Synthetic Marijuana Killed Him and Sent Him to Hell. Then He Cried Out to Jesus

When Rick was 17, the Navy was on the horizon—a planned escape route out of town, out of his tangled family history.

He had a ship-out date set. He also had a girlfriend, older than him—24 to his 17—whom he’d met at Sonic. The relationship was passionate and messy, with no trace of Christ in it. He could admit that even then.

There was another thing, too: a product with a deceptively harmless name.

“Mr. Nice Guy.”

It was synthetic marijuana, a lab-made cannabinoid meant to mimic weed while dodging drug tests. It didn’t show up in urine screens, making it popular among people trying to get high while staying technically “clean.”

Rick had smoked it hundreds of times. So had his mom. So had his girlfriend. None of them had ever had more than a typical, hazy high.

That night would be different.

The evening settled in like any other. The sky turned from blue to deep velvet. The apartment complex quieted as neighbors closed blinds and flipped on televisions.

Out on the small back patio, the three of them gathered—the mother, the son, and the girlfriend. The rail overlooked a drop steep enough that a fall would mean severely broken bones at best, death at worst.

They sat in a rough triangle, the night pressing in cool around them.

Rick’s mom packed the bowl, fingers moving with the ease of ritual. She took the first hit, inhaling, exhaling, passing it on.

He wasn’t nervous. If anything, he was bored. Synthetic weed had become a routine escape. Whatever real dangers lurked in the spirit world, this wasn’t it—or so he thought.

Rick brought the pipe to his lips, drawing in a lungful of smoke. The high never had time to reach his bloodstream.

The Fall Into Sheol

The feeling slammed into him mid-inhale.

It wasn’t dizziness. Not the slow, familiar drift of being stoned. It was a tidal wave of dread—pure, distilled hopelessness, flooding his mind and chest in a single, brutal instant.

Every nightmare he’d ever had seemed like a pale shadow of this reality.

He felt trapped—stuck forever, cut off from every good thing he had ever known. It wasn’t just fear; it was damnation made emotion. The knowledge that there would be no escape, no relief, no dawn.

In that first split-second, his physical body jerked.

On the patio, his eyes rolled back. He dropped the pipe, the smoke still in his lungs, and fell backward out of his chair, limbs thrashing.

But the Rick who experienced that fall didn’t feel his body hit the concrete. He felt something stranger.

From his perspective, the world he’d been looking at—patio, rail, mother, girlfriend—suddenly zoomed away like a picture shrinking into the distance.

It was as if he fell backward through the back of his own head. The “screen” of his eyesight grew smaller and smaller, like a window closing fast, until it vanished altogether. Only darkness remained.

He was falling.

Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. Literally falling through the void—down, down, down—at an impossibly fast speed.

There was no wind in his face, no physical body sensations, but his soul knew the direction: downward, away from the earth, away from light.

The feelings that had hit him at the first moment only intensified. Hopelessness sharpened into something unbearable. Panic, despair, sorrow, regret—every negative emotion a human can feel, multiplied beyond what mortal flesh can survive.

Humans can die of grief, of fear, of shock.

Down there, he realized, you could feel something far worse than any of those, and you would not die. There was no relief of unconsciousness waiting at the bottom of that emotional cliff. Only more falling.

This alone could kill me, he thought—or would have thought, if thinking hadn’t been nearly drowned in the flood. But I don’t die. I just…keep feeling it.

Time became meaningless. It could have been seconds; it felt like years.

Then he hit something.

They Saw Heaven: Real Accounts of Those Who Entered the Afterlife and Came Back

Vladimir Prokhnevskiy

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The Stone Floor of the Dead

The impact jolted him.

Instead of continuing to plummet endlessly, he smashed into a surface that felt like rough stone—a flat, hard platform in the middle of all that darkness.

The term came to him later: the top of a tower. That’s what it seemed like, though he couldn’t see its sides, only feel the solidity beneath him.

Before he could catch his breath—not that he had lungs or breath there—hands clamped around his wrists and ankles.

They were not human hands.

He couldn’t see them clearly in the darkness, but he could feel them: long fingers with a grip like iron, skin that radiated malevolence. The touch itself felt unclean, as if the corruption went deeper than the skin, straight into whatever he had instead of veins.

The creatures—they could only be demons—began to drag him.

