Howard Storm was an atheist dad of two and university professor when his life changed forever during a trip to Paris
A man who claims to have “died and gone to hell” has shared his experience, which is far from the traditional depiction of burning flames and screams of torture. Instead, he describes a feeling of defeat and despair that was unlike anything people might imagine.
Howard Storm, an atheist father of two and professor and chairman of the art department at North Kentucky University in the USA, had his life changed forever during a trip to Paris on June 1, 1985. He recalls experiencing a sudden, intense pain that made him believe he’d been shot.
“It was like, right there, bang, the most acute pain I’d ever experienced in my life,” he said. He went to the hospital where he was informed that he had a perforation of the duodenum and would die without immediate surgery, reports the Liverpool Echo.
He said: “I didn’t want to die because I knew with 100% certainty that when you die, that’s it, it’s over. The screen goes black, like in the movie theatre, you know? Says ‘the end,’ blackness, nothing.”
At 38 years old, with a wife, two children, a good job, a career, art galleries showcasing his work, and financial success, he felt it wasn’t his time to die. He then described waking from unconsciousness, standing next to his bed, feeling better than he ever had in his life, only to realise that the lifeless body in the bed was his own.
“But I couldn’t accept that, because it’s not. I mean, that’s impossible. Then I heard people outside the room calling me by name in English, which I thought was weird because everybody in the French hospital spoke French.
“And they said, ‘Hurry up. We’ve been waiting for you. We know everything. We’ve been waiting and waiting, and it’s time for you to come with us’. So I assumed, since I had mentioned the doctor, that they were gonna take me to the doctor.
“So I left the light of the room and went out into the very grey, dank hallway, where there was this group of people that stayed back in the darkness away from the light of the room. He said he was led down what he first thought was the hallway.”
He said: “We walked for miles, and miles, and miles, and we never went up or down. They encircled me and just shepherd me into ever-increasing darkness. It started off with them being very officious. Like, ‘This way, keep moving, hurry up’. That evolved into, ‘What’s the matter with you? Move, move faster. You’re too slow’. That became vulgar.
“And then it became clear that they were gonna have at me. They began by kicking, punching, pulling. Then they started biting, and ripping, and tearing. And then they started invading me physically. So eventually, I was completely torn apart, lying on the ground, unable to even move or defend myself in any way.
“I’m completely defeated, completely depressed and in despair. And I couldn’t think of any way out. This is it forever, and ever, and ever with these horrible people.
“And I heard a voice say, ‘Pray to God’. And I thought, I don’t believe in God, I don’t pray. And the voice said, ‘Pray to God,’ kind of strong. And I thought, I don’t know how to pray. I can’t pray.”
He said the voice became louder and said, “Pray to God”. He said his mind went “involuntarily” to him as a little boy in a Sunday school singing “Jesus Loves Me”.
He added: “I could see it vividly. I could hear it vividly. But much more importantly, I could feel it vividly, that as a little boy, when I sang “Jesus Loved Me”.He added: “I believed in him as a little boy.
“And when that happened, I decided that I needed to take a chance ’cause I didn’t know whether he would care about me or not. As far as I was concerned, his best option would be to leave me there. And I called out to him, ‘Jesus, please save me’.
“He said at that point a “tiny light” appeared in the darkness and got very bright. He explained: “It came upon me. It was impossibly brilliant.
“If it had been light as we experience light in this world, it would have consumed me. I mean, I just would have been burnt up.
“But it was that bright. Out of it emerged hands and arms, and he reached down and touched me, and I saw myself come back together from the roadkill that I was. You know, I became complete.”
He emotionally detailed the life-changing encounter saying: “Much more important to me was that he filled me with the love that I never experienced in this world. And his hands and arms picked me up without any effort, and he brought me up against himself, and put his arms around me, to stroke my back like a mother or father would with their child. And I cried out of joy into his chest, slobbering all over him.”
Reflecting on the dark aspect of his journey, he said, “The people who took me into that place of darkness were people just like me. They were people who had rejected God, rejected God’s love, and God gave them exactly what they wanted.
“I don’t believe God punishes anybody. I believe God gives everybody exactly what they want.
“The Bible says humans judge by appearances, God judges by the heart, and if we seek God and seek God’s love, we will find it in this world and in the next. And if we reject God and reject God’s love, we get to go to a world where those things don’t happen.
“And I don’t mean this as a joke. I mean this absolutely sincerely.”
“Hell’s not so bad. The problem is the people that are there. They’re awful. They’re really awful.
“There’s nothing to do there except torment one another, so Hell is a place of continuous torment. It’s a place of complete hopelessness and despair.”
The former professor recounted his experience in the Lee Strobel film “The Case for Heaven”, available on YouTube. The encounter had such a profound impact on him that he transformed his life.
No longer an atheist, he became a Christian and gave up his tenured professorship and role as art department chairman at the university. He went on to become a pastor at a small church.
In the film, Lee Strobel, an award-winning former Chicago Tribune journalist, commented: “That’s some evidence that this was more than just some loose hallucination. There was something profound that happened to him, something that chilled him to the bone.”