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Flatliners II: TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE · The Occult Rejects

0:02
Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen?
0:12
Speaker 1: Something wonderful. What? I understand how you feel. You see,
0:18
Speaker 1: it's all very clear to me now. Welcome to the
0:25
Speaker 1: Occult Rejects. In the first Flatliners episode, we spent most
0:30
Speaker 1: of our time looking at the border between life and
0:32
Speaker 1: death from the outside, because modern medicine has given us
0:35
Speaker 1: ways to observe that boundary that would have been unimaginable
0:39
Speaker 1: even a few generations ago. We looked at what happens
0:42
Speaker 1: to cerebral blood flow when the heart stops, what EEG
0:46
Speaker 1: can and cannot tell us about the dying brain, what
0:48
Speaker 1: researchers have recorded during cardiac arrest and resuscitation, and why
0:53
Speaker 1: the biological process we casually call death is not one
0:56
Speaker 1: perfectly synchronized moment in which heartbeat, awareness, electrical activity, and
1:01
Speaker 1: cellular viability disappear together. We also looked at the AWARE studies,
1:07
Speaker 1: apparent out-of-body perception, CPR-induced consciousness, and the strange fact that
1:12
Speaker 1: some people return from catastrophic medical emergencies carrying memories of
1:16
Speaker 1: the interval during which everyone around them assumed they were unconscious.
1:21
Speaker 1: What we did not really have room to do was
1:23
Speaker 1: stay inside those experiences long enough to understand how elaborate, frightening,
1:28
Speaker 1: and sometimes completely alien they can become. Because popular culture
1:32
Speaker 1: has created such a standardized picture of the near-death experience
1:36
Speaker 1: that most people can almost tell the story before hearing it.
1:40
Speaker 1: Somebody leaves the body, enters a tunnel, encounters brilliant light,
1:44
Speaker 1: meets deceased relatives, fears overwhelming love, and returns convinced that
1:49
Speaker 1: death should no longer be feared. Experiences like that certainly
1:53
Speaker 1: exist within the literature. but they are not the entire literature,
1:57
Speaker 1: and researchers studying distressing near-death experiences have been pointing that
2:01
Speaker 1: out for decades. In 1992, psychiatrist Bruce Grayson and researcher
2:06
Speaker 1: Nancy Evans Bush published one of the foundational papers on
2:10
Speaker 1: frightening NDEs and described several broad patterns, including experiences containing
2:16
Speaker 1: familiar NDE features that were interpreted as frightening experiences dominated
2:21
Speaker 1: by apparent non-existence or an endless void. and experiences containing
2:26
Speaker 1: explicitly hellish landscapes, threatening presences, or states of extreme isolation.
2:32
Speaker 1: Their point was not that these reports prove the existence
2:35
Speaker 1: of hell, and that distinction is going to matter throughout
2:38
Speaker 1: everything we discuss tonight, because extraordinary testimony is not the
2:42
Speaker 1: same thing as objective proof of the world being described.
2:46
Speaker 1: Some of the cases we are going to examine were
2:48
Speaker 1: recorded in academic journals, some were preserved through interviews conducted
2:52
Speaker 1: years later, Some contain details that changed as memory evolved,
2:56
Speaker 1: and others survive mainly because the experiencer eventually wrote a book.
3:01
Speaker 1: Those differences matter enormously if we are evaluating evidence. But
3:05
Speaker 1: they do not erase the human reality that the people
3:07
Speaker 1: involved remembered something powerful enough to reorganize years or decades
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Speaker 1: of their lives. That is also why this episode is
3:14
Speaker 1: going to work differently from the first one. I am
3:17
Speaker 1: not going to interrupt every story with another explanation of hypoxia,
3:21
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide, temporal parietal integration, anesthesia, REM intrusion, or neurotransmitters,
3:28
Speaker 1: because we have already established that a brain under extreme
3:30
Speaker 1: physiological stress is capable of producing extraordinary alterations of consciousness,
3:36
Speaker 1: while also recognizing that reproducing one feature of an NDE
3:40
Speaker 1: does not automatically explain every feature of every case. Tonight,
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Speaker 1: the emphasis is on the stories themselves, especially the ones
3:48
Speaker 1: that do not fit comfortably into the reassuring model people
3:51
Speaker 1: normally associate with near-death research. And the first one is
3:55
Speaker 1: appropriate because the woman who experienced it eventually became one
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Speaker 1: of the people responsible for forcing the research community to
4:02
Speaker 1: acknowledge that the darker material existed at all. Nancy Evans
4:06
Speaker 1: Bush was 28 years old when she underwent the experience
4:09
Speaker 1: that would eventually shape a substantial portion of her life.
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Speaker 1: Although at the time she possessed none of the vocabulary
4:16
Speaker 1: that would later become associated with near-death experiences. She came
4:20
Speaker 1: from a New England Protestant family of clergy and scholars,
4:23
Speaker 1: and later described herself as having been shaped by the rational,
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Speaker 1: socially conscious liberal Protestantism of the mid-20th century, which is
4:31
Speaker 1: worth knowing because her experience did not emerge from a
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Speaker 1: religious world filled with demons, occult visions, or expectations of
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Speaker 1: supernatural punishment. Decades later, she would become office manager, executive director,
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Speaker 1: and eventually president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
4:50
Speaker 1: But when the experience occurred, she had never heard the
4:52
Speaker 1: expression near-death experience and had no reason to imagine other
4:56
Speaker 1: people were reporting anything remotely similar. The crisis occurred during
5:01
Speaker 1: the delivery of her second child, and what Bush later
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Speaker 1: remembered was not a gradual movement through a conventional tunnel,
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Speaker 1: but an abrupt disruption of ordinary bodily location. She became
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Speaker 1: aware of herself outside the hospital environment, at one point
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Speaker 1: remembering a perspective above what she recognized as the hospital roof.
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Speaker 1: after which everything opened outward into an enormous dark space.
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Speaker 1: She compared the movement that followed to being an astronaut
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Speaker 1: traveling at tremendous speed without a capsule, except there was
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Speaker 1: no spacecraft, no protective body, and no familiar world remaining
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Speaker 1: around her. What made the experience frightening was not physical pain,
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Speaker 1: but scale and orientation, because virtually everything through which a
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Speaker 1: human being normally establishes where they are had disappeared. There
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Speaker 1: was movement through darkness, the feeling of traveling farther and
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Speaker 1: farther from everything recognizable, and then a small group of
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Speaker 1: circular forms appeared ahead. Bush remembered those forms as alternating
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Speaker 1: black and white circles, accompanied by a strange clicking quality,
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Speaker 1: and although she would later associate them with the yin
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Speaker 1: and yang symbol, she maintained that she did not recognize
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Speaker 1: that symbol at the time. More disturbing than their appearance
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Speaker 1: was the impression of intelligence and authority she associated with them.
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Speaker 1: because she did not initially understand them as conventional demons
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Speaker 1: or religious figures, but as something mechanical, contemptuous, and completely
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Speaker 1: at home in an environment where she was the intruder.
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Speaker 1: They seemed to understand something about reality that she did not,
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Speaker 1: and what they communicated to her was far more disturbing
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Speaker 1: than the announcement that she had died. The message, as
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Speaker 1: Bush remembered it, was that nothing had ever existed. The
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Speaker 1: world had never existed, her family had never existed, her
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Speaker 1: life had never existed, and even the self attempting to
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Speaker 1: object this revelation possessed no ultimate reality. She later used
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Speaker 1: the language of annihilation to describe the emotional center of
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Speaker 1: the experience. But annihilation almost understates what frightened her, because
7:00
Speaker 1: annihilation ordinarily assumes something exists before being destroyed. Bush believed
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Speaker 1: she was being shown that there had never been anything
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Speaker 1: to destroy in the first place, which meant that her husband,
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Speaker 1: her children, her memories, the history of the world, and
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Speaker 1: even the consciousness trying desperately to insist that those things
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Speaker 1: were real belonged to an illusion that was finally being exposed.
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Speaker 1: This is a very different form of terror from the
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Speaker 1: traditional image of hell, because hell at least preserves the
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Speaker 1: individual long enough to suffer, while Bush's experience seemed to
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Speaker 1: erase the premise that the individual had ever been real.
