Ever since the first flicker of human consciousness, one question has haunted civilisation: what happens after we die? From ancient myths to modern neuroscience, humanity has been trying to decipher the mystery of what lies beyond. With scientific advancement came desperate attempts to map the unseeable: studies measuring brain activity moments after death, experiments tracking flickers of consciousness as the body shuts down, and near-death research probing the line between the physical and the spiritual. Yet despite decades of effort, science has barely begun to scratch the surface.
And then came a case that defies reason.
For Steve Kang , the story began not with faith, but with despair, and what followed has baffled even those who study the limits of human awareness. Raised as a practising Buddhist with no exposure to Christianity or the Bible’s depictions of heaven and hell, Kang says that when he attempted to take his own life in 1998, he found himself in a place that mirrored the Biblical description of hell, a world of darkness and torment that he could not have imagined.
His account, unsettling and eerily consistent with Christian theology despite his unfamiliarity with it, would later mark a profound turning point in his life. What began as a near-fatal act of hopelessness led him to reevaluate his beliefs and eventually embrace Christianity, a transformation that continues to intrigue psychologists, theologians, and scientists alike, as they grapple with what consciousness might truly encounter after death.
A fall from grace
1998 had been a devastating year for Steve Kang. His father, once a successful businessman in South Korea, lost everything in the country’s financial collapse. At just 19, while studying at the University of California, Irvine, Kang suddenly found himself on his own, scrambling to find work, a scholarship, and somewhere to live.
Up until then, he had been a diligent student and a devout Buddhist. But hardship drove him into darker places. “During that entire summer,” he told The Daily Mail, “I do not remember being sober for more than an hour here and there. We partied and got into trouble.”
By the time the fall semester began, he was too addicted and disoriented to attend classes. Then, at a college party, Kang made a mistake that would change his life forever. He smoked what he thought was marijuana, but the bong contained a lethal mix of heroin, cocaine, and PCP, a combination known as a “death bowl.”
“Something in there messed with my brain,” he recalled. “I stayed awake for ten straight days. I didn’t get a second of sleep after that.”
Ten days without sleep
By the fifth day, his sense of reality began to crumble. “I didn’t know what time of the day it was,” he wrote in his book 8 Hours in Hell: A Shocking Firsthand Experience of What Really Awaits in the Afterlife. “By the sixth and seventh day, when I looked in the mirror I saw that my pupils were so big and black, the white parts of my eyes were hardly visible.”
He phoned Buddhist monks back in Korea, his mentors, seeking help. Their reply cut deep: “We are in the middle of a silent prayer. We cannot help you.”
“It was a very dark time,” he said. “My birthday fell during those ten days, and friends would be like, ‘Steve, happy birthday,’ and I couldn’t reply. I still attended classes, but when teachers and my friends were talking to me, I could not process even a sentence of what they were saying.”
He described feeling haunted, cups falling, metallic noises echoing from a temple poster, convinced he was under a spiritual attack.
Then, on the eighth day, a vision appeared. An elderly Asian man with a long white beard, what Kang believed to be a Buddhist spirit, told him that if he “sacrificed his body,” he would receive “50,000 fewer years in hell.”
“It sounded like a good deal at the time,” Kang said.
He wrote his mother a letter of apology. Two days later, he stabbed himself repeatedly in the stomach and neck with a kitchen knife. His terrified mother found him in a pool of blood and immediately called 911.
“I was in hell”
As surgeons fought to keep him alive, Kang felt himself falling, not rising, as if pulled down an endless, echoing shaft. “I knew I was dying,” he said. “It was like a roller coaster, an elevator, just falling. The fear and the anxiety kept building. After what felt like five minutes, I landed and looked around. I was in hell.”
The Asian grandfather he thought would guide him toward nirvana was nowhere to be found. Instead, Kang sensed a dark, overpowering presence, and in that moment, he realised the truth. The figure who had once urged him to take his life was not a guide at all, but Satan himself. “I felt betrayal right away. I felt so lonely,” he said.
As doctors worked to restart his heart, Kang said he was fighting for his soul, trapped in a place of unbearable darkness that he had never imagined could exist.
The world he described was one of bleak desolation, a cracked, barren wasteland. “For some reason, I could still see,” he said. “People ask me, ‘How can you see if there's no sunlight?’ But you can still supernaturally see. There's sand pebbles everywhere. There's no grass, there's no flowers, there's no plants, there's no food, there's not even a drop of water.”
“To the left, I saw purplish-red cliffs. There were people on top of the cliff, on the bottom of the cliff. When I looked up, evil spirits were there, not small, like in cartoons. These things were really tall, as tall as buildings, wearing capes. And I knew they were in charge of this place.”
He said the agony was worse than anything imaginable. “It’s not a place you want to go,” Kang said. “I almost feel like I don’t even want Kim Jong-il or Hitler to go there. I don’t want my worst enemies to go there.”
