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Ray Catania was 20 when he died in a gas leak that filled his room and set fire to his parents’ home as he slept.
‘All night long, the gas was rising into my bedroom, and I was breathing it in,’ Ray, now 57, tells Metro over Zoom from his home in New York.
‘There was a big ball of flames, and the wall caught fire. My father put it out with a fire extinguisher,’ he remembers.
Roused by the noise of police radios and fire trucks, Ray tried to get out of bed and failed. ‘I couldn’t move my legs at all. They were completely paralysed. I couldn’t get my head off the pillow; I couldn’t yell or speak.’
He managed to pull himself with one arm and fell to the floor, smashing his head on the boards. Strangely, Ray felt no pain.
‘I didn’t feel anything because I wasn’t in that body anymore,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘I was above it, in the corner of my room looking down. I could see my lifeless body.
‘The room was a perfect square,’ adds Ray. ‘The colours were vivid and bright, everything was more vibrant, like going from old television to high definition. I could tell you the exact sweatsuit I was wearing.
‘And I was soaking wet, because the first thing you do when you die is pee yourself.’
Opposite him, in another corner, was The Light, he says.
‘It was a huge cone shaped white light, but not a light. It was everything. It was love, painlessness, peace, joy, enlightenment. It was not separate from me. I was part of it.’
An unknown being called him into the cone and Ray felt a sense of euphoria. ‘Nothing has ever felt as good as that moment, he recalls. ‘I don’t think anything ever will again until I go back to the light.’
However, as Ray approached it, he saw his father storm into the room and lift his body from the floor. ‘He was screaming for the paramedics. Distraught, in tears.’
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The next thing Ray knew he was back in the house, downstairs in the living room where paramedics were resuscitating him.
‘I woke up and they were on top of me with all their tools and gadgets. But still I felt no pain.’
‘There’s definitely an afterlife’
Ray made a full recovery, but later learnt he had died again several times on the way to hospital. When he told family and friends about his out-of-body experience, they dismissed him as “crazy”.
For years he believed them, even though the fire had not been his first brush with death – or the afterlife.
When he was 10, Ray was caught in an undertow while swimming at Wildwood beach in New Jersey. ‘I started to panic, when a being said, “calm down, swim sideways, take all the time you need”. So I did, and I later discovered it is how you get out of an undertow.’
Years later, working in a New York bar, Ray escaped a shooting after a ‘mystical being’ showed him the way out of danger.
There were also other visions and experiences, which for years Ray believed to be proof of his own unravelling. It wasn’t until he met a medium in his forties, who explained how psychics see life and death, that Ray began to investigate further. He trained as a metaphysical counsellor – a practice that uses spiritual principles and intuitive practices to help people solve their problems – and has written a book about what he’s seen
‘There’s definitely an afterlife,’ he insists. ‘At the end of the day, we’re all one, we’re all part of this light.’
Ray is just one of the people who has taken part in the Afterlife Experiences Survey, which looks into near death experiences.
Carried out by Brandon Massullo of Wooster Community Hospital and James Houran of Integrated Knowledge Systems, the pair have spoken to many ‘sincere people with good memories’ to get their stories.
‘This is a study that aims to reach people all around the world who have had unusual experiences that they think could be evidence of an afterlife,’ James explains. ‘We are testing some secret hypotheses, but we think the various experiences show meta-patterns that no one has yet explored or perhaps even suspected.’
‘I could see somebody trying to pump my chest’
Stella Ralfini also died when she was young. Now 78, the Londoner tells Metro her heart stopped beating for four minutes following a car accident when she was 16.
Stella had a sense of foreboding as she got into the car with her older boyfriend Mick after a party in Kent. Everyone had been drinking, it was a rainy winter night, and they had a long journey back to London. When the car hit a bollard, the door smashed open and the weight of the passenger next to Stella forced her out onto the motorway.
‘I didn’t go down a tunnel. What I did see was my life flash before me, and it was very, very fast, with lots of lovely memories of me at different ages with my parents and other people. Then I was aware I was watching from above.
‘I looked down and saw my leg at a bad angle. Blood was pooling on the road in the rain and I could see somebody on top of me trying to pump my chest, while someone else was crying. All I remember was saying, “I’m too young to die. I want to get back into my body”,’ the natural beauty expert explains.
Moments later, as she lay on the road, Stella’s eyes opened. ‘I just got back into my body. It’s the most bizarre thing that’s ever happened to me.’
The ambulance arrived and she drifted in and out of consciousness on the way to Maidstone hospital. Mick was stunned. ‘All he kept saying afterwards was, “You were dead.”’
The experience shaped the rest of Stella’s life and, convinced that her soul had left her body, she became a Buddhist, trained as a Reiki master in Japan and learned from monks in China. She also volunteered in hospitals, supporting those at the end of their lives.
‘I sat with people who were dying of cancer and I could see, as they closed their eyes, a little stream of light that seemed to come from the forehead or the crown and leave their body.’
Stella, author of natural health and beauty book Sensual Sorcery, now has no fear of death, rather she has been left ‘in awe’ of the universe.
‘I am convinced we don’t die when the body dies,’ she says. ‘Because if my body was dead on the highway, who was the one looking down?’
‘I experienced limbo’
Abigail Barnes also experienced a spiritual awakening following a massive and unexpected stroke 13 years ago. Now 45, Abigail lives in London.
But back then, she was travelling internationally in her role as a senior marketing manager, and her arrival in Boston had been ordinary, with dinner and a few drinks. The next morning she woke with what she thought was a hangover.
‘I had a headache and black and white lights were flashing in front of my eyes. Then I felt violently sick and became paralysed,’ remembers Abigail, who runs her own company, Success by Design Training.
It was then that she experienced a gateway to somewhere else. ‘It looked like a big oak door,’ she explains. ‘But it didn’t feel grand, more like a side door. And the feeling I got was, “Why are you here?”’
Abigail drifted in and out of two realms she now believes to have been the normal world and ‘limbo’.
‘I was on the bed in my friend’s house, but simultaneously in a white room. I could hear a committee of voices talking like they were arguing a legal case,’ she remembers.
‘Some were saying, “She’s had 32 years, she’s not done it yet”. Others were saying, “Give her another chance”. I felt like some of them were angels, some were ancestors. I just kept begging them to please give me another chance.’
Physically, Abigail was waiting in a corridor at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. When she heard the committee say “send her back” she was suddenly woken by a doctor who told her she’d had a massive stroke and was in intensive care
A day or two later, Abigail had another strange experience.
‘I heard a shuffling at the end of the bed. I opened my eyes and saw this being with giant wings, like an Archangel’s wings. It was very traditional, like all the pictures. It was almost as if it had waited for me to wake up so I could see it was there, to know I was okay. Once it saw that I’d seen it, it vanished.’
She later learned this happened at the exact point her Catholic mother had been on the plane from London praying for angels to support her.
Of course; science provides several explanations for this type of experience. Oxygen deprivation can cause tunnel vision, bright lights and euphoria, while carbon dioxide build-up can trigger hallucinations and a sense of leaving the body.
Activity in the brain’s temporal lobes can also produce religious sensations, and a surge of neurotransmitters may explain calm and euphoria.
But Ray, Stella and Abigail aren’t trying to prove life after death to anyone. They are happy to know that what they experienced profoundly changed their lives and all three have found more peace, intuition and compassion as a result.
As Ray says: ‘At the end of the day, we’re all one, we’re all part of this light. I never try to change anyone’s belief system, but if you are feeling like there’s more to this world, or things are happening to you and you wish to understand more, I’m very open to that.’
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