Chapter 10

Hellish NDEs and the Cry from the Darkness

The dark passage belongs to God's pursuit, not to its failure

Howard Storm was not the kind of man who expected to meet God. He was an art professor at Northern Kentucky University. For decades he had worn his atheism like a badge of honor. He took pride in the sharpness of his arguments against faith. He mocked his wife's quiet Christianity and considered anyone who believed in God to be, at best, intellectually weak. In June 1985, while leading a group of students on a trip to Paris, his intestines perforated. He collapsed on the floor of a hospital room and lay there in agony, waiting for surgery that seemed to take forever to arrive.¹

As the pain grew unbearable, something happened that Storm was not prepared for. He felt himself separate from his body. He was standing, looking down at his own form on the hospital bed. He could see his wife sitting beside him. He tried to speak to her. She did not respond. He was, as far as he could tell, dead.²

What followed was not the warm tunnel of light that most NDE accounts describe. Storm heard voices calling to him from outside the room. They were soft at first, friendly, coaxing. "Come with us," they said. "We've been waiting for you." He followed them out of the room and into a corridor that grew steadily darker. The voices remained friendly, even warm. But as they moved deeper into the gray mist, he noticed a change. The figures around him were no longer gentle. Their laughter turned to sneering. Their touches turned to clawing. They began to tear at him, biting and scratching with a cruelty he could barely describe even years later.

Storm fought back. But for every blow he landed, they grew more vicious. He was overwhelmed. He fell to what felt like a filthy ground in total darkness, stripped of every defense, every pretense, every argument he had spent his life building. He had nothing left. No pride. No cleverness. No control.

And in that moment, from somewhere deep in his childhood memory, a scrap of a song surfaced. A children's hymn he had not thought of in thirty years. "Jesus loves me, this I know." He could barely whisper it. But he said the name. Jesus.³

The effect was instant. A pinpoint of light appeared far above him. It grew. It rushed toward him. And when it reached him, it was not an impersonal glow. It was a person, a presence of such overwhelming love that Storm could only weep. The beings that had been tearing at him scattered. He was lifted, held, bathed in a brilliance that he later said made the sun look like a candle. Howard Storm, the lifelong atheist, met Jesus in the darkest place he had ever been.⁴

This chapter is about the experiences we don't usually hear about. The ones that never make it into the bestselling books or onto the talk-show circuit. Not every near-death experience is bathed in light and love. A real number of them are dark, frightening, even hellish. And far from weakening the argument of this book, I believe these dark accounts actually strengthen it. They show us something we might otherwise miss: for some souls, the encounter with God does not begin with warmth. It begins with the taste of what life without God is actually like.

The darkness comes first. Then the cry. Then the rescue.

That pattern matters more than I can say. It tells us that even the dark passage is part of God's pursuit. Not its failure.

Not Every Experience Is Light

In the previous chapters, I've spent a good deal of time with the well-known features of near-death experiences. The out-of-body moment. The tunnel. The light. The being of overwhelming love. The life review. These are real and well-documented, and they matter to this book's argument. But they are not the whole picture.

A smaller but genuine portion of people who come close to death report something very different. Instead of peace, they experience terror. Instead of light, darkness. Instead of a loving presence, they encounter hostile figures, or an empty void, or an overwhelming sense of judgment. Researchers call these "distressing NDEs," and they have been part of the literature since the earliest days of NDE research, even if they have received far less attention than their brighter counterparts.⁶

Raymond Moody's original 1975 study mentioned the possibility of negative experiences but focused almost entirely on the positive ones. Kenneth Ring's early work did the same. The field's initial bias was toward the comforting cases, partly because those were the ones people were willing to talk about and partly because researchers, like everyone else, prefer good news. It took a generation of careful work before the dark side of the NDE landscape was mapped with anything like the rigor given to the light.⁷

Nancy Evans Bush deserves more credit than almost anyone for doing that mapping. She is a former president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) who herself had a distressing experience during childbirth, and she spent decades collecting and studying these accounts. In her book Dancing Past the Dark, she identifies three broad types of distressing NDEs.⁸

The first is what she calls the inverse experience. It contains many of the same elements as the classic NDE: a tunnel, a sense of movement, figures waiting on the other side. But everything feels threatening rather than comforting. The tunnel is suffocating instead of inviting. The figures are menacing instead of welcoming. The light, if it comes at all, burns rather than warms. The person feels drawn in a direction they do not want to go, powerless to resist.⁹

The second type is the void experience. The person finds themselves in utter emptiness. No landmarks. No sound. No light. No presence of any kind. Just a featureless darkness stretching in every direction. It is not painful in the way Storm's account was painful. It is something different, and in its own way, something worse: total isolation. The complete absence of connection to anything or anyone. People who report these experiences often describe the loneliness as more unbearable than any physical pain they have ever known.