7:35
Speaker 1: She tried to resist what was being communicated, but the
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Speaker 1: experience carried the overwhelming subjective authority frequently reported in NDE literature,
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Speaker 1: where people insist afterward that what happened did not possess
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Speaker 1: the unstable quality of an ordinary dream. Bush did not
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Speaker 1: come away claiming that she had literally visited hell, nor
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Speaker 1: did she even remember thinking clearly that she was dead
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Speaker 1: during the experience, but she became convinced that she had
8:00
Speaker 1: encountered something related to death, and she had no language
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Speaker 1: capable of making that experience compatible with the religious and
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Speaker 1: intellectual world she already knew. and she had no language
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Speaker 1: capable of making that experience compatible with the religious and
8:13
Speaker 1: intellectual world she already knew. When she returned to ordinary awareness,
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Speaker 1: the aftermath looked nothing like the familiar story of an
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Speaker 1: experiencer awakening in a hospital and immediately announcing that everything
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Speaker 1: is beautiful. Bush remembered herself psychologically stunned while her newborn
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Speaker 1: was elsewhere receiving care, which gave everyone around her an
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Speaker 1: obvious explanation for why she seemed distressed even though the
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Speaker 1: source of the distress was something none of them knew
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Speaker 1: had happened. She attempted to explain the experience to her
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Speaker 1: husband and stopped, eventually burying most of it for roughly
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Speaker 1: 20 years. That silence is important because whatever explanation we
8:50
Speaker 1: ultimately place upon the origin of the experience, Bush's own
8:53
Speaker 1: account of the aftermath is not one of attention, validation,
8:57
Speaker 1: or immediate spiritual prestige. It is an account of confusion, concealment,
9:01
Speaker 1: and the feeling that she possessed knowledge too frightening to communicate.
9:06
Speaker 1: Several years later, while visiting a friend, Bush encountered a
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Speaker 1: copy of Carl Jung's Man and his symbols and saw
9:12
Speaker 1: an image resembling the circular forms from the experience. She
9:16
Speaker 1: later said the recognition triggered such immediate terror that she
9:19
Speaker 1: threw the book and left abruptly enough for the friend
9:22
Speaker 1: to remember the incident years afterwards. Bush eventually identified what
9:26
Speaker 1: she had seen with the yin-yang form, raising a question
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Speaker 1: that remained important to her because she did not remember
9:32
Speaker 1: consciously knowing the symbol before the experience. Forgotten exposure, memory reconstruction,
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Speaker 1: and later pattern matching are all plausible possibilities, and there
9:41
Speaker 1: is no need to pretend otherwise. But the episode remained
9:44
Speaker 1: psychologically important because it suddenly gave visible form to something
9:49
Speaker 1: she spent years trying not to think about. Her eventual
9:52
Speaker 1: involvement with IANDS transformed the private experience into a research problem.
9:58
Speaker 1: Once inside the organization... Bush encountered a community understandably fascinated
10:02
Speaker 1: by radiant and life-changing NDEs, yet letters and reports occasionally
10:07
Speaker 1: revealed people carrying stories much closer to her own. And
10:11
Speaker 1: rather than excluding them because they interfered with the preferred picture,
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Speaker 1: she began gathering them. That work ultimately contributed to her
10:18
Speaker 1: collaboration with Bruce Grayson and to the 1992 paper that
10:22
Speaker 1: helped formalize the modern study of distressing NDEs. There is
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Speaker 1: an extraordinary irony in that history. Because the woman who
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Speaker 1: believed she had briefly entered a reality in which nothing
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Speaker 1: had ever existed became one of the researchers responsible for
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Speaker 1: making an entire neglected category of human experience visible. Whether
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Speaker 1: Bush's experience emerged from childbirth physiology, anesthesia, dissociation, altered cerebral function,
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Speaker 1: memory processes, or something we do not yet adequately understand
10:52
Speaker 1: remains open to interpretation. But the thing that makes her
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Speaker 1: story so effective at the beginning of this episode is
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Speaker 1: that there is no devil, torture chamber, or lake of
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Speaker 1: fire anywhere in it. The terror comes from something more
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Speaker 1: abstract and perhaps even more difficult to defend against. The
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Speaker 1: possibility that love... family, identity, and history was never real
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Speaker 1: to begin with, and that the consciousness objecting to that
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Speaker 1: revelation was simply the last piece of the illusion discovering
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Speaker 1: that it did too not exist. Vera's experience moves almost
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Speaker 1: completely in the opposite direction, because instead of stripping reality
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Speaker 1: down to darkness and abstraction, it begins by constructing exactly
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Speaker 1: the kind of beautiful environment people expect from a near-death story.
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Speaker 1: On April 5th, 1981, The 50-year-old woman identified as Vera
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Speaker 1: in the academic literature was driving home after taking a
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Speaker 1: friend back to his house during extremely heavy rain when
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Speaker 1: her car began spinning on the wet road. She did
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Speaker 1: not remember seeing the vehicle that apparently struck or clipped her,
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Speaker 1: but she remembered the violent rotation of her own car
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Speaker 1: and an instinctive attempt to stop the movement with her
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Speaker 1: foot before the vehicle struck one lamppost and then wrapped
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Speaker 1: itself around another. The wreck was severe enough that she
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Speaker 1: was later told rescuers required roughly an hour to remove her,
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Speaker 1: although she remembered none of the extraction herself. The case
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Speaker 1: was investigated several years later by Barbara Bramall under the
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Speaker 1: supervision of psychologist Harvey Irwin and was published in the
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Speaker 1: Journal of Near-Death Studies as The Devil in Heaven, a
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Speaker 1: title that sounds sensational until you understand what made the
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Speaker 1: case theoretically interesting. The investigators reported that Vera had not
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Speaker 1: been deeply religious during childhood had converted to Roman Catholicism
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Speaker 1: in her 20s without becoming particularly observant, knew essentially nothing
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Speaker 1: about NDE literature before the accident, and had discussed the
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Speaker 1: experience afterward with only a limited number of people. According
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Speaker 1: to the tape-recorded interview used to construct the case history,
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Speaker 1: what she remembered after the crash was the sensation of
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Speaker 1: rising away from the scene, an activity below her without
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Speaker 1: hearing the sounds that should have accompanied it. And somewhere
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Speaker 1: during the ascent, she perceived a voice saying that it
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Speaker 1: was too late. She continued upward until the accident scene
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Speaker 1: disappeared and entered an enormous tunnel through which she remembered
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Speaker 1: moving in a spiral. Yet what waited at the end
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Speaker 1: was anything but frightening. The environment was brilliantly illuminated and
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Speaker 1: open with vivid blue sky, pale stone or pebble-like ground,
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Speaker 1: and intensely green trees bordering a broad landscape she compared
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Speaker 1: to a playing field, while the entire place carried a
13:31
Speaker 1: peculiar sense of recognition. Vera believed the landscape resembled a
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Speaker 1: sandy field from her childhood strongly enough that she momentarily
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Speaker 1: felt like the younger version of herself again, and in
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Speaker 1: the distance she noticed a solitary building. Because nothing else
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Speaker 1: appeared to be present, she walked toward it and found
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Speaker 1: a structure resembling a church, although without a steeple, reached
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Speaker 1: by several steps and entered through large doors that were
13:55
Speaker 1: already standing slightly open. Inside, the emotional character of the
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Speaker 1: experience began changing. A long red carpet stretched through the
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Speaker 1: building between rows of pews, while the people occupying those
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Speaker 1: pews wore black hooded robes concealing their faces, with flashes
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Speaker 1: of red visible inside the hoods whenever Vera caught the
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Speaker 1: proper angle. She continued toward what appeared to be an altar,
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Speaker 1: where six silver goblets stood beside a large silver vessel,
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Speaker 1: and then a door near the altar opened and a
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Speaker 1: figure emerged whom Vera immediately understood to be the devil.
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Speaker 1: The being instructed her to take one of the goblets,
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Speaker 1: and when she obeyed, he lifted the larger vessel and
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Speaker 1: began pouring something toward the cup that Vera perceived not
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Speaker 1: as wine, water, or blood, but as fire. The tranquility
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Speaker 1: that had accompanied the accident scene, ascent, tunnel, and landscape
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Speaker 1: collapsed immediately. She dropped the goblet and ran, passing through
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Speaker 1: a stone barrier whose gates opened before her and then
14:53
Speaker 1: another barrier formed from iron bars. after which the environment
14:57
Speaker 1: became progressively warmer and brighter until she woke up in
15:01
Speaker 1: the hospital with a nursing sister beside her who had
15:03
Speaker 1: reportedly remained there throughout the night. What makes the case
15:07
Speaker 1: valuable is that the researchers distinguished Vera's later religious interpretation
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Speaker 1: from the experience itself. Vera eventually came to believe that
15:16
Speaker 1: the goblet represented suffering she had been required to accept
15:19
Speaker 1: and that the event constituted some form of divine judgment.