“You're just in this agony, and there's no ability to converse with people. It was so much pain, so much accusation, so much fear. It was like anxiety multiplied, fear of condemnation multiplied.”
For eight hours, surgeons worked on him, repairing torn arteries and blood vessels. Doctors told his mother to prepare for the worst. But she refused.
“She prayed to every god she could think of, Allah, Buddha, Muhammad , Confucius, Taoist gods, Shinto gods,” he recalled. “Then she remembered her friend in California, Mrs Kim , was a Christian. And she called her.”
“No more Buddhism, no more drugs… I love you”
Kang says it was those prayers that pulled him back. “I heard a voice in my heart,” he wrote. “A voice I have never heard before. He said, ‘No more Buddhism, no more drugs… I love you.’”
He believes that voice was Jesus.
“The doctor said it was a miracle that I awakened,” he said. “There were staples holding my skin together around my stomach and neck, and tubes going in and out everywhere.”
Redemption and faith
The recovery took a decade. Kang suffered constant panic attacks and insomnia, relying on 20 medications, including Xanax, Lithium Carbonate , and antidepressants, just to function. “For ten years, I never slept one night normally. I had visions of demons laughing at me.”
Then, around Christmas 2012, he said he experienced what he called a “heavenly visitation.”
“I was standing on the top of a hill, and before my very eyes, the mountains, fields, and valleys stretched out,” he said. “A heavenly, bright light shone in all directions. I clearly heard the voice of the Father God with my own ears. I even heard the heavenly choir of angels worshiping God… no human choir could sing that beautifully.”
He threw away his pills and, for the first time in years, slept peacefully. He later joined the US Army as a chaplain and met his wife, Goeun Kim .
Now 47, he lives in California as an evangelical pastor, his body still marked with scars, his faith forged from trauma. “God saved me from hell,” he said, “to help prevent other people from attempting suicide.”
Belief, doubt, and the unexplained
Sceptics have suggested that Kang’s experience was merely a hallucination brought on by trauma and drugs. Kang disagrees.
“That can be a common objection,” he said. “I love objections. I love having a good dialogue. They use the same argument for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, they say the disciples hallucinated because they wanted to see him so much. For me, evidence is everything.”
He referenced research by megachurch pastor John Burke , who interviewed nearly 1,000 people claiming near-death experiences. “Same exact story,” Kang said. “Same turnaround of life. So, I respect everyone’s beliefs and the scepticism, but what they saw is what I saw, and it’s what is in the Bible.”
As a man raised outside Christianity, Kang finds that fact hard to ignore. “I had no idea how the Bible described hell,” he reflected. “So, it can’t be a hallucination.”
His story, one that straddles faith, psychology, and the mysteries of human consciousness, raises the same question that science still cannot answer: what really happens when we die?
And then came a case that defies reason.
For Steve Kang , the story began not with faith, but with despair, and what followed has baffled even those who study the limits of human awareness. Raised as a practising Buddhist with no exposure to Christianity or the Bible’s depictions of heaven and hell, Kang says that when he attempted to take his own life in 1998, he found himself in a place that mirrored the Biblical description of hell, a world of darkness and torment that he could not have imagined.
His account, unsettling and eerily consistent with Christian theology despite his unfamiliarity with it, would later mark a profound turning point in his life. What began as a near-fatal act of hopelessness led him to reevaluate his beliefs and eventually embrace Christianity, a transformation that continues to intrigue psychologists, theologians, and scientists alike, as they grapple with what consciousness might truly encounter after death.
A fall from grace
1998 had been a devastating year for Steve Kang. His father, once a successful businessman in South Korea, lost everything in the country’s financial collapse. At just 19, while studying at the University of California, Irvine, Kang suddenly found himself on his own, scrambling to find work, a scholarship, and somewhere to live.
Up until then, he had been a diligent student and a devout Buddhist. But hardship drove him into darker places. “During that entire summer,” he told The Daily Mail, “I do not remember being sober for more than an hour here and there. We partied and got into trouble.”
By the time the fall semester began, he was too addicted and disoriented to attend classes. Then, at a college party, Kang made a mistake that would change his life forever. He smoked what he thought was marijuana, but the bong contained a lethal mix of heroin, cocaine, and PCP, a combination known as a “death bowl.”
“Something in there messed with my brain,” he recalled. “I stayed awake for ten straight days. I didn’t get a second of sleep after that.”
Ten days without sleep
By the fifth day, his sense of reality began to crumble. “I didn’t know what time of the day it was,” he wrote in his book 8 Hours in Hell: A Shocking Firsthand Experience of What Really Awaits in the Afterlife. “By the sixth and seventh day, when I looked in the mirror I saw that my pupils were so big and black, the white parts of my eyes were hardly visible.”
He phoned Buddhist monks back in Korea, his mentors, seeking help. Their reply cut deep: “We are in the middle of a silent prayer. We cannot help you.”
