDE is not necessarily a literal revelation of hell. The Christian doctrine of final judgment and the biblical picture of Gehenna are not the same thing as a brief, perception-shaped experience during a cardiac event. Even those distressing experiences that include classic hell-imagery may be glimpses, warnings, dreams, perceptual filtering, or some combination — but they are not, in themselves, the kind of authoritative revelation that can fund detailed claims about the geography of hell.¹⁴

A distressing NDE is not the experiencer's "true destiny" laid bare. It is not God showing the experiencer who they really are at the bottom. The God who is love does not work that way. He pursues. He calls. He warns when warning is useful. He does not unmask people for the sport of it.

And finally, a distressing NDE is not a tool for pressuring others into the kingdom. Some well-meaning Christians have used hellish NDE accounts as evangelistic battering rams — proof texts to scare unbelievers into faith. The Bible does speak honestly about judgment, and we will not flinch from that. But fear-based evangelism built on dramatic NDE testimony does not match the patient, kind, costly love that Jesus shows in the Gospels. Be careful here. The pulpit is not a place for spiritual horror movies.

What Distressing Experiences May Mean

If we are not allowed to dogmatize, what are we allowed to say? Several real possibilities are on the table, and a wise pastor or friend holds them all loosely.

First, a distressing NDE may be a glimpse of life apart from the mercy of God — a moment when the soul, briefly stripped of God's gracious common presence, perceives what existence without that presence is like. C. S. Lewis suggested in The Problem of Pain that hell is, in a real sense, a person's stubborn turning in upon themselves, away from joy.¹⁵ A distressing NDE may give a momentary perception of that direction, intended as a wake-up call rather than a life sentence.

Second, a distressing NDE may be God's pursuit reaching deeper. The Howard Storm pattern suggests this. Some people will not turn toward Christ until they have been frightened past their pride. The experience does not show God's hostility. It shows God's refusal to let them drift quietly into ruin.

Third, a distressing NDE may be a perceptual experience filtered through the experiencer's own state. Researchers note that distressing NDEs more often occur in people whose level of alertness and consciousness during the event was lower, whose physiological state was more compromised, or who were in a high-anxiety state going into the event.¹⁶ This does not mean the experience was not real. It does mean the lens through which it was perceived was clouded. Two people may walk through the same field at dusk; one sees a peaceful meadow, the other sees a haunted wood. The field is the same. The eyes are different.

Fourth, for some Christian believers, a distressing experience may involve real spiritual opposition. The Bible takes the existence of evil powers seriously (Ephesians 6:12), and Christians from Antony of Egypt to Martin Luther have reported direct attacks from such forces.¹⁷ Where a believer's experience involved fear and confusion but ended in deliverance — through prayer, through the name of Jesus, through the kindness of Christ Himself — it may be that what they passed through was a real assault, ending in a real rescue.

The honest pastoral answer is that we do not always know which of these factors — or what mixture of them — is at work in a given case. That is not a failure. That is humility before mystery. We hold what Scripture clearly says, we hold the experience as the experiencer reports it, and we pray for wisdom.

How the Bible Holds These Tensions

The Bible never describes distressing near-death experiences directly. It does, however, hold together two truths that bear on what we have just said.

The first is that judgment is real. Jesus warned about judgment more often than any other figure in the New Testament. He spoke of weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 25:30). He told the parable of the rich man, who lifted up his eyes in Hades, in torment, and saw Lazarus far off (Luke 16:23). The reality of conscious suffering apart from God's gracious presence is not an invention of medieval art or modern fundamentalism. It is in the words of Christ.¹⁸

The second truth is that the same Christ who warned of judgment pursues people, even into the dark places. The mysterious passage in 1 Peter 3:18–4:6, treated more fully in Chapter 13, suggests that the crucified Christ went, in His spirit, to "the spirits in prison" between His death and resurrection.¹⁹ Whatever the precise meaning of that passage, it shatters the picture of a Christ who simply abandons sinners. The God of the Bible is the God who descends. He goes after lost sheep, lost coins, lost sons. He goes, in some real sense, into Hades itself. The author of this book holds an open hope (laid out more fully in Chapter 13) that God's gracious pursuit continues even after death — not as universalism, but as the long, patient love of a God who does not give up easily.

Hold both. Judgment is real, and so is the pursuit. The frightening NDE need not be evidence that the pursuit has stopped. It may be evidence that the pursuit has just become more direct.

Back to Frank

The pastor walked Frank through this slowly, over many weeks. He told him: I believe you. Your experience was real. It does not mean you are damned. It may have been God's pursuit before you knew you needed to be pursued. It may have been an attack from the enemy that ended when you came back to your body, and to a life of faith you had already received. We do not have to figure it all out today. Tell me everything. Let us pray it through. Let us read Scripture together. Let us walk this with discernment, and not in a hurry.

