It's the question we've all asked: What happens after death? These people who died and came back to life say they have an idea.
14 True Stories from People Who Died and Came Back to Life
“The most glorious feeling”
In 1994, orthopedic surgeon Tony Cicoria called his mom from a pay phone during a lake house trip. They’d hung up, but he still had the phone in his hand when a blue flash came out. He hadn’t realized there’d been a lightning storm brewing.
He felt his body fly backward—and then, confusingly, forward. Cicoria turned around to see his own body lying on the ground. I’m dead, he thought. No grief. No ecstasy. Just a fact.
After watching a woman start CPR, Cicoria moved on, floating up the stairs to see his kids getting their faces painted, realizing that they’d be OK. “Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light … an enormous feeling of well-being and peace,” he told the New Yorker.
“The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up. … There was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had’—slam! I was back.”
“All the fear was gone”
After a four-year battle with lymphatic cancer, Anita Moorjani slipped into a coma in 2006. Doctors were sure it was the end, not realizing that in her near-death state, she was still conscious. Initially, she felt like she was floating above her body with “360-degree peripheral vision” of the hospital room and beyond, she told Today.
She felt the presence of her late father, who had a message for her. “He said that I’ve gone as far as I can, and if I go any further, I won’t be able to turn back,” she said. “But I felt I didn’t want to turn back because it was so beautiful. It was just incredible because, for the first time, all the pain had gone. All the discomfort had gone. All the fear was gone. I just felt so incredible. And I felt as though I was enveloped in this feeling of just love. Unconditional love.”
About 30 hours after falling into a coma, Moorjani flickered back into consciousness. Two days later, her organs started to regain function, and the tumors started shrinking. Now she’s cancer-free and is a public speaker and author of five books, including What If This Is Heaven?
“It was really bright”
At age 4, Annabel Beam was diagnosed with two chronic, life-threatening digestive disorders. By age 8, she was ready to give up—until something unexplainable happened. She was sitting on a tree branch 30 feet in the air when it cracked. She fell into a hollow at the base of the tree and was trapped for six hours.
She says she died and went to heaven: “It was really bright, and I sat on Jesus’s lap, and he told me, ‘Whenever the firefighters get you out, there will be nothing wrong with you,’” Beam told Today.
“And I asked him if I could stay, and he said, ‘No, I have plans you need to fulfill on Earth that you cannot fulfill in heaven.’” When she woke up, her illness had healed. Her mom wrote the book Miracles from Heaven, which was later turned into a film.
“I experienced an overwhelming sense of peace”
Tessa Romero, a 50-year-old mother, had a remarkable back-from-the-dead experience. While dropping her kids off at school, she had sudden heart failure and spent 24 minutes without a heartbeat. During this time, she underwent an intense near-death experience that reshaped her understanding of life and death.
In her book, 24 Minutes on the Other Side: Living Without Fear of Death, Romero describes the sensation of leaving her body and observing the scene from above.
She recalls: “I saw my own body lying there, yet felt more alive than ever, awake and conscious, but invisible and unheard by those around me. I experienced an overwhelming sense of peace, a cessation of all physical and emotional pain.”
The incident impacted her perspective and diminished her fear of death, instilling hope for a peaceful afterlife.
A serene, dark space
Real survival stories are always inspiring, but David Ditchfield’s story is something else altogether. In 2006, he was dragged under a speeding train, but he miraculously survived. During the surgery that followed, he had a near-death experience.
He was in a serene, dark space surrounded by pulsating orbs and encountered beings of light exuding unconditional love. Following his recovery, Ditchfield discovered extraordinary artistic and musical talents he had never possessed before.
He began to create paintings depicting his experience and composed classical music without formal training. His debut symphony, “The Divine Light,” inspired by his experience, received a standing ovation.
Ditchfield shared his journey in the book Shine On: The Remarkable Story of How I Fell Under a Speeding Train, Journeyed to the Afterlife and the Astonishing Proof I Brought Back with Me.
“I felt my soul or something come right out of my body”
When Ernest Hemingway was serving with the American Red Cross in Italy during World War I, he was badly injured by a mortar bomb. He apparently died for a moment, but in typical Hemingway style, he doesn’t make it sound too flowery. “I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner,” he told a friend who related the story to Life magazine. “It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.”
“Time wrapped in on itself”
The Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) collects stories from people who have seen the “other side.” In one story, a 4-year-old girl was in the hospital with a high-grade fever that had caused hallucinations, vomiting and fever, when she felt her toes reach the foot of the bed. She opened her eyes to see herself lying on a gurney before she started to rise out of the building.
