Has anyone here had a near death experience they want to write about

[Raineyrocks]

I haven't but I've always been interested in listening to anyone that has had a near death experience.  I think I remember shyfrog talking about his, anyone else?

I wonder what happens to everything and everybody after they die.  I've read that NDE's can be explained by the pineal gland doing something that creates the bright light a lot of people see.  Also how can these NDE experiences really tell us what happens after we're dead if they're not really dead for good?

Then again everything is energy so can you ever destroy energy?  Reincarnation to me is something I can understand a little but if we are all really judged by God at judgment day which reincarnate would get judged?
What I'd be scared of the most is still being around in this dimension after I die and being able to see people who I love and them not knowing I was there or if some awful things were happening to them and I could see it but not do anything to stop it.

When my dog/best friend in the whole world died I, (well Rick), buried him in our back yard and I would watch the birds eating worms by his grave and I would think those birds have parts of Nocona, (my dog's name), in them so he does live on. 

We still have Nocona too and our cat Ebony up here, I couldn't leave them behind.

[Raineyrocks]

I've never experienced a NDE myself, but Michael Roll's material fascinates me. See below...

I read Sir William Crookes experiences with his and I guess his wife's seances with Katie but I don't see how that is concrete proof of life after death. Crookes even monitored vital signs on Katie which is strange but being the devil's advocate here I'm not left with really knowing that life after death exists from Crookes accounts.
Does Michael Roll have more articles on the subject?

[KBCraig]

I once pissed Mary off to an extreme degree.

That's as near to death as I ever hope to experience. 

Can't write about it, though. I might suffer PTSD...

[41mag]

 

There was an episode on Penn & Teller's Bullshit that talked about NDE.  It was in season 1 (Disc 3 I think, but not sure right now).

[Raineyrocks]

I once pissed Mary off to an extreme degree.

That's as near to death as I ever hope to experience. 

Can't write about it, though. I might suffer PTSD...

Now, that's some scary experience! Good thing Rick doesn't post on here!

[Otosan]

Not had a NDE (except that time my friends and I played with TNT), but have had a "alien abduction" experience that still haunts me.

[Kat Kanning]

So that's where you've been lately.   

[Raineyrocks]

Not had a NDE (except that time my friends and I played with TNT), but have had a "alien abduction" experience that still haunts me.

Wow, what happened?  If you want to talk about it of course.  I don't ever dismiss  strange experiences when people tell me about them or I have them.  There is some weird shit that really really happens. 

My youngest son used to talk to some little boy name Lucas when he was younger and he said the little boy lived in the house next to us.  The house next to us was abandoned because old people owned it and then died.

One time a couple years ago I went for an alternative healing class using pendulums and energy, etc. I went to the teachers house for a chakra cleansing and one of my knees was bothering me for years because I fell real hard on it when my brother and I were goofing around.  Well she got to that knee and whatever she did I felt and heard a pop, she wasn't touching it at all, and the pain has been gone ever since.  The strangest thing was this though:  She was telling me how aliens pick her up every so often and teach her things. I swear when I was looking at her as she was telling me this her eyes got all weird, you know the iris, well her eyes filled up totally brown colored and became a weird round shape.  It did scare me though.

My daughter, Carrie, told me she's seen a UFO up here already too.  I like to blame anything weird I see on acid flashbacks this way I can function half-way normal in this strange exsistence.

[Raineyrocks]

Not had a NDE (except that time my friends and I played with TNT), but have had a "alien abduction" experience that still haunts me.

If you are not joking, I'd be most interested in hearing about it.

Yeah Otosan, no wife jokes!

[Pat McCotter]

Does having a body temp of 65 degF and my heart stopped for 15 minutes count? The doctors did that to me when they put some clips on an aneurysm in my brain. I remember no experiences during the time.

[Raineyrocks]

Otosan,

Thank you so much for sharing that I can tell it must have been a difficult thing to write about and relive again.  I totally believe you even though you said you didn't care if anyone believes you I'm just letting you know that I do.

