Near-death Experiences Case #5

Thomas Welch was required to walk across a trestle over a dam fifty-five feet above the water where the sawmill was located. He gives this account:

"I was dead as far as this world is concerned. But I was alivein another world. There was no lost time. I learned more in that hour out of the body than I could ever learn while in this body. All I could remember is falling over the edge of the trestle. The locomotive engineer watched me go all the way down into the water. The next thing I knew I was standing near a shoreline of this burning, turbulent, rolling mass of blue fire. As far as my eyes could see it was just the same, a lake of fire. There was nobody in it. I was not in it. I saw other people whom I had known that had died when I was thirteen. Another was a boy I had gone to school with who had died from cancer of the jaw that had started with an infected tooth while he was just a young lad. He was two years older than I. We recognized each other, even though we did not speak. They, too, were looking and seemed to be perplexed and in deep thought, as though they could not believe what they saw. Their expressions were those of bewilderment and confusion. The scene was so awesome that words simply fail. There is no way to escape, no way out. You don't even try to look for one. This is the prison out of which no one can escape except by Divine intervention. I said to myself in an audible voice, 'If I had known about this I would have done anything that was required of me to escape coming to a place like this.' But I had not known."