“I began browsing through time,” she writes on the NDERF website. “I later detailed things that occurred before I could even talk … As I kept ascending, I felt at peace. There were no questions or unknowns. Time wrapped in on itself.”
She felt no fear or worry. It seemed like there was no past, present or future. Everything seemed to be happening all at once. “I began drifting towards a beautiful light, and I wanted to touch it. Suddenly, there was a pop. It felt like I was attached to a cord when someone grabbed it and jerked me down.”
“I had the vision of seeing a white light”
When actress Jane Seymour was shooting the 1988 film Onassis, she went into anaphylactic shock when her bronchitis antibiotics were injected into a vein instead of a muscle. “I had the vision of seeing a white light and looking down and seeing myself in this bedroom with a nurse frantically trying to save my life and jabbing injections in me, and I’m calmly watching this whole thing,” she told the Omaha World-Herald in 2016.
She later told HuffPost how the experience had changed her: “I remember looking down at this body that was mine, realizing I wasn’t in it, and I totally grasped the concept that your body is really a vehicle,” she said. “You need to service it like a car.”
“Just this total, total blackness”
In October 2023, Tommy McDowell found himself in the intensive care unit, his body ravaged by sepsis-induced organ failure. While unconscious, McDowell stepped into a void he describes as “extreme blackness.”
As recounted during the conversation with Baltimore’s 11 News, “I have no vision, no sight, no body feeling, no breath, nothing. Just this total, total blackness. And it was terrifying.”
He felt an overwhelming sense of isolation and fear. Amid this abyss, McDowell cried out in desperation.
“I screamed out, and I said, you know, ‘My God, my God, where are you?’ And that was when I had just this incredibly overwhelming sense of peace and comfort,” said McDowell. “I don’t have the language to describe exactly how much it was. It’s like I tell people, whatever your best life was, multiply it by 10,000 times, and maybe you’ll get close to the extreme of what this felt like.”
“In the room were three beings, made of shimmering crystal”
When NDERF contributor Laurie was 19 years old, she was swept into rapids on a rafting trip. She was trapped beneath the surface, and as water filled her lungs, she knew she was going to die. Everything went black, then white, as if she were traveling through a tunnel.
“Looking around me, I could see a room that appeared to be formed from pure white clouds, yet wasn’t solid,” she told NDERF researchers. “In the room were three beings, made of shimmering crystal. Light shone through them like a glass prism, forming a rainbow. One was larger than the other two, but all of them spoke to me,” she said.
Laurie felt scared of the beings, and seemingly in response to her fear, they transformed into beings she recognized as angels. “They didn’t have bird wings; they had fibers like fiber optic cables that were shaped like wings, and pure light shone through the fibers, forming colors in all shades. When they spoke, their messages were sent telepathically.” The angels showed her a golden field with beautiful music, with a tree and a lake nearby. A kayaking rescuer brought her to safety.
“Swooping golden orbs”
In 2008, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, MD, went into a coma with a rare form of meningitis. His doctors figured he had only a 10% chance of living. Instead, he was transported to a place he calls the Gateway Valley, which he describes on his personal website.
“I was rescued by a slowly spinning clear white light associated with a musical melody that served as a portal up into rich and ultra-real realms,” he writes. “The Gateway Valley was filled with many Earth-like and spiritual features: vibrant and dynamic plant life, with flowers and buds blossoming richly and no signs of death or decay, waterfalls into sparkling crystal pools, thousands of beings dancing below with great joy and festivity, all fueled by swooping golden orbs in the sky above, angelic choirs emanating chants and anthems that thundered through my awareness, and a lovely girl on a butterfly wing.”
After being unconscious for a week, he woke up. Incredibly, he hadn’t suffered any brain damage. His book Proof of Heaven describes more of his experience.
“Love was actually permeating my being”
Dave Bennett was the chief engineer of an underwater research vessel in 1983. One night, he was thrown into the ocean. He’d been educated on the signs of oxygen deprivation, but as he drowned, he suddenly experienced something unlike anything he’d read about.
He felt an omnipresent being accompanying him as the darkness slowly faded into light. Surprisingly, he started to move toward it. “As I got closer, there were waves and waves of love that were just wrapping me in this warm embrace,” he said at an International Association for Near-Death Studies conference.
