Elizabeth Krohn wants to stay alive to see her granddaughter get married and have kids one day but she revealed she is no longer scared to die after her near-death experience
A mum who once dismissed the notion of an afterlife said her opinion completely changed when she was struck by lightning.
Elizabeth Krohn was outside a synagogue in Houston, Texas, when she claims she was briefly transported to heaven after her accident.
The bolt hit her in 1988 when she was a 28-year-old mum-of-two and she has since revealed what exactly she saw when she was dead.
She was heading towards the synagogue with one hand holding an umbrella, and the other holding the hand of her two-year-old son, when her life changed in an instant.
Elizabeth recalled: “We started walking, suddenly, there was like a chill in the air. And it felt like static electricity. My hand was right in front of me and I looked down and thought, ‘This is stupid, I shouldn’t be holding the umbrella like this.’
“As soon as I thought ‘let go, just let go of the umbrella,’ a large bolt of lightning hit the top of the umbrella.”
Moments later, Elizabeth saw a heap on the ground, and she realised it was her body.
Remembering what happened next, she told the Coming Home YouTube channel: “As soon as I realised I was dead, a light appeared. The light was wholesome. It was alive. The light was conscious. And it wanted me to follow it.
“It led me to a place that I called the garden. It wasn’t a garden like you would think of here on earth. The words don’t exist to really adequately describe the place I was in. Everything was perfect. This place was heaven.”
Shortly after, she claimed she sat on a bench where she had a conversation with God, via the voice of her dead grandad who had died one year earlier, which was why she was at the synagogue service.
During the experience in the afterlife, she said she developed an understanding of the relationship between space and time and how it worked.
Then, she said she was given a choice about what to do next.
Elizabeth said: “You can go back, you can stay here, there was a gorgeous path in the garden and it led to a mountain range that was off to the right. Apparently, if I decided to stay, I would take this path over the mountains.
“The entire time I was there, everything was so perfect, there was nothing I could have asked for. Everything I needed was right there. Why would I go back?”
However, she continued: “He said there was more you had planned to do in this life. You will have a third child, it will be a girl. He said she has already picked you and your husband to be your parents. You can either go back now and finish. You’re 28 years into it. Or, you can start over.
“That made it pretty easy. I need to go back and just finish the job.”
Opening her eyes, Elizabeth was back in the rain, and she saw people rushing out from the synagogue to help her.
She remembered being clear in her mind what had happened, but told herself she could not say anything, because she knew she would be laughed at.
Elizabeth was treated for burns from the lightning strike and spent the next three months bedbound because it was painful to walk because of the injuries to her feet.
She later told rabbis about her near-death experience but was dismissed. Her mother was fascinated and believed her but her husband “pretty much laughed” and told her she was “losing it”.
However, they remained married for another nine years, and in that time they had a third child, a girl.
Summing up her perspective now, she said: “My near-death experience totally shifted how I think about life and death and religion… how I think about everything.
“Because when you know that death is not the end, it changes everything. The old me was very by the book, everything very rigid, very structured. I did not believe in life after death.
“I thought when you die, that’s it, lights out, you’re done. And that is not the case, consciousness survives.”
