I descended to Hell for 8 hours after a suicide attempt. It’s nothing like the movies… my mother prayed to every God – but only one came to save me

It had been a bad year for Steve Kang.

His father, once a wealthy man who owned a chain of successful businesses in South Korea, was forced to live in poverty almost overnight in the midst of the country’s 1998 financial crisis.

Kang was living in the United States and studying at the University of California, Irvine. Suddenly he had to find a job, a place to live, and apply for a scholarship.

Aged 19 and by then a studious student and Buddhist practitioner, he was quickly drawn into the drug scene.

He told the Daily Mail: ‘I don’t remember being sober for more than an hour here and there all summer long. We partied and got into trouble.

‘When the fall 1998 semester began, I was so addicted and affected by drug use that I didn’t even have the mental strength to go to class.’

Later, at a party during his first week at university, he smoked a hookah (popularly known as the death bowl) which he thought contained marijuana but was actually a lethal mixture of heroin, cocaine and PCP.

‘Something there confused my brain,’ he said. ‘I stayed awake for 10 days. ‘I couldn’t sleep for a second after that.’

He believes that his soul went to hell after 10 days of torture.

At the end of these ten torturous days, he believes that he has descended into the depths of hell after his suicide attempt.

And he describes what he saw there in detail in his new book: 8 Hours in Hell: A Shocking First-Hand Experience of What Really Awaits in the Afterlife.

‘On the fifth day of my ordeal, I did not know what time of day it was,’ he wrote.

‘On the sixth and seventh day, when I looked in the mirror, I saw that my pupils were very large and black, and the white parts of my eyes were barely visible.’

Fearing for his life, he sought help from the Buddhist monks who mentored him in Korea.

Their response was: ‘We are in the middle of a silent prayer. ‘We can’t help you.’

He said he had never felt so alone.

‘It was a very dark time. My birthday fell on these ten days and my friends were saying, “Steve, happy birthday” and I couldn’t respond.

‘I was attending classes, but when my teachers and friends were talking to me, I couldn’t understand a single sentence of what they were saying. I keep asking myself “Where am I? What grade am I in?” I was asking. ‘I opened the textbook but I couldn’t read a single sentence.’

During this period he was convinced that he was under spiritual attack and even claimed that he was being haunted by a ghost.

Kang (top right) with his family – his father was plunged into poverty following the financial crisis in South Korea in 1998.

Kang now works as a preacher and hopes to help prevent others from attempting suicide

‘Glasses were falling out of the bathroom. ‘There was a poster on the wall that we had taken from the temple and it was making metallic noises.’

On the eighth day, Kang said he was visited by an Asian grandfather with a long, white beard and bushy eyebrows, whom he believed to be a Buddhist spirit.

He said he was told that if he sacrificed his body, he would spend 50,000 years less in hell.

‘It seemed like a good deal at the time,’ he said. ‘I wrote a letter to my mother, apologized for not making her proud and said I hoped to see her in the afterlife.’

Two days later, exhausted both physically and mentally, he stabbed himself repeatedly in the stomach and neck with a kitchen knife.

His horrified mother found him covered in blood and immediately called 911.

As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he had what he now believes was an out-of-body experience. However, instead of going to heaven as he expected, he began to fall. His Asian grandfather, who he thought would accompany him to nirvana, was nowhere to be seen. Kang believes that Satan has visited him.

And while the surgeons were fighting to save his life, he was fighting for his soul.

‘I immediately felt betrayed. “I felt very alone,” he said.

‘I knew I was going to die. And when I started going down, it was like a roller coaster, an elevator. You just fall and the fear and anxiety increased.

‘After what felt like a five-minute fall, I got off and looked around. ‘I was in hell.’

The scene he described was completely dark; a barren, cracked landscape filled with lost souls.

Kang described hell as a barren, cracked landscape with no grass or vegetation.

He also said he was surrounded by evil spirits wearing cloaks, some as tall as buildings.

‘For some reason I could still see,’ he said. ‘People ask me: ‘How can you see that there is no sunlight?’ But you can still see supernaturally.

