September 26, 2025 • 51 mins
Join Sandra for two astonishing stories of divine intervention. Discover a mechanic who saw verifiable evidence after being crushed to death and another man saved by spirit warnings and his dog.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
And you're here.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Thanks for choosing the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost Day
and Paranormal Podcast Network. Your quest for podcasts of the paranormal, supernatural,
and the unexplained ends here. They invite you to enjoy
all our shows we have on this network, and right now,
let's start with Chase of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast am employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:42):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself. Hi,
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on a journey to prove the existence of life after death.
On each episode, we'll just discuss the reasons we now
know that our loved ones have survived physical debt, and
(01:05):
so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. What
happens when a man is crushed by a truck and
watches angels save his life. You'll hear that astonishing evidence
packed near death experience later in our show today, But first,
what if you didn't need a crisis to connect with
the other side. Afterlife expert and podcast host Gary Langley
(01:29):
has been guided by spirit his entire life, and he's
here to share his evidence of the afterlife and how
we can all learn to listen. Here's Gary.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
You know, I kind of came into this life not
feeling like this was all there was. I felt there
was a greater reality, and then I started having some
experiences which led me down the path a little further.
I think one of my first experiences in young adulthood,
I was about nineteen. We had no heat in the
(01:59):
house because of Florida, but there was a cold snap
and my bed was a mattress on the floor. So
at that time I was nineteen and now I can't
get up from that. It was an extremely cold night
and I had a space heater and a big quilt
on my bed, and I kept moving the space heater closer,
and in the wee hours of the morning, it was
(02:21):
as if a face was right in front of mine
and shouted Gary. As I opened my eyes, the quilt
blew up in flames. I folded it over on itself
and put the fire out. Now I'm a sound sleeper,
so had that not transpired, I could have been extremely injured.
(02:43):
That added to my curiosity of what was that? Who
was giving me a warning? And They've happened throughout my life.
I'll tell another story many years later. I was driving
down a mountain road and sometimes I'm Claire Audient and
it's just like a thought in my head, but it's
(03:06):
not my thought, and I hear, Gary, you might want
to slow down. There's a blind curve ahead, and Gary,
you might want to slow down. There's a gray Pinto
on the wrong side of the road. Now, not only
did it give me a warning, it gave me evidence.
So I instinctively slowed down, and around the curve on
(03:28):
my lane came a primered gray Pinto and I would
have head on with that car. I had to pull
over after that one and just say, oh, my gosh,
that just happened. So experiences like that, I've always felt protected,
and I've always felt a great sense of protection, and
(03:49):
that deepened my search for what's this reality really about.
Let me backtrack a little. In the mid nineteen seventies,
of course, I found Raymond Moody's book right after it
came out, Giving Away my age here. But that was
profound to me. It resonated with me on a level.
And there wasn't much about near death experiences available at
(04:14):
that time. So that started a journey of looking into that.
I began to delve into different teachers. At that point,
I had a really interesting experience. I had had a
twenty year thyroid overactive thyroid condition and doctors had told me, well,
(04:35):
you know, you need to drink radioactive iodine, which kills
part of the thyroid, and they said, condition like yours
doesn't just go away. Well, at the time, I had
been reading a lot of the work of Joel Goldsmith,
who was an incredible healer in his day, and so
I thought, I don't want to drink radioactive iodine. And
(04:58):
I had a doctor in New York tell me, you know,
if you do that, you could get thyroid cancer. So
I thought, yeah, let's skip that. So I started using
Goldsmith's method and I would sit in sort of a
meditation and say, if this has a beginning, then it
has an end, and it's not the real because the
(05:20):
real has no beginning and no end. It just Is
and I went back to the doctor. Different doctor. This
was at Kaiser Hospital in California. She's looking at me
and she said, let's test your thyroid, and she had
just taken radioactive iodine for her thyroid. All my te
(05:41):
levels came back normal. It just vanished. She said, you're
one for the textbooks because twenty year issue like that
does not clear itself up. Never heard of that. And
I said, well, there are other ways of healing, and
she said, okay, go ahead tell me. And I just
stayed silent because it wasn't going to fly. I couldn't
(06:02):
explain that. So, realizing there is a greater reality, I
began to explore read everything I could get my hands on.
The more I began to take in and have experiences
of my own and some out of body experiences as well.
I developed a belief in the afterlife. But that's not
(06:25):
the hole enchilada, because a belief implies doubt. It could
be true, it could not be true, and that's a
healthy reaction initially, but there came a tipping point where
it went from belief to knowing that the afterlife exists.
The most profound out of body experience I had was
(06:48):
nineteen ninety five, September sixth. I remember the day well
because it was my mother's birthday as well. I lived
on a camp and retreat center in the Sierra Mountains,
and at that time I worked under somebody else. He
and his family lived there. On September sixth, we watched
his daughter drive out to her first day of her
(07:12):
senior year of high school. And she drove to the
San Joaquin Valley, which was the Fresno area, and we
watched her drive out. We did our day's work. I
went home that evening. I lived on the property as well,
in a different dwelling than they did. That evening, I
went to bed and suddenly my whole body started vibrating.
(07:34):
I was seeing gold flecks of light, and I'm like
in that in between state. Suddenly I find myself and
I'm on the roof of a building and I'm looking
down at the streets and there are trash can fires
and people screaming, and I thought, this is really unusual.
(07:55):
Somebody pointed to a building on this flat roof of
this building I'm on, it was like a little shed.
I walked over to the shed and opened the door
and there was my friend's daughter, and she looked at
me and she said, Hi, what are you doing here?
And I said, I can't stay. I just want you
to know you're loved. And I gave her a hug,
(08:19):
and then I woke up same experience, my whole body vibrating.
So I thought, well, that was really vivid and very unusual.
So the next day came, the seventh of September, her
father came over. We began our day's work on the property,
and I'm seeing concern on his face and I said,
(08:39):
what's wrong. I'll make up a name, because just to
protect their privacy, he said, we can't find Susan. I
knew immediately I had seen her on the other side.
It wasn't until midday that day that a helicopter was
flown they found the wreckage of her car from the
morning of the sixth. But I had no clue that
(09:02):
anything was miss I had no idea that she had
crossed over at sixteen years of age, and I had
never dreamed of her before or after. And it was
also much more vivid than any dream I'd ever had.
So that was a profound eye opener, A scale tipper,
(09:22):
and I really suggest to people do some research, find
a good medium. Now I'll skip ahead to my sixty
fourth birthday. I had planned a reading with Suzanne Wilson. Well,
she blew my socks off because the morning of my
sixty fourth birthday, I was having my morning coffee and
(09:42):
I said to Siri, please play when I'm sixty four
by the Beatles. So I go that afternoon onto Zoom
to have the reading, and at one point during the reading,
Suzanne says, well, that's funny. I'm hearing that Beatles song
Will you still need me? Will you will feed me
when I'm sixty four? And I said, oh, you want
(10:04):
to know something. She said, hold on, I have a
little woman bringing that song through. She said, I think
it's your mother. She said five two blue eyes. Absolutely.
My mother was five two with blue eyes. So when
you have a reading like that, something switches in you.
You begin to realize, oh, this stuff is real. Because
(10:26):
we will try and talk ourselves out of the signs
we get. We'll feel very confident in them, and then
we'll go, oh, my mind's just making that up. No
it's not. So she gave me a whole hour and
a half of evidence in that reading. I had another
really good reading. The camp that I used to manage
(10:49):
in the Sierra Mountains was built by Bob Matthias, who
was the nineteen forty eight and fifty two de Caathlon
gold medal winner in the Olympics and also a four
term congressman. Bob contracted cancer and his wife called me
and said, he really wants to see you. So I
went down to their house. I'm sitting by his chair
(11:11):
talking to him. At one point I put my hand
on his arm and I said, Bob, I really love you.
Because he had become like family. You know, Bob was
from a different generation, so it was probably a little
hard for him to have a guy say I love you.
