Emilio Carrillo’s near-death experience

Step 1

November 7, 2010 · Near Seville · Told by Emilio Carrillo and his blog

Carrillo falls on his way down a hill and breaks his fibula

Emilio Carrillo was 52. He was an economist and had been a university lecturer. He was a Socialist city councilor in Seville from 1999, and deputy mayor for urban planning until 2008. In 2010 he worked for the Seville Provincial Council.

Since 2008 he had also been giving talks on spirituality in Seville, and he wrote every day on his blog, “El Cielo en la Tierra” [Heaven on Earth]. He says that before 2010 he knew nothing about near-death experiences.

He fell on his way down a hill in the early hours of Sunday, November 7, 2010. He broke his fibula, one of the bones of the leg. He wrote about it on his blog nine days later. He said it had been a silly fall and that he would give his next talks in a wheelchair.

Three weeks later, the broken leg put him in the ICU.

Step 2

November 26 to 29, 2010 · Critically ill · Told by Carrillo and the Seville press

A thrombosis causes an infarction in one lung, and he is admitted to the ICU

According to Carrillo, on Friday, November 26, the fracture caused a thrombosis. A thrombosis is when a clot blocks a blood vessel. That clot reached one of his lungs and caused a pulmonary infarction. At first, he says, it was wrongly diagnosed as pneumonia.

In the early hours of Monday, November 29, Carrillo went to the Sagrado Corazón clinic in Seville. He had a sharp pain in his side and was coughing up blood. That is how the Seville press reported it the next day, based on what people close to him said. According to those reports, he walked in, accompanied by his family, and was admitted to the ICU.

Carrillo says he entered the ICU in a critical state, with more clots in his leg. But in his talks Carrillo places his arrival at the emergency room or the ICU later than the press does. He gives times ranging from eleven in the morning to half past one in the afternoon.

Carrillo says that, that afternoon, he left his body.

Step 6

After the experience · Carrillo’s account

Carrillo says he tells his wife about aunt María, and her face changes

Carrillo says he told his wife, María Jesús, about the experience and that she listened without quite believing it. Until he told her that his aunt María, whom he believed to be alive, was among the dead.

According to Carrillo, María Jesús’s face changed. She told him that aunt María had died that same day, at two in the afternoon. Carrillo says there was no way he could have known. According to the times he gives, he had been in the ICU since the morning, and the aunt had died two and a half hours before the experience began.

Carrillo does not always place that conversation at the same moment. He says it was right after the experience ended, when his wife was allowed into the ICU. That is how he tells it in October 2014 and in his 2015 book. But in two talks in 2016, he says it was when he was already beginning to recover. In one of them he adds that his wife didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to upset him while he was so ill. In those two talks he gives another time of death, a quarter past two.

Every time he recounts that conversation, he speaks about the aunt first, and she tells him afterward that the aunt has died.

The aunt’s death was in the newspaper the next day.

Step 7

November 30, 2010 · In the ICU · Told by the Seville press and a death notice

A death notice announces that María Benito Martínez has died at 101, and the press says Carrillo has been conscious

On November 30, 2010, the newspaper ABC de Sevilla printed, on its death notices page, the notice for Doña María Benito Martínez. It says she died in Seville on November 29, 2010, at age 101. It was placed by her nephews and nieces and her great-nephews and great-nieces. The mass was held on the morning of the 30th, at a funeral home in Seville.

Benito is Carrillo’s second surname. The age and the day match those of his aunt María. And the notice mentions no children, only nephews and nieces, which fits what Carrillo says of his aunt, who never had children. Carrillo has never given his aunt’s surnames, so we can’t be sure it is her. Everything suggests it is. The notice does not give the time of death.

That same day, the news agency Europa Press reported that Carrillo had been admitted. The story ran in Diario de Sevilla and El Correo de Andalucía, and in ABC the following day. According to the people close to him who spoke to the agency, Carrillo had been conscious the whole time and was as talkative as ever. Those reports say nothing about an experience.

On December 10, after twelve days in the clinic, Carrillo went home.

Step 8

December 2010 to 2013 · Told by Carrillo’s blog, talks, and books

Carrillo describes his experience in talks and in a book, without mentioning the aunt yet

On December 11, 2010, María Jesús wrote on her husband’s blog. She said he had been discharged the previous afternoon, after twelve days in the hospital, and that he had been in a very serious condition. She added that he would later share some “recent experiences.” On December 30, Carrillo wrote on the blog about his illness. He said nothing about the experience or about anyone in the family dying.

In October 2011, in a talk in Lleida, Carrillo said that at one point he had been dead “from a clinical point of view.” He spoke about his experience between 2011 and September 2014, in recorded talks in Lleida, Málaga, Tarifa, Barcelona, Valencia, Linares, and Andorra. We have reviewed ten of those recordings, and he does not mention the aunt in any of them.

At the end of 2012, he published a free book, “Amor: Vida y Consciencia” [Love: Life and Consciousness], with a chapter on his experience. He describes the tunnel, what Christ looked like, and why he came back. He speaks of the dead people who were with him in general terms, as grandparents, parents, or siblings, and he does not name the aunt. In January 2014 he published the same text on his blog.

The aunt appeared for the first time almost four years after the experience.

Step 9

October 2014 to today · Told by Carrillo’s talks and books

Carrillo first speaks about aunt María in a 2014 talk, and presents her as his proof

In October 2014, Carrillo gave a talk at a conference on life after death in Albacete. There he told the whole story of aunt María. He gave her name, her age of 101, the time of two in the afternoon, and his wife’s reaction. It is the first time we have found the aunt in anything he has said or written.

A year later, in 2015, he told it the same way in his book “El tránsito” [The passage]. There he presents it as the fact that cleared up his doubts about what he had been through. In 2016 he told it in several talks. One of them, in Valencia, now has almost a million and a half views.

Over the years, some details have changed. In 2016 and in 2018 he said the aunt was 102, not 101. In 2016 he gave the time as a quarter past two. And in a 2016 feature in El Español, he calls her “one of my mother’s sisters,” with no name and no time. There he says the aunt died while he was in the ICU, and that he was told afterward. In several recent talks he no longer mentions her.

Today Carrillo is a writer and gives talks on spirituality. He says his experience changed his life.

One question remains: did Carrillo know his aunt had died before anyone told him?