Your story was very impactful, so, you know, let us know as much as you're comfortable sharing what, what happened.

Okay.

Um, I'll start off with saying I was a, a born and raised Catholic, which influenced, of course, my beliefs.

Uh, we were a very religious family, and I believed everything that I was taught, including the part about hell.

Uh, here we are at Halloween, so, um, uh, people [laughs], you know, are focused on, uh, devils and spirits and ghosts and all of that stuff, and that just tells us something about our culture.

And, uh, in other cultures, they, they celebrate differently, but that was something that I had been told, that when I died, I would go to purgatory, and that was like hell, except I would get out.

And, uh, we even, in school, if, if something went wrong, you'd say, "Oh, give that up for the poor souls in purgatory." We just really felt that that's where we were gonna go.

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Okay.

And it was quiet and, and I just thought, "Well, I better hang out.

I don't know if I'm sitting or standing or what." But then I had this sensation and looking at this swirling terrible fog, red fog, and I thought, "This is weird." And then I started hearing people screaming and moaning and all that, and I thought, "Oh, God, this can't be good." And then this voice just kind of boomed out of the fog that said, "Do you know where you are?" And all I can think of was, "Hell?" [laughs] And this booming, horrible laugh, and that's what started the near-death experience.

It was quite lengthy.

Uh, it had all kinds of different scenes that kept changing, from demons to, to zombies, to walking on this endless road.

Uh, all, all kinds of, um, unpleasant experiences.

And then when I got to the last one, I, I didn't really know it was the last one, but I knew I'd been there a long time.

Wow.