And he immediately said, and I love that camp. And
I could tell it made him a little nervous that
(11:31):
I had said that, but you know, he took it
fast forward. He did pass away. I went to about
four months later a public demonstration of mediumship by a
medium called Peter Close from the UK. I'd never met
this medium before. I'm in a room of one hundred
and fifty people. At one point, Peter said, I have
(11:54):
a world class athlete here. I look around, nobody's raising
their hand. He said he was known as the world's
greatest athlete in his day. He was. And so I
put my hand up and he said, he wants you
to know something, and I said, what's that. He said,
he loves you too. He just couldn't say it when
(12:15):
he was there. Now that's evidence. Nobody could make that
stuff up. Once you realize you have all kinds of
help from the other side to convince you that you're eternal,
and once you do realize that, that's pretty much the
(12:36):
end of psychological fear.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
We'll take our break now, and when we get back,
Gary shares the story of a devastating house fire, the
heroic dog who saved his life, and why imagination is
the key to opening the door to the other side.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast and Paranormal
(13:01):
Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(13:27):
Sandra Champlain. Let's continue our conversation with The Soul Explorer's
podcast host Gary Lang.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
I think we as a race of people, we harbor
too much fear. And when I say fear, I'm not
talking about there's a bear chasing me. I'm talking about, well,
what if this happens, what if that happens? Mostly never happens,
but we spend a lot of time on it. Well,
that kind of drops away when you finally get to
(13:57):
that point that you realize is that important, You don't
need to be afraid. So this year I went through
a pretty profound experience. I had moved from California back
to Florida to assist my cousin. It was sort of
a lifelong pact that if we're both single, we'll move
(14:17):
in together when we're retired. I was with her for
a year and she passed away. So a year after that,
on January fourth of this year, I had this wonderful dog.
He's a chocolate lab. His name was Bear. I also
had a cat i'd had for fourteen years. At one
(14:37):
thirty in the morning, and remember I'm a sound sleeper,
as I mentioned earlier, one thirty in the morning, the
dog starts dancing on the bed and making a very
weird sound, waking me out of a deep sleep, at
which point I realized my house was on fire, so
(14:58):
moving very quickly to get out because houses burn fast.
I have to tell you my dog was right behind
me as I was going out, and when I hit
the living room to get to the door, there was
no oxygen. I took a breath in it burned, but
there was no air, so I held my breath. He
was right behind me, but he turned around and went
(15:21):
back to the bedroom because he couldn't breathe and I
could not yet him to come. Barely got out with
my life, and that dog saved my life. So ended
up losing him due to asphyxiation, and also my cat
which I never did find her and everything I owned.
(15:41):
So life presents us with some very incredible scenarios. There's
two ways you can go. You can be a victim
or you can say okay, that was an experience that
I went through. It wasn't happening to me specifically, it
was maybe happening for me. That's hard to take. I
(16:05):
understand when you lose everything. As a medium I was
interviewing recently said she said, Gary, you have no more attachments.
You are now free to do the work. You're doing
full tilt. There's nothing holding you back. That was the
feeling I emerged from, and people were asking me how
(16:27):
are you functioning? Because I was still doing our podcast,
and I have to say the community of people stepped up.
Somebody started to go fund me for me, which really helped.
I said, well, I'm not a victim. I'm actually happy,
not that it happened, but I'm still in a state
(16:49):
of happiness. My dog saved my life. I survived with
the clothes on my back, and here we are some
months later. But it's all working out, and it freed
me into the next step of the work I want
to do, which is not to try and convince anyone
(17:10):
of the afterlife, but provide the information. And I put
this challenge out to anyone. Go on the journey. Take
the journey, investigate, read books, find out more, listen to
podcasts like yours. You will not regret taking this journey,
(17:30):
because once you realize this is all real, the greater
reality is real, then your whole life changes.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh Gary Wow. Our friend Brian Smith has the website
and book Grief to Growth. We love Brian. I know
Ra your story truly is one of choosing an empowering
context to live in, because that mind wants to fight us.
(18:00):
In my own head, whether it's to be a victim
or this shouldn't have happened, or the what ifs, or
the guilts, or how I could have done all this differently.
Through your journey, you've built up yourself so that you
could actually choose an empowering context to live in. I
doubt it's twenty four to seven because you're human, but
you are showing people that there is something available by
(18:23):
our thoughts.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Am I correct, Oh, absolutely, our thoughts are things. Now.
I don't believe I created the reality of a fire,
but our thoughts are really powerful. And what are we
entertaining If we're entertaining victimhood, We're putting out negativity. It's
a very low vibration. We all know people that do
(18:44):
that live in that state. They're not happy. Somebody was
telling me about how bad their day was and how
the food where they were was terrible, and I said, look,
change your thoughts, change your reality. And as you begin
to perceive things with the knowledge that there is this
(19:05):
greater reality that we're just walking through this very short
time on earth. So when we judge things, we're going
to keep experiencing that coming up for us until we
no longer judge them. So think about your thoughts as
creative because they are always creating your reality.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
And sometimes grief is a thing that cracks us wide
open to go on this adventure some different ways. I
wanted to ask about pets because our heart goes out
to you with bear and your kitty. What are your
thoughts about animals in the afterlife?
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Their spirit too? And I can tell you I think
I communicate with animals pretty well. I had a really
strong bond with my dog. I'm caretaking a dog right now,
which is a Great Pyrenees, and we make this eye
contact and there's a communication going on. It's not verbal
(20:11):
for me, but there's an understanding. So their spirit just
like we are. And the people that are pet communicators,
they're doing the same thing mediums do. And in fact,
I asked the pet communicator last night that we had
on do you communicate with people as well? So she goes, yeah,
I see spirit people as well. So our animals are
(20:36):
great teachers. My animals have taught me unconditional love, and
unfortunately love is a word that's so misunderstood in our society. Yes,
there can be a personal love from me to another person,
and that's generally what we think of when we think
of love. But I'm talking about A love that doesn't exclude,
(21:00):
is all encompassing. Even if you don't like somebody, you
can love them. Doesn't mean you have to be around them,
but you can extend love because you see they are
where they are on their journey, and be supportive of them.
One thing I have noticed is the more I do
(21:21):
this work, and I bet Sandra you probably have had
the same experience, my intuitive and ability to connect has increased,
and I will often now get messages from people when
we're in an interview. And in fact, we had a
medium on recently whose son had transitioned and he started
(21:45):
giving me information which she confirmed. So your own abilities
to connect and how do you do that, well, just
be still, be quiet, talk to them. It's very easy
to just sit down and have a conversation with them.
If they realize you have that interest in connecting, they're
(22:07):
going to make the effort to give you signs and
maybe even directly talk to you. Anybody can develop this.
We all have the ability. It's atrophied because of the
society we live in, but it can be reignited. I
do meditate some, but I'm not a big meditator, but
(22:29):
I at least take a few minutes to get quiet
every day, and when you do that, send out a
hello to your loved ones on the other side and
you'll get one back. Imagination is a key to opening
that door. And we think of imagination as not being real.
It's very real. So one thing I've come to realize
(22:54):
is this world is not what it appears to be
to us. We think of everything is a solid object,
but even science will tell us this table is a
bunch of moving particles with a lot of space in between.
But we see it as a solid object. And I
think somebody and I wish I could remember his name,
(23:15):
recently won a Nobel Peace Prize for saying that when
we are viewing something, what's behind us doesn't really exist
until we turn around and look at it. So science
is coming along, especially with studies and quantum physics. What
(23:35):
we need to realize we're all energy and we're all connected.
So find out for yourself. Nobody can convince you. I mean,
even what we do. We're putting the information out there,
but you can't convince anybody until they have a direct experience.
And don't dismiss the little signs and synchronicities that come
(23:58):
your way because those will increase as you become more
open to them. Don't force them, don't try and look
for a sign in everything, but sometimes things will happen
that are just undeniable.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Gary, from the bottom of my heart and our listeners
as well, thank you for being our guest today.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Well, thank you for having me. If I can leave
one last thought with everyone, wake up every day, think
of three things that you're grateful for and start your
day that way. And to be of service that's the
greatest thing. And to be of service doesn't have to
be a big act. It can be smiling at the
(24:39):
checkout person in the store. It can be a kind
word or holding a door for an elderly person. It
can change everything for them in that day. You don't
even know the effects that has, but begin to live
from that place in yourself where you're of service to
(24:59):
others and love like you never have before, and embrace
life because it's a grand adventure.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Be sure to check out the Soul Explorers podcast and
when we get back, you'll hear a story of a
man crushed under the weight of a twelve thousand pound
truck who floated to the ceiling three times with a
miraculous healing, near death experience, verifiable information and more. We'll
(25:30):
be right back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife
on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast, a m paranormal
podcast network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(25:59):
Sander Shampane now an incredible near death experience. It's about
a man named Bruce Van Nada, and before his life
was forever changed, he would not have described himself as
a spiritual person. He was just a regular guy from Wisconsin,
a husband, a father, and a talented mechanic who had
started his own successful diesel repair business. His childhood was difficult.