He slid across the stone and then felt his body bump-bump-bump down steps. They were pulling him down a staircase, each jarring thud of his head on the edge of a step somehow registering in this strange, body-less state.

He tried to move, to fight, but he was paralyzed. Whatever strength he once had was gone, as if his will itself had been crushed. The emotions alone—so thick and oppressive—kept him from even forming the idea of resistance.

There was only one direction: down.

Far off in the distance, faint and flickering, he saw it: a red glow.

At first it was just a small ember against the black, but as his eyes adjusted—or whatever passed for vision in this place—he realized it was fire. Not like a campfire, warm and contained. More like pools of flame, scattered and distant, burning without giving any comfort.

He couldn’t see what was in those pools. People? Spirits? He didn’t know. The horror he was already experiencing swallowed the capacity to care.

The only thing that mattered was that he was being taken toward that glow.

“Sheol,” he would later call it—the biblical underworld, the place of the dead. At the time, he didn’t know the word. He only knew that God was not there.

Everything good he’d ever taken for granted on earth—sunlight, laughter, the relief of sleep, the warmth of another human being’s touch, a cool drink of water, a kind word—was entirely absent.

This place was the absence of God made into a location. “There is no God here,” he understood, not as theology but as fact. “No hope. No relief. Nothing good. Ever.”

The demons dragged him down, step after step, deeper and deeper into that truth.

The Voice in the Dark

He had been raised in church, nominally. His mother had prayed over him as a baby and dedicated him to God. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew Bible verses, worship songs, stories of Jesus.

Down here, all of that had been wiped clean.

He couldn’t remember that God was real. Couldn’t remember that there was a way out. It was as if a veil had been drawn over his whole memory, cutting off every thought that might lead him toward hope.

Later, he would quiet his mind and realize: God had allowed that temporary amnesia. Not because He had abandoned Rick, but because Rick had abandoned Him. Rick had played with darkness, belittled sin, taken God lightly.

Now, God was showing him what life looked like with every trace of Himself removed.

The demons kept pulling. His wrists and ankles burned where their claws gripped. Their hatred pressed against him like heat.

The emotions crescendoed to a point he hadn’t known existed. Despair beyond despair. Terror beyond terror. The crushing certainty that this was forever.

Then, over the roar of his internal agony, a Voice broke through. It wasn’t audible the way human voices are; it didn’t come from outside his head. It came from over his whole being, like a bell sounded across a valley. “Call My name.”

The words were simple. Calm. They cut through the chaos like a sword.

For a split second, Rick’s mind cleared enough to think.

He knew, without knowing how he knew, whose Voice that was. God had just reminded him: there is a name.

In that instant, muscle memory from childhood church kicked in. His mother’s prayers. Sunday school lessons. Worship songs where a single name was lifted above all others.

“Jesus!”

He screamed it.

The Hand from the Light

The name ripped out of him with everything he had—every scrap of will, every fragment of hope, all shoved into a single cry.

“JESUS!”

Down in sheol, the name was a bomb.

The demons’ hands yanked back as if they’d been burned. They recoiled from him, retreating up the staircase in a scrabbling frenzy. Their grip on his wrists and ankles broke, leaving him sprawled on the cold stone.

For the first time since the fall began, something other than darkness appeared nearby.

In the corner of his vision, a small white point of light opened—like a pinprick in the fabric of black.

It widened.

The light wasn’t just bright; it was pure. It radiated a quality that was the complete opposite of everything in sheol—hope where there had been hopelessness, peace where there had been panic, love where there had been hatred.

As it grew, the demons drew even farther back, hissing soundlessly, unable to stand in its Presence.

From within that widening aperture, a hand reached out.

It was not ethereal or ghostly. It was solid. Real. Human and more-than-human at the same time. There was strength in it, and gentleness, and a familiarity that made his soul ache.

Rick didn’t hesitate. He grabbed it.

The moment his fingers—if he had fingers in that state—wrapped around the hand, two realms collided.

The light surged around him, swallowing the darkness, the stone platform, the distant red fires, the demons on the staircase. For an instant, his consciousness blurred, pulled upward with such power that it felt like being launched from the bottom of the ocean to the surface in a heartbeat.

But he didn’t surface into his body. Not yet.

To learn what happened next, read Rick’s full story in They Saw Heaven.