Jeffrey Long's research through the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation reinforces this taxonomy. In the largest database of NDE reports ever compiled, Long found that among those who rated the content of their experience, 64.3 percent described it as wonderful, 32.1 percent as mixed, and 3.6 percent as frightening. The hellish subset, containing graphic imagery of torment or hostile beings, is smaller still, perhaps one percent of all reports shared with the database. But Long is careful to note that these figures almost certainly undercount the true prevalence, because people with frightening experiences are far less willing to share them, even on an anonymous website.⁵⁶

I find the void experience particularly striking, because it is hard to explain as a projection of cultural expectations. Most people's mental picture of hell involves fire, demons, and torment. Almost no one grows up imagining hell as total emptiness. Yet that is exactly what some people report. The void does not match any common preconception of what a negative afterlife experience should be. This fact alone suggests that something deeper than expectation is at work.¹⁰

There is also a theological point worth drawing out. Christian thinkers have long spoken of evil as privation, the absence of a good that should be present. Augustine and Aquinas both taught that evil has no independent existence. It is a hole, a lack, a missing piece. If that is right, then the void experience may be the most theologically precise of Bush's three categories. It shows the soul what existence without God actually is: not fire and screaming, but nothing. No warmth. No connection. No meaning. No name. Just a featureless emptiness that goes on and on. That emptiness is what the refusal of God leads to, when carried to its logical end. Not active punishment, but the cold absence of everything that gives existence its point.

The third type is what researchers frankly call the hellish experience. This is Storm's territory. The person encounters hostile beings, experiences active violence or torment, and feels trapped in a place of real suffering. These accounts are the most dramatic, the most disturbing, and the hardest to hear. They are also the ones most commonly suppressed by the people who have them.¹¹

Not everyone who reports a distressing NDE fits neatly into one of Bush's three categories. Some accounts combine elements of all three. A person may begin in the void, encounter hostile figures, and then pass through an inverse version of the classic NDE elements. The boundaries are blurry, as they usually are when we try to impose clean categories on messy human experience. But the three types are useful as a rough map of the territory. They tell us that the dark side of the NDE landscape is not one thing. It has its own variety and its own contours.

Consider a very different kind of distressing account. A woman I will call Margaret, whose story appears in the IANDS research archives, experienced cardiac arrest during surgery. She found herself not in darkness but in a vast, empty plain, stretching in every direction. There was light, but it was thin and gray. There was no warmth in it. No one was there. No voices, no figures, no hostile beings. Just emptiness. She walked for what felt like hours. The silence was total. She described it later as the loneliness of being the last person alive, except without the company of even her own body. She could feel herself dissolving into the emptiness, losing her edges, losing her name. And then she heard, or felt, a single word. Not in English. Not in any language she knew. But she understood it. The word was her name. Someone knew she was there. She reached toward the voice, and the gray light flooded with color, and she was back.⁵⁵

Margaret's story is not as dramatic as Storm's. But it illustrates the same pattern. The void. The helplessness. And then the turning, the reaching, the answer. The cry from the darkness does not always sound like a scream. Sometimes it is a whisper. Sometimes it is just the soul leaning, barely perceptibly, toward the one who already knows its name.

Long also records a case that maps onto this chapter's central argument with striking precision. A woman named Cathleen C. was poisoned with strychnine in her drink. As she lost consciousness, she descended into what she described as the deepest, darkest void she had ever experienced. She heard the anguished cries of what seemed like millions of souls, weeping and wailing, saying nothing, offering no comfort. She had no body. She had no voice. She was, by every measure, helpless.⁵⁷

One other finding from Long's research deserves mention here. Prior studies have established, and Long confirms, that it is simply wrong to assume that morally upright people receive pleasant NDEs while morally troubled people receive hellish ones. The data do not support that neat division. People with no obvious moral failing have reported terrifying experiences, and people whose lives were in serious disarray have reported encounters of overwhelming love. Whatever determines the character of the experience, it is not a simple reward-and-punishment calculus.⁵⁹

Why the Dark Stories Stay Hidden

How common are distressing NDEs? That turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer, for a very human reason.

People do not volunteer these accounts.

Think about it from the experiencer's side. You have just survived a cardiac arrest or a terrible accident. Your family is grateful. Your doctors are relieved. And then someone asks you what you saw on the other side. If what you saw was light and love, the story is easy to tell. People smile. They nod. They say it's beautiful. You feel affirmed.

But if what you saw was darkness and terror? If you felt yourself being torn apart by hostile figures? If you experienced something that felt like hell? The response is very different. People recoil. They look at you strangely. They wonder what you did to deserve it. They wonder what kind of person has that experience when they die. The unspoken question hangs in the room: are you that bad?¹²

So you stay quiet. You tell a softened version, or you tell nothing at all.

Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings was one of the first to document this pattern. In his clinical practice and his book To Hell and Back, he noted that patients who described terrifying experiences immediately after resuscitation often changed their stories within days or weeks. When Rawlings spoke with patients in the first minutes after revival, some told him of horrifying encounters. When other researchers followed up later, those same patients either denied the experience entirely or had replaced it with a milder version. The memory seemed to fade, or the person chose to forget it.¹³

Rawlings had his own biases, and later researchers have rightly noted his tendency to sensationalize his findings.¹⁴ His methodology has been questioned, and his theological conclusions sometimes outran his evidence. But his core observation holds up: the shame factor is real. People who report blissful NDEs become objects of curiosity and even admiration. People who report hellish ones become objects of suspicion. The social pressure runs in one direction, and it pushes the dark stories underground.

Rawlings also raised a question that deserves more attention than it has received. If patients described terrifying experiences minutes after resuscitation and then denied them weeks later, which version is more reliable? In most research contexts, we trust the earliest report, the one closest to the event. A witness statement given at the scene is worth more than a statement given months afterward. If that principle holds here, then the rate of distressing NDEs in the earliest studies may actually be understated, because most NDE researchers conducted their interviews days, weeks, or even years after the event. By then, the memory had either faded or been edited. Rawlings, whatever his faults, was one of the few who talked to patients while the experience was still raw.

Miller draws together the quantitative picture with care. Across the published research, twelve studies involving 1,369 experiencers found that 315 of them, roughly twenty-three percent, reported NDEs ranging from disturbing to terrifying. Nine other studies, involving 459 experiencers, found none at all. The gap is enormous, and Miller argues persuasively that it has more to do with methodology than with reality. The studies that found no distressing cases were often the ones that asked less probing questions, or that interviewed patients long after the event, or that were conducted by researchers whose published posture made it clear they preferred the comforting stories. The studies that found higher rates were the ones that asked harder questions and asked them sooner.⁶⁰

Miller also notes a striking finding from deathbed research. Investigators who interviewed 1,400 hospice patients daily in a New York hospice unit found that while over eighty percent experienced deathbed visions, roughly eighteen percent, about one in five, reported distressing experiences. That figure aligns closely with Bush's NDE estimate and suggests that the dark encounter at the threshold of death is not limited to the cardiac-arrest population.⁶¹

Long's research through the NDERF database adds a further dimension to the underreporting problem. He observes that people who have had hellish NDEs are likely aware that sharing their experience risks negative judgments from others, and that those who have had these experiences may be more comfortable sharing on an anonymous website than in a face-to-face interview. Even so, the hellish accounts remain a small fraction of NDERF submissions. The stigma cuts deep.⁶²

Bush estimates that roughly one in five NDEs may be distressing in some form.¹⁵ Other researchers place the number lower, perhaps five to fifteen percent. The International Association for Near-Death Studies has collected thousands of accounts, and the distressing ones are a clear minority. But a minority of a very large number is still a lot of people. And nearly everyone who studies the question agrees that the true prevalence is higher than the reported prevalence, probably by a significant margin.¹⁶

This matters for honesty. If we are going to take the bright NDEs seriously as data, we have to take the dark ones seriously too. We cannot pick only the evidence we like.

J. Steve Miller, in his careful survey of the NDE literature from a Christian perspective, notes that this honesty problem cuts in more than one direction. Some researchers want to dismiss all distressing NDEs as artifacts of brain chemistry, because the dark data complicates a tidy "everyone goes to the light" story. Others want to use the dark accounts as direct proof texts for a traditional hell, reading every terrifying report as a literal glimpse of eternal damnation. Miller argues that neither extreme serves the evidence well. The right posture is to take the accounts seriously without jumping to conclusions about their final meaning.¹⁸

I think Miller is right. And I want to go a step further. I believe these dark accounts, when read carefully and honestly, are not a problem for this book's argument. They are a confirmation of it. But before I can explain why, I need to address a question that sits underneath all NDE research for a Christian reader.

Weighing the Accounts: The Discernment Question

How much should a Christian trust NDE reports?

If you take the Bible seriously, this is a genuine tension. On one hand, the accounts are too consistent, too cross-cultural, and too well-documented to simply wave away. The veridical cases I discussed in Chapter 6 resist purely materialistic explanation. Something real is happening at the threshold of death. On the other hand, NDEs are not Scripture. They are not revelation. And some of them contain elements that sit awkwardly alongside biblical teaching. A responsible Christian cannot treat every NDE report as though it carried the authority of inspired text.¹⁹

So what do we do with them?

Shaun Tabatt has thought about this question as carefully as anyone I know. His approach is refreshingly practical. Test every account against Scripture. Then ask a simple question: does this experience point me toward Jesus, or is it focused on making the experiencer famous?²⁰

That single question cuts through a tremendous amount of noise. An NDE account that draws the hearer toward Christ, toward repentance, toward a deeper awareness of God's holiness and love, deserves serious attention. An account that inflates the experiencer's ego, contradicts clear biblical teaching, or replaces the gospel with a vague spirituality deserves healthy skepticism. The test is not whether the experience happened but whether its theological content lines up with what God has already revealed.

Tabatt offers a fuller framework of about nine questions a careful reader can bring to any NDE report.²¹ Does the account line up with what Scripture teaches about God, about judgment, about grace? Does the experiencer show the kind of lasting transformation we would expect from a genuine encounter with the living God? Are the fruits of the experience consistent with what the Spirit produces in a person's life? Or does the account lead away from Christ rather than toward him?