(26:24):
Both of his parents had been severely abused and neglected
as kids, and they often self medicated their deep inner pain.
It was what many would call a dysfunctional home filled
with verbal and physical abuse. As a young man, Bruce
tried to soothe his own inner pain with drugs, alcohol,
(26:44):
and adrenaline. He raced motorcycles when big game hunting, anything
to feel something other than the wounds he carried from
his family. Eventually, Bruce got married, started a family, and
poured his energy into his work building his mechanic business.
From the ground up, and it was on a work
(27:05):
call at the end of a long day that his
world would literally be crushed. On November sixteenth, two thousand
and six, Bruce was at a remote logging business working
on a truck with a coolant leak. It had already
been a long, twelve hour day for him, starting at
six am that morning. He was packing up his last
(27:27):
few tools ready for his long drive home when the
other mechanic, a man named Leonard, whom he'd known for
a long long time, tapped him on the shoulder. Bruce
remembers looking up at the clock on the wall and
seeing it was six ten pm. He just wanted to
go home and eat supper, but Leonard asked Bruce to
(27:48):
look at one last thing, a small oil leak under
the engine. So Bruce looked. He saw that the massive
logging truck was propped up in the air by a
single slender bottle jack. The front wheel had been removed.
There were no safety stands, no jack stands, no wooden blocks,
(28:10):
nothing to prevent thousands of pounds of steel from crashing
to the floor if that one jack failed. But Bruce
also noticed that the truck had been sitting like that
for three days already. Leonard had even been under it
just moments before, so in a fateful assumption, Bruce thought
(28:31):
to himself, Oh, no, big deal, it must be good.
Trusting the setup, Bruce rolled underneath the truck on his back,
feet first. He settled in with the bumper just behind
his head, the still running engine humming inches above his face,
and the massive front axle, weighing between ten and twelve
(28:54):
thousand pounds, hovering just a few inches above his stomach.
He quickly found the oil leak and yelled for Leonard
to shut the engine off. Leonard climbed up into the
cab of the truck, and that's when everything went wrong.
As Leonard's weight settled into the driver's seat, the truck's
air suspension caused the entire chassis to lift. It was
(29:18):
a normal movement for the truck, but a death sentence
for the jack beneath it. Bruce saw a flicker of
movement in his peripheral vision and turned his head just
in time to see the jack teetering rocking on the
edge of the axle. Before he could even shout, it
shot out and five tons of weight fell right through
(29:41):
the middle of his body. The axle itself was six
or eight inches wide and rounded, not sharp. It acted
like a blunt guillotine, crushing him in half. There was
a deafening explosion of steel hitting concrete, and before the
first wave of unimaginable pain even registered, before he even
(30:03):
looked down to see the damage, Bruce's spirit cried out.
He remembers saying, Lord help me twice. When he finally
looked down, he saw that the axel had fallen completely
through him. There was only an inch of space between
the axle and the concrete floor. He knew in that
(30:27):
moment his body was about an inch thick, literally thinner
than his own spine. The pain, he said, was just
off the charts. Leonard, now in a panic, managed to
get the truck jacked back up just enough to lift
it off Bruce's body, and for the first time Bruce
(30:48):
could see the full extent of this horror. He said
the only word he could think of to describe the
impossible flat spot in his middle was cartoonish, and that
there was nothing in life that it could compare to.
Lying there looking at his own impossibly flattened body. A
(31:10):
new terror set in the truck was teetering on the
jack again, he begged Leonard to drag him out, terrified
the jack would slip and crush him a second time.
But Leonard was frozen, paralyzed by the fear that moving
a man with a back injury could make things worse.
He kept repeating to himself, I've called nine one one,
(31:33):
I've called nine one one. Bruce knew he had to
save himself. He reached back, grabbed the bottom of the bumper,
and with every ounce of his strength, he dragged himself out.
He noticed his bicep was shaking uncontrollably, so fast it
was a blur. But something was even more terrifying. In
(31:54):
that moment of exertion, he realized the truck had collapsed
his lungs. He was desperately sucking for air but getting nothing.
And then he heard the sound of his own life ending.
His heart, which had been pounding in his ears, suddenly
just stopped. He said, it sounded like an engine shutting off,
(32:15):
and on the last beat of his heart, his spirit
left his body. In an instant, Bruce was floating fifteen
feet up in the rafters of the garage. The excruciating,
world ending pain was gone. In its place was a
feeling he could only describe as perfect piece. It was
(32:37):
a piece, he said, that surpassed all mental understanding. He
was so blissful, so disconnected from the horrific scene below,
that he didn't even realize that the crushed man on
the floor was him. He was just watching, having what
he called a party by myself. In the ceiling. Bruce
(32:59):
watch as the volunteer EMTs began to arrive, their pagers
having gone off all over the small town. He saw
eight of them come through the main door of the garage,
but as Bruce watched from above, the ninth and tenth
responders came in through a different door, a back door.
This tiny little detail, an insignificant observation, would become the
(33:24):
cornerstone of his story, because over a year later, after
months in the hospital, Bruce went to that fire department's
monthly meeting to thank the people who responded to his accident.
He was able to walk around the room and pick
out eight of the ten people who had been there.
(33:44):
Two of them were the last to arrive, the two
who had come in the wrong door. In front of everyone,
he asked them why they had to think for a
moment and then they remembered they had missed the driveway
and the chaos and had come in a secondary entrance.
That little detail witnessed while he had no heartbeat and
(34:07):
no pulse, proved that the real Bruce was in fact
in the ceiling looking down. This is one of the
most powerful examples, by the way of a vertical perception,
that we have an impossible detail observed while clinically dead,
and verified over a year later from his out of
(34:27):
body vantage point. Bruce also saw two enormous eight foot
tall angels with long hair and shining white robes, kneeling
on either side of his body, placing their hands into
that flat spot where he'd been crushed. It didn't seem
strange to him from the ceiling, he later said, it
(34:48):
felt perfectly normal, because in the spirit, realm angels are normal.
He watched as Leonard knelt beside him, crying, running his
fingers the hair of the body on the floor, apologizing
over and over, saying I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I should
be the one that's dead, not you. He saw a
(35:09):
big man in farmer bib overalls, standing with his arms crossed,
telling the others it's too late, He's passed from the ceiling.
He watched as a female emt named Shannon pushed her
way in, frantically searching for a pulse, slapping his face
and yelling his name over and over again. Her voice
(35:32):
began to pull him back. He remembers his spirit creeping
down from the ceiling before rushing back into his body,
and in that instant, with no CPR, no medicine, nothing,
his heart started beating again. Bruce was back. His eyes
popped open, and the first thing that hit him was
(35:55):
the horrifying, sickening pain and shocking realization. Oh no, I'm
the guy under the truck. It's me, and it hurts
so bad. The pain was so overwhelming that his spirit
immediately rejected it. He remembers simply thinking, I don't want this,
(36:17):
and in that instant his heart stopped again. His spirit
left his body and shot back up to the ceiling rafters,
but this time something new appeared. A tunnel opened up
before him, going up at a forty five degree angle
with a brilliant light at the end. He knew it
(36:37):
was heaven, and he felt himself rocketing towards it, feeling
g force like a thrill ride. He was going home.
Before he could reach the end, he heard Shannon's voice
calling his name again, and he was sucked backwards, pulled
out of the tunnel, and slammed back into his body.
(36:58):
His heart started being for a second time again, the
agony was just too much. He thought, I don't want
to fight. It hurts too bad, and for a third time,
his heart stopped. His spirit left and he flew back
up the tunnel, and a third time he was pulled
right back. As his heart started. For the final time,
(37:21):
he heard a new voice, a calm, powerful voice that
he knew was God. It said to him, if you
want to live, you're going to have to fight, and
it's going to be a hard fight. Bruce thought about
it for a couple of seconds and decided no, this
piece was too good and the pain was too great.
(37:43):
We're going to stop for our break right now, so
that when we get back, you'll also hear Bruce's miraculous
healing more verifiable information. And I just remembered two guys
that told me some incredible verifiable information shared after a
near death experience. So we'll be right back. You're listening
(38:04):
to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Costacosta
Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife.
