Chapter 10

Hellish NDEs and the Cry from the Darkness

When the encounter opens in shadow, and the cry is still heard

Howard Storm was an art professor. He was also an atheist, and a thorough one. He had no interest in God, no patience for religion, and no expectation that death held anything at all. Then, on a June afternoon in 1985, his appendix ruptured in a Paris hospital room. What happened next took everything he believed and tore it apart.¹

I want to tell you his story. But first I need to say something about why it matters here.

In the last five chapters we have built a case. The soul survives death. The dying process opens onto a real encounter. Time in that encounter is not bound by the clock. And the God who meets the dying is a God whose love does not end at the grave. If you have read those chapters, you may have a picture forming: a warm, gentle meeting with a being of light and love. Many near-death experiences do look that way.

Not all of them do.

A real minority of people who come close to death report something very different. Their experience is dark. It is terrifying. Some call it hellish. And if this book is honest, it has to face these reports head-on. I think they are some of the most important evidence we have. They tell us something about God's pursuit that the pleasant accounts alone cannot tell us. They show us what love looks like when it meets a soul that is not ready for it. And they show us that even from the very bottom of that darkness, a cry for help is heard.²

The Data: What Distressing NDEs Look Like

The modern study of near-death experiences began with Raymond Moody's Life After Life in 1975. Moody's cases were almost all positive. Light, peace, love, a warm welcome. It was the cardiologist Maurice Rawlings who first drew wide attention to the other side. In Beyond Death's Door (1978) and To Hell and Back (1993), Rawlings reported cases from patients he had personally resuscitated. Some described terrifying scenes of fire, darkness, and hostile figures.³

Rawlings made an observation that still shapes this field. He noticed that patients who reported dark experiences often forgot them within hours or days. Patients who reported pleasant ones remembered them clearly. This led him to argue that distressing NDEs are far more common than the published numbers suggest. People suppress them. They refuse to talk about them. They rewrite them in memory as something less frightening.⁴

I should be candid: Rawlings was not always careful with his data. His theological agenda sometimes outran his clinical precision. He wanted to use distressing NDEs as proof of a literal, eternal hell, and that goal led him to overstate his case. Later researchers have confirmed his core observation about underreporting while noting his lack of rigor.⁵

The most careful study of distressing NDEs came from Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush. In a landmark 1992 article in the journal Psychiatry, they gathered the available cases and sorted them into three broad types.⁶

How common are these experiences? Estimates vary, but the most widely cited figure puts distressing NDEs at roughly one in five. Some researchers believe the true number is higher once underreporting is factored in.⁷ Nancy Evans Bush went on to write the definitive book on the subject, Dancing Past the Dark, published in 2012. She spent decades collecting and studying these accounts. She was herself a distressing-NDE experiencer, which gave her both credibility and compassion in handling the data.⁸

The inverse type is especially interesting. Some people report all the same elements as a radiant NDE, yet they experience them with fear. The same tunnel feels like a trap. The same light feels like exposure. Bush suggests that the difference may have less to do with what is "out there" than with how the person's soul receives it.⁹ That observation will matter when we come to the theology.

The void type is also worth pausing on. People who experience it describe a vast, empty nothingness. No ground. No sky. No other people. Just the self, alone, in a darkness that has no edges and no end. Some say it felt like being erased. Others describe a crushing sense of total meaninglessness. What strikes me about the void accounts is what they are missing. There is no God. There is no love. There is no connection to anyone. The void is what it might feel like to get exactly what a self-enclosed life asks for: a world with nothing in it but you.

What matters for our purposes is not the exact percentage. What matters is the pattern that runs through these reports, and what that pattern means for the question this book is trying to answer.

Howard Storm: The Anchor Case

So let me tell the story I promised.

Storm was lying in his Paris hospital bed, waiting for emergency surgery, when his condition worsened sharply. He felt himself leaving his body. He could see his wife sitting by the bed. He could see his own body lying there. So far, this sounds like many other NDEs.¹⁰

Then something different happened. He heard voices. They were calling him, urging him to follow. He did. He walked into a gray, foggy place, led by figures he could not quite see. The light faded. The fog thickened. And the beings who had been friendly turned hostile. They began to mock him. Then they began to push him. Then they attacked him.

Storm describes what followed as an experience of being torn apart, piece by piece, by creatures who seemed to enjoy his suffering. I will not soften this. His published account is one of the most harrowing things in the NDE literature. He was a grown man, a professor, a person who prided himself on self-reliance. And he was reduced to total helplessness. He lay in the dark, broken, stripped of every defense he had ever built.¹¹

Then something stirred in his memory.

It was a fragment. A scrap of a song he had heard as a child in Sunday school, decades earlier. "Jesus loves me, this I know." He could barely remember the words. He had not been inside a church since childhood. He had no active religious faith. But from the bottom of that darkness, with no plan and no strategy, he cried out: "Jesus, save me."¹²

I come back to Storm's account again and again. The pattern is unmistakable. Darkness. The cry. The answer. That sequence is the whole argument of this book in miniature.