In the afterword of The NDE Conspiracy, Tabatt distills his framework into a set of practical questions any reader can carry into any NDE account: Does this fit within what I know about heaven, hell, and the afterlife from the Bible? Does it match up with what I know to be the teachings of historic and orthodox Christian theology? Does this account point me to Jesus, or is it focused on making the experiencer famous? Does it fit within a recognized NDE framework? Is there something about this account that provokes a negative response in my spirit? And finally, what fruit do I see in the life of the experiencer: is the person walking with Jesus or walking away?⁶³ These are not academic questions. They are the kind of questions a pastor or a thoughtful believer can ask in a living room, sitting across from someone who has just shared something they have never told anyone before.

Miller adds a crucial companion principle, and it speaks directly to the distressing NDEs. Even if a dark experience is genuine, even if the person really did encounter the other side, that does not mean they should believe everything they were told during the encounter. If the beings they met were malevolent, then those beings were probably lying. Miller puts it bluntly: demons hate people and typically lie, intimidate, and induce fear. When a hostile being tells a terrified soul that they are doomed, that God cannot help, that nothing is real, those are exactly the words we would expect from a deceiver, not from the God who promises never to leave or forsake.⁶⁴

These are sensible questions, and they apply with special force to the distressing NDEs. When Storm cried out to Jesus and was rescued, his entire life changed. He went from a mocking atheist to an ordained minister. That is the kind of fruit that is hard to explain apart from a real encounter. It passes Tabatt's test. Other accounts, where the experience leads only to confusion or to spiritual claims that contradict Scripture, deserve more caution.

I find this approach wise because it avoids two errors that Christians fall into on opposite sides. The first error is flat dismissal: all NDEs are demonic, and no Christian should pay them any attention. This position has the virtue of simplicity but the vice of ignoring a mountain of evidence, including cases where people obtained verified information they could not have known by any normal means.²² The second error is unquestioning acceptance: every NDE is a genuine trip to heaven (or hell), and we should build our theology around them. This position has the virtue of openness but the vice of placing personal experience above the authority of Scripture.

With that framework in hand, let me look more closely at what the distressing NDEs actually reveal.

The Pattern in the Darkness

When I read through distressing NDE accounts, one thing strikes me more than any other. It is not the variety of the experiences, though they certainly vary. It is the recurring shape.

Case after case follows a pattern that I call the "darkness-cry-rescue" sequence. The person descends into darkness or encounters something terrible. They reach a point of total helplessness, stripped of every resource and every defense. And then, at the very bottom, they cry out. Sometimes they cry out to God. Sometimes to Jesus by name. Sometimes the cry is wordless, just a raw reaching toward something beyond themselves. And in that moment, everything changes.²⁴

We saw this in Storm's account. He was being torn apart by hostile figures in pitch darkness. He had no resources left. No arguments. No strength. No dignity. And from somewhere in his childhood memory came the name of Jesus. He whispered it. And the light came.

This is not a one-time pattern. Bush, who has collected hundreds of distressing accounts, notes that a significant number of them do not end in the darkness. They turn. The person calls out, and something answers. The darkness breaks. The hostile figures flee. Light enters. Love enters. And the person is changed.²⁵

Miller confirms this independently in his study of the NDE literature from a Christian perspective. He identifies what he calls a "conversion-response pattern" in the distressing-NDE data. The person is overwhelmed by darkness, reaches the end of themselves, and turns toward God. The turn does not always involve the name of Jesus, but it always involves a reaching out, a surrender of the self-sufficiency that had kept the soul sealed against God. And the response, when it comes, is always overwhelming in its love and power.²⁶

Cardiologist Michael Sabom's Atlanta Study offers a different angle on the same pattern. In the course of interviewing seventy-one consecutive near-death experiencers, Sabom located two cases of experiences with what the patients described as hell. One was a wheelchair-bound veteran named Jake, who had attempted suicide thirteen years earlier. Jake described a scorched landscape populated by demons who mocked and kicked him. But even in that desolate place, God spoke, not in an audible voice but in a communication Jake understood, telling him that he had thrown away what had been offered. The sky lit up with each word. Sabom notes that Jake's experience, unlike most pleasant NDEs, left him with what psychological testing revealed as an extraordinarily low sense of closeness to God, a score that correlated with his continued vulnerability to suicidal behavior. The dark passage did not, in Jake's case, produce the immediate transformation we see in Storm. But Sabom reads even that outcome theologically: the frightening NDE may represent an unveiling of the soul's own awareness of its distance from God and the dissonance between that distance and the felt presence of divine holiness.⁶⁵

I want to sit with this for a moment, because I think it matters enormously for everything this book argues.

If these dark experiences were simply random brain events, we would not expect them to follow a consistent narrative shape. Random firings do not tell stories with turning points. They do not build toward a climax and resolve in a rescue. They produce fragments, not arcs. Yet account after account describes a darkness that gives way when the person turns toward God.