(38:32):
I'm Sandra Champlain and before I continue with Bruce's story,
his miraculous healing and other details, this story reminded me
of two people that I met. One was a paramedic
who said a man flatlined was put into the ambulance.
He and the other paramedic never spoke with this man,
(38:55):
and the man's eyes were closed the entire time. After
he got better, he went and he found the paramedics
that helped him, and when asked how he could identify
those paramedics, he said it was easy because while he
was in the ambulance, he read their name tags. The
other is a story I heard from a firefighter. Often,
(39:19):
the fire department is first called when there is an emergency,
and an ambulance follows. While this team of firefighters found
a woman again flatlined in her bathtub. Now this was
a very obese woman, and one of the firefighters made
a derogatory comment about the woman. The woman survived and
(39:41):
because her consciousness was not in her body, but she
was witnessing this scene, she went to the fire department
and she tracked down the man who made the derogatory
comment and gave him a piece of her mind. Pretty incredible.
Let's continue with Bruce's story. Last we knew he has
(40:03):
flatlined a few times and his heart started beating again.
He would rise to the ceiling to view everything, and
next we'll hear about a voice. He heard a new voice,
a calm, powerful voice that he knew was God. It
said to him, if you want to live, you're going
to have to fight, and it's going to be a
(40:24):
hard fight. Bruce thought about it for a couple of
seconds and decided no, this piece was too good and
the pain was too great. He was ready to give
up for good. But then the emt Shannon, leaned in
close and asked him a question that would change the
course of his destiny. She asked, what do you have
(40:46):
to fight for? Do you have a wife? Do you
have kids? Until that moment, the pain had erased everything else.
But now, in a flash, he remembered his family and
he knew this was God using this woman to remind
him why he had to stay. He chose to fight.
(41:07):
Bruce was back in a body that was destroyed beyond comprehension,
having made the choice to endure an impossible battle, but
his journey to the other side and the incredible miracles
that would follow were far from over. Bruce was airlifted
to a major trauma center, where the head surgeon, who
(41:27):
was called in from home, took one look at his
catastrophic injuries and delivered a grim prognosis to Bruce's wife, Laurie.
The surgeon told her two things. First, in all my
years of running this trauma center, I've never seen a
body so badly crushed and still make it to the
(41:48):
hospital alive. Your husband must have one hell of a
will to fight. And second, he said, his body is
so badly destroyed and damaged, don't expect him to live
through the hour, but cross your fingers. Laurie and their
friends from church refused to cross their fingers. They began
(42:09):
to pray. Knowing the doctor had given him less than
an hour to live, they decided to thank God for
every thirty minutes that Bruce remained alive. All through that
long night, they gathered in a circle every half hour,
offering prayers of gratitude. The next morning, the surgeon came
(42:30):
in shocked to find Bruce was still alive. Bruce was
kept in a medically induced coma for weeks while surgeons
performed five major operations trying to piece his body back together.
They later reviewed his case and the medical literature, confirming
that he is the only person in history to have
(42:52):
survived having five major arteries severed in that way. But
that wasn't the biggest miracle. The truck's axle had obliterated
nearly all of his small intestines. At the time of
his accident, medical science believed a person needed a minimum
(43:12):
of one hundred centimeters of small intestine to absorb nutrients
to sustain life. Doctors were only able to save a
tiny piece, leaving him well below that critical threshold. Bruce
was in the hospital for months, unable to eat, wasting away,
losing sixty five pounds. He was literally starving to death.
(43:36):
His appearance changed so drastically that one of his own
aunts came into his hospital room and didn't recognize him,
thinking she was in the wrong room. Finally, a doctor
gave him the devastating news they didn't expect him to
live more than six months to a year. And then
(43:57):
something else extraordinary happened. A man Bruce had never met,
named Bruce Carlson, living halfway across the country in New York,
was woken up at five a m. Two mornings in
a row, he heard a voice he believed was God
telling him to buy a plane ticket to fly to
(44:18):
Wisconsin and pray for Bruce van Nada in the hospital.
The first morning, the man was freaked out and didn't
do it. The second morning, the voice was so loud
he bought the ticket. He came to the hospital and
laid his hands on Bruce's forehead. As he prayed, Bruce
felt a tangible energy surge through his body. He felt
(44:42):
the power of God come out of the man's palms,
go into his stomach, and physically felt his intestines coming back.
Doctors later confirmed the impossible. Bruce went from having just
a tiny, insufficient piece of intestine to having nine to
(45:04):
eleven feet, approximately half of a normal person's length. It
was a complete miracle, a healing that nobody could deny
because there was no medical proof before or after this.
And what about Shannon, the EMT who had called him
back to life three times? Her story adds another layer
(45:25):
of synchronicity to this incredible event. Bruce later learned that Shannon,
who had been raised Catholic had walked away from her
faith as a teenager, declaring herself an atheist. Years later,
she and her husband bought a house that they thought
had spirits in it, what some people would call a haunting.
(45:46):
The thumps and bumps were so undeniable that it forced
her to reconsider her entire worldview. If spirits were real,
she reasoned, then maybe God was real too. She had
just begun this new spiritual journey when she was the
one who responded to Bruce's accident, and in that critical moment,
(46:07):
she didn't just perform CPR. She prayed. She said, she
prayed with all of her heart three times for God
to bring Bruce back. Bruce's experience completely transformed him. He
spent his life running from inner pain, but his journey
to the other side healed him in ways that went
(46:28):
far beyond the physical. The first thing he wanted to
do when he came out of his coma was to
tell everybody about the angels. He tried to speak, but
he had a breathing tube in his throat. He motioned
for a pen and paper, but his brain was so
traumatized he couldn't form the letters. It took six months
(46:49):
before he could read or write again. But the very
first thing he said when the tube finally came out
was I saw two angels. God sent two human among
his angels to save me. Bruce's story is a stunning
testament to the reality of the spirit world, my friends,
the power of prayer, and the miracles that can occur
(47:12):
when we open ourselves to a reality beyond the physical.
His journey shows us that even in our darkest moments,
we are not alone. He saw angels, he felt a
sense of peace from that ceiling that surpasses all understanding,
and he came back with proof, proof that consciousness survives,
(47:33):
and proof that a loving force is always with us,
even when we can't see it with our earthly eyes.
He was saved, he believes, for a reason. One time
on a TV show, the host asked him, why would
God save you if nobody else with these injuries has
ever lived. What's so special about you? Bruce said, God
(47:55):
gave him the answer immediately from the Bible that God
shows uses the weak things, the lowly things, so that
no one may boast before him. The reason why He
saved me was to set the bar so low, to
say that look if I'd save that knucklehead, I'd save anybody.
(48:17):
His experience completely removed his fear of death and gave
him a new purpose to spend the rest of his
life telling people that God is real, that we survive
physical death, and that we are loved. Bruce van Nada
went on to write a book called A Miraculous Life,
True Stories of supernatural Encounters with God. He also created
(48:41):
his own ministry, making a difference for many called sweet
Bread Ministries in Wisconsin. I don't think it matters if
you use the word God, universal consciousness, a divine light.
There's something a light so bright that's undeniable, a feeling
of this unconditional love, and that we're connected to all
(49:03):
of it. These stories from both Bruce and Gary, they
were both liberated from the psychological fear that holds many
of us back. It reminds me of these beautiful words
of the poet RUMI. You are not a drop in
the ocean. You are the entire ocean. In a drop.
We are all vast, eternal, and connected to that same
(49:25):
source of love and miracles that we heard about today.
There's a world of miracles that awaits when we can
pay attention to what we do have. My friend Greg
told me a mantra he just started using today. I'm
grateful for the life I have while I pursue the
life I desire. So as you pursue that life you desire,
(49:47):
come visit me, will you, and we Don't Die dot
com come join me on one of our free Sunday gatherings.
It's an inspirational, non denominational service with a medium demonstration included,
and they're super fun. Come fifteen minutes early or so
and say hello. I would love to meet you. Also,
we offer classes. If you don't yet have a copy
(50:08):
of my book We Don't Die, a skeptics Discovery of
Life after Death, and you want a free PDF copy,
just enter your name and email address at the bottom
therewdotdie dot com. So in closing, I'm Sandra Champlain. Remember
you are a divine, eternal being and that consciousness will
(50:29):
keep on, keep it on, even when we leave our bodies.