Frank cried more in those weeks than he had cried in thirty years. He told his wife. He told a Christian counselor. Slowly, the secret became something he could carry instead of something that carried him.

He did not get neat answers to every question. He did get something better: he got a brother in Christ to walk with, an honest framework, and a renewed confidence that the Jesus he had loved since age twelve was the same Jesus who, even in the dark place, had not been absent from him. He had simply not seen Him yet.

For Your Reflection

1. Have you ever heard someone share a frightening near-death or deathbed experience? How did the people around them respond — and how do you wish they had responded?

2. If you have had such an experience yourself, what fears has it raised that you have never said out loud? Who, in your life, might be safe to say them to?

3. What do you do with the idea that a distressing experience may be God's pursuit rather than God's rejection? Does that ring true to you, or does it raise more questions?

4. Are there places in your own grief where the silence of the Christian community has made things harder rather than easier?

5. What does it look like, in practical terms, for your church to be a safer place for hard stories?

6. When you read about Frank, what part of his story most reminded you of yourself or of someone you love?

7. If you brought a hard experience to Jesus today — without trying to figure it all out first — what would you most want to say to Him?

For Pastors and Caregivers

Key pastoral observation. Many pastors have never been trained for this conversation, and most distressing-NDE experiencers can read that lack of training in our faces from the first sentence. The shame these experiencers carry is real, and decades-long, and it shapes how they hear every word from us. The single most important thing a pastor can do in the first conversation is to slow down, lower the volume, and communicate — with body language, tone, and word — that this person is safe in your office. Most of the healing begins there, before any theology is spoken.

Watch for distressing DBEs at the bedside as well. Most deathbed experiences are comforting, but a meaningful minority are not.²⁰ A dying person who is agitated, frightened, or speaking of dark figures is not necessarily lost. They may be working through unresolved guilt, an old trauma, or simple anxiety about dying. Hold their hand. Pray softly. Read a psalm. Ask if they would like to make peace with anyone or anything. Many distressing DBEs settle into peace when the dying person is not alone in them.

What to say. "I believe you. I want to understand. Tell me what happened — all of it, in your own time." "Your experience does not mean you are damned. It does not even mean you saw hell, in the literal sense. It means something — something we will work to understand together." "Whatever it was, Jesus is bigger than it, and He has not left you."

What NOT to say. "Well, it was probably hell — you'd better straighten up." (This crushes a person who is already crushed and reduces a holy God to a roadside billboard.) "It was just a bad dream — don't worry about it." (This dismisses an experience that the person has carried for decades.) "Maybe you weren't really a Christian." (Almost never helpful, almost always destructive, and almost always wrong.) "I don't really believe in NDEs, but…" (The "but" never lands; you have already shown the person that their experience does not count for you.)

Watch-outs. First, psychological trauma after a distressing NDE is real, and pastoral care alone may not be enough. A trusted Christian counselor — particularly one familiar with spiritually transformative experiences — is often a vital partner. The American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE) maintains a directory of trained professionals and is worth knowing about. Second, beware the temptation to use the experiencer's story as a sermon illustration, even with permission. Most experiencers who agree to that later regret it. Honor their privacy.

Next steps. Read Greyson and Bush's research on distressing NDEs, especially Bush's Dancing Past the Dark. Read Howard Storm's My Descent into Death. Read the relevant chapter in J. Steve Miller's Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? for a Christian-pastoral framework. And then, when the next Frank walks into your office, do the simplest and most powerful thing: lean forward, look him in the eye, and say, "I believe you. Tell me everything."

For Further Reading

Nancy Evans Bush, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences. The most thorough single treatment of distressing NDEs by a researcher who has spent decades listening to experiencers; especially helpful on the categories and aftermath of distressing experiences.

Howard Storm, My Descent into Death. The classic first-person account of a distressing NDE that became a moment of Christ's pursuit and rescue; pastorally invaluable for both experiencers and those who walk with them.

J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? Especially the discussion of distressing NDEs and the multiple Christian frameworks for understanding them; carefully evangelical and pastorally sensitive.

Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife. The chapter on hellish NDEs in the NDERF database is fair, sober, and clinically careful.

Barbara Rommer, Blessing in Disguise: Another Side of the Near-Death Experience. An older but still useful study of distressing NDEs, particularly strong on long-term aftereffects.

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, especially the chapter on hell. Lewis's treatment of hell as a state of self-imposed turning is theologically illuminating for thinking about what some distressing experiences may briefly disclose.