And if these experiences were simply "trips to hell" in the traditional sense, we would not expect them to contain a rescue at all. A traditional hell has no exit. The gate is locked. The sentence is forever. Yet account after account describes a door that opens when the person cries out.²⁷

The pattern looks like something else entirely. It looks like a pursuit.

What the Darkness Means

I need to be careful here, because I am about to make a theological claim that goes beyond what the data alone can prove. But I believe the claim is well-grounded in Scripture, in the character of God as this book has been developing it, and in the accounts themselves.

I believe the dark passage is the experience of God's holiness met by an unready soul.

Let me explain what I mean. Throughout this book, I have been arguing that God pursues every soul with a love that does not give up. At the threshold of death, the soul meets Christ. In the conscious state beyond death, God continues to draw. At the final judgment, every person stands in God's full, unveiled presence. But what does that meeting feel like for a soul that has spent its whole life running from God? What happens when a heart built entirely on self-sufficiency suddenly encounters the one reality it cannot control?

Think of it this way. The same sun that warms a healthy person's skin burns the person with a severe sunburn. The problem is not with the sun. The sun has not changed. The problem is with the condition of the skin. In the same way, I believe the same divine presence that feels like overwhelming love to a willing soul can feel like terror and agony to an unwilling one.²⁸

This is not a new idea. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has held for centuries that hell is not the absence of God's love but the presence of God's love experienced as torment by a heart that refuses to receive it. We will develop that tradition fully in Chapter 25 and Chapter 26. For now, the point is simpler: darkness in these NDE accounts may not be the absence of God at all. It may be what the presence of God feels like to a soul that is in flight from him.²⁹

Howard Storm was a man who had spent his entire adult life building a world with no room for God. His pride, his arguments, his self-image were all constructed on the foundation of his own self-sufficiency. When he met God's reality at the threshold of death, those carefully built defenses did not protect him. They collapsed. And the collapse felt like being torn apart. It was a kind of tearing apart: the dismantling of a false self before a true self could emerge. The pain was real. But it was not the pain of a God who wanted to hurt him. It was the pain of a man whose entire identity was built on a lie, meeting the truth for the first time.³¹

I find this reading of the dark passage more convincing, and more biblical, than the alternatives. It does not require us to believe that God sends some people to a place of torment while sending others to a place of joy. It asks us to believe something simpler and, I think, truer: that God's presence is always the same, and that our response to it depends on the condition of our hearts.

Consider the pattern in Scripture. When Isaiah saw the Lord "high and lifted up" in the temple, his first response was not joy. It was terror. "Woe is me! For I am lost," he cried, "for I am a man of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:1, 5).³² The holiness of God, encountered directly, felt like judgment before it felt like grace. Isaiah needed the coal from the altar, the purifying touch, before the encounter could move from agony to calling. The darkness came first. Then the cleansing. Then the mission.

Peter had a similar moment. When the miraculous catch of fish revealed who Jesus really was, Peter did not throw his arms around the Lord in gratitude. He fell to his knees and said, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord" (Luke 5:8). The closeness of holiness did not produce comfort. It produced conviction. Peter's first instinct was to run. Jesus did not let him.

And notice what happened next. Jesus did not say "Fine, go away." He said, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men" (Luke 5:10). The conviction gave way to calling. The terror gave way to purpose. The encounter moved from judgment to grace, but only because Peter stayed long enough for the whole thing to unfold. If Peter had been pulled away after the first moment, the story would have ended in fear. Because he stayed, it ended in mission.

That distinction matters for the dark NDE. Many of these accounts capture only the opening of the encounter, the fear, the conviction, the stripping away. The person is revived before the encounter can complete its full arc. What if the dark passage is the Isaiah moment, the Peter moment, and the rescue that follows is the coal on the lips, the call to come and follow? What if the darkness is not the whole story but only the first chapter?

This idea, which I think of as the "incomplete encounter," matters for another reason too. It means we should be cautious about building too much on any single distressing NDE. If the person was pulled back before the full arc unfolded, we are reading a half-finished story. We are looking at the crisis without the resolution, the conviction without the pardon. A doctor who saw only the incision and not the healing would think surgery was nothing but violence. A reader who stops at the dark passage and does not see the cry and the rescue will draw the wrong conclusion about what God was doing in that moment.

I see the same pattern in the distressing NDEs. The soul encounters something overwhelmingly real. It is not ready. The encounter feels like agony, like exposure, like falling apart. And then, at the bottom, the cry comes. And the cry is answered.

The Cry That Changes Everything

Let me be precise about what I think the cry is, because this matters for everything this book argues.

