Elizabeth Krohn Spent Two Weeks in Heaven After Lightning Strike

The Storm

It was September 1988. Elizabeth Krohn: "I never would have made fun of anyone to their face but I definitely thought this was a bunch of BS that that can't happen that is not reality."

She pulled into the parking lot at her synagogue. The rain was coming down in sheets. She told her four-year-old Jeremy to run to the door and wait. She climbed over the seat to get Andy, her two-year-old, out of his car seat. She grabbed her umbrella, put Andy down, held his hand. They took a few steps.

It went through her head: "oh well this is this is stupid." Her wedding ring was touching the shaft of the umbrella. She remembers thinking, "just let go of the umbrella but before I could even do that there was a bolt of lightning touched the top of the umbrella and that was it I was dead."

The Disorientation

She was dead, but she didn't know it. She was still very conscious and very aware of everything going on. Jeremy and Andy were both screaming. Andy had his hands to his ears because the lightning had burst his eardrums. Jeremy ran back out toward them, and Elizabeth remembers being angry at him for not staying at the building like she'd told him.

Jeremy grabbed his brother and started pulling him toward the building. Elizabeth followed them inside. A man in the lobby came over, trying to figure out why the children were screaming. Her thought was: "why is he ignoring me why is he talking to them and not to me."

Then she thought: where's my umbrella? She looked out the window. There it was in the parking lot. She looked to the right: "about 20 feet from the umbrella I saw me on the ground it was just so disorienting."

She knew she was in the building. She saw herself out in the parking lot. She thought: "oh no I was wearing new shoes that had been very expensive." She could see that the soles of the shoes were burned off, her feet sticking out. She looked down in the lobby. The shoes were fine, perfect, on her feet. Except she was floating about a foot above the ground, not standing on it.

As soon as she thought "I want to go out there and look at myself I was there looking down at myself." She kept willing herself to get up. "Get up get up you're ruining your outfit you've already destroyed the shoes now get up you're lying in a grease puddle."

Then it hit her suddenly: "oh wait I can't get up uh I'm dead I'm still completely conscious and aware in fact even more conscious and more aware than I was when my body was alive."

The Light and the Garden

A light appeared to her right and up a little bit. It was alive. This light had consciousness. It wanted her to follow it. She thought, "well okay I'll follow it and I'll see what this is."

The light led her to a garden. It's not a garden like anything here on Earth, she says. The plants were different. The flowers were blossoming, just exploding with color. She struggles to describe it: "it's so frustrating because I the words just don't exist here."

What she felt there was "this overwhelming overwhelming unconditional love that existed there for me." She's a mother. She loves her children unconditionally. But this was different: "it was so much bigger and stronger more powerful and deeper and I don't want to minimize how I feel about my own children because I do feel that way about them but this was different."

There was a bench. A voice told her to sit on it. It was the voice of her grandfather, who they had been at services to hear his name read because he was dead. She knew his voice. He had a heavy French accent. He told her to sit down. "By golly when your dead grandfather tells you to sit you you sit," she says.

The bench was ornate, handcarved and polished, all swirls. As soon as she sat down it morphed around her, like it became whatever her body was. Her grandfather sat down next to her. She never looked at him. People ask her all the time what he looked like. She didn't turn and look because number one, she didn't feel like she was supposed to, and number two, she was really afraid of what she would see. He'd been dead for a year.

Two Weeks of Answers

He told her he was going to answer any questions she had, but he told it to her in her head. It was telepathic. The only time she heard his voice was when he told her to sit down. After that, the information was just fed into her. It was almost like it was familiar, like "I've been here before."

There were three orbs in the sky. She calls them violet color but it wasn't really violet. The way they were moving in proximity to each other, it was some sort of calendar marking the passage of time. Why was she trying to mark the passage of time? It was explained to her that she would have to remember it in linear terms in order to decipher the information she was given. It turned out to be two weeks in linear terms. She sat there and got this information for two weeks.

She was told she could stay there if she wanted to or she could choose to come back. He was going to help her make that decision by answering any questions she had. He said if you do decide to stay you're going to follow this path to the mountains and you will go over the mountains and once you're over the mountains you will stay, you can't go back.

In the distance, she saw other people, she saw animals. All the people were paired up with someone else. She asked why. He said, "well so are you I mean they can see you and you're sitting here with me." She said they're all young, they're all like 18 years old. At the time she was 28.

