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 with a chain of successful businesses in South Korea, was reduced to a life of poverty almost overnight in the midst of the country's 1998 financial crisis.
Kang was living in the US studying at the University of California, Irvine. He was suddenly forced to find a job, a place to live and apply for a scholarship.
Age 19, and up until then a hard-working student and practicing Buddhist, he was rapidly drawn into the drug scene.
'During that entire summer,' he told The Daily Mail, 'I do not remember being sober for more than an hour here and there. We partied and got into trouble.
'When the fall 1998 semester started I was so addicted and affected by drug use that I did not even have the mental strength to go to class.'
Then, at a party that first week back at college, he smoked a bong containing what he thought was marijuana, but was actually a lethal combination of heroin, cocaine, and PCP - known colloquially as a death bowl.
'Something in there messed with my brain,' he said. 'I stayed awake for 10 straight days. I didn't get a second of sleep after that.'
After smoking the death bowl, Kang didn't sleep for a full 10 days
After those 10 days of torture, he is convinced his soul went to hell
At the end of those torturous 10 days, he believes he descended to the depths of hell following a suicide attempt.
And he describes in detail what he saw there in his new book, 8 Hours in Hell: A Shocking Firsthand Experience of What Really Awaits in the Afterlife.
'By the fifth day of my ordeal, I didn't know what time of the day it was,' he wrote.
'By the sixth and seventh day, when I looked in the mirror I saw that my pupils were so big and black, the white parts of my eyes were hardly visible.'
Fearing for his life, he called the Buddhist monks who had been mentoring him back in Korea for help.
Their response was: 'We are in the middle of a silent prayer. We cannot help you.'
He said he had never felt more alone.
'It was a very dark time. My birthday fell during those 10 days, and friends would be like, "Steve, happy birthday," and I couldn't reply.
'I still attended classes, but when the teachers and my friends were talking to me, I could not process even a sentence of what they were saying. I kept asking myself, 'Where am I? What class am I in?' I opened the textbook but could not read even one sentence.'
During that period he was convinced he was under spiritual attack, and even claims he was haunted by a poltergeist.
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 other people from attempting suicide
'Cups were just falling from the bathroom. We had a poster on the wall that we bought from the temple, and this was making all these metallic noises.'
On the eighth day, Kang said he was visited by what he believed was a Buddhist spirit, in the form of an Asian grandfather with a long, white beard and bushy eyebrows.
He said he was told that, if he sacrificed his body, he would receive 50,000 fewer years in hell.
'It sounded like a good deal at the time,' he said. 'I wrote a letter to my mom, apologized for not making her proud, and that I hoped to see her in the afterlife.'
Two days later, physically and mentally drained, he stabbed himself repeatedly in the stomach and neck with a kitchen knife.
His terrified mother found him in a pool of blood and immediately called 911.
As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he had what he is now convinced was an out of body experience. But, rather than going to heaven, as he expected, he started to plummet. The Asian grandfather, who he thought would accompany him to nirvana, was nowhere to be seen. Kang believes he had been visited by Satan.
And while surgeons fought to save his life, he was fighting for his own soul.
'I felt betrayal right away. I felt so lonely,' he said.
'I knew I was dying. And when I started to descend, it was like a roller coaster, an elevator. You're just falling, and the fear and the anxiety escalated.
'After what felt like five minutes of falling, I landed and looked around. I was in hell.'
The scene he described was one of utter darkness - a barren, cracked landscape filled with lost souls.
Kang described hell as being a barren, cracked landscape with no grass or plants
He also said he was surrounded by evil spirits - some as tall as buildings - wearing capes
'For some reason, I could still see,' he said. 'People ask me, 'How can you see if there's no sunlight?' But you can still supernaturally see.
'There's sand pebbles everywhere. There's no grass, there's no flowers, there's no plants, there's no food, there's not even a drop of water.
'To the left, I saw purplish-red cliffs. There were people on top of the cliff, on the bottom of the cliff. I looked to my right, there were people, and I was in so much spiritual, emotional agony.
'When I looked up, evil spirits were there, and they were not small, like in the cartoons. These things were really tall - as tall as buildings - they were wearing capes, and I knew they were in charge of this place.
'And I knew I was going to get tortured, because there were caves like prison cells. And I was like, "I'm next."
The pain, he said, was worse than anything he'd ever experienced.
Meanwhile, for eight hours, doctors performed two long surgeries 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, she prayed to every deity she could think of to save her son: Allah, Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius, Taoist gods and Shinto gods.
'Then she remembered that her friend in California, Mrs Kim, was a Christian. And she called her.'
Kang still has a large scar on his neck where he thrust the knife in
His stomach also bears a large scar as a result of his suicide attempt - doctors said it was a miracle he survived
Kang met his wife Goeun Kim after he said God visited him for the second time
Kang is convinced it was those prayers that saved him.
'I heard a voice in my heart,' he wrote in the book, 'a voice I have never heard before. He said, "No more Buddhism, no more drugs… I love you."
He believes he was visited by Jesus
'The doctor said it was a miracle that I awakened,' he told The Daily Mail. 'There were staples holding my skin together around my stomach and neck, and tubes going in and out everywhere.'
He was alive, but it took another 10 years to heal both physically and emotionally.
Unable to exercise, he gained weight and suffered from constant anxiety attacks. Plagued by severe insomnia, even when he finally managed to get to sleep, nightmares about hell haunted him.
He was on a cocktail of 20 meds to control his anxiety, including Xanax, Lithium Carbonate, and other antidepressants.
'For 10 years, I never slept one night normally. I had visions of demons laughing at me.'
Burned out and exhausted, he believes God came to him twice during this time, in the form of a vision of heaven.
'I still vividly remember all the details,' he said. 'I was standing on the top of a hill, and before my very eyes, the mountains, fields, and valleys stretched out.
'A heavenly, bright light shone in all directions. I clearly heard the voice of the Father God with my own ears. I even heard the heavenly choir of angels worshiping God and knew they were not human because no human choir could sing that beautifully.'
After the second 'visitation', around Christmas 2012, he believes he was finally healed.
The pills went in the trash and his insomnia finally stopped. He even joined the US Army as a chaplain and met his now wife, Goeun Kim.
Now aged 47 and working as an evangelical pastor, he still has huge scars on his stomach and neck. He believes God saved him from hell to help prevent other people from attempting suicide. It was the 10th leading cause of death in the US in 2024.
After Kang's second 'visitation' from God, he believes he was finally healed. The pills went in the trash and his insomnia finally stopped
Kang with his wife, Goeun Kim - the couple still live in California
Skeptics have, of course, claimed his experience was merely a hallucination - the result of severe trauma combined with the high quantity of hard-core drugs he'd ingested.
'That can 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, the 12 disciples hallucinated, because they wanted to see him so much."
'For me, evidence is everything.'
He pointed to research by megachurch pastor John Burke, who has interviewed nearly 1,000 people who claim to have had a near death experience.
'Same exact story,' he said. 'Same turnaround of life. So, I respect everyone's beliefs and the skepticism, but what they saw is what I saw, and it's what is in the Bible.'
He also noted that, as a man who had been brought up a Buddhist, he had no previous knowledge of the Bible's descriptions of heaven or hell.
'So,' he reasoned, 'it can't be a hallucination.'
8 Hours in Hell: A Shocking Firsthand Experience of What Really Awaits in the Afterlife by Steve Kang is published by Destiny Image
