• In 2016, a priest says he went to hell for a short time.
  • He saw guys walking like dogs and heard demons singing Rihanna songs.
  • Many of the best-known near-death experiences, like this trip to hell, are more positive than this one. However, there are also bad NDEs.

A priest named Gerald Johnson who lived in Michigan and had a heart attack in 2016. He says that he had a near-death experience (NDE) that took him to hell, which was a place he never thought he’d go.

Johnson recently went on TikTok to talk about his painful NDE. It wasn’t the warm, bright-light epiphany you might expect from someone who goes to the afterlife for a short time.

“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” Johnson says in the video that everyone is talking about. “Whatever he did to me, I don’t care. “That’s not fair to anyone.”

Johnson says that after his heart attack in February 2016, his spirit left his body and went to hell through “the very centre of the Earth.” Even though he says, “I can’t explain what I saw there,” he did his best.

Johnson says he saw a guy walking on all fours like a dog and getting burned from head to toe:

“His eyes were bulging, and even worse, he had chains around his neck.” He was like a dog from hell. The chains were held by a devil.”

Johnson also heard music in hell, like the happy songs “Umbrella” by Rihanna and “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin. This time, though, the songs were sung by devils to “torture” people.

Johnson says that his horrible near-death experience taught him that he should forgive people who had hurt him instead of waiting for them to get what they deserved.

You might think Johnson’s story is hard to believe. But experts say that even though many of the NDEs that get the most attention are good, bad NDEs do happen. Just that the experts aren’t sure how or why.

Researchers, especially those from the International Association for Near-Death Studies, think that NDEs are most likely caused by a change in the way blood flows to the brain during quick life-threatening events like a heart attack, a blow to the head, or even shock. As your brain starts to lose blood and oxygen, its electrical activity starts to slow down. “Local parts of the brain lose power one at a time, like a town losing power one neighbourhood at a time,” one expert told Scientific American.

During a near-death experience (NDE), your mind keeps working, but not in the way it usually does. Whether the NDE is caused by a lack of oxygen, some kind of anaesthesia, or a neurochemical reaction to trauma, those who have one have a real, sometimes traumatic memory of it. We might not know how that memory came to be, and unlike Johnson and his trip to hell, victims might not want to talk about it again, but it could change their lives.