I've had lots of really strange experiences too.  Way too many to write about but I do remember having this dream in my old house:  I was walking around and there was a door that I walked through and it led to another part of the house, the furniture was all covered in white sheets and the living room was painted and furnished in deep reds and golds.  I walked up steps into a kitchen and it all so seemed so familiar and normal to me.  Well when I woke up the next morning I got up and automatically tried to walk to the "door" that I walked into during my dream and I asked Rick what happened to the rest of the house that's how real that dream was to me and I had 2 more dreams afterward eerily similar. These dreams I remember like it was yesterday too.

My twin sister and I also used to play a game called birdies when we were very little.  We would fly around the room and land on each other's beds and I really remember that we were really flying around the room.  There is no doubt to me that we were experiencing out of body experiences.

When I was a teenager I woke up at 3 am because I heard an explosion and smelled fire so I looked out of my bedroom window and saw buildings on fire a block away.  I went into my mom's room and told her and she said, "we'll watch the news tomorrow."  Well nothing was on the news and our neighborhood was normal.  3 nights later I experienced the "exact" same vision and the next morning on the news some oil refinery exploded a block away exactly where I saw it.

This one is wild and I'll make it my last:  My sister and I were teenagers and we were watching tv in the living room and all of the sudden   the house started shaking, I saw red box shaped trucks going the wrong way down our one way street.  I said to my sister, "don't you feel the house shaking, don't you see these red trucks, wtf is going on?"  She heard, saw, and felt nothing.  3 days later we're in the living room and the house starts shaking, red fire trucks are going the wrong way on our one way street, the corner store was on fire.
Weird, huh?

[Insurgent]

I'll share something which happened to me around ten years ago. I was visiting a Christian commune in Chicago for a couple days, and had a terrifying experience while sleeping.

At 3am I woke up to feel a crushing weight on my chest, as I slept on my back. I was unable to breathe or talk and it felt like someone was sitting on me. There was no one there, though of course. At the time I was a devout Christian and the only thing I could think to do was try to cry out and say "Jesus", which I was eventually able to utter after several unsuccessful attempts. The weight left immediately and nothing like this has ever happened to me again.

I've heard since then that every culture has some myth about a gnome that sits on your chest while you are sleeping and steals your breath.

[Recumbent ReCycler]

I've had some near death experiences, but apparently not the kind some of you folks are talking about.  Mine involved a lot of pain due to severe injuries, and did not involve passing out or having any strange dreams.

[Beth221]

i was engaged to a homicidal/suicidal maniac!!  I made it out alive, thankfully. 

2 days after i moved out of his house, and ended the relationship for good, he killed a mutual friend (gruesome murder..) and killed himself.
Here is the story, most is true.  You know how the media can be, this was front page stuff, so some of it is stretched for the readers enjoyment.  There is so much more i could add to the story, from living with this monster. 

Enjoy the reading!


Michael Shechtman: The classic profile of an abuser

'You do what Michael says.'

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 4, 2004

BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer

He left her headless body in the upstairs tub and the bloody chain saw on the bathroom floor.

Then Michael Shechtman took what he had cut away, the very essence of the 20-year-old woman's identity, and put it in a green trash bag.

Wednesday, March 24, broke warm and peaceful in the quiet woods of Plainfield, Conn.

Shechtman, 32, carried the trash bag out to his black Mercury sedan, his company car, and placed it on the passenger seat.

Any neighbor watching could have imagined Shechtman on his way to work. Like most abusers of women, he was a master of deception.

Publicly, he cultivated a persona of a magnanimous dynamo: the world-trotting marketing manager for a chemical-plating company who made his coworkers laugh, delivered ice cream and chocolates to his female assistants and in his spare time was earning his doctoral degree in chemistry.

Privately, he was a social deviant with a history of terrorizing and subjugating women.

Eleven years ago Shechtman repeatedly threatened to decapitate his then girlfriend and display her head to her ex-boyfriend or parents.

Criminal profilers says such savagery is rarely committed impulsively. Killers who mutilate have usually fantasized about doing so for years.

WITH THE SEVERED head of his newest woman in the seat beside him, Shechtman drove up his driveway.

At the curb, he avoided the stacks of boxes and bags set out for the garbage men. In one, detectives would later find the remnants of another Shechtman relationship: invitations to the wedding of him and a 22-year-old dental assistant from West Greenwich. She began dating Shechtman when she was 18. He was 28.