‘There are sand and pebbles everywhere. There is no grass, no flowers, no plants, no food, not even a drop of water.

‘I saw purplish red cliffs to the left. There were people at the top of the cliff, at the bottom of the cliff. I looked to my right, there were people and I was in so much mental, emotional agony.

‘When I looked up, I saw that the evil spirits were there and they were not small like in the cartoons. These things were really tall – as tall as buildings – they wore cloaks, and I knew they were in charge of this place.

‘And I knew I was going to be tortured because there were caves like prison cells. And I said, “I’m next.”

He said the pain was worse than anything he’d ever experienced.

Meanwhile, doctors carried out two lengthy surgeries over eight hours to repair his torn arteries and blood vessels and at one stage even told his mother to expect the worst.

But refusing to let him go without a fight, he prayed to every god he could think of to save his son: Allah, Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius, Taoist gods, and Shinto gods.

‘Then she remembered that her friend in California, Miss Kim, was a Christian. And he called her.’

Kang still has a large scar on his neck where he stabbed the knife

He also has a large scar on his stomach as a result of his suicide attempt; Doctors said it was a miracle he survived

Kang met his wife Goeun Kim after saying God visited him for the second time

Kang believes it was these prayers that saved him.

‘I heard a voice in my heart,’ he wrote in the book, ‘a voice I had never heard before. “No more Buddhism, no more drugs… I love you,” he said.

He believes that Jesus visited him.

“The doctor said it was a miracle I woke up,” he told the Daily Mail. ‘I had staples holding my skin together around my stomach and neck and tubes going in and out everywhere.’

He was alive, but it took another decade for him to recover, both physically and emotionally.

Unable to exercise, she gained weight and suffered from constant anxiety attacks. He suffered from severe insomnia, and even when he finally managed to fall asleep, he was haunted by nightmares about hell.

He was taking a cocktail of 20 medications, including Xanax, Lithium Carbonate and other antidepressants, to control his anxiety.

‘I haven’t slept normally at any night for ten years. I dreamed that demons were laughing at me.’

Exhausted and exhausted, he believes that God came to him twice during this time in the form of heavenly visions.

‘I still remember all the details vividly,’ he said. ‘I was standing on a hill and mountains, fields and valleys lay before my eyes.

‘A heavenly, bright light was shining in every direction. I heard the voice of God the Father clearly with my own ears. I even heard the heavenly angel choir worshiping God, and I knew they were not human because no human choir could sing so beautifully.’

He believes he was finally healed after the second ‘visit’ around Christmas 2012.

The pills went in the trash and his insomnia finally ended. He even joined the US Army as a chaplain and met his current wife, Goeun Kim.

The man, now 46 and working as an evangelical pastor, still has large scars on his stomach and neck. He believes that God saved him from hell to prevent others from attempting suicide. It was the 10th leading cause of death in the United States in 2024.

Kang believes that he was finally healed after God’s second ‘visit’. The pills went to waste and his insomnia finally ended

Kang and his wife Goeun Kim – the couple still lives in California

Of course, skeptics claimed that his experience was just a hallucination; It was the result of a combination of severe trauma and the large amounts of heavy medication he was taking.

‘This may be a common objection,’ he said, adding: ‘I love objections. I love having a good dialogue.

‘They use the same argument for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They say, “Oh, 12 students hallucinated because they wanted to see it so bad.”

‘For me, evidence is everything.’

He pointed to research by megachurch pastor John Burke, who interviewed nearly 1,000 people who claimed to have had near-death experiences.

‘Same story,’ he said. ‘It’s the same turn of life. So I respect everyone’s faith and skepticism, but what they see is what I see and what’s in the Bible.’

He also stated that, as a man raised Buddhist, he had no prior knowledge of the Bible’s definitions of heaven and hell.

‘So,’ he reasoned, ‘this can’t be a hallucination.’

8 Hours in Hell: A Shocking First-Hand Experience of What Really Awaits in Life After Death Written by Steve Kang Published by Destiny Image