15:23
Speaker 1: with the physical disabilities caused by the accident becoming incorporated
15:27
Speaker 1: into that theology. Irwin and Bramwell, however, noted that this
15:31
Speaker 1: interpretation developed afterward, while Vera's emotional description of the original
15:35
Speaker 1: event was much more complicated. She had felt peaceful through
15:39
Speaker 1: the body separation, ascent, tunnel, and beautiful landscape, and became
15:43
Speaker 1: frightened only after entering the building and encountering the robed
15:46
Speaker 1: figures and the being she identified as the devil. That
15:49
Speaker 1: complicated an early assumption that frightening NDEs might represent a
15:53
Speaker 1: completely different phenomenon from pleasurable ones, because Vera apparently moved
15:58
Speaker 1: between both states inside one continuous experience. The frightening material
16:03
Speaker 1: did not replace the architecture of a conventional NDE, but
16:06
Speaker 1: emerged directly within it, which means that a tunnel did
16:09
Speaker 1: not automatically predict safety, brilliant light did not guarantee a
16:13
Speaker 1: benevolent destination, and something resembling heaven could contain imagery that
16:17
Speaker 1: experienced as profoundly threatening. Vero also did not emerge as
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Speaker 1: a rigid fundamentalist afterward. Researchers described increased spirituality, reduced materialism,
16:28
Speaker 1: and greater concern for other people alongside an increasingly universal
16:32
Speaker 1: religious outlook. For our purpose, the thing that makes her
16:35
Speaker 1: story memorable is not simply that she claimed to encounter
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Speaker 1: the devil, but that she believed she first reached somewhere beautiful,
16:42
Speaker 1: recognized it with the strange familiarity of childhood, voluntarily approached
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Speaker 1: the only building she could see, and discovered that the
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Speaker 1: nightmare was sitting inside the place that most closely resembled Sanctuary.
16:55
Speaker 1: On Saturday, June 10th, 1995, a six-year-old boy identified in
17:00
Speaker 1: the published case report as Scott walked outside with his
17:03
Speaker 1: mother Karen and his nine-year-old brother Graham because an ice
17:06
Speaker 1: cream truck had entered their neighborhood. Scott collected his ice cream,
17:10
Speaker 1: moved from behind the truck, and had entered the roadway,
17:13
Speaker 1: where a passing automobile struck him hard enough that his
17:15
Speaker 1: mother remembered seeing his body rotate, threw three complete somersaults
17:19
Speaker 1: before landing roughly 25 feet away. Karen later described him
17:24
Speaker 1: as completely limp during those rotations, with his arms and
17:28
Speaker 1: legs moving like those of a rag doll, and when
17:30
Speaker 1: she reached him, she reported finding no detectable pulse. Scott's
17:34
Speaker 1: injuries included a concussion, bacillus skull fracture, raptured right eardrum,
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Speaker 1: fractured pelvis, extensive swelling, and multiple lacerations, and he remained
17:44
Speaker 1: unconscious for a period before recovering in the hospital. What
17:47
Speaker 1: makes Scott's case unusually useful is not simply that a
17:51
Speaker 1: child later claimed to have met the devil, because a
17:53
Speaker 1: frightening story reconstructed many years after a childhood accident would
17:57
Speaker 1: give us obvious reasons for caution. Researcher Richard Bonifant had
18:01
Speaker 1: access to records much closer to the event, including Karen's chronology,
18:06
Speaker 1: drawings Scott made shortly after leaving the hospital, a narrative
18:10
Speaker 1: he wrote when he was eight, family testimony, and later
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Speaker 1: interviews that allowed Bonifant to compare how the memory developed
18:17
Speaker 1: and the result in one of the most fascinating elements
18:19
Speaker 1: of the entire story, because the central structure remained fairly
18:23
Speaker 1: consistent while some of the imagery changed in exactly the
18:26
Speaker 1: way we might expect memory to change as a child
18:29
Speaker 1: grows older and acquires more cultural material. Scott's first remembered
18:34
Speaker 1: experience was the accident itself, except he described himself as
18:38
Speaker 1: occupying two perspectives simultaneously. He remembered somehow connected with the
18:42
Speaker 1: body that had been struck, while also observing events from
18:45
Speaker 1: the vicinity of a tree roughly 30 feet away, where
18:49
Speaker 1: he believed he watched his own body tumble through the
18:51
Speaker 1: air and land on the pavement. He remembered trying unsuccessfully
18:55
Speaker 1: to communicate with his family, hearing his father express love
18:59
Speaker 1: toward him and attempting to embrace him only to experience
19:01
Speaker 1: his arms passing through the man's body. He also remembered
19:05
Speaker 1: calling for his brother Graham, while Graham later reported the
19:08
Speaker 1: strange impression of hearing Scott call internally despite Scott's physical
19:12
Speaker 1: body remaining unconscious. None of this constitutes controlled evidence of
19:16
Speaker 1: perception outside the body, but the details belong to the
19:19
Speaker 1: published case rather than later internet embellishment. The environment then changed,
19:25
Speaker 1: and Scott found himself in what he called the Bad
19:27
Speaker 1: Dark Place, facing a vortex that he compared to a
19:30
Speaker 1: tornado lying horizontally on the ground. That comparison matters because
19:35
Speaker 1: it sounds exactly like the language of a six-year-old trying
19:38
Speaker 1: to explain an unfamiliar structure through something he already understood.
19:43
Speaker 1: As he entered it, Scott encountered a being he interpreted
19:46
Speaker 1: as the devil. Although the creature looked very different from
19:49
Speaker 1: the standard red demon that eventually entered his later drawings.
19:53
Speaker 1: He remembered something diseased and decomposing, with rotten or infected flesh, scores,
19:59
Speaker 1: claw-like hands and feet in greenish slime that reminded him
20:02
Speaker 1: of the monsters from the Ghostbusters cartoon, while its voice
20:06
Speaker 1: sounded like a sickened, rasping version of Darth Vader. The
20:10
Speaker 1: most important thing the entity communicated was also the simplest.
20:14
Speaker 1: It told Scott that he was bad. Bonenfant learned that
20:17
Speaker 1: during the months before the accident, Scott had been getting
20:20
Speaker 1: into trouble during the first grade for ordinary childhood behavior,
20:23
Speaker 1: such as talking or drawing, when he was supposed to
20:25
Speaker 1: be working. And he had repeatedly come home describing himself
20:29
Speaker 1: as a bad child. That provides an obvious psychological connection
20:33
Speaker 1: between his life and the frightening experience. because a six-year-old
20:37
Speaker 1: who has already internalized the accusation that he is bad
20:40
Speaker 1: then suffers a catastrophic accident and encounters an authority figure
20:44
Speaker 1: expressing precisely that judgment. Bonifant did not hide that possibility,
20:50
Speaker 1: and neither should we, because the fact that an experience
20:53
Speaker 1: may draw upon psychological material does not make the experience
20:56
Speaker 1: less interesting. In many ways, it makes the architecture more revealing.
21:01
Speaker 1: Scott remembered the creature attempting to seize him and described
21:04
Speaker 1: something like a negative force pulling him away from God,
21:08
Speaker 1: while he experienced his movement through the environment as largely
21:11
Speaker 1: outside his control. Years later, he compared it to riding
21:14
Speaker 1: through a carnival haunted house where you can respond to
21:17
Speaker 1: whatever appears but cannot simply stop the mechanism and step away.
21:22
Speaker 1: He could not explain exactly how he escaped the creature
21:25
Speaker 1: and instead remembered holding desperately to his belief in God.
21:28
Speaker 1: After which, he once again entered the vortex and began
21:31
Speaker 1: moving toward a distant point of light, encountering faces or
21:34
Speaker 1: voices associated with people who loved him, as the same
21:37
Speaker 1: tunnel that had carried him into terror gradually became the
21:39
Speaker 1: route carrying him away from it. When Scott emerged, he
21:43
Speaker 1: believed he encountered his recently deceased uncle Russell, and this
21:47
Speaker 1: portion of the case demonstrates why early and later accounts
21:50
Speaker 1: must remain separate. His mother remembered that shortly after the accident,
21:54
Speaker 1: Scott described Russell wearing a gray suit, which attracted her
21:58
Speaker 1: attention because Russell had normally not worn suits, but had
22:01
Speaker 1: reportedly been buried in one. and she believes Scott did
22:04
Speaker 1: not know that. Years later, Scott remembered his uncle dressed
22:09
Speaker 1: more like he had been near the end of his life,
22:11
Speaker 1: in bedclothes and partly covered by a sheet. The clothing, therefore,
22:15
Speaker 1: cannot responsibly be presented as some perfectly preserved evidential detail,
22:20
Speaker 1: but the encounter itself remains central. Scott remembered Russell telling
22:31
Speaker 1: him that he had been badly hurt but would recover
22:41
Speaker 1: and addressing him by family nickname Buddy. The experience then
22:45
Speaker 1: moved toward its emotional opposite as Scott encountered brilliant light
22:49
Speaker 1: that did not hurt his eyes in which he understood
22:51
Speaker 1: as the presence of God. He remembered another lesser light
22:55
Speaker 1: separating from it and interpreted that second presence as an angel.
23:00
Speaker 1: His mother recalled him initially describing the angel as female
23:03
Speaker 1: and calling her Susan, whereas in later interviews Scott could
23:10
Speaker 1: no longer remember the gender, physical appearance, or name, and
23:13
Speaker 1: retained mainly the image of a bright star. The angel
23:17
Speaker 1: escorted him through another dark environment, but Scott repeatedly insisted
23:21
Speaker 1: that this darkness was fundamentally different from the first. He
23:25
Speaker 1: eventually used the word dungeon, then immediately explained that it
23:28
Speaker 1: had no chains, straw, or torture devices. What he meant
23:32
Speaker 1: was a protected enclosure within doors or windows where the
23:35
Speaker 1: threatening being could no longer reach him, making this what
23:38
Speaker 1: he called the good dark place rather than the bad one.
