A Virginia woman, who has twice experienced a return from the brink of death, is now sharing her extraordinary encounters with the afterlife.
Deborah Prum, a wife, mother, and former research director at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, has decided to speak openly about the remarkable out-of-body experiences she had during two life-threatening events that nearly shattered her family’s world.
The first of these near-death experiences occurred in the mid-1980s when Prum went into premature labor with her eldest son.
During this crisis, she suffered from extremely high blood pressure, a drop in blood cell counts, liver issues, and experienced seizures.
Prum described how she felt herself leaving her body amidst the medical emergency and entered a state devoid of pain or emotion. From the vantage point of the hospital ceiling, she watched as doctors diligently worked to save both her and her child.
More than two decades later, Prum and her husband faced another brush with death in a serious car accident. This time, she found herself in a realm illuminated by a glowing yellow light, where she felt she existed as pure energy.
Prum continues to wonder if she got a glimpse of the afterlife during the accident and said she didn’t want to return to her body before being pulled back to Earth.
Mysteriously, she added that an unknown man held her hand and kept her stable until paramedics arrived at the crash, but her husband and the first responders never saw this person or have ever been able to track down who was there.
Deborah Prum (Pictured) went through two near-death experiences, including one where she believes she may have seen the afterlife
Prum said her first NDE was so shocking that she never told friends what had happened in the hospital.
As her blood pressure spiked, doctors shouted for Prum to be rushed into the emergency room, where surgeons were preparing to perform an emergency C-section to save her premature baby.
At that point, Prum explained how she felt that she had physically left her body and was looking at herself being tended to by the hospital staff.
Her last memory of floating above the emergency room was of doctors wheeling her into the operating room for the C-section.
Prum would spend the next three days in a medically induced coma, and her newborn son would spend his first two weeks of life in the neonatal intensive care unit.
‘Except for my husband, Bruce, I don’t remember telling anyone about my out-of-body experience. I didn’t know what to make of it nor how to talk about it,’ she explained in HuffPost.
A study by researchers at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine showed many survivors of near-death experiences recalled an awareness of entering what feels to them like another realm.
That’s exactly what happened to Prum during her second brush with death in 2007, after an SUV drove through a red light and struck her and her husband’s car on Valentine’s Day.
Near-death experiencers often recount a feeling that they physically entered a different realm of consciousness as their body was dying (Stock Image)
Prum’s husband, a physician, found that she had no pulse after the crash.
Although he continued to yell her name, Prum said she had already crossed over into a realm where she lost all recognition of herself as an individual and morphed into a being of energy tied to a larger ‘life force.’
‘Immediately after the crash, I had no awareness of myself as a unique entity — no cognition of having a distinct identity. Instead, I felt utterly and profoundly peaceful in a way that I’d never sensed. To my core, I felt safe and at home,’ Prum wrote.
The near-death experiencer described this blissful realm as being filled with a glowing yellow light that reminded her of being submerged in pudding.
However, she could still hear to husband calling her name in the distance and tried to block it out as this energy realm put Prum in a euphoric state she didn’t want to leave.
Shortly after, Prum said she was pulled back into her body, where a strange man described as being ‘in his 40s, curly hair with a receding hairline, button-down dress shirt and no tie’ was waiting by her passenger side door.
Prum said the man unbuckled her seatbelt, kept her from moving due to her injuries, and held her hand until an ambulance arrived.
Despite her vivid memory of this man and how he helped her, Prum’s husband never saw him at the accident scene, nor did the paramedics who rescued her from the car.
To this day, no witnesses have ever been found who can confirm that this mysterious good Samaritan was at the scene or who he was.
‘It took my having two NDEs to make me believe they exist. Would I have been convinced if I hadn’t experienced them? My guess is no,’ Prum said.