The cry from the darkness is the first movement of the soul toward God. It is the instant when the will, which has been running, turns. Not all the way. Not with full understanding. Not even with clean motives. Just a raw reaching out, a "help me," a whisper of a name half-remembered from childhood. It is not a polished prayer. It is not a well-considered theological statement. It is barely a choice in any deliberate sense. But it is enough. The God who is listening does not need a perfect request. He needs an opening.³³

Storm's cry was a children's hymn. Others report simply shouting "God!" or "Help!" or "Jesus!" in their desperation. Some cry out without words at all, just a reaching of the soul toward something beyond the darkness. The specific content is not the point. The direction is. The soul stops running away and turns around. And when it does, even feebly, God is already there.³⁴

I think of Jonah, swallowed by the great fish, sinking into the depths. "Out of the belly of Sheol I cried," he wrote, "and you heard my voice" (Jonah 2:2).³⁵ Notice the structure. He does not cry from a comfortable place. He cries from Sheol itself, from the place of the dead, from the belly of the sea creature. And God hears. The darkness was not outside God's reach. It was inside it.

The psalmist knew this too. "If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:8).³⁶ There is no depth the soul can reach that God has not already reached first. The darkness is not a place where God cannot go. It is a place where God is already waiting.

This gives the cry its full meaning. The person who cries out from the dark passage is not reaching toward a God who might not hear them. They are reaching toward a God who has been there all along, who was present even in the darkness, whose holiness was the very thing that made the darkness feel so terrifying. The cry does not summon God from far away. It opens the soul to a God who was never absent.

What about the hostile figures? What are we to make of the beings that Storm and others encounter in the darkness? I hold this honestly: I'm not sure. They may be real spiritual forces of evil, agents of the darkness that Scripture speaks of (Ephesians 6:12). Or they may be the person's own spiritual darkness turned outward, the accumulated weight of a life lived against God made visible and hostile. Or some combination. Scripture speaks of real spiritual warfare, and I do not dismiss that possibility. But Scripture also speaks of the human heart as "deceitful above all things, and desperately sick" (Jeremiah 17:9), and the dark NDE may be what happens when that sick heart is finally exposed to a holiness it cannot hide from.³⁸

Miller's research strengthens the case for taking the hostile-figure reports seriously. Reports of evil sentient beings, he notes, are so common in distressing NDEs that some researchers include them in their very definition of what makes an NDE negative. In Bush's own distressing experience, beings heckled and mocked her, telling her with chilling authority that she was not real, that her life had never existed, that the whole world was a joke. Other experiencers report being told they are doomed, that God cannot help, that nothing awaits them but torment. Miller points out that these are exactly the kinds of communications we would expect from malevolent beings whose aim is confusion and despair, not truth. The content of the hostile encounter aligns with what Scripture describes as the strategy of the father of lies: to steal, kill, and destroy.⁶⁶

Tabatt presses this insight further. In The NDE Conspiracy, he argues that Satan is actively at work attempting to confuse and twist the gift of NDEs, leading people away from the truths about God revealed in Scripture. Tabatt sees both explicit and subtle demonic influences in some afterlife experiences, and he warns that this is precisely why discernment matters. The existence of hostile beings in distressing NDEs, far from undermining the Christian reading of these experiences, may actually reinforce it: if the biblical worldview is right about the reality of spiritual warfare, then we would expect to find evidence of that warfare in the data, and we do.⁶⁷

I don't think we need to settle this question to understand the main point. Whatever the hostile figures are, they scatter when the name of Jesus is spoken. They have no power against the light. That fact alone tells us something important: the darkness, however real, is not stronger than the love of God.³⁹

The Dark Passage and the Best Possible Approach

Now I want to connect the dark NDE data to the larger argument of this book. And to do that, I need to introduce an idea that will be developed fully in Chapter 23 but that needs to appear here because it changes the way we read every dark passage.

The idea is this. If God knows each person perfectly, and if God wills to give each person the best possible appeal to their freedom, then it follows that the best approach will look different for different souls. For a soul that is already inclined toward God, the gentle invitation of light and love may be enough. But for a soul that is sealed shut by decades of pride, anger, bitterness, or self-sufficiency? For that soul, a gentle approach might simply bounce off. The walls are too thick. The defenses are too strong.⁴⁰

For those souls, the most loving thing God can do may be to let them taste the darkness. Let them feel, even briefly, what life truly apart from God would be like. Not because God enjoys watching them suffer. Because God knows that sometimes the walls will not come down any other way.

I think of a father I once knew whose adult son had fallen deep into addiction. The father tried everything. Gentleness. Firmness. Pleading. Reason. Financial help. Tough love. Nothing worked. Finally, the father did the hardest thing a parent can do: he stepped back and let his son feel the full weight of his choices. It was agonizing for the father. But it was the only road his son would walk. And in the end, it was the road that brought his son home.⁴¹

I believe something like this is happening in the dark passage. God, who knows each soul with perfect clarity, knows that for some the path to "yes" runs through the experience of "no." The darkness is not God abandoning the soul. It is God composing the appeal. It is love taking the only road that particular heart will walk.

This reading also helps with a question that has puzzled researchers for years: why do some people get the dark experience and others get the bright one? If all NDEs are encounters with the same God, why does the experience vary so dramatically?

