Is hell real? One good way to answer the question whether hell is real is to ask people who have actually been dead. People who have been clinically dead and come back report having so-called near death experiences where some do in fact report having distressing or direct “hellish experiences.”

  A Gallup Poll in 1982 estimated that out of eight million Near Death Expriences (NDEs) in the U.S., only about 1 percent had an “unpleasant” experience. Some NDE researchers have come up with the same number of about 1 percent but they have also openly admitted an emphasis on pleasant or heaven-like experiences.

   Researchers who have looked at unpleasant and hellish experiences within the NDE have found about 15 percent. Researcher Margot Grey found a high rate of 12 percent “hellish experiences” and Peter Fenwick found that 15 percent of the people in his study had “moments of terror.”

   Most reliable according to statistical certainty would be P. M. H. Atwater’s large sample of 3,000 NDEs. She found that out of 3,000 adult NDEs 15 percent had “unpleasant experiences” whereof one third, 5 percent, had a hellish experience where they described it as “truly hellish.” She also confirmed this number from a smaller sample of 700 NDEs where she found 105 cases of unpleasant experiences, which again makes it 15 percent.  

   Is there proof of hell then? We could conclude that hell is real based on these statistics and the fact that people do have unpleasant “hellish experiences” in their NDE. However, in an ultimate sense the reality of hell is complex.

   In her article Is There a Hell, Atwater concludes the following:

Is there a hell? To one who thinks he or she has been there, the answer is yes. To a person like myself, who has studied what evidence exists and has conducted countless interviews, the answer is this: there is more to the near-death experience than anyone currently knows. The phenomenon is vast in scope, its implications more important and more dynamic than most people are willing to admit. Heaven and hell may seem more conceptual than fact, but right now they are all we have to go on as we search further afield into what the mind and its mental imagery might reveal about the source of our being.

   The fact that people do have unpleasant NDEs with hellish experiences, does count as a proof that people do have experiences of hell. However, as Atwater also tells us; hell (and heaven) may ultimately be more a conceptual reality than an actual reality. 

   NDE research in general agrees with this conclusion that we cannot take these “hellish experiences” as an absolute proof of the dogmatic religious interpretation of hell. As we saw in the last two chapters, the angry judgmental God of dogmatic religion does not exist in the light of NDEs. To confirm that God is not angry in relation to hell, I also asked about the following statement in my study: “God wants to punish us in hell.” Here in total rejection 100 percent said that they disagreed with 86 percent saying that they strongly disagreed.

   Then how are we to understand unpleasant NDEs in relation to the religious understand of hell? This, as Atwater points out, takes a deeper investigation because the phenomenon of the NDE is vast in scope and has more important implications than most of us are willing to admit or accept.

   The first fact is that NDE research finds a vide difference in the content of NDEs based on cultural differences. These differences are most evident in pleasant or heaven-like experiences where meetings with religious figures are clearly defined by the religious background of each individual. However, while we do find unpleasant or hell-like experiences in most or all cultures, there is still a difference in the cultural content of these negative experiences.

   If we look at a couple of Western experiences of hell we can see how the content fits with a classical Western view of hell. The first person explains that, “I felt I was in Hell. There was a big pit with vapour coming out and there were arms and hands coming out trying to grab me.”

   Also in Fenwick’s book The Truth in the Light, another person gives this longer testimony:

            It was really like all the images I had ever had of Hell. I was being barbecued. I was wrapped in tinfoil, basted and roasted. Occassionally I was basted by devils sticking their basting syringe with great needles into my flesh and injecting my flesh with the red-hot fat. I was also rolled from side to side with the long forks that the devils used to make sure that I was being well and truly roasted.

   In both testimonies of hell we have the classical content of a Western hell and while the first person tells us she felt she was in hell the last person even explains that it was like all the images he had ever had of hell. 

   If we look at non-Western experiences of hell we will quickly see that the content is different. Todd Murphy published a study of Buddhist NDEs in 1999 where he looked at 11 Thai cases. While there was a higher frequency of distressing elements in these NDEs, it is very clear that they have specific cultural content as in ten cases people met Yama, the Buddhist Lord of Death or his servants that are called Yamatoots.

   One account reveals that, “Yamatoot told him that he had to be judged. He then found himself in front of Yama, the lord of the underworld.” Another person explains that, 

I looked and saw that they were Yamatoots. One of them spoke to me saying "we've come to take you to hell". I said "I'm not going", and I tried to escape. I turned and repeated that I was not going to go to the house of Yama.

   Secondly, besides specific cultural content we also find that fact and perception can be very different. Not only cultural conditioning, but also the perception of each individual can play a major factor in how the NDE is experienced. Atwater explains that, “Invariably an attack of some kind would take place in hellish scenarios or a shunning, and pain would be felt or surges of anxiety and fear.” But; “Amazing as it may seem, I noticed that the same scene that one individual considers wonderfully positive another may declare negative or horrific.”

   There is evidence to suggest that not only cultural concepts of hell play a factor in the perception of hell, but also one’s environment may play a factor. First, the finding of higher rates of unpleasant NDEs among people with distressing states of mind at the moment of death, such as e.g. suicide attempts, seems to suggest that our mental state has an impact on the negative content of the NDE. Also higher frequencies of negative experiences have been found in other cultures, such as in African cultures where a belief in woo doo and a sense of being “bewitched” was predominant.

   Also very interestingly, a German study that compared East German NDEs with West German NDEs happening before the fall of the wall, found a huge difference in distressing experiences. Where the East German NDEs had a frequency of negative experiences of 60 percent, the West German study only found 29 percent.

   So, we find that not only is there is difference in cultural content but there also seems to be a difference in perception of what is experienced as distressing, and that both mental state and environments may affect the negative experience.