She had chipped nail polish on her fingers. She thought she probably had a burn on her hand from the lightning. She looked at her hand. It was perfect. It was like she was 18. There was nothing. Her nails looked perfect. There were no age spots, nothing. The skin was perfect. The odd thing was there was no wedding ring. She didn't understand that. He said "well we can talk about that if if you want" and she said "no no not yet not yet I had other questions that apparently were more pressing for me."

The Third Child and the Divorce

He told her that if she came back she was going to have a third child and it was going to be a girl. She wanted to know how he knew that. He said "because she's already chosen you she's already chosen you and your husband as her parents." When he said that, it was kind of like, well gosh then I better be there. He said "no it's not a big deal if if you're not there she'll choose someone else." That really made her think, "no no if she picked me then she's mine and I want to meet her."

He also told her that she would be getting a divorce, which was really strange because at that point they had been married for eight years, they were fine, they were happy, there was no reason to think they would be getting divorced. In fact they did get divorced but it took another nine years. She also thought, well if we do get divorced I want to be the one to raise the boys and this daughter if I have a daughter.

She decided she would come back. He said okay, "I have to let you know that there's going to be a lot of physical pain involved because first of all I have to get you back into your body when you left your body your soul expanded and it's much larger than the body and I have to squeeze you back in and your body is burned so there will be pain."

The Proof

He told her a couple of things about the future. He told her about the upcoming Super Bowl. She had never even watched a Super Bowl. He also told her that George H.W. Bush was going to win the election. This was September and the election was in November. She was not a political person and didn't care. She said "why are you telling me these things" and he said "because when you get back you're going to have a hard time remembering what we talked about and what you were told when you see who wins that Super Bowl or you see that George Bush is named president it'll trigger your memories of being here."

He helped her back into her body. He was like hugging her, like squeezing her. It was bone crushingly tight. She opened her eyes and she's lying in the rain in the parking lot and she realized it had probably been maybe two minutes, yet she knew she had been somewhere for two weeks. People were just starting to come outside to help her.

Understanding Heaven

When she was in the garden that was Heaven, she says. She doesn't know what was on the other side of the mountains. But she also understood something profound: all the people that she saw there were not seeing a garden. Each one of them was seeing what their version of heaven was. That guy over there may have been an Olympic swimmer and maybe he felt he was in a swimming pool. Maybe that one over there thought they were on a beach. "We were all in the same place heaven but heaven was tailored to each one of us it was very personal," she explains.

This understanding, that the afterlife is deeply personalized, would become central to her message. Heaven isn't one place that looks the same to everyone. It's a state of being that manifests according to each soul's deepest sense of peace and belonging.

The Aftermath and the Nightmares

She was back and she was burned. She did not feel like she was the same person and her husband definitely sensed that something was different. She had to spend several months in bed because her feet were so burned.

She slept a lot. As she was sleeping she was having dreams. These dreams were very specific and she remembered details. Not only did she remember the details, they were all bad dreams. They were nightmares. Nightmares of terrible events: tsunamis and earthquakes and plane crashes and horrible horrible things.

The first plane crash nightmare she had she told her husband. She said, "I saw this plane and it's crashed and it's in water" and she told him the flight number and she told him how many people are on the plane. He was pretty freaked out. She called her mom and told her. Two days later mom called her screaming turn on the TV. There it was. She had the flight number correct. She had the number of people on board correct. It was TWA Flight 800.

It was pretty unnerving for her. Why is the universe doing this to me? Am I supposed to try to stop it from happening? Am I supposed to call the FAA and say hey I'm just this mom in Houston and I think that plane's going to crash? And then if the plane crashes they're going to be knocking on my door saying what did you do to our plane? It just didn't make sense to her.

In 1997 her husband moved out. He could not take it anymore. Her waking up and talking about these horrible events. And she couldn't stop. They were so specific.

The Email Record

Around the same time, she realized she could email herself these nightmares and then she would have a date and time stamp of when she had this nightmare. She never thought anybody would look at these emails. It was strictly for her own sanity because she kept thinking, well maybe maybe I had the nightmare after it happened, maybe they were just reporting it again on the news. She was trying to make excuses.

She did start emailing them to herself and they were accurate. Not all of her nightmares happened. When she started writing her book with Jeff Kripal (Jeff is a Dean at Rice), he had one of his grad students take all of her emailed nightmares and try to match them up to events that happened around that time. But not all of them happened. He doesn't know and she doesn't know if they really didn't happen or they just weren't reported in the news. Like if a helicopter crashes in Taiwan, that's terrible and maybe it's on the news there but this grad student doing the research didn't find anything. So either it didn't happen or it wasn't reported. Her feeling is that probably it was both.

