Anna Stone: A Skeptical Scientist Meets Herself on the Other Side

Medical Details

On November 8, 2016, at age 38, Anna fainted and was rushed to the hospital, where she was found to have a ruptured ectopic pregnancy; she says she had lost nearly half of her blood volume. She flatlined and staff attempted resuscitation, then stopped and called time of death. She says she returned just under six minutes after time of death was called, gasping and sitting up on the table.

The Experience

Anna Stone worked as a research scientist on government defense contracts and considered near-death experiences unscientific. She admits it was a hard time in her life: she was drinking and in a toxic marriage. In November 2016, unexplained bleeding led to a collapse, and at the hospital she learned she had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

She describes an unbearable feeling that something was very wrong, as if every cell were about to explode. Then, in an instant, she was out of her body, floating to the ceiling like a balloon. She heard the monitor flatline and watched the team try to resuscitate her, feeling no attachment to her body. Her one thought was, "So that was it." She was struck that her snarky personality was still intact. She also heard a doctor remark on a past medication addiction in her records, though she had been free of it for eight years.

Thinking of her children, she was instantly with her oldest daughter, taking an exam at her college 210 miles away, and saw she was fine. Then she was in the waiting room with her youngest, Lucy, barely two, playing with Legos, and saw she was fine too.

When she glanced to one side, she was no longer in the hospital but in a yellowish-white space she sensed as a room. There was no tunnel, no relatives and no religious figures; she felt alone yet not alone. She was enormous, everywhere and nowhere at once, without eyes or ears, seeing in every direction just by thinking it. Then a figure appeared before her who was herself, like a twin with slightly different features. Telepathically, this other self sent one word, "nope," just the way Anna talks. She knew instantly it meant she was not staying.

All of her vastness narrowed into a single stream and shot back into her body through her navel, painfully, like breaking the surface of water just before drowning. She sat up gasping, shocking the staff, who had stopped and were filling out forms. When she asked the doctor about the comment she'd overheard, he asked, "How could you have heard that?" She realized it had been real.

At first she was troubled that she hadn't felt more worry for her children. She later came to understand, she says, that negative emotions are absent on the other side, and that she had planned this as a reset for her life.

How It Changed Their Life

She says she physically could no longer drink alcohol and her addiction ended. Within months she became a teacher of troubled youth, went back to finish her undergraduate degree and a master's, and is now pursuing a second master's and a PhD in psychology and consciousness studies. She describes a drive to serve others and to heal her childhood trauma.