A dark, boiling pit where sinners burn in eternal flames – suffering the same torment they meted out to victims on earth – may sound like a vignette from Dante’s Inferno, but this is the scene witnessed by a man who claims he has been to hell.
Bryan W. Melvin was 22 years old when he ‘died’ for four hours and, more than four decades later, he remains convinced that the ‘hot, vile and awful-smelling’ place he visited was the realm of Satan.
Fighting back tears, Bryan, 67, told the Daily Mail how he saw Adolf Hitler being punished in flame-filled ovens, and how he believed he would remain in hell himself permanently to atone for his earthly sins.
His testimony will seem incredible to many but Bryan, from Fort Collins, Colorado, a former atheist whose experience led him to become an evangelical Christian, is adamant he was judged by Jesus Christ and sent to perdition after ‘dying’ from cholera.
Bryan was working at a construction site in Tucson, Arizona, when he mistakenly drank polluted water containing ‘rust-coloured algae’.
‘I found out after I got taken to hospital that I had contracted cholera, along with some type of neurotoxin from the algae, plus a form of dysentery,’ Bryan recalled.
But he didn’t receive this diagnosis until a day later. He was sent home from work and became so unwell that his housemates wanted to take him to hospital – which he refused.
Two days later, when his friends organised a trip out of town, Bryan briefly felt better and encouraged them to leave him alone.
‘And then after they left,’ Bryan continued, ‘it all hit me again. I managed to crawl back into the bedroom and on to the bed – and that’s when I died.’
Bryan W. Melvin, 67, said he died for four hours and went to hell after falling ill with cholera
Bryan’s supernatural experience began with him emerging from his physical body and ‘floating above’ it before leaving through the ceiling.
Scientists are not entirely sure why some have near-death experiences but it has been suggested they are brought on by physiological changes in the brain, sometimes caused by lack of oxygen.
Altered states of consciousness, which may manifest as vivid sensory perceptions such as seeing bright lights and feeling detached from the body, can then occur.
Research by Dr Donna Thomas, from the University of Lancashire, showed that most ‘will report very blissful experiences’ – which is how Bryan’s began.
‘I took my last breath, I’m floating above my body, then went through the ceiling,’ he explained.
‘I was more alive than I am now, going through this dark void, heading toward this light. And I was hearing this beautiful music.’
Bryan, who said he was a vehement atheist in his youth despite being brought up by Christian parents, added: ‘The singing was in a different language but I understood every word.’
Bryan, with his late wife Sharon soon after they married in 1988, was an atheist and used to argue with Christians. After his experience, he became an evangelical
Bryan said he was presented with snippets of his life. He saw the ways in which God helped and saved him, all the while feeling happy and pain-free.
But this idyllic scene would soon be replaced by something much more sinister.
‘I did not realise I was heading toward a reckoning and that God’s love was getting ready to judge me,’ he admitted.
Bryan was then shown all his sinful behaviour over the years – which included stealing, backstabbing and openly mocking Christianity.
He said he came face-to-face with a being he immediately understood to be Jesus and that he was told he was going to an ‘overwhelming’ place. He was warned: ‘An option for your return is yet to be decided.’
Bryan said: ‘I was facing judgment and I couldn’t get out. I was lifted up next, and the wall of this place of darkness opened up like a scroll.
‘I went through it and I found myself in a hideous tunnel. It was like being inside a tornado. It was hot, vile, smelled awful. And I could hear laughter, slurping noises, screams, shrieks.’
Bryan said he realised that where he was going was ‘not a good place’ – but while he expected to see ‘devils, pitchforks and flames’, what he actually encountered was a ‘house on a hill’.
People came out of the house to greet him, fooling Bryan into thinking he was not in a hellish place at all, but the atmosphere quickly began to change.
He said: ‘I found myself surrounded by hideous-looking creatures. There were lizard-looking things, there were all kinds of foul-looking beings.
‘This entity walked over to what looked like the horizon and he ripped it open like a veil, and I remember this plainly.