So thank you so much for listening to Shades of
the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am
Paranormal podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost
Day and Paranormal podcast Network. Make sure and check out
all our shows on the iHeartRadio app or by going
to i heart radio dot com. Mm hmm
And you're here.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Thanks for choosing the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost Day
and Paranormal Podcast Network. Your quest for podcasts of the paranormal, supernatural,
and the unexplained ends here. They invite you to enjoy
all our shows we have on this network, and right now,
let's start with Chase of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast am employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:42):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself. Hi,
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on a journey to prove the existence of life after death.
On each episode, we'll just discuss the reasons we now
know that our loved ones have survived physical debt, and
(01:05):
so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. What
happens when a man is crushed by a truck and
watches angels save his life. You'll hear that astonishing evidence
packed near death experience later in our show today, But first,
what if you didn't need a crisis to connect with
the other side. Afterlife expert and podcast host Gary Langley
(01:29):
has been guided by spirit his entire life, and he's
here to share his evidence of the afterlife and how
we can all learn to listen. Here's Gary.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
You know, I kind of came into this life not
feeling like this was all there was. I felt there
was a greater reality, and then I started having some
experiences which led me down the path a little further.
I think one of my first experiences in young adulthood,
I was about nineteen. We had no heat in the
(01:59):
house because of Florida, but there was a cold snap
and my bed was a mattress on the floor. So
at that time I was nineteen and now I can't
get up from that. It was an extremely cold night
and I had a space heater and a big quilt
on my bed, and I kept moving the space heater closer,
and in the wee hours of the morning, it was
(02:21):
as if a face was right in front of mine
and shouted Gary. As I opened my eyes, the quilt
blew up in flames. I folded it over on itself
and put the fire out. Now I'm a sound sleeper,
so had that not transpired, I could have been extremely injured.
(02:43):
That added to my curiosity of what was that? Who
was giving me a warning? And They've happened throughout my life.
I'll tell another story many years later. I was driving
down a mountain road and sometimes I'm Claire Audient and
it's just like a thought in my head, but it's
(03:06):
not my thought, and I hear, Gary, you might want
to slow down. There's a blind curve ahead, and Gary,
you might want to slow down. There's a gray Pinto
on the wrong side of the road. Now, not only
did it give me a warning, it gave me evidence.
So I instinctively slowed down, and around the curve on
(03:28):
my lane came a primered gray Pinto and I would
have head on with that car. I had to pull
over after that one and just say, oh, my gosh,
that just happened. So experiences like that, I've always felt protected,
and I've always felt a great sense of protection, and
(03:49):
that deepened my search for what's this reality really about.
Let me backtrack a little. In the mid nineteen seventies,
of course, I found Raymond Moody's book right after it
came out, Giving Away my age here. But that was
profound to me. It resonated with me on a level.
And there wasn't much about near death experiences available at
(04:14):
that time. So that started a journey of looking into that.
I began to delve into different teachers. At that point,
I had a really interesting experience. I had had a
twenty year thyroid overactive thyroid condition and doctors had told me, well,
(04:35):
you know, you need to drink radioactive iodine, which kills
part of the thyroid, and they said, condition like yours
doesn't just go away. Well, at the time, I had
been reading a lot of the work of Joel Goldsmith,
who was an incredible healer in his day, and so
I thought, I don't want to drink radioactive iodine. And
(04:58):
I had a doctor in New York tell me, you know,
if you do that, you could get thyroid cancer. So
I thought, yeah, let's skip that. So I started using
Goldsmith's method and I would sit in sort of a
meditation and say, if this has a beginning, then it
has an end, and it's not the real because the
(05:20):
real has no beginning and no end. It just Is
and I went back to the doctor. Different doctor. This
was at Kaiser Hospital in California. She's looking at me
and she said, let's test your thyroid, and she had
just taken radioactive iodine for her thyroid. All my te
(05:41):
levels came back normal. It just vanished. She said, you're
one for the textbooks because twenty year issue like that
does not clear itself up. Never heard of that. And
I said, well, there are other ways of healing, and
she said, okay, go ahead tell me. And I just
stayed silent because it wasn't going to fly. I couldn't
(06:02):
explain that. So, realizing there is a greater reality, I
began to explore read everything I could get my hands on.
The more I began to take in and have experiences
of my own and some out of body experiences as well.
I developed a belief in the afterlife. But that's not
(06:25):
the hole enchilada, because a belief implies doubt. It could
be true, it could not be true, and that's a
healthy reaction initially, but there came a tipping point where
it went from belief to knowing that the afterlife exists.
The most profound out of body experience I had was
(06:48):
nineteen ninety five, September sixth. I remember the day well
because it was my mother's birthday as well. I lived
on a camp and retreat center in the Sierra Mountains,
and at that time I worked under somebody else. He
and his family lived there. On September sixth, we watched
his daughter drive out to her first day of her
(07:12):
senior year of high school. And she drove to the
San Joaquin Valley, which was the Fresno area, and we
watched her drive out. We did our day's work. I
went home that evening. I lived on the property as well,
in a different dwelling than they did. That evening, I
went to bed and suddenly my whole body started vibrating.
(07:34):
I was seeing gold flecks of light, and I'm like
in that in between state. Suddenly I find myself and
I'm on the roof of a building and I'm looking
down at the streets and there are trash can fires
and people screaming, and I thought, this is really unusual.
(07:55):
Somebody pointed to a building on this flat roof of
this building I'm on, it was like a little shed.
I walked over to the shed and opened the door
and there was my friend's daughter, and she looked at
me and she said, Hi, what are you doing here?
And I said, I can't stay. I just want you
to know you're loved. And I gave her a hug,
(08:19):
and then I woke up same experience, my whole body vibrating.
So I thought, well, that was really vivid and very unusual.
So the next day came, the seventh of September, her
father came over. We began our day's work on the property,
and I'm seeing concern on his face and I said,
(08:39):
what's wrong. I'll make up a name, because just to
protect their privacy, he said, we can't find Susan. I
knew immediately I had seen her on the other side.
It wasn't until midday that day that a helicopter was
flown they found the wreckage of her car from the
morning of the sixth. But I had no clue that
(09:02):
anything was miss I had no idea that she had
crossed over at sixteen years of age, and I had
never dreamed of her before or after. And it was
also much more vivid than any dream I'd ever had.
So that was a profound eye opener, A scale tipper,
(09:22):
and I really suggest to people do some research, find
a good medium. Now I'll skip ahead to my sixty
fourth birthday. I had planned a reading with Suzanne Wilson. Well,
she blew my socks off because the morning of my
sixty fourth birthday, I was having my morning coffee and
(09:42):
I said to Siri, please play when I'm sixty four
by the Beatles. So I go that afternoon onto Zoom
to have the reading, and at one point during the reading,
Suzanne says, well, that's funny. I'm hearing that Beatles song
Will you still need me? Will you will feed me
when I'm sixty four? And I said, oh, you want
(10:04):
to know something. She said, hold on, I have a
little woman bringing that song through. She said, I think
it's your mother. She said five two blue eyes. Absolutely.
My mother was five two with blue eyes. So when
you have a reading like that, something switches in you.
You begin to realize, oh, this stuff is real. Because
(10:26):
we will try and talk ourselves out of the signs
we get. We'll feel very confident in them, and then
we'll go, oh, my mind's just making that up. No
it's not. So she gave me a whole hour and
a half of evidence in that reading. I had another
really good reading. The camp that I used to manage
(10:49):
in the Sierra Mountains was built by Bob Matthias, who
was the nineteen forty eight and fifty two de Caathlon
gold medal winner in the Olympics and also a four
term congressman. Bob contracted cancer and his wife called me
and said, he really wants to see you. So I
went down to their house. I'm sitting by his chair
(11:11):
talking to him. At one point I put my hand
on his arm and I said, Bob, I really love you.
Because he had become like family. You know, Bob was
from a different generation, so it was probably a little
hard for him to have a guy say I love you.