But there is something else about Storm's case that I want to notice. The aftereffects. A near-death experience is not just something that happens to a person. It changes them. And the changes in Storm were among the most dramatic in the NDE literature. This angry, self-sufficient atheist became a gentle, humble minister who spent his life helping others. His marriage changed. His priorities changed. The way he treated people changed. Something broke open inside him in that dark place, and what came out the other side was a different man.

That kind of transformation is hard to explain if the experience was only a hallucination. Hallucinations do not typically remake a person's character from the ground up. But an encounter with the living God might.

The Pattern: Darkness, Cry, Rescue

Storm is not alone. When you read through the distressing-NDE literature, the same pattern surfaces repeatedly. The details differ. The imagery varies. Some experiences feature fire; others feature emptiness; others feature hostile beings. But in the cases where the experience does not simply end with medical resuscitation, there often comes a turning point. The person calls out for help, and something answers.¹⁴

Bush documents this pattern carefully in Dancing Past the Dark. She resists easy answers. She does not claim that every distressing NDE resolves in rescue; some people are simply revived while still in the dark experience. She does not claim that the cry is always specifically Christian. Some people call out to God. Some call out to Jesus. Some simply scream for help. But the pattern is there, and it is hard to miss.¹⁵

What is the cry, exactly? I think it is the moment when self-sufficiency breaks. It is the moment when a person stops trying to save themselves and admits that they need something they do not have. For Storm, it was the moment when the professor and the atheist and the self-made man all fell away, and what was left was a child crying for his Father. That may be the most honest prayer any person can pray.

Other researchers have noted a similar shift. Greyson, in his 2021 book After, observes that distressing experiences sometimes change into positive ones during the course of the event. The darkness gives way. The terror lifts. What looked like a dead end opens into something else. He is careful not to make theological claims about why this happens. But the data are consistent with what I am about to argue.¹⁶

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that every person who has a distressing NDE was a terrible person. I am not saying that the darkness is punishment in any simple sense. Bush has pushed back hard against the idea that distressing NDEs are God's way of scaring sinners straight. Some of the people who have these experiences are ordinary, decent folks. Some are children. The triggers are not straightforward, and any neat correlation between moral character and NDE type breaks down under the evidence.¹⁸

What I am saying is this: the dark passage is consistent with the theology this book is building. And it tells us something that the light-only picture misses.

The Theological Reading: Why Darkness Fits

Think about what this book has argued so far. God meets every dying person with a love that is perfectly suited to that person's soul. In Chapter 23 I will call this the "staged approach," drawing on Jerry Walls's concept of optimal grace. It means the best possible sequence of appeals to each soul, composed by a God who knows that soul completely.¹⁹

For some people, the best approach begins with gentleness. The warm light. The overwhelming love. The tender invitation. Those souls are ready, and they respond.

But some souls are not ready for gentleness. Some are so hardened, so armored, so committed to running their own lives that a gentle welcome would simply bounce off. Howard Storm was that kind of soul. He had spent decades building walls. A soft invitation would not have reached him. He needed something else first. He needed to feel what life apart from God actually tasted like. Not as a theory. Not as a warning in a sermon. As a reality he could not escape from.²⁰

This is not God torturing anyone. That distinction matters, and I want to press it. The darkness Storm entered was the truth of the life he had built. When he followed those voices into the fog, he was following the logic of a world without God. In that world the self is king. Love is a transaction. Strength is the only safety. The hostile beings who stripped him bare were showing him the end of that road. And when every defense was gone, then something deeper than his atheism rose up and cried for help.

That cry was real. And the answer was immediate.

I want to be careful here. I am making a theological reading of the NDE data, not a scientific one. The data do not prove this reading. But they fit it well. The staged-approach model says that God knows, through what theologians call middle knowledge, which sequence of experiences will best reach each person. For the soul that would respond to gentleness, the encounter opens in light. For the soul that needs to taste its own darkness first, the encounter opens in shadow. In both cases the goal is the same: a free, loving "yes."²²

Remember Bush's observation about the inverse type. Some people experience the very same features as a radiant NDE but feel terror instead of peace. The same divine presence, met by a different heart. That is exactly what the divine-presence model of hell will argue in later chapters: hell is not a place far from God. It is the experience of God's full presence by a soul that wants nothing to do with Him. The fire is not separation. It is God, met by a soul not ready to receive Him.²³

This tells us something about God's character that I do not want you to miss. A God who lets some souls taste darkness before meeting them in light is not a God who enjoys suffering. He is a God who knows each person well enough to meet them where they actually are. A grieving mother may need the warm embrace. A self-armored skeptic may need the collapse of his defenses first. The love is the same. The wisdom that shapes the approach is the same. Only the path is different, because the people are different.

And the destination, in every case, is the offer of Christ.

Two Errors to Avoid

Before I go further, I want to name two mistakes that people commonly make with this material. Getting either one wrong distorts the picture badly.