For more on Elizabeth's collaboration with scholar Jeffrey Kripal and the rigorous documentation of her precognitive experiences, see their detailed discussion on NDE Radio.

The Most Shocking Nightmare

The most shocking nightmare to her was one that they did not put in the first book. It's in her second book. She will not name the actual plane crash because there are surviving family members.

In the nightmare she was on the plane that was crashing. That never happened before. Previously she just saw a snapshot of wreckage and had information about it. Many times it was the actual photo that would be on the news. There was an earthquake in San Francisco, the Oakland Bay Bridge. The top layer fell onto the bottom layer. The picture she saw in her nightmare was this police officer standing at the edge of the part that had broken, looking over the edge, and there was a red car dangling. That's the exact picture that was on the news.

But this really really really bad nightmare, she was on the plane and she was talking to another passenger. The woman told her her name. She introduced her to her child who was sitting next to her. It was like they were at a cocktail party just making small talk. Suddenly she knew that's it, it's going to crash and I need to open my eyes. Until she opened her eyes she was on this plane. The woman grabbed her arms and wouldn't let go and until she let go Elizabeth couldn't wake up. The woman was screaming for her to take her child with her. She knew Elizabeth could leave and she wanted her to take her child. She told Elizabeth her husband's name and said, "take my child and find the father please please."

Then there was this jolt. Then she was outside the plane. She saw souls like rising from the wreckage. They were just floating up from the wreckage. It was so surreal.

She sent herself the email with the woman's name, with her husband's name, with her child's name. She'd never had detail like that. It was a foreign airline. She had the name of the airline. The woman had a foreign name and Elizabeth misspelled it by one letter. Her husband said "what you got names of people" and she said "yeah yeah."

About three days later they printed a manifest, a list of all the passengers, and her name and the child's name matched up to Elizabeth's email. That was terrible, she says.

Elizabeth discusses the emotional and spiritual weight of these precognitive experiences in greater depth in her interview with Coming Home, where she explores how she learned to live with this unexpected gift.

Talking About It

She's not having nearly as many nightmares as she used to and she's pretty sure it's because she's talking about it. She's doing what she's supposed to be doing. And it took her a long time. She did not publicly discuss her NDE or the things that followed it for 27 years. She did not talk about it. Once she started talking about it they kind of lessened, the frequency.

For 27 years she carried this alone. The divorce her grandfather predicted came nine years after her experience. She did have a third child, a daughter, just as he said. The Super Bowl and election results came true, triggering her memories as promised. But she told almost no one. The weight of knowing things before they happened, of watching tragedies unfold that she'd already seen, of feeling fundamentally changed in a way her husband couldn't understand, all of it she bore in silence.

Then she began to speak. First in small circles, then in her book "Changed in a Flash," then in interviews like this one with IANDS and this conversation with Tia Renee. The nightmares lessened. She found her purpose.

What She Wants People to Know

First and foremost the most important thing: "Consciousness survives death just because your body dies you are not gone you're you're still here you still exist."

To her that was the biggest hurdle to understand: where you go when your body dies, that that is home. This is not. "I mean no offense Allan I'm not I'm not no offense against you but this is not fun living on Earth is not fun," she tells her interviewer. "This is um really hard and we all deserve credit for for doing this you know we agreed to do it and we're here and we're doing it um but that's home."

During our lives we can affect what our afterlife will be like, she says. Where we will go. Everyone there saw something different. What you're doing with your life here will determine what that looks like for you. "It's so personalized and tailored to each person," she explains. "What we do here matters a lot."

When the interviewer says "oh and no offense taken by the way I oh good I don't want to be here either," Elizabeth responds: "good it doesn't mean I want to die I don't want to die I I just U you know I have no fear of death but I do have fear of pain." She always equates this place with school. "It's like nobody likes being in school and I want you want summer vacation that's that's that's having," she says. The interviewer agrees: "exactly."

What This Experience Reveals

Elizabeth Krohn's account stands out among the thousands of near-death experiences documented over the past 50 years for several reasons. First, the sheer duration. Two weeks. Most NDEs last seconds or minutes in subjective time. Elizabeth sat on that bench with her grandfather for what she experienced as 14 days, asking questions, receiving answers, watching those violet orbs mark the passage of time. She was told explicitly that she needed to remember it in linear terms to decipher the information later. This suggests something profound about the relationship between timeless consciousness and our temporal, embodied existence.

