You may remember — we hope you do — the incredible account of a Marine from Louisiana named Shawn Weed who said he was out of his body and heading for a horrifying place during an eight-minute death episode at Camp Wilson in California on April 4, 1994, caused by a prank gone horribly — terrifyingly — wrong.
To recount: on a break from the Marines and relaxing (“chilling”) with two Marine buddies (one a corporal, the other an S-2 intelligence agent), Weed and his friends were goofing around taking pictures of a noose that was placed over his neck when — caught from behind by one of the men, who thought it would be even funnier to tighten the noose a bit — Weed was suddenly unable to inhale, unbeknown to his colleagues, who had snapped a few photographs of the “gag” and thought Weed was prolonging the stunt.
He was anything but.
Weed found himself unable to breathe. Desperate, the Marine had tried to loosen the noose strangling him. That proved impossible. Suddenly, he found himself there in the room, but in an entirely new way, now staring at his own body in the same room as his Marine buddies, who took an appallingly long while to notice that he was unconscious and in trouble. His spirit had left his body.
With equal suddenness, Weed next found himself out of the room and in a totally unfamiliar otherworldly place with darkness so thick and solid black it nearly had a texture: a vast region or plane that seemed to have no ground or floor, and yet with something that he was standing on, like air and yet firm, a place he didn’t recognize at all: no light, no wind, no sound, standing on nothing, as if in a giant warehouse. The only light was a dim light coming from his own form. He felt stuck despite trying to stride forward to find an exit. “I had no clue,” he says, “where I was.”
“I began to realize that I was standing in-between two parallel planes that stretch on forever and there’s no walls, there’s no doors, there’s no windows, I’m trapped in between these two parallel planes, and there’s no way out.
“From that point I became very scared but before I could even think of another thought I was snatched off of my feet by a very, very large demon. And of course for me, I didn’t know what had happened. It was like getting hit by a truck and having no clue that it was ever coming. This thing had come upon me so fast and caught me with such complete surprise and was so big, I can’t possibly begin to describe what it feels like to be in the grips of something that big.”
You can watch his account on the Youtube video below. A terrifying demon gripped his shoulder.
We caught up with Shawn recently, earnest to know if he has had any experiences since.
The answer was no — but his brush with that towering demon, and rescue by the Archangel Michael, changed his life.
While his living is now as an Uber driver and solar electrician, he preaches on occasion (non-denominational) and has married a woman from El Salvador, with whom he has had two children. He lives in Los Angeles.
As for those churches (often Spanish ones): “If they allowed me to, I give my testimony, but a lot of churches these days don’t want to hear it. It goes against their own personal beliefs — too scary — don’t want to scare their children.”
If you are not living your life for Christ, he preaches, if you do not overcome the world, “you are not making it in.” He’s sees the world as ready to implode “like Rome did.”
Focused now solely on quoting directly from the Bible, he says that his encounter with the archangel — who “when he spoke to me, he elevated my understanding to understand him” — caused his IQ to increase from 114 when he entered the Marines to between 140 and 150 today (for our discernment). We will say this: he is well-spoken. We present two versions, a short snippet and one that is more than an hour (we recommend the long second version). God’s peace!
[resources: The Other Side and What You Take To Heaven]