And he immediately said, and I love that camp. And
I could tell it made him a little nervous that
(11:31):
I had said that, but you know, he took it
fast forward. He did pass away. I went to about
four months later a public demonstration of mediumship by a
medium called Peter Close from the UK. I'd never met
this medium before. I'm in a room of one hundred
and fifty people. At one point, Peter said, I have
(11:54):
a world class athlete here. I look around, nobody's raising
their hand. He said he was known as the world's
greatest athlete in his day. He was. And so I
put my hand up and he said, he wants you
to know something, and I said, what's that. He said,
he loves you too. He just couldn't say it when
(12:15):
he was there. Now that's evidence. Nobody could make that
stuff up. Once you realize you have all kinds of
help from the other side to convince you that you're eternal,
and once you do realize that, that's pretty much the
(12:36):
end of psychological fear.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
We'll take our break now, and when we get back,
Gary shares the story of a devastating house fire, the
heroic dog who saved his life, and why imagination is
the key to opening the door to the other side.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast and Paranormal
(13:01):
Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(13:27):
Sandra Champlain. Let's continue our conversation with The Soul Explorer's
podcast host Gary Lang.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
I think we as a race of people, we harbor
too much fear. And when I say fear, I'm not
talking about there's a bear chasing me. I'm talking about, well,
what if this happens, what if that happens? Mostly never happens,
but we spend a lot of time on it. Well,
that kind of drops away when you finally get to
(13:57):
that point that you realize is that important, You don't
need to be afraid. So this year I went through
a pretty profound experience. I had moved from California back
to Florida to assist my cousin. It was sort of
a lifelong pact that if we're both single, we'll move
(14:17):
in together when we're retired. I was with her for
a year and she passed away. So a year after that,
on January fourth of this year, I had this wonderful dog.
He's a chocolate lab. His name was Bear. I also
had a cat i'd had for fourteen years. At one
(14:37):
thirty in the morning, and remember I'm a sound sleeper,
as I mentioned earlier, one thirty in the morning, the
dog starts dancing on the bed and making a very
weird sound, waking me out of a deep sleep, at
which point I realized my house was on fire, so
(14:58):
moving very quickly to get out because houses burn fast.
I have to tell you my dog was right behind
me as I was going out, and when I hit
the living room to get to the door, there was
no oxygen. I took a breath in it burned, but
there was no air, so I held my breath. He
was right behind me, but he turned around and went
(15:21):
back to the bedroom because he couldn't breathe and I
could not yet him to come. Barely got out with
my life, and that dog saved my life. So ended
up losing him due to asphyxiation, and also my cat
which I never did find her and everything I owned.
(15:41):
So life presents us with some very incredible scenarios. There's
two ways you can go. You can be a victim
or you can say okay, that was an experience that
I went through. It wasn't happening to me specifically, it
was maybe happening for me. That's hard to take. I
(16:05):
understand when you lose everything. As a medium I was
interviewing recently said she said, Gary, you have no more attachments.
You are now free to do the work. You're doing
full tilt. There's nothing holding you back. That was the
feeling I emerged from, and people were asking me how
(16:27):
are you functioning? Because I was still doing our podcast,
and I have to say the community of people stepped up.
Somebody started to go fund me for me, which really helped.
I said, well, I'm not a victim. I'm actually happy,
not that it happened, but I'm still in a state
(16:49):
of happiness. My dog saved my life. I survived with
the clothes on my back, and here we are some
months later. But it's all working out, and it freed
me into the next step of the work I want
to do, which is not to try and convince anyone
(17:10):
of the afterlife, but provide the information. And I put
this challenge out to anyone. Go on the journey. Take
the journey, investigate, read books, find out more, listen to
podcasts like yours. You will not regret taking this journey,
(17:30):
because once you realize this is all real, the greater
reality is real, then your whole life changes.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh Gary Wow. Our friend Brian Smith has the website
and book Grief to Growth. We love Brian. I know
Ra your story truly is one of choosing an empowering
context to live in, because that mind wants to fight us.
(18:00):
In my own head, whether it's to be a victim
or this shouldn't have happened, or the what ifs, or
the guilts, or how I could have done all this differently.
Through your journey, you've built up yourself so that you
could actually choose an empowering context to live in. I
doubt it's twenty four to seven because you're human, but
you are showing people that there is something available by
(18:23):
our thoughts.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Am I correct, Oh, absolutely, our thoughts are things. Now.
I don't believe I created the reality of a fire,
but our thoughts are really powerful. And what are we
entertaining If we're entertaining victimhood, We're putting out negativity. It's
a very low vibration. We all know people that do
(18:44):
that live in that state. They're not happy. Somebody was
telling me about how bad their day was and how
the food where they were was terrible, and I said, look,
change your thoughts, change your reality. And as you begin
to perceive things with the knowledge that there is this
(19:05):
greater reality that we're just walking through this very short
time on earth. So when we judge things, we're going
to keep experiencing that coming up for us until we
no longer judge them. So think about your thoughts as
creative because they are always creating your reality.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
And sometimes grief is a thing that cracks us wide
open to go on this adventure some different ways. I
wanted to ask about pets because our heart goes out
to you with bear and your kitty. What are your
thoughts about animals in the afterlife?
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Their spirit too? And I can tell you I think
I communicate with animals pretty well. I had a really
strong bond with my dog. I'm caretaking a dog right now,
which is a Great Pyrenees, and we make this eye
contact and there's a communication going on. It's not verbal
(20:11):
for me, but there's an understanding. So their spirit just
like we are. And the people that are pet communicators,
they're doing the same thing mediums do. And in fact,
I asked the pet communicator last night that we had
on do you communicate with people as well? So she goes, yeah,
I see spirit people as well. So our animals are
(20:36):
great teachers. My animals have taught me unconditional love, and
unfortunately love is a word that's so misunderstood in our society. Yes,
there can be a personal love from me to another person,
and that's generally what we think of when we think
of love. But I'm talking about A love that doesn't exclude,
(21:00):
is all encompassing. Even if you don't like somebody, you
can love them. Doesn't mean you have to be around them,
but you can extend love because you see they are
where they are on their journey, and be supportive of them.
One thing I have noticed is the more I do
(21:21):
this work, and I bet Sandra you probably have had
the same experience, my intuitive and ability to connect has increased,
and I will often now get messages from people when
we're in an interview. And in fact, we had a
medium on recently whose son had transitioned and he started
(21:45):
giving me information which she confirmed. So your own abilities
to connect and how do you do that, well, just
be still, be quiet, talk to them. It's very easy
to just sit down and have a conversation with them.
If they realize you have that interest in connecting, they're
(22:07):
going to make the effort to give you signs and
maybe even directly talk to you. Anybody can develop this.
We all have the ability. It's atrophied because of the
society we live in, but it can be reignited. I
do meditate some, but I'm not a big meditator, but
(22:29):
I at least take a few minutes to get quiet
every day, and when you do that, send out a
hello to your loved ones on the other side and
you'll get one back. Imagination is a key to opening
that door. And we think of imagination as not being real.
It's very real. So one thing I've come to realize
(22:54):
is this world is not what it appears to be
to us. We think of everything is a solid object,
but even science will tell us this table is a
bunch of moving particles with a lot of space in between.
But we see it as a solid object. And I
think somebody and I wish I could remember his name,
(23:15):
recently won a Nobel Peace Prize for saying that when
we are viewing something, what's behind us doesn't really exist
until we turn around and look at it. So science
is coming along, especially with studies and quantum physics. What
(23:35):
we need to realize we're all energy and we're all connected.
So find out for yourself. Nobody can convince you. I mean,
even what we do. We're putting the information out there,
but you can't convince anybody until they have a direct experience.
And don't dismiss the little signs and synchronicities that come
(23:58):
your way because those will increase as you become more
open to them. Don't force them, don't try and look
for a sign in everything, but sometimes things will happen
that are just undeniable.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Gary, from the bottom of my heart and our listeners
as well, thank you for being our guest today.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Well, thank you for having me. If I can leave
one last thought with everyone, wake up every day, think
of three things that you're grateful for and start your
day that way. And to be of service that's the
greatest thing. And to be of service doesn't have to
be a big act. It can be smiling at the
(24:39):
checkout person in the store. It can be a kind
word or holding a door for an elderly person. It
can change everything for them in that day. You don't
even know the effects that has, but begin to live
from that place in yourself where you're of service to
(24:59):
others and love like you never have before, and embrace
life because it's a grand adventure.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Be sure to check out the Soul Explorers podcast and
when we get back, you'll hear a story of a
man crushed under the weight of a twelve thousand pound
truck who floated to the ceiling three times with a
miraculous healing, near death experience, verifiable information and more. We'll
(25:30):
be right back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife
on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast, a m paranormal
podcast network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm
(25:59):
Sander Shampane now an incredible near death experience. It's about
a man named Bruce Van Nada, and before his life
was forever changed, he would not have described himself as
a spiritual person. He was just a regular guy from Wisconsin,
a husband, a father, and a talented mechanic who had
started his own successful diesel repair business. His childhood was difficult.