23:42
Speaker 1: The drawings Scott created after the accident may be the
23:44
Speaker 1: most striking physical artifacts connected with the case. His early
23:48
Speaker 1: devil contained hook-like claws, skeletal features, diseased flesh and greenish ooze,
23:54
Speaker 1: while his parents remembered him pressing and twisting the marker
23:57
Speaker 1: against the creature's eyes hard enough to make a hole
23:59
Speaker 1: in the paper. A separate drawing of the angel emphasized
24:03
Speaker 1: yellow radiance and light. When Bonifant asked him to draw
24:06
Speaker 1: the figures again years later, the devil had become far
24:09
Speaker 1: more conventional, with prominent teeth, red eyes, and recognizably satanic features,
24:14
Speaker 1: while the angel had simplified almost into a sun-like light.
24:18
Speaker 1: In other words, the later drawings became more culturally standardized
24:21
Speaker 1: than the earlier ones. which is exactly what we might
24:24
Speaker 1: expect if memory and culture exposure gradually rewrite peripheral details.
24:30
Speaker 1: Scott's parents also reported months of anxiety, nightmares, and restlessness
24:34
Speaker 1: after the accident, and he moved from his own room
24:37
Speaker 1: into Graham's because the brothers felt safer sleeping together. The
24:41
Speaker 1: family briefly entered counseling, while Scott simultaneously developed a much
24:45
Speaker 1: stronger interest in religion and questions about death. We cannot
24:49
Speaker 1: determine from the evidence whether he encountered an independently existing entity,
24:53
Speaker 1: but the case gives us something almost as interesting. A
24:56
Speaker 1: rare opportunity to watch a childhood memory preserve its emotional
24:59
Speaker 1: geography while the visual details slowly change. The accident, separated perspective,
25:05
Speaker 1: bad darkness, sideways tornado, accusation, threatening creature, dead uncle, brilliant light,
25:12
Speaker 1: and protected darkness remain recognizable even as the devil becomes
25:15
Speaker 1: more conventional. The angel loses the name and Russell's clothing changes.
25:19
Speaker 1: If Bush's experience threatened the existence of the entire universe
25:23
Speaker 1: and Vera discovered horror inside Sanctuary, Scott's darkness appears to
25:27
Speaker 1: have been built at least partly from a sentence he
25:29
Speaker 1: had already been carrying around before the car ever hit him.
25:35
Speaker 1: Howard Storm's account begins not with a sudden accident, but
25:38
Speaker 1: with a medical emergency unfolding slowly enough for him to
25:42
Speaker 1: understand that he might be dying. Storm was 38 years
25:46
Speaker 1: old in 1985, and an art professor at Northern Kentucky
25:49
Speaker 1: University who described himself at the time as a committed atheist,
25:54
Speaker 1: and he was traveling in Europe with students when severe
25:56
Speaker 1: abdominal pain developed in Paris. According to his later account,
26:00
Speaker 1: physicians diagnosed a perforated duodenum requiring emergency surgery, but hours
26:05
Speaker 1: passed without an operation while the pain intensified and his
26:08
Speaker 1: physical strength deteriorated. Storm later described reaching the point where
26:13
Speaker 1: he believed he could no longer force himself to breathe,
26:16
Speaker 1: telling his wife Beverly goodbye and becoming convinced that he
26:19
Speaker 1: would not survive until morning. There is an important evidentiary
26:22
Speaker 1: limitation here that does not need to be repeated every
26:25
Speaker 1: few paragraphs. Storm's experience was not recorded during prospectively monitored
26:31
Speaker 1: cardiac arrest, and his autobiographical narrative does not provide the
26:35
Speaker 1: kind of contemporaneous EEG, blood pressure, or resuscitation timeline that
26:41
Speaker 1: would let us assign the experience to a precisely measured
26:43
Speaker 1: period of absent brain activity. What we have is testimony
26:47
Speaker 1: from a critically ill man who believed he was approaching death,
26:51
Speaker 1: followed by an independently documented transformation in his life afterward,
26:55
Speaker 1: and that is enough to make the story significant without
26:58
Speaker 1: claiming more than the evidence allows. Storm remembered the transition
27:02
Speaker 1: as becoming suddenly and intensely awake, finding himself standing between
27:06
Speaker 1: the beds in his hospital room and seeing another body
27:09
Speaker 1: beneath the sheets that resembled him Because the idea of
27:12
Speaker 1: surviving death violated his entire worldview, he briefly entertained the
27:17
Speaker 1: absurd possibility that hospital personnel had somehow constructed a replica
27:21
Speaker 1: of him while he was unconscious. He attempted to communicate
27:25
Speaker 1: with Beverly and the other patient without receiving any response.
27:29
Speaker 1: And while he was still trying to understand what was happening,
27:31
Speaker 1: he heard voices outside the room calling him by name.
27:35
Speaker 1: The voices initially sounded friendly, and included men and women
27:38
Speaker 1: of different ages speaking English, something Storm found unusual in
27:42
Speaker 1: the French hospital. They told him they had been waiting
27:45
Speaker 1: for him, urged him to come with them, and claimed
27:47
Speaker 1: that they could help, which was exactly what a sick
27:50
Speaker 1: and frightened man who believed he needed emergency surgery wanted
27:53
Speaker 1: to hear. Storm hesitated because the corridor already seemed strange
27:58
Speaker 1: and because he had an intuitive feeling that leaving the
28:00
Speaker 1: room might make returning difficult. Yet the figures were the
28:04
Speaker 1: only people who appeared capable of hearing him. and they
28:07
Speaker 1: repeatedly assured him that his problems would disappear if he followed. Eventually,
28:12
Speaker 1: he did. At first, the environment still resembled a hospital corridor,
28:17
Speaker 1: close enough for Storm to rationalize what was happening, although
28:20
Speaker 1: the hallway seemed filled with haze and extended far beyond
28:23
Speaker 1: anything compatible with the building. The figures remained several feet
28:26
Speaker 1: ahead whenever he tried to approach them, appearing pale and
28:29
Speaker 1: clothed in gray, while their awareness became increasingly impatient whenever
28:33
Speaker 1: he asked who they were or where they were taking him.
28:36
Speaker 1: Storm remembered looking backward and somehow continuing to see the
28:39
Speaker 1: doorway of the hospital room in the distance, with Beverly
28:43
Speaker 1: and his physical body inside even as that doorway seemed
28:46
Speaker 1: to recede farther and farther away. As the remaining light disappeared,
28:51
Speaker 1: the behavior of the people around him changed. Reassurance became sarcasm,
28:56
Speaker 1: then mockery, and the figures began commenting on his exposed
28:59
Speaker 1: hospital gown and weakness while insisting that the destination was
29:03
Speaker 1: still just ahead. Storm gradually became convinced that their promise
29:06
Speaker 1: of assistance had been a deception, and that every step
29:09
Speaker 1: was carrying him farther from whatever route back still existed.
29:13
Speaker 1: When he finally refused to continue, the psychological intimidation became
29:17
Speaker 1: physical violence, and he described the crowd striking, biting, and
29:20
Speaker 1: clawing him while reacting to his resistance with amusement. He
29:24
Speaker 1: interpreted them not as horned demons, but as recognizably human
29:28
Speaker 1: personalities whose compassion had completely disappeared. and he later said
29:32
Speaker 1: there were aspects of the assault he avoided describing because
29:35
Speaker 1: remembering them remained deeply disturbing. While lying in the darkness
29:39
Speaker 1: after the attack, Storm remembered hearing something resembling his own
29:43
Speaker 1: voice telling him to pray to God, which struck him
29:46
Speaker 1: as ridiculous because prayer belonged to a worldview he had
29:49
Speaker 1: spent his adult life rejecting. Unable to remember a coherent prayer,
29:54
Speaker 1: he assembled fragments of the 23rd Psalm, the Lord's Prayer,
29:57
Speaker 1: patriotic language, and whatever phrases mentioning God he could retrieve
30:01
Speaker 1: from childhood. According to Storm, the effect on the surrounding
30:05
Speaker 1: beings was immediate. They reacted angrily to the religious language
30:08
Speaker 1: while simultaneously withdrawing, insisting nobody could hear him even as
30:13
Speaker 1: they moved farther away until he could no longer detect them.
30:16
Speaker 1: Once alone, Storm began interpreting the experience through the life
30:20
Speaker 1: he had constructed before entering the hospital. Thinking about professional ambition, recognition, possessions,
30:26
Speaker 1: and the emotional distance he believed he had developed between
30:29
Speaker 1: himself and other people. He had expected death to extinguish consciousness,
30:34
Speaker 1: yet inside the experience he found himself aware in precisely
30:37
Speaker 1: the nothingness he had assumed would contain no observer at all.