“It was a very dark time,” he said. “My birthday fell during those ten days, and friends would be like, ‘Steve, happy birthday,’ and I couldn’t reply. I still attended classes, but when teachers and my friends were talking to me, I could not process even a sentence of what they were saying.”
He described feeling haunted, cups falling, metallic noises echoing from a temple poster, convinced he was under a spiritual attack.
Then, on the eighth day, a vision appeared. An elderly Asian man with a long white beard, what Kang believed to be a Buddhist spirit, told him that if he “sacrificed his body,” he would receive “50,000 fewer years in hell.”
“It sounded like a good deal at the time,” Kang said.
He wrote his mother a letter of apology. Two days later, he stabbed himself repeatedly in the stomach and neck with a kitchen knife. His terrified mother found him in a pool of blood and immediately called 911.
“I was in hell”
As surgeons fought to keep him alive, Kang felt himself falling, not rising, as if pulled down an endless, echoing shaft. “I knew I was dying,” he said. “It was like a roller coaster, an elevator, just falling. The fear and the anxiety kept building. After what felt like five minutes, I landed and looked around. I was in hell.”
The Asian grandfather he thought would guide him toward nirvana was nowhere to be found. Instead, Kang sensed a dark, overpowering presence, and in that moment, he realised the truth. The figure who had once urged him to take his life was not a guide at all, but Satan himself. “I felt betrayal right away. I felt so lonely,” he said.
As doctors worked to restart his heart, Kang said he was fighting for his soul, trapped in a place of unbearable darkness that he had never imagined could exist.
The world he described was one of bleak desolation, a cracked, barren wasteland. “For some reason, I could still see,” he said. “People ask me, ‘How can you see if there's no sunlight?’ But you can still supernaturally see. There's sand pebbles everywhere. There's no grass, there's no flowers, there's no plants, there's no food, there's not even a drop of water.”
“To the left, I saw purplish-red cliffs. There were people on top of the cliff, on the bottom of the cliff. When I looked up, evil spirits were there, not small, like in cartoons. These things were really tall, as tall as buildings, wearing capes. And I knew they were in charge of this place.”
He said the agony was worse than anything imaginable. “It’s not a place you want to go,” Kang said. “I almost feel like I don’t even want Kim Jong-il or Hitler to go there. I don’t want my worst enemies to go there.”
“You're just in this agony, and there's no ability to converse with people. It was so much pain, so much accusation, so much fear. It was like anxiety multiplied, fear of condemnation multiplied.”
For eight hours, surgeons worked on him, repairing torn arteries and blood vessels. Doctors told his mother to prepare for the worst. But she refused.
“She prayed to every god she could think of, Allah, Buddha, Muhammad , Confucius, Taoist gods, Shinto gods,” he recalled. “Then she remembered her friend in California, Mrs Kim , was a Christian. And she called her.”
“No more Buddhism, no more drugs… I love you”
Kang says it was those prayers that pulled him back. “I heard a voice in my heart,” he wrote. “A voice I have never heard before. He said, ‘No more Buddhism, no more drugs… I love you.’”
He believes that voice was Jesus.
“The doctor said it was a miracle that I awakened,” he said. “There were staples holding my skin together around my stomach and neck, and tubes going in and out everywhere.”
Redemption and faith
The recovery took a decade. Kang suffered constant panic attacks and insomnia, relying on 20 medications, including Xanax, Lithium Carbonate , and antidepressants, just to function. “For ten years, I never slept one night normally. I had visions of demons laughing at me.”
Then, around Christmas 2012, he said he experienced what he called a “heavenly visitation.”
“I was standing on the top of a hill, and before my very eyes, the mountains, fields, and valleys stretched out,” he said. “A heavenly, bright light shone in all directions. I clearly heard the voice of the Father God with my own ears. I even heard the heavenly choir of angels worshiping God… no human choir could sing that beautifully.”
He threw away his pills and, for the first time in years, slept peacefully. He later joined the US Army as a chaplain and met his wife, Goeun Kim .
Now 47, he lives in California as an evangelical pastor, his body still marked with scars, his faith forged from trauma. “God saved me from hell,” he said, “to help prevent other people from attempting suicide.”
Belief, doubt, and the unexplained
Sceptics have suggested that Kang’s experience was merely a hallucination brought on by trauma and drugs. Kang disagrees.
“That can be a common objection,” he said. “I love objections. I love having a good dialogue. They use the same argument for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, they say the disciples hallucinated because they wanted to see him so much. For me, evidence is everything.”
He referenced research by megachurch pastor John Burke , who interviewed nearly 1,000 people claiming near-death experiences. “Same exact story,” Kang said. “Same turnaround of life. So, I respect everyone’s beliefs and the scepticism, but what they saw is what I saw, and it’s what is in the Bible.”
As a man raised outside Christianity, Kang finds that fact hard to ignore. “I had no idea how the Bible described hell,” he reflected. “So, it can’t be a hallucination.”
His story, one that straddles faith, psychology, and the mysteries of human consciousness, raises the same question that science still cannot answer: what really happens when we die?
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