Kathy McDaniel ‘had no idea she was dead’ during the whole ordeal
A woman claimed that she journeyed through hell to meet God in heaven after being put into a three-week coma. Kathy McDaniel, speaking on the DEAD Talks Podcast, said that she still recalls everything that happened so clearly that it cannot have been down to her imagination.
The mother was put into a medically induced coma after facing lung failure caused by an aggressive strain of flu back in 1999, which saw her fighting for her life. Upon recovery, she alleges to have found herself in a place she could only describe as hell.
Even decades later, she vividly remembers the experience and shares her story to validate others who have had near-death experiences. Speaking on the podcast, she insisted her memory of the ordeal was still “as crisp as could be”, adding: “To me, it proves it happened not in my brain but in my soul – and you can’t turn the soul off.”
Raised Catholic, Kathy spent her childhood attending Catholic schools and Sunday church services. However, life struggles and traumas, including divorce and the loss of a baby, led her to question her faith in God.
She asked: “I’m a nice person, why does this stuff keep happening to me?” She caught a severe strain of flu after caring for a friend who was ill in Seattle, reports the Express US.
With alarming symptoms, she said: “I was coughing up blood… I could feel my life force draining out through my feet.” A doctor diagnosed Kathy with ARDS – known fully as acute respiratory distress syndrome – a life-threatening illness that occurs when your lungs are severely compromised.
Kathy, who was in her fifties at the time, was put into a drug-induced coma and given a mere 38% chance of survival. She had an experience that she says ‘haunts her to this day’ that started by ‘waking up’ in a “totally dark place”.
She described witnessing an eerie “reddish glow” which she initially mistook for a sunrise. However, she claimed this soon developed into a “pretty but weird” swirling fog that started getting “a little too warm” and began to give off a “really bad” smell.
She said: “Then this voice just boomed out, scared me half to death and it said ‘do you know where you are’. I’m thinking, and the only thing I can come up with is hell. The voice did this maniacal laugh and I just ran into the darkness. I didn’t care if I hit a wall, fell in a ditch, that thing was going to get me so I kept running.”
Things then took a bizarre turn as Kathy found herself being transported to various strange places. She says these included a ruined city with collapsing buildings and a warzone before encountering what she describes as “a demon”.
She said the ‘demon’ offered her a “way out” if she completed a simple gardening task. Kathy claimed she “had no better offers” when she was handed “children’s scissors” and was told to cut down seven-foot-tall blackberry bushes that would keep growing back.
She then spent a considerable amount of time walking along a dirt road, with nothing around but the occasional pile of rocks. All the while, Kathy claimed she had “no idea [she] was dead” and mentioned in the podcast that she came across some of her living relatives during the journey she took.
Kathy told the podcast host that she never experienced a flatline, indicating no physical death occurred. However, she said: “It’s very common, and is accepted now in the groups that I belong to, that if you’re in a coma, your consciousness can wander off.”
She said: “I started off in hell but ended up in the presence of God”. During her experience, Kathy claims to have found “an architect’s book” with a plan.
She continued: “It was halfway open and I thought they were telling me something. I remember saying, ‘that’s going to be too hard’ and then I saw my friend who had died the month before.” She claimed that he had reversed in age from 53 to 35 and looked nothing like he did on his deathbed.
Kathy said: “If he’s dead, and I’m standing next to him, I must be dead too.” Her friend informed her she had “too much left to do” and it wasn’t long afterwards that she was “welcomed back to Earth”. Kathy said that people who hear her story often deny it, believing that they “don’t want it to happen to them”.
An astounding 5 to 10% of the general population are estimated to have memories of a near-death experience, claims Scientific American. Lots do report having interactions with God and getting a glimpse of the afterlife.