“It was the most amazing feeling I ever had, and it felt as if this love was actually permeating my being, and it transformed me into this being of life,” Bennett said. “And as I got closer to the light, the light appeared to me like it was millions upon millions of fragments of light.” Out of that, he saw what he interpreted as his family—not the ones he’d had on Earth but a second “soul family.”
This soul family relived his life with him through different viewpoints. He was told to go back to life to fulfill his purpose, and after 18 minutes underwater, he popped back to the surface.
“That’s Jesus”
In 2015, 17-year-old Zack Clements collapsed in the middle of his high school gym class. His heart stopped for a solid 20 minutes as doctors tried to revive him. But while he was unconscious, Clements says he caught a glimpse of heaven.
“I saw [this] line of white angels. In the middle was the prettiest of them all, and I didn’t know who it was at first until he got closer to me. And then I realized: That’s Jesus,” he said to People.
“He put his hand on my shoulder and said I’ll be all right.” Some people have claimed the teen’s story was a hoax, but to be resuscitated after 20 minutes—without any lasting brain damage—is a medical miracle of survival.
“It was hot in that tunnel”
In April 2023, actor Jamie Foxx suffered a brain bleed and had a stroke while filming Back in Action in Atlanta. He fell into a coma for almost three weeks and woke up to find himself in a wheelchair, unable to walk.
“It was kind of oddly peaceful. I was in that tunnel. It was hot in that tunnel,” he told the Sun. Foxx described his recovery as a second chance, stating, “When I was talking to [God], he said, ‘Hey man, I’m gonna give you the second chance—what you gonna do with it?’”
He shared his experience and expressed gratitude for the second chance at life in his 2024 Netflix special, What Has Happened Was. Promoting the show on Instagram, he posted: “Me: Thank you God, for my second chance. God: Watchu GON do wit it? Me: Spread joy/laughter errday. God: Bet.”
What does science say about near-death experiences?
There are scientific studies that explore the phenomenon of NDEs. An New York University Grossman School of Medicine study suggests that almost 40% of patients revived from cardiac arrests reported conscious thoughts or memories during the experience. The study also observed brain activity up to an hour into resuscitation in some patients, which challenges the belief that our brains shut down soon after a cardiac arrest.
The study’s lead author, Dr. Sam Parnia, reported that during cardiac arrest, the brain often releases a “brake system,” enabling patients to access their full consciousness, memories and emotions. These are different from dreams or mere hallucinations and offer valuable insights into human consciousness during such critical moments.
FAQs
What is it called when a person dies and comes back to life?
The phenomenon is called autoresuscitation. It was named the “Lazarus phenomenon” by J.G. Bray in a publication in the Journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in 1993. The term is named after the biblical figure Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected.
What is the longest time a person has died before coming back to life?
The longest instance we could find of an individual being medically dead and then revived is 17 hours. It’s the case of Velma Thomas, which was reported by ABC News. When her body was unconscious (rather, reported dead), she had no identified brain activity but underwent spontaneous recovery.
Is death peaceful or scary?
Death or near-death experiences vary from individual to individual. Many people who died and came back to life report feelings of peace, comfort and a sense of detachment from pain.
Some individuals also report distressing experiences characterized by fear, void and isolation, like the case of Tommy McDowell. How a person perceives death can be influenced by their individual beliefs and neurological factors.
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Sources:
- Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: “Temporality of Features in Near-Death Experience Narratives”
- The New Yorker: “A bolt from the blue”
- YouTube: “Dr. Tony Cicoria | Expressions”
- Anita Moorjani: “Share your truth with the world”
- Today: “Survivors of near-death experience share their ‘afterlife’ stories”
- Daily Mail: “I was a sceptic about the afterlife but the other side has changed me”
- YouTube: “The near-death experience of David Ditchfield”
- NDERF: “Mache G NDE”
- HuffPost: “Ten life lessons I learned from actress Jane Seymour”
- WBAL-TV: “People share what they felt during near-death experiences”
- NDERF: “Laurie L NDE”
- Eben Alexander: “My experience in a coma”
- YouTube: “Profound near-death experience account – David Benett”
- People: “Zack Clements says he saw Jesus when he was dead”
- Fox News: “Brain bleed sent Jamie Foxx into a stroke”
- Scientific American: “Study on survivors of near-death experiences”
- Times of India: “Insights from a groundbreaking study reveal near-death experiences of patients”
- Journal of Clinical Medicine: “Lazarus phenomenon or the return from the afterlife”
- ABC News: “Doctor calls near-death experience a ‘miracle’”
- Life: “Mister Papa”
- Journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists: “The Lazarus Phenomenon Revisited”
