Following a near-death experience, a woman claimed to have seen amazing things in the afterlife and to have spent 11 minutes in heaven.
When Charlotte Holmes’ blood pressure unexpectedly soared to a worrisome 234/134 in September 2019, she was at her regular check-up with her cardiologist. The doctors told her that she was either having a heart attack or another stroke.
While her husband Danny looked on helplessly, she was admitted to the hospital while medical professionals attempted to stabilize her.
He told the TV show The 700 Club about the moment he believed he was losing his wife: “They called this code right away, and everyone rushed in.”
“They just started working on her, and I thought well; I’m wondering if I’m even going to be able to bring her home.”
As her health worsened, Charlotte started talking about things she could see, like flowers. However, when her husband looked around the room and saw that there were none, he had a startling realization.
“That’s when I knew she was not in this world,” he stated.
His wife was clinically dead for the following eleven minutes after her heart stopped beating.
But Charlotte claims that she was witnessing medics and physicians try to resuscitate her while gazing down from above at her dead corpse.
“I could smell the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever smelled, and then I heard music,” she recalled. “When I opened my eyes, I knew where I was. I knew I was in heaven.”
The mother, who is from Wichita, Kansas, described how everything around her was pure “beauty” in every way, and she watched in awe as “everything swayed” in time with the music she could hear.
“I can’t convey to you what heaven looked like, because it’s so above what we can even imagine, a million times,” Charlotte said, explaining she was then led deeper into the afterlife by a group of angels.
“There’s no fear, it’s like pure joy when the angels take over,” she continued. “I seen my mom, I seen my dad, I seen my sister, I seen family members standing behind.”
“I seen saints of old,” the mum explained. “They didn’t look old, they didn’t look sick, none of them wore glasses. They looked like they were in their 30s. Yet it says in the scriptures, ‘we will be known as we were known’.”
“I knew them there in their new bodies. They looked wonderful.”
Then, to her confusion, Charlotte disclosed that she had seen a toddler.
She said: “I can remember thinking, ‘who is this?’ And I heard my heavenly father say to me, ‘It’s your child.”
“I lost that child. I was five-and-a-half months pregnant. I can remember them holding the baby up and saying, ‘Charlotte, it’s a boy.’ Then he was gone. So when I seen this toddler, I said, God, how is that possible?”
“He said, ‘They continue to grow in heaven—but there’s no time, it’s eternity.”
Then, according to Charlotte, she was transported to a location that was entirely different from the bliss she had just experienced.
“God took me to hell, and I looked down and the smell, and the rotten flesh – that’s what it smelled like…and screams,” she said. “After seeing the beauty of heaven, the contrast to seeing hell is almost unbearable.”
Detailing why she was taken there, Charlotte said: “And he says, ‘I show you this to tell you, if some of them do not change their ways, this is where they shall reside.’ I heard my father say, ‘You have time to go back and share’.”
Afterward, she talked about feeling ‘pulled back inside’ her body, and Danny saw her eye quiver.
Charlotte, who went on to make a full recovery and was released from hospital after two weeks, said: “I felt the pain, where I hadn’t felt pain, I felt the sorrow.”
She made the decision to tell her amazing story to others after her near-death encounter.
“People need hope,” Charlotte said. “They want to know that there really is something out there, they want to know that everything’s okay. Heaven is more than you can imagine.”
“I can look you square in the eye and tell you for sure, heaven is real.”
The Ozark County Times reports that Charlotte died of a heart attack on November 28, 2023, at the age of 72. Her 52-year-married spouse, their daughter Chrystal, and her grandchildren survived her.