In December, in a move that profilers say may have saved her life, the woman broke off her relationship with Shechtman.

After almost four years together, she knew "he wasn't going to take it very easily." So before she left for good, "I encouraged Michael to find somebody else."

He did.

During their engagement, Shechtman worked so hard to control his fiancée and pull her away from her family that her parents were never invited to their wedding, says the woman's mother.

"I didn't see Michael," she said. "Michael chose it that way."

Even after the breakup, Shechtman's lingering power over his ex-fiancée proved debilitating.

He refused for months to allow her back into his powder-blue Cape on Kate Downing Rd. to collect her belongings.

If it had been it up to her parents, "she would have gotten her things out a lot sooner," her mother says. "But as my daughter always said: 'You do what Michael says.' "

His ex-fiancée remains in therapy. The Providence Journal has chosen not to indentify her, in part, because of her therapist's concern that even now, any association to Shechtman would "put my client at risk."

THERE had been warning signs.

David Parenteau, a short-order cook at the Middle of Nowhere Diner, in Exeter, witnessed one in 1989.

Parenteau was a junior that year and Shechtman a senior at North Kingstown High School.

Parenteau remembers Shechtman, an only child, as a loner. He walked to school alone, ate alone up on the cafeteria stage where the lofty seats were reserved for seniors, and was always the last one out of the locker room for gym.

"He was the type of kid who liked to throw rocks at people," Parenteau says. "He was devious. And always trying to get away with it."

Parenteau recalled one day in Shechtman's senior year. A cluster of students had gathered in front of the administration building after stepping off the morning buses. A rock sailed into the crowd. It struck a girl just above her eye. She needed stitches to close the wound.

Someone had seen Shechtman throw it, Parenteau says. He had been walking to school and inexplicably picked up a rock and hurled it into the crowd. Then he continued walking as if nothing happened.

Parenteau confronted Shechtman.

"I said, you split her eye open. You owe her an apology. And he said: 'I'm not apologizing to anyone.' That's when I roughed him up a little bit."

THERE were the gun charges and the pipe bomb.

In July 1993, police officers responding to a house alarm at Shechtman's parents' home in North Kingstown, found in his bedroom a cache of weapons: knives, a sawed-off shotgun, a pipe bomb in the making, an AK-47 assault rifle, two .22-caliber rifles, a 44-Magnum pistol. Several guns stood loaded.

Shechtman was 21 years old. His father told the officers it was Michael's room all right, "along with everything in it."

Shechtman pleaded no contest to a felony charge of possession of a sawed-off shotgun and received five years of unsupervised probation.

He told the police he never intended to finish making the pipe bomb.

Melissa McCulloch wonders if it wasn't meant for her.

That same year she had filed a restraining order against Shechtman, declaring "I'm very scared for my life."

According to her affidavit, Shechtman, then a Providence College student, one day blocked in McCulloch's car where she worked and began yelling at her because she wouldn't return his phone calls.

Shechtman "told me I must be stupid if I was going to [expletive] with him." He bragged about being a good shot with a new gun and warned she would end up like an East Providence teenager who had been raped and strangled.

"He also told me that I had no control of what was going to happen to me. He had all the power."

All abusers share certain characteristics, say domestic-abuse experts. They threaten violence and often use it as a means of control. They are pathologically jealous. And they maintain dual personalities that often require Broadway talent.

"I got to see both sides of Michael," says McCulloch. "He had the one side that was pleasant and nice, always there for his friends and always willing to help someone. But if you were his girlfriend you got to see the other side of him."

"I remember many times the two threats he loved to use on me were that he was going to stick a gun in my mouth and blow my brains out or -- the one that sends chills through me -- is that he was going to cut my head off and give it to my ex-boyfriend or my parents."

SHECHTMAN'S black, four-door sedan negotiated the winding turns of Kate Downing Rd.

Along with the green trash bag, he carried with him a loaded 9mm pistol, bought within the last year, an extra clip of shells and $11,000 in cash.

