Deborah Prum is a wife, mother, and former research director at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire who has spoken publicly about the out-of-body experiences she encountered during two life-threatening incidents.
Her first near-death experience (NDE) occurred in the mid-1980s when Prum went into premature labour whilst pregnant with her eldest son.
Prum developed health issues such as dangerously high blood pressure, critically low blood cell counts, liver complications, and suffered seizures.
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At one point, she revealed that she left her body during the emergency and entered a state without pain or emotion.
She described observing the scene from the hospital ceiling as doctors fought to save both Prum and her baby.
The mother would remain in a medically induced coma for three days, whilst her newborn spent his first two weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit.
"Except for my husband, Bruce, I don't remember telling anyone about my out-of-body experience," she explained. "I didn't know what to make of it nor how to talk about it."
Over 20 years later, in 2007, Prum and her husband were involved in a catastrophic car accident when an SUV ran a red light and struck her and her husband's car on Valentine's Day. Prum's husband, a physician, discovered that she had no pulse following the crash.
Though he repeatedly shouted her name, Prum said she had already transitioned into a realm where she lost all sense of individual identity, transforming into pure energy connected to a greater 'life force.'
"Immediately after the crash, I had no awareness of myself as a unique entity — no cognition of having a distinct identity," she wrote. "Instead, I felt utterly and profoundly peaceful in a way that I'd never sensed. To my core, I felt safe and at home."
She described this blissful dimension as being filled with glowing yellow light that felt like being submerged in pudding. Now, Prum questions if she got a glimpse of the afterlife during the accident and didn't want to return to her body before being pulled back to Earth.
Shortly after, Prum said she was pulled back into her body, where an unknown man - described as being 'in his 40s, curly hair with a receding hairline, button-down dress shirt and no tie' - was waiting beside her passenger door.
According to the former research director, the man unbuckled her seatbelt, prevented her from moving due to her injuries, and held her hand until paramedics arrived.
Mysteriously, despite her vivid recollection of this man and his assistance, Prum's husband never saw him at the accident scene, nor did the emergency responders who rescued her from the vehicle. To this day, no witnesses have been found who can confirm who the strange man was or if he was even there.
"It took my having two NDEs to make me believe they exist. Would I have been convinced if I hadn't experienced them? My guess is no," Prum said, reflecting on her afterlife experiences.