(26:24):
Both of his parents had been severely abused and neglected
as kids, and they often self medicated their deep inner pain.
It was what many would call a dysfunctional home filled
with verbal and physical abuse. As a young man, Bruce
tried to soothe his own inner pain with drugs, alcohol,
(26:44):
and adrenaline. He raced motorcycles when big game hunting, anything
to feel something other than the wounds he carried from
his family. Eventually, Bruce got married, started a family, and
poured his energy into his work building his mechanic business.
From the ground up, and it was on a work
(27:05):
call at the end of a long day that his
world would literally be crushed. On November sixteenth, two thousand
and six, Bruce was at a remote logging business working
on a truck with a coolant leak. It had already
been a long, twelve hour day for him, starting at
six am that morning. He was packing up his last
(27:27):
few tools ready for his long drive home when the
other mechanic, a man named Leonard, whom he'd known for
a long long time, tapped him on the shoulder. Bruce
remembers looking up at the clock on the wall and
seeing it was six ten pm. He just wanted to
go home and eat supper, but Leonard asked Bruce to
(27:48):
look at one last thing, a small oil leak under
the engine. So Bruce looked. He saw that the massive
logging truck was propped up in the air by a
single slender bottle jack. The front wheel had been removed.
There were no safety stands, no jack stands, no wooden blocks,
(28:10):
nothing to prevent thousands of pounds of steel from crashing
to the floor if that one jack failed. But Bruce
also noticed that the truck had been sitting like that
for three days already. Leonard had even been under it
just moments before, so in a fateful assumption, Bruce thought
(28:31):
to himself, Oh, no, big deal, it must be good.
Trusting the setup, Bruce rolled underneath the truck on his back,
feet first. He settled in with the bumper just behind
his head, the still running engine humming inches above his face,
and the massive front axle, weighing between ten and twelve
(28:54):
thousand pounds, hovering just a few inches above his stomach.
He quickly found the oil leak and yelled for Leonard
to shut the engine off. Leonard climbed up into the
cab of the truck, and that's when everything went wrong.
As Leonard's weight settled into the driver's seat, the truck's
air suspension caused the entire chassis to lift. It was
(29:18):
a normal movement for the truck, but a death sentence
for the jack beneath it. Bruce saw a flicker of
movement in his peripheral vision and turned his head just
in time to see the jack teetering rocking on the
edge of the axle. Before he could even shout, it
shot out and five tons of weight fell right through
(29:41):
the middle of his body. The axle itself was six
or eight inches wide and rounded, not sharp. It acted
like a blunt guillotine, crushing him in half. There was
a deafening explosion of steel hitting concrete, and before the
first wave of unimaginable pain even registered, before he even
(30:03):
looked down to see the damage, Bruce's spirit cried out.
He remembers saying, Lord help me twice. When he finally
looked down, he saw that the axel had fallen completely
through him. There was only an inch of space between
the axle and the concrete floor. He knew in that
(30:27):
moment his body was about an inch thick, literally thinner
than his own spine. The pain, he said, was just
off the charts. Leonard, now in a panic, managed to
get the truck jacked back up just enough to lift
it off Bruce's body, and for the first time Bruce
(30:48):
could see the full extent of this horror. He said
the only word he could think of to describe the
impossible flat spot in his middle was cartoonish, and that
there was nothing in life that it could compare to.
Lying there looking at his own impossibly flattened body. A
(31:10):
new terror set in the truck was teetering on the
jack again, he begged Leonard to drag him out, terrified
the jack would slip and crush him a second time.
But Leonard was frozen, paralyzed by the fear that moving
a man with a back injury could make things worse.
He kept repeating to himself, I've called nine one one,
(31:33):
I've called nine one one. Bruce knew he had to
save himself. He reached back, grabbed the bottom of the bumper,
and with every ounce of his strength, he dragged himself out.
He noticed his bicep was shaking uncontrollably, so fast it
was a blur. But something was even more terrifying. In
(31:54):
that moment of exertion, he realized the truck had collapsed
his lungs. He was desperately sucking for air but getting nothing.
And then he heard the sound of his own life ending.
His heart, which had been pounding in his ears, suddenly
just stopped. He said, it sounded like an engine shutting off,
(32:15):
and on the last beat of his heart, his spirit
left his body. In an instant, Bruce was floating fifteen
feet up in the rafters of the garage. The excruciating,
world ending pain was gone. In its place was a
feeling he could only describe as perfect piece. It was
(32:37):
a piece, he said, that surpassed all mental understanding. He
was so blissful, so disconnected from the horrific scene below,
that he didn't even realize that the crushed man on
the floor was him. He was just watching, having what
he called a party by myself. In the ceiling. Bruce
(32:59):
watch as the volunteer EMTs began to arrive, their pagers
having gone off all over the small town. He saw
eight of them come through the main door of the garage,
but as Bruce watched from above, the ninth and tenth
responders came in through a different door, a back door.
This tiny little detail, an insignificant observation, would become the
(33:24):
cornerstone of his story, because over a year later, after
months in the hospital, Bruce went to that fire department's
monthly meeting to thank the people who responded to his accident.
He was able to walk around the room and pick
out eight of the ten people who had been there.
(33:44):
Two of them were the last to arrive, the two
who had come in the wrong door. In front of everyone,
he asked them why they had to think for a
moment and then they remembered they had missed the driveway
and the chaos and had come in a secondary entrance.
That little detail witnessed while he had no heartbeat and
(34:07):
no pulse, proved that the real Bruce was in fact
in the ceiling looking down. This is one of the
most powerful examples, by the way of a vertical perception,
that we have an impossible detail observed while clinically dead,
and verified over a year later from his out of
(34:27):
body vantage point. Bruce also saw two enormous eight foot
tall angels with long hair and shining white robes, kneeling
on either side of his body, placing their hands into
that flat spot where he'd been crushed. It didn't seem
strange to him from the ceiling, he later said, it
(34:48):
felt perfectly normal, because in the spirit, realm angels are normal.
He watched as Leonard knelt beside him, crying, running his
fingers the hair of the body on the floor, apologizing
over and over, saying I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I should
be the one that's dead, not you. He saw a
(35:09):
big man in farmer bib overalls, standing with his arms crossed,
telling the others it's too late, He's passed from the ceiling.
He watched as a female emt named Shannon pushed her
way in, frantically searching for a pulse, slapping his face
and yelling his name over and over again. Her voice
(35:32):
began to pull him back. He remembers his spirit creeping
down from the ceiling before rushing back into his body,
and in that instant, with no CPR, no medicine, nothing,
his heart started beating again. Bruce was back. His eyes
popped open, and the first thing that hit him was
(35:55):
the horrifying, sickening pain and shocking realization. Oh no, I'm
the guy under the truck. It's me, and it hurts
so bad. The pain was so overwhelming that his spirit
immediately rejected it. He remembers simply thinking, I don't want this,
(36:17):
and in that instant his heart stopped again. His spirit
left his body and shot back up to the ceiling rafters,
but this time something new appeared. A tunnel opened up
before him, going up at a forty five degree angle
with a brilliant light at the end. He knew it
(36:37):
was heaven, and he felt himself rocketing towards it, feeling
g force like a thrill ride. He was going home.
Before he could reach the end, he heard Shannon's voice
calling his name again, and he was sucked backwards, pulled
out of the tunnel, and slammed back into his body.
(36:58):
His heart started being for a second time again, the
agony was just too much. He thought, I don't want
to fight. It hurts too bad, and for a third time,
his heart stopped. His spirit left and he flew back
up the tunnel, and a third time he was pulled
right back. As his heart started. For the final time,
(37:21):
he heard a new voice, a calm, powerful voice that
he knew was God. It said to him, if you
want to live, you're going to have to fight, and
it's going to be a hard fight. Bruce thought about
it for a couple of seconds and decided no, this
piece was too good and the pain was too great.
(37:43):
We're going to stop for our break right now, so
that when we get back, you'll also hear Bruce's miraculous
healing more verifiable information. And I just remembered two guys
that told me some incredible verifiable information shared after a
near death experience. So we'll be right back. You're listening
(38:04):
to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Costacosta
Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife.
(38:32):
I'm Sandra Champlain and before I continue with Bruce's story,
his miraculous healing and other details, this story reminded me
of two people that I met. One was a paramedic
who said a man flatlined was put into the ambulance.