Shechtman liked to flash money. It was something 20-year-old Heather Mullins-Keltz had little of when the police say they first met, last Nov. 17.

Heather was, in an odd way, a gift.

It was Shechtman's 32nd birthday.

Their meeting had been arranged through earlier Internet correspondences.

Heather Mullins-Keltz grew up in Orlando and Deltona, Fla., and had been raised by her father, Fred Mullins, a union electrician, and her grandmother.

Heather was the youngest of four children. Her mother left the family when she was young. When Heather was a teen, Mullins moved his family to Hope Mills, N.C., a small town outside Fayetteville, where Heather was on the dance and drama teams at Southview High School and earned a perfect 4.0 grade point average her senior year.

Last September -- two months before she would meet Shechtman -- she married a childhood friend, John Keltz. After the ceremony, relatives say, she and John packed up a U-Haul in Florida and drove north to Connecticut, where John was stationed in the Navy.

Mullins-Keltz had few friends and no job when she arrived in Groton. She passed those melancholy days of autumn, relatives say, in a faded duplex among a cluster of military houses.

Shechtman owned a neat two-story home with polished wooden floors and leather furniture. He made $70,000 annually and was on track to earn $100,000 in a few years, his supervisors say. He could, on short notice, buy a plane ticket for Mullins-Keltz' sister so she could fly up and visit.

In short, Shechtman offered a young and naive Mullins-Keltz all the accoutrements of a comfortable life.

FROM THE ROAD that Wednesday morning, Shechtman seemed desperate to reach out by cell phone to some of the women at Technic Inc., those who say they knew only his charming and energetic side.

Shechtman had already placed one call from his house to Carol Healy, a coworker he often lunched with at the Cranston company.

It had been before 8 a.m.

The walls of his upstairs bathroom were apparently already covered with Mullins-Keltz' blood.

Shechtman told Healy he had hurt Heather and was going to kill himself.

Healy asked whether Heather was still alive. Shechtman wouldn't answer.

Healy asked to speak to her. Shechtman said no.

The two hung up, and a distraught Healy drove from her home in Chepachet to the Rhode Island State Police headquarters in Scituate to report her conversation:

Her friend Michael Shechtman may have hurt someone, she told the police, and now seemed determined to kill himself.

CANDICE DeLONG retired from the FBI in 2000 as a criminal profiler. Her career included work on the 1982 Tylenol murders in Chicago and the 1996 capture of Unabomber Ted Kazynski.

After reading several Providence Journal accounts of Shechtman, DeLong concluded, as did two other criminal profilers, that he held all the classic traits of an abuser -- a controlling man who seeks out women he can easily manipulate to mask his own insecurities and relationship failures.

"A common characteristic of controlling men is they like to isolate their women from their families," says DeLong. "They don't want them to influence their thinking or feelings."

"A 20-year-old girl who is being paid attention by a 32-year-old chemistry doctorate candidate is probably thinking: 'Oh my gosh, I must be something.' Well, the reason he is interested in them is because he is a loser in relationships. Most 32-year-old men wouldn't form intimate relationships with a 20-year-old for more than a weekend. There's just nothing to talk about."

"

"To lose control is the end of the world for these guys. They get wounded. It's like putting a knife in their heart to pull away from them and it drives them to a panic level."

Killing, says DeLong, "is the ultimate control over them."

Control also explains why Shechtman may have chosen to decapitate Mullins-Keltz, DeLong says.

"Your head is the essence of you. Your face, your nose, your eyes, your lips, everything about you, the essence of your personality, why you love someone -- it's all part and parcel of who you are."

When the head of a murder victim has been badly beaten, criminal profilers often suspect that the victim knew the attacker, DeLong says. It's an indication someone "wants to destroy the essence of that person."

"If Mike was here and honest he would probably say, 'I started having fantasies about cutting people's heads off when I was a kid.' Heather happened to be the unlikely victim. This was going to happen eventually to someone. The fiancée who got out was pretty darn lucky."

AT TECHNIC in Cranston, Shechtman's office assistant Candace Tucker could see and hear the morning traffic rushing along Route 10 as she passed through the company's barbed-wired security entrance.