Second, the verifiable precognitive element. Elizabeth didn't just come back changed in her beliefs or her sense of purpose. She came back with specific, dateable, documentable knowledge of future events. The Super Bowl. The election. TWA Flight 800. The Oakland earthquake with its exact news photograph. The foreign airline disaster with passenger names spelled almost perfectly. Her husband witnessed it. Her mother witnessed it. She created a time-stamped email record. Jeffrey Kripal, a respected scholar of religion at Rice University, took her seriously enough to co-author a book and have his graduate students verify her claims against historical records.

This isn't about whether Elizabeth has some paranormal gift. It's about what her experience suggests regarding the nature of consciousness and time. If she could access information about events that hadn't yet occurred in linear time, then consciousness must exist in some relationship to time that our current scientific models don't account for. Her grandfather told her the future to prove to her, when she returned, that the experience was real. It worked.

Third, the personalized nature of the afterlife. Elizabeth saw a garden. Others there saw what they needed to see. The Olympic swimmer might experience a pool. Someone else a beach. They were all in the same place, heaven, but heaven was tailored to each soul. This aligns with hundreds of other accounts where experiencers report that the afterlife environment reflects the inner state, beliefs, and needs of the individual. It's not a one-size-fits-all destination. It's a state of being that manifests uniquely for each consciousness.

What we do here matters. Elizabeth is clear about this. Our actions, our choices, our growth in this difficult earthly existence shape what we will experience when we return home. This isn't about judgment or punishment. It's about the natural consequence of how we develop our consciousness. We are creating our afterlife right now, in how we treat others, in what we learn, in how we love.

Fourth, the detail about her grandfather. She heard his voice once, telling her to sit. After that, communication was telepathic, information fed directly into her awareness. She never looked at him because she was afraid of what she'd see and because she didn't feel she was supposed to. This respectful boundary, this sense of protocol even in the afterlife, appears in many accounts. There are rules, or at least conventions, about how things work on the other side. You don't just do whatever you want. There's structure, guidance, purpose.

The bench that morphed to fit her body. Her 28-year-old self appearing as 18, perfect skin, perfect nails, no wedding ring. Everyone there appearing young and paired with someone. These aren't arbitrary details. They tell us something about the nature of the soul's existence outside the body. We don't carry our earthly age or our earthly relationships in the same way. We're restored to some optimal state. The absence of her wedding ring suggests that earthly marriages, while meaningful here, aren't the primary relationship structure there. Her grandfather told her they could talk about it if she wanted, but she had other questions. What those other questions were, we don't know. She hasn't shared all of it.

Elizabeth's choice to return, motivated by the daughter who had already chosen her as a mother, reveals something beautiful about how souls and families connect. That little girl was already waiting, already linked to Elizabeth and her husband. If Elizabeth hadn't returned, the girl would have chosen other parents. But Elizabeth wanted to meet her. That pull, that sense of destiny and connection, brought her back into a burned body and nine more years of a failing marriage and decades of prophetic nightmares.

She came back anyway. For her children. For that daughter. For whatever purpose required her to witness future tragedies and carry that terrible knowledge. She spent 27 years not talking about it, trying to make sense of it, wondering if she was supposed to prevent these disasters or just endure knowing about them. Then she started talking and the nightmares lessened. She found her role: to tell people that consciousness survives, that we're going home, that this hard earthly existence is temporary and what we do here shapes what comes next.

Elizabeth Krohn didn't seek this experience. She was a skeptic holding an umbrella in a storm. Lightning found her. She died, spent two weeks in a personalized heaven, chose to return, and came back with proof that it was real and a burden of knowledge about the future. She lost her marriage. She gained a daughter. She lived in silence for 27 years. Now she speaks.

What she's telling us is simple and profound: you don't end when your body dies. You're going home. What that home looks like depends on what you're doing right now. This life is school. It's hard. We all agreed to be here. And summer vacation, the real home, is waiting.

She has no fear of death. She has fear of pain. That distinction matters. She knows where she's going. She's been there. She sat on that bench for two weeks. She felt that overwhelming unconditional love that's so much bigger than anything we experience here. She's not in a hurry to die, but she's not afraid of it either. She's doing her work here, raising her children, telling her story, helping people understand what awaits them.

That's what this experience reveals: consciousness is primary, the body is temporary, love is the fundamental reality, and we're all going home when this is done. Elizabeth Krohn is living proof.