Bryan, from Colorado in the US, travels the country talking about his life-changing experience
‘The heat came in and hit me, and he stood up and motioned for me to come out of this place. So I stepped out of it and I realised I was in a cube, a square cube, a cell.’
He described being inside a circular pit and seeing cells stacked six high. There were red, molten rocks and the stench – sulphur mixed with rotting and decay – was all-consuming.
‘People were inside the cells and they were receiving just recompense,’ Bryan said, adding that those who were suffering the worst punishments were lower down in the meandering structure.
He saw people suffering the precise torments they had meted out in their lifetime.
‘It was like the demons were taunting people that were trapped inside these cubes,’ Bryan explained. ‘They would enact things they did in their life.
‘Some of them were being beaten up, but the more mental torture people were going through was worse.’
Among those he saw in hell, Bryan said, were Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich, who was one of the architects of the ‘final solution’ that led to the Holocaust in the 1940s.
‘Adolf Hitler, he was in a cell full of fire, burning,’ Bryan recalled. ‘He was the one burning in the ovens.’
At this point, the present-day evangelist had no idea that he was going to emerge from what he has no doubt was hell.
‘I had no idea I was going to come out of it,’ he said. ‘This was my permanent home. I knew I deserved this place. I was totally without hope.’
But Bryan’s story didn’t end there – and it’s what happened next that he credits with changing his life and turning him into a Christian who spends much of his life proselytising.
Bryan said he feared he would never escape from the place he understood to be hell
While he believed he was going to be locked in a cell for eternity, Bryan said that he suddenly felt someone behind him.
He identified them as being Jesus on account of the holes in his wrists, which he is convinced were caused by the crucifixion, and said that he was ‘rescued’.
Visibly emotional, Bryan explained: ‘He carried me out of there and I wept like I’ve never cried before.’
Bryan revealed how he experienced some resistance, with some entities trying to deceive him into going back into hell.
But Jesus intervened.
‘He blew on me and I went backwards, and I went back through the black void, and floated into my body feet first,’ he said.
Bryan, who believes he was ‘dead’ between 11:50am and 3:50pm, awoke in Tuscon Hospital in excruciating pain after being found ‘ice cold’ in his house.
‘I recall [the neighbour] saying things like “hang in there”,’ Bryan said.
‘I was bent over in agony with my head banging against the glove box. I found myself floating above the truck and then back into my body and out and back several times.’
He recalled doctors saying his ‘blood was viscous’ and having an oxygen mask placed on his face.
Bryan added that he was admitted to the hospital with ‘the beginning stages of rigor mortis’ and that his skin lacked elasticity and was covered with bluish blotches.
He said: ‘I had a watch nurse in the room and at intervals [she was] squeezing an IV solution bag with its tube and needle hooked into my arm.’
Bryan revealed he still suffers health issues today and has had relapses over the years, which led him to contact the hospital in the mid-1990s for his records.
He explained: ‘I was told the records were on microfiche and that after ten years were destroyed.
He has recounted his experience in a 2005 book titled ‘A Land Unknown: Hell’s Dominion’
‘All I have is what I wrote down about cholera, neurotoxin, some type of dysentery.’
Bruce Greyson, one of the world’s leading near-death experience researchers, estimates that only around 11 to 22 per cent of people go through the sensation.
Bryan believes the reason he was ‘brought back’ was ‘to warn people’ of what is at stake for those who choose to live in sin.
After his recovery, and following moments when Bryan descended back into old, destructive behaviours such as drinking too much alcohol or smoking cannabis, he realised that he had to pick a new path.
‘I just said, “Lord Jesus, I never want to go back to that awful place”,’ he recalled. ‘[I said to God] take me, I’m yours. You know, I owe you my life.
‘That’s what I said. And it was from that moment, something changed.’
Bryan, who in 2005 published A Land Unknown: Hell’s Dominion recounting his experience, today travels around the US as an evangelical, speaking at churches and joining prayer meetings.
‘People’s lives have been shattered by life, they’re broken, they’re battered, they’re bruised, and we help pray and help them walk through that,’ he concluded.
‘That’s what we’re supposed to do as Christians.’