Upstairs in her office on the second floor, the telephone rang. It was shortly after 8 a.m..

It was Michael.

"Is Gayle there?" Shechtman asked tersely without his usual banter -- How are you? What's going on there? How are the kids? Shechtman loved engaging in conversation.

Gayle Lyne was Technic's assistant marketing manager. She had worked with Shechtman for six years, and the two were good friends.

"It's still early," Tucker told Shechtman. "She's not in yet."

"OK," Shechtman said, and abruptly hung up.

Five minutes later, he called back. Tucker could hear the road passing as he spoke into his cell phone.

"I'm trying to reach Gayle," he said again.

She's still not in, Tucker told him. Shechtman sounded odd. Not the chipper guy who faithfully brought her and Lyne chocolate ice creams every Monday afternoon in summer (the local Ben & Jerry's had a two-for-one special) and who periodically arrived with Sweenor chocolates just to see them smile, it seemed.

Tucker became concerned: "Is there anything I can do -- for you?"

"Nope," Shechtman said.

Then: "I got to go."

He hung up.

ARROGANCE marked Shechtman's arrival at Technic in October 1994.

"He was like a bull in a china shop," recalls David Weisberg, the company's vice president. In his mind, "No one was as good as he was."

One employee threatened to quit rather than work with Shechtman.

"He was very rough around the edges when he came here, but to his credit he really matured," says Weisberg. "He went from being disliked by everybody to someone who everybody liked."

It took time, but Shechtman learned teamwork and diplomacy.

If a client company was dissatisfied with how an alloy adhered to its electrical components, Shechtman would work with the technicians in the lab to solve the problem. That he could manipulate the company's electron microscope won him respect among the lab rats.

His edgy personality smoothed. Friendships developed. For about two years, Shechtman lifted weights with Technic's shipping manager, Al Antos.

Three times a week they would meet at the Power House Gym, in Coventry, and go through their routines. Shechtman preferred free weights over the weight machines. They gave him a bigger pump and bigger muscles.

For a man who stood only 5 feet 4 inches, Shechtman could bench-press 260 pounds.

Shechtman often swapped comments with his lifting partners about the pretty women in the gym, Antos remembers. "But it was never: 'I'd like to cut her head off with a chain saw.' "

Shechtman proved his value at Technic, constantly volunteering to help others with work-related problems. Maybe to a fault.

If there was one criticism Weisberg had of Shechtman it was "his need to be constantly juggling 10 things at the same time."

CAROL HEALY, Shechtman's coworker, was still at the Rhode Island State Police headquarters, explaining her last conversation with Shechtman, when her cell phone rang.

Again it was Michael.

He was in his car and demanding to meet with her.

He promised not to hurt her.

He was adamant.

He just wanted to give her something, he said.

They agreed on a parking lot off Route 6 in Foster. But state troopers were waiting when Shechtman's car pulled in. Seeing the cruisers, Shechtman sped off with the troopers in pursuit.

As the chase stretched across the northwest corner of Rhode Island, Gary Sousa, the chief of police in Plainfield, for the last 22 years, took a phone call from the Rhode Island State Police.

Within minutes he had three of his men meeting him at Shechtman's house at 84 Kate Downing Road, a few miles away.

With guns drawn, Sousa, a Vietnam veteran, and another officer guarded the front door in case anyone ran out. Two other officers, toting rifles, ran around back. They crouched around Shechtman's outdoor hot tub and the deck and made their way to a back door of the garage, where they broke in.

Upstairs they found the gruesome confirmation of Carol Healy's fear.

The medical examiner would later determine Heather Mullins-Keltz died of asphyxia from compression of her neck -- before she had been decapitated.

ON MONDAY, Shechtman had told his coworkers Heather was in danger.

He arrived at Technic with Mullins-Keltz by his side. The pair made their way up to the second floor, where Shechtman kept a tiny cluttered office. Bright rolls of shiny copper semiconductor panels, computer disks and green highlighters, his favorite markers, lay scattered across his desk. Cardboard boxes of company calendars lined the floor. Detectives would later find pornography on his computer.

Gayle Lyne and Candace Tucker kept offices on each side of him. Neither had seen Shechtman at work for two weeks. He had taken vacation -- something few in the company ever remembered him doing in his 9 1/2 years there.