He and the other paramedic never spoke with this man,
(38:55):
and the man's eyes were closed the entire time. After
he got better, he went and he found the paramedics
that helped him, and when asked how he could identify
those paramedics, he said it was easy because while he
was in the ambulance, he read their name tags. The
other is a story I heard from a firefighter. Often,
(39:19):
the fire department is first called when there is an emergency,
and an ambulance follows. While this team of firefighters found
a woman again flatlined in her bathtub. Now this was
a very obese woman, and one of the firefighters made
a derogatory comment about the woman. The woman survived and
(39:41):
because her consciousness was not in her body, but she
was witnessing this scene, she went to the fire department
and she tracked down the man who made the derogatory
comment and gave him a piece of her mind. Pretty incredible.
Let's continue with Bruce's story. Last we knew he has
(40:03):
flatlined a few times and his heart started beating again.
He would rise to the ceiling to view everything, and
next we'll hear about a voice. He heard a new voice,
a calm, powerful voice that he knew was God. It
said to him, if you want to live, you're going
to have to fight, and it's going to be a
(40:24):
hard fight. Bruce thought about it for a couple of
seconds and decided no, this piece was too good and
the pain was too great. He was ready to give
up for good. But then the emt Shannon, leaned in
close and asked him a question that would change the
course of his destiny. She asked, what do you have
(40:46):
to fight for? Do you have a wife? Do you
have kids? Until that moment, the pain had erased everything else.
But now, in a flash, he remembered his family and
he knew this was God using this woman to remind
him why he had to stay. He chose to fight.
(41:07):
Bruce was back in a body that was destroyed beyond comprehension,
having made the choice to endure an impossible battle, but
his journey to the other side and the incredible miracles
that would follow were far from over. Bruce was airlifted
to a major trauma center, where the head surgeon, who
(41:27):
was called in from home, took one look at his
catastrophic injuries and delivered a grim prognosis to Bruce's wife, Laurie.
The surgeon told her two things. First, in all my
years of running this trauma center, I've never seen a
body so badly crushed and still make it to the
(41:48):
hospital alive. Your husband must have one hell of a
will to fight. And second, he said, his body is
so badly destroyed and damaged, don't expect him to live
through the hour, but cross your fingers. Laurie and their
friends from church refused to cross their fingers. They began
(42:09):
to pray. Knowing the doctor had given him less than
an hour to live, they decided to thank God for
every thirty minutes that Bruce remained alive. All through that
long night, they gathered in a circle every half hour,
offering prayers of gratitude. The next morning, the surgeon came
(42:30):
in shocked to find Bruce was still alive. Bruce was
kept in a medically induced coma for weeks while surgeons
performed five major operations trying to piece his body back together.
They later reviewed his case and the medical literature, confirming
that he is the only person in history to have
(42:52):
survived having five major arteries severed in that way. But
that wasn't the biggest miracle. The truck's axle had obliterated
nearly all of his small intestines. At the time of
his accident, medical science believed a person needed a minimum
(43:12):
of one hundred centimeters of small intestine to absorb nutrients
to sustain life. Doctors were only able to save a
tiny piece, leaving him well below that critical threshold. Bruce
was in the hospital for months, unable to eat, wasting away,
losing sixty five pounds. He was literally starving to death.
(43:36):
His appearance changed so drastically that one of his own
aunts came into his hospital room and didn't recognize him,
thinking she was in the wrong room. Finally, a doctor
gave him the devastating news they didn't expect him to
live more than six months to a year. And then
(43:57):
something else extraordinary happened. A man Bruce had never met,
named Bruce Carlson, living halfway across the country in New York,
was woken up at five a m. Two mornings in
a row, he heard a voice he believed was God
telling him to buy a plane ticket to fly to
(44:18):
Wisconsin and pray for Bruce van Nada in the hospital.
The first morning, the man was freaked out and didn't
do it. The second morning, the voice was so loud
he bought the ticket. He came to the hospital and
laid his hands on Bruce's forehead. As he prayed, Bruce
felt a tangible energy surge through his body. He felt
(44:42):
the power of God come out of the man's palms,
go into his stomach, and physically felt his intestines coming back.
Doctors later confirmed the impossible. Bruce went from having just
a tiny, insufficient piece of intestine to having nine to
(45:04):
eleven feet, approximately half of a normal person's length. It
was a complete miracle, a healing that nobody could deny
because there was no medical proof before or after this.
And what about Shannon, the EMT who had called him
back to life three times? Her story adds another layer
(45:25):
of synchronicity to this incredible event. Bruce later learned that Shannon,
who had been raised Catholic had walked away from her
faith as a teenager, declaring herself an atheist. Years later,
she and her husband bought a house that they thought
had spirits in it, what some people would call a haunting.
(45:46):
The thumps and bumps were so undeniable that it forced
her to reconsider her entire worldview. If spirits were real,
she reasoned, then maybe God was real too. She had
just begun this new spiritual journey when she was the
one who responded to Bruce's accident, and in that critical moment,
(46:07):
she didn't just perform CPR. She prayed. She said, she
prayed with all of her heart three times for God
to bring Bruce back. Bruce's experience completely transformed him. He
spent his life running from inner pain, but his journey
to the other side healed him in ways that went
(46:28):
far beyond the physical. The first thing he wanted to
do when he came out of his coma was to
tell everybody about the angels. He tried to speak, but
he had a breathing tube in his throat. He motioned
for a pen and paper, but his brain was so
traumatized he couldn't form the letters. It took six months
(46:49):
before he could read or write again. But the very
first thing he said when the tube finally came out
was I saw two angels. God sent two human among
his angels to save me. Bruce's story is a stunning
testament to the reality of the spirit world, my friends,
the power of prayer, and the miracles that can occur
(47:12):
when we open ourselves to a reality beyond the physical.
His journey shows us that even in our darkest moments,
we are not alone. He saw angels, he felt a
sense of peace from that ceiling that surpasses all understanding,
and he came back with proof, proof that consciousness survives,
(47:33):
and proof that a loving force is always with us,
even when we can't see it with our earthly eyes.
He was saved, he believes, for a reason. One time
on a TV show, the host asked him, why would
God save you if nobody else with these injuries has
ever lived. What's so special about you? Bruce said, God
(47:55):
gave him the answer immediately from the Bible that God
shows uses the weak things, the lowly things, so that
no one may boast before him. The reason why He
saved me was to set the bar so low, to
say that look if I'd save that knucklehead, I'd save anybody.
(48:17):
His experience completely removed his fear of death and gave
him a new purpose to spend the rest of his
life telling people that God is real, that we survive
physical death, and that we are loved. Bruce van Nada
went on to write a book called A Miraculous Life,
True Stories of supernatural Encounters with God. He also created
(48:41):
his own ministry, making a difference for many called sweet
Bread Ministries in Wisconsin. I don't think it matters if
you use the word God, universal consciousness, a divine light.
There's something a light so bright that's undeniable, a feeling
of this unconditional love, and that we're connected to all
(49:03):
of it. These stories from both Bruce and Gary, they
were both liberated from the psychological fear that holds many
of us back. It reminds me of these beautiful words
of the poet RUMI. You are not a drop in
the ocean. You are the entire ocean. In a drop.
We are all vast, eternal, and connected to that same
(49:25):
source of love and miracles that we heard about today.
There's a world of miracles that awaits when we can
pay attention to what we do have. My friend Greg
told me a mantra he just started using today. I'm
grateful for the life I have while I pursue the
life I desire. So as you pursue that life you desire,
(49:47):
come visit me, will you, and we Don't Die dot
com come join me on one of our free Sunday gatherings.
It's an inspirational, non denominational service with a medium demonstration included,
and they're super fun. Come fifteen minutes early or so
and say hello. I would love to meet you. Also,
we offer classes. If you don't yet have a copy
(50:08):
of my book We Don't Die, a skeptics Discovery of
Life after Death, and you want a free PDF copy,
just enter your name and email address at the bottom
therewdotdie dot com. So in closing, I'm Sandra Champlain. Remember
you are a divine, eternal being and that consciousness will
(50:29):
keep on, keep it on, even when we leave our bodies.
So thank you so much for listening to Shades of
the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am
Paranormal podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost
Day and Paranormal podcast Network. Make sure and check out
all our shows on the iHeartRadio app or by going
to i heart radio dot com. Mm hmm
Host
Sandra Champlain
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