30:42
Speaker 1: His story later continued toward a point of light, a
30:44
Speaker 1: being he identified as Jesus, other luminous entities, a life review,
30:49
Speaker 1: and an extensive Christian interpretation. But the frightening portion is
30:53
Speaker 1: enough for what interests us here. because Storm's horror is
30:56
Speaker 1: organized around deception rather than immediate monstrous imagery. The figures
31:01
Speaker 1: do not approach him snarling, they approach him offering help.
31:04
Speaker 1: They know his name, recognize that he is frightened, speak
31:08
Speaker 1: his language, and behave like only people in the hospital
31:10
Speaker 1: capable of acknowledging him, which is exactly why he follows them.
31:15
Speaker 1: That slow corruption of ordinary social trust is what makes
31:18
Speaker 1: Storm's account so effective, because by the time the environment
31:21
Speaker 1: becomes obviously threatening, he believes he has already traveled an
31:25
Speaker 1: enormous distance away from the hospital room. Storm eventually abandoned
31:30
Speaker 1: the trajectory of his academic art career, entered theological study,
31:34
Speaker 1: and became an ordained United Church of Christ minister. And
31:38
Speaker 1: although that transformation cannot establish the objective reality of the
31:41
Speaker 1: beings he described, it demonstrates that whatever happened in Paris
31:45
Speaker 1: did not fade into the category of an interesting dream.
31:48
Speaker 1: The experience reorganized his profession, religion, and understanding of what
31:53
Speaker 1: his life was supposed to accomplish. By the time Angie
31:56
Speaker 1: Fenimore underwent the experience she later described in Beyond the Darkness,
32:01
Speaker 1: the psychological darkness she associated with it had already been
32:05
Speaker 1: part of her life for years. Fenimore was 27 years old, married,
32:10
Speaker 1: and the mother of two young children, but she also
32:12
Speaker 1: described a deeply troubled childhood, followed by long periods of
32:15
Speaker 1: depression and suicidal thinking. She had heard about a peaceful
32:19
Speaker 1: NDE experience by her stepmother after an automobile accident and
32:24
Speaker 1: had become fascinated with the possibility that death might contain
32:27
Speaker 1: the tranquility she felt unable to find in ordinary life,
32:32
Speaker 1: meaning she entered her 1991 crisis already familiar with the
32:36
Speaker 1: reassuring model of near-death experience. What she remembered instead began
32:41
Speaker 1: with a remarkably elaborate life review. Fenimore described scenes from
32:45
Speaker 1: her 27 years unfolding rapidly, while remaining comprehensible. But she
32:50
Speaker 1: did not experience them simply as memories projected before her.
32:54
Speaker 1: She believed she could feel the emotional perspectives of other
32:57
Speaker 1: people involved in those events. One of the most important
33:00
Speaker 1: examples involved her mother, whom she had experienced during childhood
33:05
Speaker 1: as rejecting or abandoning her. Yet during the review, she
33:08
Speaker 1: believed she could understand her mother's emotional position and suddenly
33:12
Speaker 1: saw painful events within a context unavailable to her as
33:15
Speaker 1: a child. Whether we interpret that neurologically as reconstruction of
33:19
Speaker 1: autobiographical memory and perspective, psychologically as an altered state producing
33:24
Speaker 1: emotional reinterpretation, or spiritually as Fenimore eventually did, the subjective
33:29
Speaker 1: effect was the same. The history she thought she understood
33:33
Speaker 1: became larger than the version she carried into the experience.
33:36
Speaker 1: When the review ended, Fenimore became aware inside an enormous
33:40
Speaker 1: darkness and eventually found herself among men and women scattered
33:44
Speaker 1: through what she perceived as a nearly limitless dark expanse.
33:48
Speaker 1: Some stood, some wandered, others remained crouched or almost motionless,
33:53
Speaker 1: while additional figures seemed to continue arriving. Their pale clothing
33:57
Speaker 1: looked filthy and degraded, but what disturbed her the most
34:01
Speaker 1: was their psychological isolation, because although she believed thoughts could
34:05
Speaker 1: be perceived directly, almost nobody seemed interested in genuine communication.
34:10
Speaker 1: They appeared absorbed in grievances, disappointments, and obsessive loops carried
34:14
Speaker 1: over from life, as though consciousness had survived while the
34:17
Speaker 1: ability to escape one's own perspective had not. Fenimore later
34:22
Speaker 1: interpreted many of these people as suicide victims who attempted
34:25
Speaker 1: to escape emotional suffering only to discover that death had
34:29
Speaker 1: not removed the state of mind from which they were
34:31
Speaker 1: trying to flee. That interpretation belongs to Fenimore's later religious
34:36
Speaker 1: understanding and cannot be independently established as an objective description
34:40
Speaker 1: of any external realm, but the imagery itself is disturbing.
34:44
Speaker 1: because suffering does not require a demon actively administering punishment.
34:49
Speaker 1: The inhabitants appear to generate their own prison, and Fenimore
34:52
Speaker 1: experienced the surrounding darkness almost as an extension of their
34:56
Speaker 1: internal condition. One man attracted her attention because he seemed
35:00
Speaker 1: even more depleted than the others, appearing approximately 60 years
35:04
Speaker 1: old and crouching with so little emotional response that Fenimore
35:08
Speaker 1: developed the impression that he had been there for an
35:10
Speaker 1: unimaginable period of time. She briefly wondered whether he might
35:14
Speaker 1: be Judas Iscariot, but this is another detail that requires
35:17
Speaker 1: careful wording because later retellings can turn a fleeting interpretation
35:21
Speaker 1: into a claim of identification. The figure did not announce
35:25
Speaker 1: that he was Judas, nor did Fenimore receive independently verifiable
35:29
Speaker 1: information establishing who he was. The association emerged from her
35:33
Speaker 1: own religious imagination while she tried to understand what she
35:36
Speaker 1: was seeing. The most disturbing idea was the apparent absence
35:40
Speaker 1: of distractions. privacy, or relief. Ordinary life continually interrupts obsessive
35:46
Speaker 1: thought through hunger, sleep, work, conversation, physical movement, changing light, responsibilities,
35:52
Speaker 1: and the demands of other people. But Fenimore imagined a
35:55
Speaker 1: state in which nearly all of those interruptions were gone,
35:58
Speaker 1: while consciousness and memory remained. People were surrounded by others
36:02
Speaker 1: and yet trapped inside almost perfectly private misery, making her
36:06
Speaker 1: hell less a torture chamber than an eternal inability to
36:09
Speaker 1: escape the self. Eventually, she described encountering luminous presences she
36:14
Speaker 1: interpreted as God and Christ, and receiving the message that
36:18
Speaker 1: death had not allowed her to discard the suffering of
36:21
Speaker 1: her life. What she had attempted to escape remained psychologically present,
36:25
Speaker 1: and in her interpretation, had been magnified. Fenimore survived and
36:30
Speaker 1: published her account after four years later, which means the
36:33
Speaker 1: detailed metaphysical sequence rests principally upon retrospective autobiography rather than
36:38
Speaker 1: prospective psychological monitoring. That limitation does not weaken the reason
36:43
Speaker 1: the story belongs here, because the central problem exists whether
36:46
Speaker 1: we interpret the event spiritually or neurologically. Human beings do
36:50
Speaker 1: not enter altered states as blank slates, we being trauma, expectation, guilt, relationships,
36:57
Speaker 1: religious language, and the entire architecture of memory with us.
37:01
Speaker 1: And if consciousness under extreme conditions constructs a world from
37:05
Speaker 1: that material, the resulting environment may feel less like a
37:08
Speaker 1: random hallucination than like being forced to inhabit everything unresolved
37:12
Speaker 1: within oneself. Fenimore's hell, therefore, does not require demons, but
37:17
Speaker 1: the prison and the prisoner have effectively become the same thing.
37:22
Speaker 1: George Gordon Ritchie was 20 years old in December 1943,
37:27
Speaker 1: an Army private undergoing training at Camp Barcalay near Abilene, Texas,
37:31
Speaker 1: when he became seriously ill with pneumonia shortly before he
37:33
Speaker 1: was supposed to travel east for further medical education. His
37:37
Speaker 1: later account states that during the early morning hours of
37:40
Speaker 1: December 21st, he was found without detectable pulse, respiration, or
37:44
Speaker 1: blood pressure and pronounced dead, after which an attendant preparing
37:48
Speaker 1: his body believed he detected movement and persuaded a physician
37:51
Speaker 1: to return. Ritchie eventually claimed that roughly nine minutes separated
37:56
Speaker 1: the declaration of death from an attempt to revive him
37:59
Speaker 1: using an ejection of adrenaline into the heart. Later, writers
38:02
Speaker 1: reported that he cited affidavits from medical personnel involved, although
38:06
Speaker 1: the detailed NDE narrative itself was not contemporaneously documented and
38:10
Speaker 1: did not become widely known until years afterward. The beginning
38:14
Speaker 1: of the experience is almost strangely mundane compared with everything
38:17
Speaker 1: that follows, because Ritchie did not initially believe he had
38:20
Speaker 1: died and remained preoccupied with the fact that he was
38:23
Speaker 1: supposed to be traveling east. He remembered sitting up, seeing
38:27
Speaker 1: what looked like another person lying in his hospital bed,
38:30
Speaker 1: and became increasingly frustrated when nobody responded to him. When
38:34
Speaker 1: an orderly approached, Ritchie moved aside to avoid a collision
38:37
Speaker 1: and then experienced the man passing directly through the space
38:40
Speaker 1: he believed himself to occupy. Even then, his first major
38:44
Speaker 1: concern was not metaphysical revelation, but missing the train to Richmond,
38:48
Speaker 1: and he remembered leaving the hospital and traveling east at
38:51
Speaker 1: extraordinary speed, using stars and landscape features to orient himself.