While Heather chatted with Lyne and Tucker, Shechtman crossed the hall to Weisberg's office.

"I have a personal problem," Shechtman told him.

Shechtman claimed Heather's husband was abusing her.

She was filing divorce papers, Shechtman told his boss. There was no telling how her husband might react.

"To protect her," Shechtman told Weisberg, she was staying with him; Shechtman asked Weisberg for permission to work at home for the next few days until things settled down.

"Are you safe?" Weisberg asked.

Shechtman said he wasn't sure. Maybe we'll move back to my parents' house in North Kingstown for a while, Shechtman replied.

Mullins-Keltz's cousin, Samantha Ramsey, says Shechtman magnified the marital problems Heather and John Keltz were having to convince Heather to stay with him.

"From what I do know, there has been no reason to think that [Keltz] was abusive," Ramsey said. "He treated her like a princess. I think he loved her."

Shechtman, she said, "pitted them against each other."

"The guy really convinced her that she deserved better than the enlisted life," Ramsey says. "He manipulated her."

SITTING in his boss's office that Monday morning, Shechtman gave Weisberg an abridged version of events.

According to a Plainfield police report, which Police Chief Sousa read to a reporter, Shechtman and his fiancéewere involved in what the report called a "relationship" with Mullins-Keltz and her husband as early as last December.

On the evening of Dec. 8, 2003, Shechtman told the police he had taken his fiancée and Mullins-Keltz to New Hampshire for a weekend. And now Keltz "was upset with the relationship." And, Shechtman said, Keltz had made threatening remarks.

A Plainfield police officer called Keltz's home in Groton. Keltz wasn't there. The officer left a message telling him to stay away from Shechtman's house.

Keltz has repeatedly declined to speak to reporters.

Shechtman described the Keltzes' marital problems as potentially dangerous when he went again to the Plainfield police station on March 6 -- this time with Mullins-Keltz in tow.

Shechtman told an officer that Heather was planning to file for divorce. The couple wanted the police to know, they said, because they feared Keltz would try to take Heather back.

Mullins-Keltz made a point of stating she was staying with Shechtman voluntarily.

Shechtman also called Heather's grandmother in Florida. He expressed the same concerns regarding Keltz. The family says they doubted his insinuations.

SHECHTMAN spent Tuesday night, March 23, at home, growing angry.

Mullins-Keltz hadn't come home.

Around 9 p.m. he called the Plainfield police for the first time. A patrolman swung by his house. Shechtman told the officerthat Heather had gone out with her "soon-to-be-ex-husband" and hadn't returned. He was worried about her, he said.

Shechtman called the Groton police and told them the same story. The Groton police sent a cruiser by Keltz's home and noticed there was no car in the driveway.

Shechtman called the Plainfield police back later. She's still not home, he reported.

Shechtman called Heather's father in North Carolina.

I'm worried, he told Fred Mullins. Heather's been out with John for hours. Shechtman rambled on, eventually persuading Mullins there might be reason to worry.

Then, while the two men talked, Heather walked back inside Shechtman's house.

Heather spoke to her father. She told him not to worry. Everything was fine.

The police would later learn Mullins-Keltz had spent the day reconciling with Keltz. The two had even shopped at Wal-Martfor a new wedding ring.

It had been less than a month since Heather Mullins-Keltz had moved in with Shechtman.

THREE STATE police cruisers pursued Shechtman as he sped along Route 6 after his attempt to meet Carol Healy.

In Providence, he turned onto Route 10, heading south. Just over the Cranston line, Shechtman's Mercury struck two cars and a Jersey barrier.

It came to a stop about a mile from Technic.

As troopers andthe Johnston police approached, Shechtman orchestrated a final act of control.

He raised his 9mm pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

The troopers then found the trash bag in the front seat.

"I'm sure he was talking to the head all the way," says DeLong, the former FBI profiler. "It probably gave him immense pleasure, immense power. To have the head is to have her."

But he did more than just talk.

Somewhere along his final ride, Shechtman had pointed his pistol at the trash bag and fired.

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Holy shit.