My Journey to Hell: Enduring Torture in a Pit of Blackness

Steve Kang came soul-to-soul with the supernatural in a barren wasteland full of giant demons and other lost beings chained together.

A man’s physical body lay motionless on an operating table in California after a failed suicide attempt, while he believed his spirit was enduring never-ending suffering.

During the frantic efforts of doctors to revive him, Kang recounted an out-of-body incident where he felt himself plunging into a dark and excruciating dimension he identified as hell.

Following the distressing occurrence, Kang, a Buddhist monk turned evangelical preacher, shared his harrowing encounter in an interview, hoping to deter others from embarking on a similar harrowing journey through what he perceived as hellish torment lasting eight hours.

It was September 1998 and, at the time, Kang was in the grip of substance abuse. He was convinced he we possessed by an evil spirit urging him to commit suicide.

Following his attempt, as doctors worked to repair the resulting knife-cut veins in his neck and stomach, Kang said he found himself in a world of complete darkness. 

‘It’s not a place you want to go,’ Kang explained of his temporary surroundings. ‘I almost feel like I don’t even want Kim Jong-il or Hitler to go there. I don’t want my worst enemies to go there.’

Pastor Steve Kang of the Revive The Nations Ministry shared his out-of-body experience in which he said he descended into Hell for what felt like 20 minutes

Kang described this realm as a dark and barren landscape, full of countless souls in agony and giant demons watching over them

A study by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine showed many survivors of near death experiences recalled an awareness of entering what feels to them like another realm.

‘It was not a pleasant place, there was no light,’ Kang said of his own near-death vision. ‘There was no plants. I don’t remember seeing even an ounce of grass. It was just like rocky floor.

‘There’s cliffs everywhere, and they look like purplish red, just not a pleasant color. You look up, and it’s just dark. Just imagine a very dark night without the moon.’

He told the Daily Mail he wasn’t alone in this dark realm, either – claiming his spirit encountered an endless number of others standing all around him.

Kang added that all of his feelings of fear, guilt and shame were suddenly magnified as he stood in the crowd of lost souls.

Making things even worse, Kang said he saw a group of giant demons wearing capes standing by, watching the souls’ agony.

‘I knew they were in charge of this place,’ Kang claimed. ‘They’re like three, four, five stories tall, very tall beings.’

He said what scared him most aside from the pain – ‘and I was in so much pain during this time’ – was the lack of ‘awareness or ability to look at somebody and go, “Hey, how are you doing? What’s your name?”‘

‘You’re just in this agony, and there’s no ability to like converse with people. It was so much pain, so much accusation, so much fear. It was like anxiety multiplied, fear of condemnation multiplied.’

The NYU researchers revealed their subjects entered some sort of mental or spiritual state that allowed them to evaluate – on a moral level – the actions and relationships they’ve had throughout their lives.

The study found these experiences were not the same as hallucinations, delusions or dreams – rather, it poses the theory that a dying brain goes through disinhibition, which may allow people to access ‘new dimensions of reality’ and recall all memories stored throughout a lifetime.

Although Kang said his experience seemed to last all of 20 minutes, his loved ones and surgeons revealed that he didn’t regain consciousness in the ‘natural world’ for roughly eight hours. 

In 2017, Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health, theorized that this time-bending experience arose during near-death experiences because the brain’s temporal processing is disrupted under extreme conditions, causing events to seem much longer or much shorter than they really were. 

Thankfully for Kang, as he was going through this nightmarish journey, he was receiving help from the spiritual world.

Kang said the growing feeling of guilt, shame and fear while journeying through hell was worse than any torture he could imagine

Kang was raised in a Buddhist family. So while he was undergoing treatment, his mother reached out to the family’s temple in Korea for support. 

She was turned away without any help.

Ironically, Kang was training to be a Buddhist monk, and admitted to the Daily Mail he would often argue with Christians about their faith.

With her son in surgery and few people to turn to, Kang’s mother reached out to a close friend who brought a Christian prayer group to the hospital for support.

That’s when Kang claims something amazing started to happen both in the operating room and on his otherworldly journey.

‘They started praying, and the doctor later said that this was a miracle,’ Kang claimed.

The specialist who reattached Kang’s blood vessels noted that it took two separate surgeries to fix all the damage.

However, Kang remembers the doctor telling him, ‘It’s a miracle that I found every vessel at the right time. If I was a few minutes late, you know, you might not be here.’

The now-pastor told the Daily Mail his entire experience in hell changed at one point, and he claims it coincided with when his mother’s friend started to pray. He described a feeling of peace washing over him as he heard a voice he thought belonged to Jesus.

It was at that moment, Kang claims, when he instantly left hell and returned to his body. 

He shared the experience with his mother and the prayer group, and told them of his new life goal of becoming a church pastor.

‘I’ve been sober for 25 years – don’t drink, don’t smoke anymore, don’t look [at] anything stupid online,’ Kang explained, adding that ‘God gave me this inner strength to be so pure.’

Now the pastor for Revive The Nations Ministry, Kang explained he had kept his journey through hell private until he started to connect with others on social media who say they’ve had similar experiences.

A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology of 465 near-death experiences revealed that up to 10 percent involve some sort of negative experience involving torture or a hellish landscape. 

Through the social networks, Kang met many other people who have described the underworld with almost the exact same details, and some who described visiting heaven.

‘I started seeing that this is not just Steve’s story. This is a story of everybody, every nation across every country, anyone that God decides to have mercy on,’ Kang explained.

‘And now our job, I believe, is to share the story and tell people that there is a cure for spiritual cancer or sin or death,’ the pastor added.