The first error is treating dark NDEs as proof of eternal hell. Some popular writers, Rawlings among them, have used these accounts as evidence that a literal, never-ending hell exists. They claim that the experiencers were getting a preview of their eternal future. I do not think this is right. These are experiences of the dying, not reports from the damned. They occur in people who were resuscitated, people who came back, people whose story did not end there. To treat them as postcards from eternal punishment is to claim far more than the evidence supports.²⁴

The second error is explaining them away. Some researchers, uncomfortable with the darkness, have tried to reduce these experiences to brain chemistry. Oxygen deprivation. Temporal-lobe seizures. The psychological residue of guilt and anxiety. I find these explanations thin. They face the same basic problem as physiological explanations of pleasant NDEs. They fail to account for the verified details. They fail to account for the life-changing aftereffects. And they fail to account for the deep coherence of these experiences across different people and cultures.²⁵

Hold both truths at once. Distressing NDEs are real. They are meaningful. They are neither previews of eternal damnation nor neurological artifacts. They are moments in which the soul encounters something beyond itself, and the encounter is not yet finished. That is the reading this book offers.

The Dark Passage and the Extended Offer

Here is where this chapter connects to the larger argument.

In Chapter 5, I described the dying process as a doorway with depth. In Chapter 8, I argued that the intermediate state is not a sealed prison but a place where God's pursuit continues. What the dark NDEs show us is the bridge between those two ideas.

The dark passage at the moment of death can extend into the intermediate state. The felt taste of separation from God that Storm experienced for a few minutes could become something longer. For a soul that does not cry out at the threshold, that taste of darkness could become the sustained experience of Hades. This is what I mean when I say that Hades is the felt reality of a life lived apart from God. It is not a punishment inflicted from the outside. It is the lived experience of one's own refusal, held in the hands of a God who has not given up.²⁶

And the cry remains answerable.

That is the point I want to press home. In Storm's case, the cry came within the dying experience itself, probably within minutes of clock time. But this book argues that the same cry can be made later. It can be made in Hades, during the conscious intermediate state. It can be made at the final judgment, when the soul stands in the full, unveiled presence of God. At every stage, the God who holds the keys to the realm of the dead (Revelation 1:18) is listening. The door does not close until the judgment closes it.²⁷

Think of the dark passage, then, as the beginning of a longer pursuit. For some souls, the darkness at the deathbed is enough. They cry out, and they are rescued at once, as Storm was. For others, the darkness may need to deepen. The self-deception may need to be stripped away layer by layer, over time, in the felt reality of Hades. Only then may the person be ready to hear what God has been saying all along. That is not cruelty. That is patience. It is the patience of a God who would rather take the long road than lose the soul.

What the Dark Passage Does Not Mean

I do not want anyone to walk away from this chapter afraid for their dying loved one. So let me say clearly what the dark passage does not mean.

It does not mean that every dying person goes through darkness. Most NDE reports are positive, full of light and peace and love. The dark passage is for some, not for all. This book's theology says it comes only when it is the best path for that particular soul.²⁹

Nor does it mean that the person who enters darkness is abandoned. Storm's whole account is proof of the opposite. The darkness was real. But it was not the final word. Christ came for him in the middle of it.

It does not mean that a dark beginning guarantees a dark ending. The life review and the deeper dynamics of the encounter still come for every soul. The darkness is a passage, not a destination. It is where some souls begin their meeting with God. It is never where God intends them to stay.

And it does not mean that darkness equals damnation. This chapter is describing the beginning of an encounter, not the end of one. The dark passage opens the door. What happens on the other side of the cry is the meeting with Christ, the seeing of the truth, and the offer of love. The later chapters of this book will develop that offer in full. The question about whether anyone finally and forever refuses that love is a real question, and it gets a real answer in Chapters 20 through 22. But that is a different question from the one this chapter asks.

The question this chapter presses is simpler. Can God reach a person who is in the dark? The NDE evidence says yes. Storm's experience says yes. And the theology of this book says yes. The God who descended into the realm of the dead has already been to the darkest place there is, and He did not come back empty-handed.

The Cry and the Heart of the Book

I want to end where I began.

A man on a hospital-room floor in Paris. Broken and alone in a place darker than anything he had imagined. Reaching into a childhood memory he thought he had forgotten. Crying, "Jesus, save me."

That cry is the heartbeat of this entire book.

Everything I am building here comes down to one claim: the cry from the dark place is heard. It is heard at the deathbed. It is heard in Hades. It is heard at the judgment. There is no depth to which a person can fall where the love of God cannot reach them. There is no darkness so thick that the light refuses to enter it.³⁰

Some people will never need the dark passage. They will meet the light at death and say yes with open arms. I thank God for that. But some people need the darkness first. Some people need to feel the full weight of their own refusal before they can let it go. For those souls, the dark passage is not cruelty. It is the last resort of a love that refuses to quit.

I think of the people I have known who were most like Howard Storm. People who had built their lives around control, around self-reliance, around the certainty that they needed no one and nothing beyond themselves. People whose armor was so thick that a gentle word would never have reached them. For each of them, I hold this hope: that when the armor finally breaks, as it will, there will be a voice waiting in the darkness. And that voice will sound like home.

Psalm 139 says it plainly: "If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:8, ESV). Even there. Even in that darkness. God is there.

And the cry is always heard.