38:56
Speaker 1: At one point, Ritchie descended toward an unfamiliar town to
38:59
Speaker 1: ask for directions and encountered another man who ignored him
39:02
Speaker 1: completely before apparently passing through him as the orderly had done.
39:07
Speaker 1: Nearby stood a small restaurant or cafe that Ritchie later
39:10
Speaker 1: claimed to recognize when he physically traveled through Vicksburg, Mississippi,
39:14
Speaker 1: months afterward. That retrospective identification has been debated and cannot
39:19
Speaker 1: be treated like a prospective hidden target experiment, but it
39:22
Speaker 1: became one of the unusual details that helped draw attention
39:25
Speaker 1: to his story. long before near-death research developed into an
39:29
Speaker 1: organized field. After returning toward the hospital, Ritchie remembered encountering
39:33
Speaker 1: an overwhelming light that he interpreted through Christian language as
39:37
Speaker 1: the presence of Christ, after which the experience expanded into
39:41
Speaker 1: a guided journey through what he understood as several different
39:44
Speaker 1: conditions of post-mortem existence. The darker portions were not dominated
39:48
Speaker 1: by a single organized hell filled with flames and demons. Instead,
39:52
Speaker 1: Ritchie believed he saw human personalities continuing to orbit the objects,
39:57
Speaker 1: behaviors and emotions to which they had been attached during
40:00
Speaker 1: physical life, as though bodily death had removed their ability
40:03
Speaker 1: to satisfy a desire while leaving the desire itself intact.
40:08
Speaker 1: One of the most memorable scenes involved alcohol. Ritchie described
40:12
Speaker 1: living men drinking while apparently disembodied figures crowded around them desperately,
40:16
Speaker 1: attempting to participate, even though they no longer possessed bodies
40:20
Speaker 1: capable of consuming anything. In his interpretation, these were people
40:24
Speaker 1: whose attachment to alcohol had survived death, and he believed
40:28
Speaker 1: he watched them trying to enter or attach themselves to
40:31
Speaker 1: living drinkers in an effort to experience through them what
40:34
Speaker 1: they could no longer obtain directly. Whether we interpret that
40:38
Speaker 1: scene as literal perception, a visionary state associated with illness,
40:42
Speaker 1: religious symbolism, or something else, Its psychological structure is powerful
40:46
Speaker 1: because addiction becomes its own punishment without requiring any external judge.
40:52
Speaker 1: He described comparable scenes of personalities remaining attached to arguments, grudges,
40:57
Speaker 1: sexual obsession, pride, and interpersonal resentment, endlessly attempting to continue
41:03
Speaker 1: conflicts the living participants could no longer perceive. Hatred persisted
41:08
Speaker 1: after the hated person could no longer hear it. Possessiveness
41:11
Speaker 1: remained after physical possession had become impossible. and desire continued
41:15
Speaker 1: after the body required to satisfy it was gone. In
41:18
Speaker 1: Ritchie's Christian interpretation, luminous beings were sometimes present around these
41:23
Speaker 1: darker states but could only simply force the inhabitants to
41:26
Speaker 1: accept assistance, which gave his vision something in common with Fenimore's.
41:31
Speaker 1: Suffering appeared to be maintained by a locked supernatural door
41:34
Speaker 1: than by the personality's inability to turn away from whatever
41:37
Speaker 1: held its attention. Ritchie's story later became historically important because
41:42
Speaker 1: Raymond Moody credited hearing him speak as one of the
41:45
Speaker 1: influences that encouraged his own investigation of people who reported
41:48
Speaker 1: experiences close to death, work that eventually contributed to the
41:52
Speaker 1: enormously influential 1975 book Life After Life. Elizabeth Sherrill was
41:59
Speaker 1: already interviewing Ritchie about the experience during the early 1960s,
42:03
Speaker 1: years before the publication of Return From Tomorrow in 1978,
42:08
Speaker 1: and she remembered him being more cautious than some later
42:10
Speaker 1: summaries suggested. When asked whether he believed he had seen
42:14
Speaker 1: exactly what awaits everyone after death, he reportedly emphasized that
42:17
Speaker 1: he did not know and regarded himself as having encountered
42:21
Speaker 1: only a threshold. Ritchie later became a physician and psychiatrist
42:25
Speaker 1: and continued discussing the experience for decades, but the long
42:28
Speaker 1: interval between the 1943 illness and the detailed published narrative
42:32
Speaker 1: means memory, theological development, and repeated retelling have to remain
42:37
Speaker 1: part of any serious assessment. What gives the account its
42:40
Speaker 1: enduring power is not laboratory verification, but its central idea.
42:45
Speaker 1: If personality somehow persisted beyond bodily death, perhaps dying would
42:49
Speaker 1: not automatically make someone wiser, kinder, or freer, because all
42:53
Speaker 1: the habits and attachments constructed during life might continue operating
42:57
Speaker 1: after many of the ordinary distractions and satisfactions of the
43:00
Speaker 1: body had disappeared. In that model, consciousness does not need
43:05
Speaker 1: flames or demons to suffer. It only needs to remain
43:08
Speaker 1: capable of desperately wanting something it can no longer obtain.
43:13
Speaker 1: One of the most unsettling cases in Grayson and Bush's
43:16
Speaker 1: original 1992 study involved a 27-year-old Jewish woman who suffered
43:20
Speaker 1: a severe automobile accident while traveling with her husband and
43:24
Speaker 1: two young sons. An oncoming vehicle crossed several lanes and
43:28
Speaker 1: struck the family car head on, collapsing part of the
43:31
Speaker 1: roof and trapping her head among the windshield, dashboard, and
43:34
Speaker 1: surrounding structure. Although witnesses apparently regarded her as unconscious, she
43:39
Speaker 1: later remembered experiencing herself outside the wreck, looking downward at
43:43
Speaker 1: the accident scene and watching motorists stop while another woman
43:46
Speaker 1: removed her child from the immediate area. The published account
43:50
Speaker 1: does not provide enough independent reconstruction for us to treat
43:53
Speaker 1: those perceptions as experimentally verified, but they form the beginning
43:57
Speaker 1: of what she remembered, and the next part immediately complicates
44:01
Speaker 1: any attempt to explain the experience through a simple religious expectation.
44:05
Speaker 1: The woman had been raised Jewish, yet became aware of
44:08
Speaker 1: a male figure whom she identified as Jesus Christ, because
44:11
Speaker 1: he resembled the traditional appearance she knew from paintings. She
44:15
Speaker 1: did not experience the figure as threatening or alien. Instead,
44:19
Speaker 1: his presence seemed to generate overwhelming serenity, and she wanted
44:22
Speaker 1: to remain near him as he guided her toward another
44:25
Speaker 1: part of the experience. The figure led her toward what
44:29
Speaker 1: she described as a well, and as they moved around it,
44:32
Speaker 1: she became aware of an entirely different environment beside or
44:35
Speaker 1: below them. There she saw people who appeared blackened, sweaty,
44:40
Speaker 1: invisibly miserable, mourning in pain while somehow chained to particular places.
44:45
Speaker 1: One emaciated man attracted her attention so strongly, she wanted
44:49
Speaker 1: to help him but understood that she could not, while
44:51
Speaker 1: the entire scene filled her with revulsion and fear because
44:54
Speaker 1: the inhabitants seemed unable to leave whatever condition held them.
44:59
Speaker 1: The strange thing is, the figures she associated with peace
45:02
Speaker 1: did not disappear when the frightening material appeared. She continued
45:06
Speaker 1: to experience extraordinary serenity in his presence, even while being
45:10
Speaker 1: shown something she found horrifying. And at one point, she
45:13
Speaker 1: remembered having to pass through part of the environment while
45:16
Speaker 1: the guide remained at a distance. She thought there might
45:19
Speaker 1: be snakes or similar creatures among dark material beneath her,
45:23
Speaker 1: but deliberately avoided examining it closely. Like Vera's story, The
45:27
Speaker 1: experience therefore refuses to divide itself neatly into a good
45:30
Speaker 1: realm followed by an evil one, because beauty and horror
45:33
Speaker 1: occupy the same continuous sequence, and the apparently benevolent guide
45:38
Speaker 1: is actively showing her the suffering rather than simply failing
45:41
Speaker 1: to protect her from it. Eventually, she leaned over the
45:45
Speaker 1: well while the figure placed a hand against her back
45:47
Speaker 1: and heard children calling for her to return. She remembered
45:51
Speaker 1: three children rather than two, two boys appearing older than
45:54
Speaker 1: the son she actually had at the time, and a
45:56
Speaker 1: little girl even though she did not then have a daughter.
