The anonymous poster recounted the experience on Reddit’s NoSleep forum, describing a brush with death that began in 2003, when they were just 15 years old. A sudden medical collapse left their heart stopped, their body motionless in the middle of a road, and their soul, they say, somewhere far darker than pearly gates and angel choirs.

“I was dead, technically,” they wrote. “My heart stopped. EMS found me unresponsive and managed to bring me back en route to the hospital. That part I’ve been told. What I remember is what happened in between.”

They claimed to have met a presence, something childlike, but deeply unsettling, that tormented them psychologically.

“It batted me around like a cat with a caught mouse,” they wrote. “Physical discomforts we imagine hell inflicting upon us pale in comparison to the torture of soul pain. Loss of a loved one comes closest, that piercing, emotional damage resulting from trauma.” Read more below