What happens when a near-death experience is frightening?

Not every near-death experience is about peace and light. Some are filled with fear, distress, or an overwhelming loneliness. Researchers call them distressing near-death experiences, or distressing NDEs. They are less common than pleasant ones, but they are not rare. Depending on the study, they are between 11 and 23 out of 100.

What they are: They are near-death experiences lived with fear, distress or an overwhelming loneliness instead of peace. They happen in the same situations as pleasant ones, such as a cardiac arrest, childbirth or an accident. And they have almost the same elements, such as leaving the body, a tunnel or a light. What changes is how they are felt.
How many: Between 11 and 23 out of 100 experiences, according to most estimates. Nobody knows the real figure, because people report them less often.
What they are like: Three types have been described. One is like a pleasant experience, but lived with terror. Another is a dark void. And another has scenes that look like hell.
Who has them: There is no way to predict it. They have nothing to do with being a good or bad person, or with religion.
What happens afterward: Some people change their lives. Others keep quiet about it for decades.

What people go through

Distressing NDEs happen in the same situations as pleasant ones, such as a cardiac arrest, childbirth, an accident, or surgery. They also share almost the same elements, such as leaving the body, a light, a tunnel, or other beings. What changes is how they are experienced. Instead of peace, there is fear, terror, guilt, or despair.

Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson have studied these experiences for decades. They describe three types:

Inverse. The person goes through, with fear, the same things that others describe with joy. A man was thrown from his horse and saw himself floating above his body. He shouted to be sent back, but nobody heard him. A woman was giving birth and saw a light coming toward her. She was terrified.
The void. The person is in endless darkness, with no up or down, and feels total loneliness. Some people feel they have never existed, or that it will go on forever.
Hellish. The person sees desolate landscapes and frightening beings. Sometimes they are attacked. Greyson and Bush found it less often than the other two. In a 2019 study from Liège, however, it came up as often as the inverse type. The best-known case is that of Howard Storm, a professor who did not believe in God.

There are also mixed experiences. They start with fear and end in peace, or the other way around. Ken Leth says spirits attacked him in the darkness and that he then reached a place of peace. Israel Vargas says he passed twice through nightmarish places before reaching a valley of peace.

How many there are

Imagine 100 people who have had a near-death experience:

Each dot is one person. The 11 filled dots are the people who found it distressing. That is what the University of Virginia found in its collection of 546 accounts, and it published this in 2023. Another 9 found it neutral. The remaining 80 found it pleasant.

Most estimates fall between 11 and 23 out of 100.
A review of thirty years of studies, by Nancy Evans Bush, is often cited as showing “as many as one in five.” Her own conclusion is more cautious, between 15 and 19 out of 100. What each study found, and why the figures vary so much, is covered in distressing NDEs in six studies.
In an ICU in Murcia, Spain, 2 of the 10 experiences a researcher collected in the hospital were distressing. That is too few cases to give a figure. More in the Murcia ICU study.
Our archive had 270 accounts as of October 9, 2026. Of these, 5 are distressing from start to finish and 63 mix moments of fear with moments of peace.

Why they are underreported

Many people keep them to themselves. According to Bush and Greyson, people who have a distressing NDE tend to hide, or disappear when asked about it. One woman said she had been married for 33 years and had still not told her husband.
The scales give them low scores. The scales that measure whether something counts as an NDE were designed with pleasant experiences in mind. We made an estimate with the average and the spread that the University of Virginia published. It shows that one in three distressing experiences would not reach the minimum score for an NDE. It is a rough calculation, not a count.
Nearly all of them are accounts that people send in. The figures come from people who decide to share their experience. Studies done in hospitals provide almost no data.

Does it happen to people who have done something wrong?

Nothing in the data says so. According to Bush and Greyson, some people regarded as saints have described deeply distressing experiences. And some people who had attempted suicide or committed crimes have had peaceful ones.

The Virginia collection looked at several things. These were sex, age, childhood, cause, religion, mood, and whether the person had attempted suicide. That study found no clear link between any of these and whether the experience was distressing. Among Catholics, 13 out of 100 experiences were distressing, compared with 6 among atheists. But there were so few people that the difference could be chance. In a 2019 study from Liège, however, distressing NDEs were more common after a suicide attempt. The person had attempted suicide in 4 of 17 distressing NDEs, and in 1 of 106 pleasant ones.

The only thing that stood out was the person’s attitude just before the experience. Among those who wanted to let go, 6 out of 100 experiences were distressing, compared with 17 among those who were fighting to stay in control.

What happens afterward

A distressing experience can leave its mark for years. Bush and Greyson describe three ways people respond:

Turning their life around. Some people take it as a warning and change their lives completely. Many turn toward religion. Howard Storm left academia and became a pastor.
Playing it down. Others attribute it to the anesthesia or a lack of oxygen and don’t give it another thought. But the memory is still there.
Carrying it. Others never manage to make sense of it. Decades later they remember it as vividly as on the first day, and they still wonder what they did to deserve it.

In the Virginia collection, 9 areas were measured. In 6 of them, people changed more after a pleasant experience than after a distressing one. But the researchers point out that a very hard experience can also help a person grow over time.

How they are explained

As with pleasant experiences, there are two explanations. And no data settles which one is right:

The classic theory: the brain produces them. On this view, they are the brain’s reaction to stress or to a violent resuscitation. In the case of the void, they would be a reaction to anesthesia that is not enough. The researcher who proposed this idea for the void acknowledged that the drugs might only set it off, without fully causing it.
The modern theory: consciousness carries on without the brain. On this view, they are real experiences of something that continues after death. Some researchers believe the fear comes from holding on to control instead of letting go. And many of the people who have them understand them as a warning.

Bush and Greyson point out something that applies to both theories. Each person describes their experience in the words of their own culture. If someone sees a being and gives it a name, they use the names they know. That does not prove the name is right, or that it is wrong.

Frequently asked questions

Are negative near-death experiences rare?

Not really. According to most estimates, they make up between 11 and 23 out of 100. There are probably more, because many people don’t talk about them.

Does a negative experience mean that person will go to hell?

Nothing in the data allows anyone to say so. All kinds of people have them, and they do not depend on how a person has lived. Nor can the opposite be proven. What they mean is a matter of belief.

Why are they so hard to talk about?

Researchers describe a widespread reluctance to talk about them. They also don’t fit the idea that near-death experiences are always beautiful. Some people take decades to speak about theirs.

Keep reading

Where these figures come from

Greyson (2023), the darker side of near-death experiences, Journal of Scientific Exploration 37(4):683-698. Read for free
The six studies of distressing NDEs, one by one: Read
Bush and Greyson (2014), distressing NDEs, Missouri Medicine 111(6):486-490. Read for free
Cristina Lázaro Pérez (2016), Murcia ICU, doctoral thesis, University of Murcia. Read for free
Our archive: 270 accounts with their records, as of October 9, 2026.