46:00
Speaker 1: The woman interpreted this as a glimpse of future children
46:02
Speaker 1: and later had a daughter whom she believed was the
46:05
Speaker 1: same girl she had perceived during the experience. That detail
46:09
Speaker 1: should not be converted into a scientifically established prophecy, because
46:13
Speaker 1: the report does not provide prospective documentation proving the vision
46:17
Speaker 1: of the girl was formally recorded before the later pregnancy,
46:20
Speaker 1: but it belongs to the published case and can be
46:23
Speaker 1: preserved as part of her testimony later. without exaggerating what
46:26
Speaker 1: it proves. The voices of the children ultimately convinced her
46:30
Speaker 1: to return. She had wanted to remain near the luminous
46:32
Speaker 1: figure and the serenity surrounding him, yet the belief that
46:36
Speaker 1: her children needed their mother overcame that desire, and the
46:39
Speaker 1: experience shifted back toward the accident. What makes this case
46:42
Speaker 1: especially useful near the end of this episode is that
46:45
Speaker 1: it undermines one of the easiest moral interpretations of frightening NDEs.
46:51
Speaker 1: Grayson and Bush repeatedly cautioned that the literature does not
46:54
Speaker 1: support a clean division in which spiritually good people receive
46:57
Speaker 1: bliss while morally bad people receive terror. And this woman's
47:01
Speaker 1: experience almost perfectly demonstrates why such categories collapse. One continuous
47:06
Speaker 1: event contains peace, fear, religious imagery outside our own tradition,
47:11
Speaker 1: apparent body separation, trapped and suffering people, maternal attachment and
47:16
Speaker 1: the decision to return. making it nearly impossible to reduce
47:19
Speaker 1: what happened to either heaven or hell without discarding half
47:22
Speaker 1: the experience. The final case returns directly to Grayson and
47:27
Speaker 1: Bush's original study and to one of the explicitly hellish
47:30
Speaker 1: narratives they presented, involving a 48-year-old woodworker describing as having
47:35
Speaker 1: no strong personal religious background, even though his wife was religious.
47:40
Speaker 1: His life had recently begun unraveling after an arrest for
47:43
Speaker 1: driving while intoxicated led to a large financial penalty loss
47:47
Speaker 1: of his driver's license, and the destruction of money he
47:49
Speaker 1: had been saving for a vacation. During the emotional collapse
47:53
Speaker 1: that followed, he attempted to end his life. The mechanics
47:57
Speaker 1: of that attempt had nothing useful here, but his wife,
48:00
Speaker 1: who was a nurse, later reported finding him unresponsive and
48:04
Speaker 1: being unable to detect either pulse or breathing. The man
48:08
Speaker 1: remembered himself outside his body and immediately experienced separation as
48:12
Speaker 1: frightening rather than liberating. He could see and hear but
48:16
Speaker 1: perception no longer seemed to operate normally, and he became
48:20
Speaker 1: aware of presences surrounding him that he interpreted as demons.
48:24
Speaker 1: At first he heard them more clearly, then he saw them,
48:28
Speaker 1: describing sounds that reminded him of blackbirds rather than growling
48:31
Speaker 1: monsters one might expect from religious imagery, while the presences
48:36
Speaker 1: seemed to understand that they had captured him and possessed
48:39
Speaker 1: the unlimited time in which to torment him. What made
48:42
Speaker 1: the environment particularly bleak was his conviction that he had
48:45
Speaker 1: not actually arrived anywhere. He felt suspended between worlds, unable
48:50
Speaker 1: to return fully to physical life, while also unable to
48:53
Speaker 1: reach whatever destination might lie beyond the place in which
48:57
Speaker 1: he had become trapped. There was no recognizable Satan, throne,
49:01
Speaker 1: or sentence of judgment, and the terror came instead from helplessness, duration,
49:06
Speaker 1: and the feeling that the beings surrounding him could pull
49:08
Speaker 1: him farther downward whenever they wished. This intermediate state was
49:13
Speaker 1: worse than the conventional hell he had imagined because even
49:16
Speaker 1: hell would at least represent a destination. Here, there was only... exposure, confusion,
49:21
Speaker 1: and the possibility of remaining indefinitely between places. At some
49:26
Speaker 1: point he became desperate to return to his physical body
49:29
Speaker 1: and remembered moving toward his home, where his wife remained
49:32
Speaker 1: unable to perceive him. He attempted to communicate and failed,
49:36
Speaker 1: then described moving into or through her body as and
49:39
Speaker 1: briefly experiencing the environment through what he understood as her
49:43
Speaker 1: sensory perspective. According to his account, he then heard her
49:47
Speaker 1: react to the emergency before she rushed toward his physical
49:50
Speaker 1: body and attempted to help him. Because she was a nurse,
49:53
Speaker 1: he later attached special significance to her report that she
49:57
Speaker 1: could find neither pulse nor breathing, although the case does
50:00
Speaker 1: not provide a prospectively monitored hospital record that would allow
50:03
Speaker 1: us to reconstruct the exact physiological intervals. A few weeks afterward,
50:08
Speaker 1: the man wrote a poem trying to express what he
50:11
Speaker 1: believed he had encountered, and its central imagery is revealing,
50:15
Speaker 1: because the hell he described was not defined by fire
50:18
Speaker 1: or brimstone, but by darkness, abandonment, and the desperation of
50:22
Speaker 1: people wanting another opportunity in life. That places the account
50:26
Speaker 1: unexpectedly close to the void experience with which we began
50:29
Speaker 1: this episode. Even though Grayson and Bush categorized it among
50:33
Speaker 1: hellish NDEs, The torment was not elaborate supernatural architecture, but separation, disorientation,
50:40
Speaker 1: and the belief that neither the physical world nor any
50:43
Speaker 1: benevolent spiritual presence remained accessible. This also brings us to
50:47
Speaker 1: one of the most uncomfortable findings in the broader literature,
50:50
Speaker 1: because distressing NDEs do not reliably map onto the categories
50:54
Speaker 1: people would like them to. Grayson and Bush collected cases
50:58
Speaker 1: involving childbirth, accidents, illness, anesthesia, suicide attempts, and other crises
51:03
Speaker 1: that overlap heavily with circumstances surrounding pleasurable NDEs, and they
51:08
Speaker 1: found no dependable rules showing that frightening experiences belonged to
51:11
Speaker 1: morally bad people, psychologically unstable people, or members of a
51:15
Speaker 1: particular religion. Some suicide attempts produced peaceful NDEs, while ordinary
51:21
Speaker 1: medical crises produced terrifying ones, and later research continued finding inverse, hellish,
51:27
Speaker 1: and void experiences as a minority but persistent part of
51:30
Speaker 1: the overall phenomenon. That uncertainty is exactly what makes these
51:34
Speaker 1: cases uncomfortable for both purely religious and purely reductionistic interpretations.
51:40
Speaker 1: A neurological explanation can point to severe physiological stress, oxygen disruption, anesthesia,
51:46
Speaker 1: altered sensory integration, memory reconstruction, and unusual neurochemistry, all of
51:52
Speaker 1: which may contribute to extraordinary experiences, but assigning mechanisms does
51:57
Speaker 1: not automatically erase the subjective authority of something a person
52:00
Speaker 1: remembers more vividly than ordinary waking life. A religious interpretation
52:05
Speaker 1: can declare the experience a warning or punishment, yet the
52:09
Speaker 1: available case literature does not provide the moral sorting system
52:12
Speaker 1: such an interpretation would require. The stories refuse to organize
52:16
Speaker 1: themselves cleanly enough to give either side the single map
52:19
Speaker 1: it would prefer. After spending two episodes along this boundary,
52:24
Speaker 1: the most uncomfortable conclusion may be that the phrase near-death
52:27
Speaker 1: experience describes something considerably less uniform than popular culture has
52:32
Speaker 1: taught us to imagine. While Vera entered a beautiful landscape,
52:36
Speaker 1: Nancy Evans Bush found herself inside a universe where existence
52:39
Speaker 1: itself appeared to have been exposed as an illusion. While
52:43
Speaker 1: Vera entered a beautiful landscape and discovered something she identified
52:46
Speaker 1: as the devil inside a building resembling a church. Scott
52:50
Speaker 1: carried the accusation that he was a bad child into
52:53
Speaker 1: a nightmare populated by a diseased creature and then emerged
52:56
Speaker 1: through the same experience into light, protection and a dead relative,
53:00
Speaker 1: while Howard Storm followed apparently helpful people away from his
53:04
Speaker 1: hospital room until their reassurance gradually transformed into cruelty. Angie
53:09
Speaker 1: Fenimore described people who seemed incapable of escaping their own despair.
