Luding Coenen’s near-death experience

Step 1

As a child · Colombia · Luding’s account

A girl they call “Locata”

Luding grows up in Colombia. Her father is a medium, and she says that as a child she also sees people who have died. She plays with them.

She always sees them the same way. She sees them without feet, from the ankles up, as if they were floating.

Her grandmother can’t see anyone and asks who she is playing with. At home they give her a nickname, “Locata,” roughly “the crazy one.” As a teenager, she warns her classmates about things that are going to happen. Her classmates start calling her a witch. She keeps it hidden for years.

Step 2

Around 1985 · 1 a.m. · Luding’s account

She arrives at the hospital about to give birth

She arrives at the hospital at one in the morning, calm and happy. She is hardly in any pain. The doctor examines her and is surprised, because she is already about to give birth.

There is no time to take her to the delivery room or to call the gynecologist. A resident and two nurses attend to her on the emergency room stretcher. A resident is a doctor who is still in training.

The baby girl is born very fast. Luding barely notices. They lay the baby beside her on a little blanket. Then the doctor starts to remove the placenta.

Step 3

Just after the birth · Critically ill and awake · Luding’s account

“Something burst”

The doctor pulls the placenta out very quickly. Luding feels that “something burst” (translated from Spanish). A lot of blood starts to come out.

The doctor puts his hand inside her to find the blood vessel that has ruptured. The blood gushes out even harder. The doctor’s white coat and the two nurses’ gowns are covered in blood. The doctor brings over a plastic basin that was in a corner. The baby won’t stop crying.

She hears the doctor: “She’s losing her pulse.” Then she hears: “She’s already lost two liters of blood.” And at last she hears: “We lost her, we lost her. There’s nothing we can do.” She begins to fade.

Up to this point, she is awake. She sees the basin, the bloodstained coat, and the baby, and she hears the doctor’s words.

Step 9

Later that night · Awake · Luding’s account

She wakes up with her husband’s blood

She is given a transfusion of blood from her husband at the time, who is at the hospital. A nurse tells her: “Something strange happened here.” That nurse was also her neighbor.

Luding tells them what she saw. They ask her whether she has a fever or is hallucinating. The nurse asks her not to tell anyone: “Hush now, don’t say anything.” The nurse says professional ethics keep her from talking, because her job is on the line.

Her husband had watched everything through a window. She repeats only one thing her husband said to her. He told her she was pale: “You look like paper to me.” Luding says that afterward he also told her everything that had happened.

In 2026 she said she spent three days in the hospital. In 2023 she said seven.

Step 10

At her postpartum checkup · Luding’s account

The doctor is frightened when he sees her

Some time later she goes for her postpartum checkup. She gets the same doctor who treated her. She knocks on the door and walks in.

Luding says the doctor jumps up, frightened, backs into a corner, and tells her: “You were dead.” Then he tells the nurse not to play that kind of joke on him. Luding answers that she has come back.

For years she tells almost no one. She says she came out of it more sensitive, and that since then she has had images of things before they happen.

Step 11

Many years later · 2 a.m. · Luding’s account

Luding says she wakes up seeing buildings fall

She now lives in the Netherlands, near the German border, with a different husband. Luding says he is “more of an atheist than a brick wall.”

One night she wakes up at two in the morning. She sees “a whole mass of earth” coming down on her. She sees dust, buildings collapsing, and people hurt among the concrete and the rebar.

She hears “another language that I didn’t understand.” She thinks it might be Iran. She wakes her husband and tells him. He says: “Be quiet and go back to sleep.” He asks her what country it is. She answers: “I don’t know.”

At eight-thirty, over breakfast, her husband tells her it’s true. There has been an earthquake in Turkey at two-thirty in the morning, “the time you said.” She hears that time afterward, from her husband.

Step 12

Another night · Luding’s account

Luding says she sees a hotel collapse

Another time, Luding tells her husband she sees a white house with stairs falling, on a hillside. She sees a woman trapped and a lot of people. “The hotel isn’t that big, but it’s sliding.” He asks her what she’s been taking.

Luding says that at four o’clock they see on the news that a hotel has collapsed in Germany. She says the house shown on TV is identical to the one she saw. It was white, A-shaped, and with wooden stairs.

Today she gives consultations as a medium. She avoids watching the news, because she says other people’s pain affects her deeply. She says she was born with the same thing as her father, and that the experience made it grow.