Betty Eadie’s near-death experience

Step 1

Before · November 18, 1973, afternoon · Doing fine · Betty’s account

A mother of seven goes into the hospital for surgery

Betty Eadie is 31. She lives near Seattle, in the United States, with her husband, Joe, and six of their children. She had seven. A daughter died at three months old, of sudden infant death syndrome.

She checks into a hospital in her city for a hysterectomy. It is an operation to remove part of her uterus. Her doctor recommended it, because she has had problems since her last pregnancy. Joe has taken a few days off work to be with her.

That night she is alone in her room. She calls home and spends half an hour saying good night to each child. When she hangs up, the darkness of the room weighs on her. She starts to think about death.

Step 2

Around 1946 and the years after · Betty’s account

As a child, she is taught that God will punish her

Betty was born in Nebraska in 1942. Her mother was Sioux, and her father was of Scottish and Irish descent. When she was 4, her parents separated. She and five of her brothers and sisters were sent to a Catholic boarding school for Native American children.

That first winter she came down with whooping cough and double pneumonia. She says she heard the doctor say: “It’s too late. We’ve lost her.” She says she then found herself in the arms of a man with a white beard that shone. Afterward, a nurse cried out that she was breathing again.

At the school, the children were taught that Indians were pagans and sinners. Betty grew up afraid of an angry God who would send her to hell. Later she went through several churches, Methodist, Lutheran, and Baptist, and she never lost that fear.

That night in 1973, alone in the hospital, she wonders what awaits her if she dies during the operation. In the end, she takes some sleeping pills.

Step 3

November 19, 1973, at night · Just after surgery · Betty’s account

She has her operation, and that night she feels weaker and weaker

She has the operation at noon. In the afternoon, her doctor tells her everything went well. That night she wakes up alone. It is a double room, but the other bed is empty. Next to her bed there is a large window. She asked for it because she has been claustrophobic since she was a child.

At nine, a nurse brings her medication. Around nine-thirty she feels dizzy and has an urge to call Joe. She calls him, but afterward she can’t remember the conversation. She is chilled to the bone and feels weaker than ever.

She tries to pull the cord to call the nurse, but she can’t move. She says it felt as if the last drops of blood were being drained from her. No one is with her.

Step 4

Around nine-thirty at night · Alone in her room · Betty’s account

Betty says she leaves her body and sees it in the bed

She feels a surge of energy. Something pulls her upward from her chest, like a giant magnet. Suddenly she is floating near the ceiling, and she feels free. Nothing hurts anymore.

Below, in the bed, there is a body. She goes down to look at it closely. Betty had worked as a practical nurse and knew what a dead body looks like. She says that body was lifeless and that it was hers. She feels no fear, only a little sorry for it.

Then three men appear beside her. They wear light brown robes with a belt of gold cord. They look old. She calls them “monks.” They tell her she has died before her time and that she shouldn’t worry. All Betty can think about is her family.

Step 5

That night · Out of her body · Betty’s account

Betty says she goes home and sees Joe and the children

She worries about how Joe will manage alone with six children. She goes out through the window, and only afterward does she realize it was closed. She says she speeds over the treetops and, in a moment, is in her living room.

Joe is reading the newspaper in his favorite armchair. The children are running up and down the stairs when they should be getting ready for bed. Two of them are having a pillow fight. Betty writes that this was normal at bedtime in their house.

That scene at home is the only part of her whole experience that someone else could confirm. As she looks at each child, she says she sees ahead of time how each one’s life will go. She understands that they will all be fine, and she feels at peace. She goes back to the hospital, where the three monks are waiting for her.

Step 9

That night, until morning · Very weak · Betty’s account

Betty says she goes back into her body and wakes up at two in the morning

Suddenly she is back in the room. The door is still half open, and the little light above the sink is still on. She sees her body under the blankets, and it disgusts her. She says it was like putting on a pair of cold, muddy work overalls. She goes into it and falls asleep.

When she opens her eyes, it is two in the morning. She works out that more than four hours have passed since she felt herself dying. She writes that she doesn’t know whether anyone tried to revive her, or whether anyone came into the room.

She says that soon afterward she sees five horrible creatures come in, half human and half animal, and that a dome of light protects her. She calls Joe, who thinks she is hallucinating and gets there within ten minutes. She tells him a little of what she has been through. She remembers that, while Joe was with her, doctors and nurses were working on her, tense. She doesn’t know when they started or what they were doing to her. She also says she saw a little girl of two or three walking on tiptoe, like a ballerina. The girl climbed onto the toe of Joe’s shoe and put her hand in his pocket. Joe couldn’t see her.

In the morning, a doctor tells her she has had a very bad night and asks her what she went through. She tells him she had nightmares.

Step 10

Around 1978, five years later · Betty’s account

Betty says her surgeon told her they had “lost her for a while”

In the years that follow, Betty falls into depression and becomes afraid to leave the house. She says she pulled through out of love for her family. When she talks about the experience with her friends, they always ask whether the doctors knew she had died.

Five years later, she makes an appointment with the surgeon who operated on her. According to Betty, he looks up her file, his eyes fill with tears, and he tells her there were complications that night. In her words, “they had lost me for a while.” He explains that she bled during the operation and that it seems she bled again during the night. He also tells her she was alone during the nurses’ shift change, so they don’t know how long she was dead. And he tells her they treated her for the rest of the morning with a shot, more medication, and IV fluids.

Betty does not give the surgeon’s name. In 1993 she told the Associated Press that the doctor had since died.

Step 11

From 1979 to today · Told by Betty and the press

Nineteen years later, she publishes one of the best-selling books in the United States

About six years after the experience, Betty and Joe took in a baby girl a few months old, and in the end they adopted her. Betty says that when the girl was two and a half, she saw her climb onto the toe of Joe’s shoe and put her hand in his pocket. It was the same thing the little girl in the hospital had done. Betty believes she was the same girl.

For years she told her story at small gatherings, including a Seattle group on near-death experiences. In 1992 she published it in a book written with Curtis Taylor, Embraced by the Light.

In October 1993, the book reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. By 1995, according to the AP, more than four and a half million copies had been sold.

Before her experience, Betty and her husband had been baptized into the Mormon church. A leaflet the publisher put in the first copies says so. The book does not name that church, and some Mormons criticized her for hiding her faith. In 1996, Betty told a Utah newspaper that she had not been expelled from her church. And she said she doesn’t talk about her faith so as not to hurt the people of her church. In 2022 she was still telling her story in interviews.

That leaves the question: can anything Betty described be checked?