Secrets from Beyond The Grave

Chapter 3 I Met a Man Who Saw Hell

Throughout my lengthy traveling ministry I have personally met and spoken with individuals who encountered a brief afterlife experience. At times the experience was shortly after an accident or immediately after a major heart attack or some near-death experience. I will never forget a man I met in 1978 who was attending my grandfather John Bava's church. He related a very eye-opening and frightening experience, which changed his life. He experienced firsthand a journey into hell. I had just begun my traveling ministry and was conducting a revival at my granddad's church, the Church of God in Gorman, Maryland. During my first revival, I met and interviewed a man name Bill Fishel, who related a dramatic event that totally transformed his spiritual life. At the time of the incident, Bill was forty-one years of age and working as a coal miner. On the morning of November 7, 1974, he was suddenly stricken with chest pains and began having difficulty breathing. He was immediately released from work and was driven to Garrett County Memorial Hospital in Oakland, Maryland, where he was admitted. The nurses began IVs, including morphine, to control the pain. The medical papers indicate a lidocaine drip was begun. While lying on the table in the emergency room, Bill suddenly blacked out. The attending doctor, Dr. Alverez, contacted a Dr. Van Ormer in Cumberland, Maryland, to advise on the situation. The last thing Bill remembered was everything fading before his eyes. It was at this moment that Bill had what some would call an out-of-body experience. He heard voices in the hospital, which seemed to slowly fade into the distance. Suddenly Bill's soul and spirit were fully alert, and he was aware of moving rapidly into a dark tunnel, headfirst, going downward into the floor and under the crust of the earth. He described this tunnel as very "dreary and dark." His first questions to himself were: "If I have died, then why am I not going up to heaven? Why am I going down?" As he continued his descent, spiraling downward, he observed a faint light at the end of the long tunnel. Suddenly he was enveloped in this light and found himself standing in a very large field with no grass or trees. The light, he would later learn, was coming from a large cavern somewhere in the earth. As he stood in this barren field, he described an intense heat that filled the atmosphere. The ground was desolate and hard. The air was very warm and uncomfortable to breathe. As he was wondering where he was, he noticed that people of various ages began to appear in the same field. Each bore an empty, blank expression on his or her face. No one was happy, and no one was speaking to the others. As these individuals began appearing in this unknown region on this barren field, a crowd began forming and filling up with many people. Bill would later realize these were the souls and spirits of men and women from around the world who had just passed away on Earth and were all drawn to this area prior to their final confinement. A Visual Look at Hell At that moment, Bill said, the strangest thing occurred. In front of this group in the distance at the end of the field stood what appeared to be a large, angelic creature. An announcement was shouted from this angel's mouth: "If you are seeking rest and peace, come with me." Drawn like a magnet to metal, the entire mass of people began moving slowly toward this