53:13
Speaker 1: George Ritchie believed he witnessed personalities still circling the habits
53:17
Speaker 1: and obsessions of physical life. The woman at the well
53:20
Speaker 1: encountered overwhelmingly serenity and human suffering within the same continuous experience.
53:25
Speaker 1: And the woodworker came back describing hell not as a furnace,
53:28
Speaker 1: but as a state in which he seemed unable to
53:31
Speaker 1: reach either world. If all eight accounts had contained the
53:34
Speaker 1: same tunnel, the same light, the same entities, and the
53:37
Speaker 1: same message, that consistency would itself demand explanation. But their
53:42
Speaker 1: variation may be even more interesting because certain structures recur
53:46
Speaker 1: while the worlds built around those structures remain intensely personal.
53:50
Speaker 1: Separation from the body appears repeatedly, yet one person experiences
53:55
Speaker 1: it as freedom while another becomes terrified because nobody can
53:58
Speaker 1: hear them. Darkness becomes protection for Scott, cosmic annihilation for Bush,
54:04
Speaker 1: a populated psychological prison for Fenimore, and a directionalist trap
54:08
Speaker 1: for the woodworker. Luminous figures can be reassuring, overwhelming, or ambiguous,
54:13
Speaker 1: while religious imagery sometimes conforms to the experience's background and
54:16
Speaker 1: sometimes violates it completely. Whatever produces these experiences seem capable
54:21
Speaker 1: of combining universal human problems such as death, attachment, identity, guilt, isolation, love,
54:28
Speaker 1: and fear with with memories and symbols belonging specifically to
54:31
Speaker 1: the individual. Modern neuroscience gives us strong reasons to resist
54:35
Speaker 1: treating every remembered detail as a literal map of an
54:38
Speaker 1: objectively existing afterlife, because extreme physiological stress, changing cerebral perfusion, anesthesia,
54:46
Speaker 1: disrupted sensory integration, dreamlike cognition, autobiographical memory, and altered neurochemistry
54:53
Speaker 1: can all contribute to experiences whose vividness may exceed ordinary
54:57
Speaker 1: waking perceptions. The first Flatliners episode already established that individual
55:02
Speaker 1: components of the NDE can be produced or approximated under
55:06
Speaker 1: very different conditions, which means that experiencing body separation, brilliant light,
55:12
Speaker 1: a sensed presence, or unusual time perception does not by
55:15
Speaker 1: itself demonstrate consciousness operating independently of the brain. At the
55:20
Speaker 1: same time, neither prospective research nor laboratory models have reduced
55:25
Speaker 1: the entire NDE phenomenon to one switch. one chemical, or
55:30
Speaker 1: one anatomical event, and the distressing cases make that problem
55:34
Speaker 1: even more difficult because people can undergo superficially similar medical
55:38
Speaker 1: crises in return describing radically different emotional worlds. One of
55:43
Speaker 1: the most important findings is therefore one of the least dramatic.
55:46
Speaker 1: Researchers still cannot reliably predict who will have which kind
55:50
Speaker 1: of experience. The literature does not support the comforting moral
55:53
Speaker 1: formula in which benevolent people receive beautiful NDEs while cruel
55:58
Speaker 1: people experience hell, nor does it support the assumption that
56:01
Speaker 1: suicide attempts automatically produce punishment. That matters because several of
56:06
Speaker 1: the stories we have looked at tonight involve people who
56:09
Speaker 1: spent years trying to understand not simply what they saw,
56:12
Speaker 1: but what the experience said about them. If the event
56:16
Speaker 1: felt more convincing than ordinary waking life, and if a
56:19
Speaker 1: religious authority then tells someone they were shown hell because
56:23
Speaker 1: they deserved it, the interpretation could become almost as psychologically
56:26
Speaker 1: consequential as the original experience. What may be easier to
56:31
Speaker 1: establish is the power these experiences possess after a person returns,
56:36
Speaker 1: because the event does not necessarily end when circulation stabilizes,
56:40
Speaker 1: anesthesia clears, or the patient eventually leaves the hospital. People
56:44
Speaker 1: have reorganized religions, careers, relationships, and entire understandings of themselves
56:49
Speaker 1: around memories from these states, while others have spent decades
56:52
Speaker 1: trying unsuccessfully to bury them. Some people become less afraid
56:57
Speaker 1: of dying, while distressing experiences can become considerably more afraid
57:01
Speaker 1: because the experience removes one of the most comforting possibilities
57:04
Speaker 1: available to a frightened human being. The possibility that death
57:08
Speaker 1: simply means unconsciousness and therefore contains nothing that can be experienced.
57:13
Speaker 1: That brings us directly back to Flatliners, because the central
57:17
Speaker 1: horror of the movie was never merely that its characters
57:19
Speaker 1: learn how to stop their hearts. The frightening idea was
57:22
Speaker 1: that they crossed a boundary they believed should remain inaccessible
57:25
Speaker 1: until death. and discovered that whatever happened there could follow
57:29
Speaker 1: them back, forcing itself into ordinary life after the medical
57:33
Speaker 1: crisis had ended. The film turns that premise into literal
57:37
Speaker 1: supernatural consequences, but the real accounts we have examined tonight
57:41
Speaker 1: suggest something psychologically stranger, because what follows those people home
57:45
Speaker 1: is often memory itself. An experience that may have lasted minutes,
57:49
Speaker 1: perhaps seconds, can remain emotionally present 40 or 50 years later,
57:53
Speaker 1: while ordinary days, conversations, and and entire periods of life
57:57
Speaker 1: have disappeared. Perhaps every person we discuss entered an extraordinary
58:02
Speaker 1: state generated completely by a brain under extreme physiological stress
58:07
Speaker 1: drawing upon memory, culture, expectation, and disruptive perception to construct
58:12
Speaker 1: a world that never existed anywhere beyond the nervous system.
58:16
Speaker 1: Perhaps some portion of these experiences reflects aspects of consciousness
58:20
Speaker 1: we do not yet understand. Or perhaps one of our
58:23
Speaker 1: mistakes has been assuming that everything placed under the label
58:26
Speaker 1: near-death experience must arise from exactly the same mechanism. None
58:31
Speaker 1: of those possibilities require us to treat uncertainty as evidence
58:34
Speaker 1: of the supernatural, but uncertainty also does not justify rewriting
58:38
Speaker 1: testimony until it becomes cleaner, simpler, and less strange than
58:42
Speaker 1: the experiences these people actually reported. The only people capable
58:46
Speaker 1: of describing what happens close to that boundary are by
58:49
Speaker 1: definition people who returned before the biological process became irreversible,
58:54
Speaker 1: which means every NDE carries the same limitation we encountered
58:59
Speaker 1: in the first Flatliners. Whatever these people experienced, they did
59:03
Speaker 1: not complete the final process of death and then return
59:05
Speaker 1: from some scientifically confirmed state beyond it. Did they reach
59:09
Speaker 1: some point of the road leading toward that boundary, or
59:12
Speaker 1: entered an altered state created during catastrophic injury, illness, and recovery,
59:16
Speaker 1: and then came back carrying memories from the interval. That
59:19
Speaker 1: is precisely why the accounts remain scientifically frustrating and humanly irresistible.
59:24
Speaker 1: Because survivors can describe what the road looked like to them,
59:28
Speaker 1: while no one can establish with certainty where the road
59:30
Speaker 1: ultimately ends. For some of the people we have followed,
59:34
Speaker 1: that road appeared to open into overwhelming light, while for
59:37
Speaker 1: others it became darkness, grotesque beings, empty landscapes, trapped personalities,
59:42
Speaker 1: contradictory religious imagery, or the horrifying possibility of consciousness continuing
59:47
Speaker 1: without anything recognizable around it. The darkest possibility in Tales
59:52
Speaker 1: from the Dark Side is therefore not that one of
59:54
Speaker 1: these eight people definitely discovered hell. because nothing in the
59:58
Speaker 1: evidence allows us to make that claim. It is that
1:00:00
Speaker 1: somewhere along the unstable border between consciousness and death, human
1:00:04
Speaker 1: beings appear capable of undergoing experiences so enormous, coherent, and
1:00:09
Speaker 1: emotionally convincing that surviving them may become only the beginning
1:00:13
Speaker 1: of the story. Whether those environments exist beyond us or
1:00:16
Speaker 1: arise entirely within us remains unresolved, but the people who
1:00:20
Speaker 1: return from them can spend the rest of their lives
1:00:22
Speaker 1: carrying places that everyone else insists they never visited. and
1:00:26
Speaker 1: that may tell us nothing certain about what waits after death,
1:00:30
Speaker 1: while telling us something deeply unsettling about the journey toward it.
1:00:34
Speaker 1: And that's the end of another Occult Rejects. Hope you
1:00:36
Speaker 1: all enjoyed, and until the next one.