The answer, on this view, is not that God plays favorites or that the dark experiencers are worse sinners. The answer is that different souls need different approaches. The variation in NDE types is not evidence of divine inconsistency. It is evidence of divine specificity. A God who knows every heart does not use a one-size-fits-all method. He crafts the appeal to fit the soul.⁴³

Let me add a word of honesty here. I am reading the NDE data through a theological lens. I know that. The data themselves do not come with labels saying "this is how God pursues hard hearts." I am interpreting them in light of the character of God as Scripture reveals it, and in light of the argument this book is building. Other readings are possible. A materialist would say the dark NDEs are simply brain events with no spiritual content at all. A strict traditionalist might say they are literal glimpses of eternal punishment. I have given my reasons for preferring the reading I'm offering, and I hold it with appropriate humility. I am making a case, not claiming certainty.⁴⁴

After the Darkness: Transformation

One of the most striking features of the distressing NDE literature is what happens to people after they come back.

Howard Storm became a Christian. Not just a nominal one. He entered seminary, was ordained as a United Church of Christ minister, and spent decades serving a congregation. The man who had spent his career mocking his wife's faith now preached the gospel every Sunday. That kind of transformation is hard to explain as a side effect of oxygen deprivation.⁴⁵

Storm is not alone. Bush documents a range of aftereffects in people who have had distressing NDEs. Many become deeply religious. Others become more compassionate, more attentive to the people around them, more aware of the weight of their own choices. Some report a lasting sense of having been given a second chance, a sense that the experience shook them awake from a way of living that was leading nowhere. The darkness showed them something they could not have seen any other way.⁴⁶

What strikes me about these transformations is how closely they parallel the aftereffects of the bright NDEs. People who come back from the light often report the same things: deeper compassion, less fear of death, a reordering of priorities, a stronger sense of purpose. The content of the experience is opposite, light versus dark, love versus terror. But the fruit is remarkably similar. Both groups come back changed in ways that point toward the same God. The person who met Christ in the light and the person who met Christ at the bottom of the dark are often, ten years later, indistinguishable in the depth of their faith and the quality of their love.

That convergence matters. If the dark passage were simply a random brain event with no spiritual content, we would not expect it to produce the same lasting transformation as the bright encounter. Random terror does not make people kinder. It does not lead to vocational calls or lifelong service. It produces anxiety and avoidance. What we see in the distressing-NDE data is something different: a darkness that hurts and then heals. That pattern does not fit the random model. It fits the pursuit model.

This is exactly what we would expect if the dark passage is part of God's pursuit rather than its failure. A punishment that leads to transformation is not pointless suffering. It is discipline. And the Bible draws a sharp line between the two. "The Lord disciplines the one he loves," the writer of Hebrews says, "and chastises every son whom he receives" (Hebrews 12:6). Discipline hurts. But it produces "the peaceful fruit of righteousness" for those who are trained by it (Hebrews 12:11).⁴⁷

Barbara Rommer, a physician who conducted the largest prior study of frightening NDEs, reached a conclusion that aligns remarkably with this theological reading. She found that frightening NDEs often result in substantial positive life changes, including a greatly reduced fear of death. Some individuals who had terrifying experiences even came to view the experience as a gift and perhaps the most important event of their lives. Long, reviewing scores of frightening NDEs through the NDERF database, reports substantial agreement with Rommer's findings. The changes may take years to manifest fully, but they are real and lasting.⁶⁸

Consider another case from Long's research. Frances Z. was a pill addict who attempted suicide by taking a hundred narcotic capsules with alcohol. During her cardiac arrest, she descended into a dark tunnel where demons surrounded her, tearing at her spiritual body with intense pain. She went deeper and deeper into what she described as hell. But Frances survived, and the experience broke her addiction. She has been sober for eighteen years. She describes her life after the experience as one of regained zeal and newly found compassion: a woman who once cared about no one now tries to help others whenever possible. The darkness did not destroy her. It woke her up.⁶⁹

I do not want to overstate the case. Not every person who has a distressing NDE comes back transformed. Some are left confused, frightened, even deeply traumatized, without a clear framework for making sense of what they went through. Bush documents these cases too, with compassion. These are the people the church most needs to reach, because they are the ones who often have nowhere to turn. If the only interpretation available to them is "you went to hell because you're a bad person," the experience becomes a wound rather than a wake-up call.⁴⁸

The pastoral care of people who have had distressing NDEs is a subject that deserves more attention than it usually gets. These are people who have been to a dark place and come back. Many of them are eager to understand what happened to them. The church should be ready to help, not with easy answers, but with the truth: that even the darkness is within God's reach, and that the cry from the bottom is always heard.

I have sat with people who were afraid to tell their stories. One man, a longtime churchgoer, experienced something dark during surgery and was convinced it meant God had rejected him. He carried that shame for years. When I was finally able to share the reading this chapter offers, that the dark passage is part of God's pursuit and not proof of God's rejection, I watched something break open in his face. It was as if he had been given permission to hope again.

