Saying you’ve been “to hell and back” is typically just a phrase that people use to mean they’ve had a bad time. Nobody ever means it literally, unless you are the Kansas lady who officially died for 11 minutes and got a brief taste of the afterlife. Thankfully, her doctors resuscitated her and she was able to tell the rest of us what heaven and hell are really like. And, believe it or not (emphasis on the not), it sounds like all those Sunday school teachers were right.
Charlotte Holmes, native of Wichita, Kansas and day-visitor to the underworld, revealed her extraordinary story on Christian talk show The 700 Club in 2019, with her literally larger-than-life tale now going viral once again. That year, the then-68-year-old took a turn when she was getting a routine cardiologist check-up and her blood pressure spiked out of nowhere. The next thing she knew she was rushed to hospital and hooked up to an IV, suffering from a suspected stroke or heart attack.
Just before she flatlined, Charlotte told her husband, Danny, who was by her side, about the “beautiful flowers” she could see all around her. “Well, I looked around, and I knew there were no flowers in that room,” Danny told The 700 Club. “That’s when I knew she was not in this world.”
“I could see Danny standing in the corner, I could see all the nurses around,” Charlotte herself recalled about the moment she died and earned herself a peak at heaven. “Then I opened my eyes, I looked around at the beauty. I could see the trees, I could see the grass. And everything was swaying with the music, because everything in heaven worships God.”
You might be wondering exactly what heaven looks like but unfortunately, Charlotte explained that our earthly words just can’t do it justice because “it’s so above what we can even imagine – [by] a million times, a million times.” The good news is that heaven has flawless customer service. According to Charlotte, it was God himself who was there to welcome her, with the Almighty taking the form of a “blindingly bright light.”
The Lord then reunited Charlotte with her long-lost loved ones. “See, they didn’t look old, they didn’t look sick, none of them wore glasses,” she revealed. “They looked like they were in their 30s… They looked wonderful.” God also introduced her to a toddler, who God explained was her miscarried son she once lost at five-and-a-half months pregnant. When she enquired how he was older than he had been in life, God explained: “They continued to grow in heaven.”
Despite being a benevolent sort of deity so far, God got a little Old Testament all of a sudden and brought Charlotte to the precipice of a fiery pit, which she describes as being “the edge of hell.” Unfortunately, hell lived up to its name and really brought the wholesome vibes of Charlotte’s trip to the afterlife right down.
“I looked down, and the smell, and then rotten flesh – that’s what it smelled like – and then screams,” she recalled. “After seeing the beauty of heaven, the contrast to seeing hell is almost unbearable.”
God then revealed that he was showing Charlotte a vision of hell as a warning, so that she might tell the rest of us what awaits on the other side if we’re not careful. “And He says, ‘I show you this to tell you, if some of them do not change their ways, this is where they shall reside,'” Charlotte recounted.
Sadly, four years after her 700 Club episode aired, Charlotte passed away in November 2023. She is survived by husband Danny, their daughter, two grandchildren, and one great grandson. We’re confident she’s definitely in the first place she saw and not the second.
