Kristle Merzlock’s near-death experience

Step 3

When she woke up · According to what the nurses told Morse

When she wakes up, Kristle asks for Heather and Melissa

The nurses at the hospital in Salt Lake City said that Kristle kept asking for “Heather and Melissa” when they took the tube out.

A week after coming home, Kristle told her mother about what she had lived through. She only told her vaguely. She said she would like to go back there, because it was nice.

A little later she gave more details to the doctor who had treated her.

Step 4

Two weeks later · At the doctor’s office · Told by Melvin Morse and Kristle

The doctor who resuscitated her asks what she remembers

Two weeks after the accident, Melvin Morse saw Kristle at a check-up, with her mother present. Morse says he introduced himself and told her he was the doctor who had treated her in the emergency room. He said this before she said she remembered him. Kristle also remembers that he spoke first.

Morse asked her what she remembered about the accident. Kristle only said she had talked to “the heavenly Father”. She was embarrassed and didn’t want to go on.

A week later they talked again. Kristle didn’t want to be recorded. First she made some drawings, and then she told her story.

This is the account Morse published in 1983.

Step 5

During the coma · She told it in 1982, according to Morse’s 1983 article

Kristle says she goes through a tunnel and a woman named Elizabeth appears

The first thing Kristle remembered was being in the water. Then she said this:

“I was dead. Then I was in a tunnel. It was dark and I was scared. I couldn’t walk.”

Then a tall woman with bright yellow hair appeared. Her name was Elizabeth. The tunnel filled with light. Together they walked to heaven.

In heaven there were more people.

Step 6

During the coma · She told it in 1982, according to Morse’s 1983 article

In heaven she meets her grandparents, an aunt, and Heather and Melissa

Kristle said heaven was fun, with lots of light and lots of flowers. It had a border around it, and she could not see what lay beyond it.

There she met many people. Her grandparents were there, who had died. An aunt who had died two years before was there too. She was her mother’s sister. She also met Heather and Melissa, two adults who were waiting to be born again.

They were the two people she kept asking for when she woke up.

Step 7

During the coma · She told it in 1982, according to Morse’s 1983 article

They ask her if she wants to go back, and she goes back for her mother

Kristle said she saw the Heavenly Father and Jesus, and that they asked her whether she wanted to go back to Earth. She said no.

Then Elizabeth asked her whether she wanted to see her mother. Kristle said yes, and woke up in the hospital.

Her family was Mormon and deeply religious. They had taught her that there is a heaven and that there you see your dead relatives again. When her aunt died, Kristle was told she would see her again.

At the end of the conversation, Kristle said something else about the emergency room.

Step 8

1982 · At the doctor’s office · Told by Melvin Morse, in 1983

Kristle says she remembers seeing the doctor in the emergency room

At the end of the conversation, Kristle said she remembered seeing Melvin Morse in the emergency room. In his article, Morse says Kristle told him this memory in the second conversation. It was after he had introduced himself as the doctor who had treated her.

Morse wrote this in his article. He added that Kristle could not give any other detail of the three days in a coma.

Morse published the case in 1983 in a pediatrics journal. It was one of the first cases of a child in a medical journal. Later he did a study with many more children. It is the Seattle study.

More details appear in later recordings and books.

Step 9

From 1989 to 2024 · Told by Kristle and Melvin Morse

Kristle says on television that she watched them resuscitate her

In 1989, at 14, Kristle told her story on the television show Unsolved Mysteries. She said that, from heaven, she had seen the doctors working. They were putting things in her arm and up her nose to help her breathe.

• On that same show, her mother and Morse recalled that Kristle had already described what they did to her at her first check-up. She talked about something in her throat, the chest compressions and the lines. That does not fit what Morse wrote in 1983. Back then he wrote that Kristle could give no other detail of the coma, except that she remembered him.
• In his 1990 book, Morse adds more. He writes that Kristle said a tall doctor without a beard arrived first and then Morse arrived. He also writes that Kristle saw her family at home. The book warns that it changes names, ages and some details.
• In 2023, Kristle says on a podcast that she saw her parents worried and her baby sister playing at home. She also says she no longer remembers some details she told Morse.

The essentials of what Kristle lived through stay the same from 1982 to 2024. She always tells of Elizabeth, meeting her dead relatives and deciding to go back for her mother. In the 2023 interview she said she lived in Wyoming and worked in mental health.