That is what the dark passage means when it is rightly understood. It is not proof that someone is beyond God's reach. It is evidence that God is still reaching, still composing the appeal, still pursuing the soul he loves. And the cry, however feeble, is always heard.

The church also needs to rethink how it talks about these experiences publicly. Too often the only Christian framework available for a distressing NDE is a fire-and-brimstone message: "You saw hell. You'd better get right with God before it's too late." That message may contain a grain of truth, but it misses the bigger picture. The person did not just see darkness. They saw the darkness break. They cried out and were answered. The story is not a warning to be terrified of God. The story is a testimony that God can be found at the bottom of the worst place a soul can reach. That changes everything about how we should respond to the person sitting in front of us.

A Word to the Grieving Reader

If you are reading this chapter because someone you love has died, and you are afraid for them, I need to speak to you directly.

This chapter is not telling you that your loved one is in torment.

That is the opposite of what I am saying. The whole point of the dark passage, as I understand it, is that it is part of God's pursuit, not the end of it. It is the opening movement of an appeal, not the final word of a sentence. If your loved one is in the dark passage, they are in the hands of a God who has not given up on them. The very darkness they may be tasting is itself the sign that God is working, composing the approach most likely to break through their defenses and bring them to the place where they can finally say yes.⁴⁹

I know this is hard to hear. I know you want certainty. It would be easier if I could simply say "everyone goes straight to the light." But this book is committed to honesty, and the evidence says that some people's experience at the threshold of death is dark. What this book adds is not a denial of the darkness. It is a re-reading of it. The darkness is inside God's reach, not outside it. The cry from the darkness is heard. And the God who holds the keys of death and Hades (Revelation 1:18) is the one who answers.⁵⁰

What This Chapter Does Not Claim

Before I close, I want to be clear about what I am not saying, because the claims I'm making are easy to overextend.

I am not claiming that every distressing NDE is a spiritual encounter with God. Some may be. Others may have more ordinary explanations. I have argued in Chapter 6 that the strongest NDE cases resist purely materialistic explanation. But not every NDE is a strong case, and intellectual honesty demands that I hold the weaker ones with an open hand.⁵²

I am not building a theology of hell on NDE reports. The theology of hell in this book is built on Scripture, tradition, and careful reasoning. NDEs are a supporting witness, not the foundation. The full treatment of what hell is and means belongs to Chapter 25 and Chapter 26. I am not asking the data to bear more weight than they can carry.

And I am not claiming that the dark passage is necessary for everyone. Most NDEs are not distressing. Most encounters at the threshold of death, as the literature reports them, are characterized by light, love, and peace. The dark passage appears to be God's approach for certain souls, not a universal experience. The variation is itself the point. A God who knows every heart uses the approach each heart needs.

Miller offers three misconceptions about distressing NDEs that reinforce these cautions, and I want to name them plainly because they are the mistakes I see most often. The first: do not assume that either all distressing NDEs are authentic glimpses of the other side, or that all are hallucinations. Examine each case on its merits, looking for the same markers of authenticity we apply to any NDE, and hold the weaker ones with an open hand. The second: even if a distressing experience was a genuine encounter, the person should not believe everything they were told during it. Hostile beings lie. That is what they do. A terrified soul does not owe credence to its tormenters. The third, and perhaps the most pastorally important: a distressing NDE does not mean the experiencer is doomed to a negative afterlife, any more than a pleasant NDE guarantees a heavenly one. The experience is a data point, not a verdict.⁷⁰

The Cry Is Heard

Let me close where I began. A man is lying in the darkness. He is being torn apart by forces he cannot see and cannot fight. He has no resources, no defenses, no arguments left. He is an atheist with no theology, no church, no prayers stored up against this moment. All he has is a fragment of a Sunday school song from his childhood, planted there by some teacher whose name he will never know.

"Jesus loves me, this I know."

It was enough.

Not because the words held magic power. Not because the name of Jesus works like a spell. But because the name expressed the one thing Storm needed in that moment: a turning toward the God who was already turning toward him. The cry was tiny. The response was overwhelming. The light came, and the darkness could not hold against it.

John wrote: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:5).⁵⁴ That sentence is the argument of this whole chapter in nine words. The darkness is real. The terror is real. The agony is real. But the light is stronger. It has always been stronger. And it will not be stopped by the darkness, any more than a sunrise can be stopped by the night that came before it.

The God who holds the keys of death and Hades (Revelation 1:18) does not lose those keys in the dark. He carries them there. And when the cry comes from the deepest place a soul can reach, he is already reaching back.

In the next chapter, I want to give this encounter its philosophical depth. The Jesuit theologian Ladislaus Boros proposed that death is not merely something that happens to us but the first fully personal act of the soul, the one moment in which a person finally sees clearly and chooses with their whole self. What Boros offers is a framework for understanding why the threshold of death is a place of such intensity, whether the experience is light or dark. His "final decision" hypothesis gives the moment its depth. This book gives it its length.