17 Year Old Willow's NDE Following Horrific Auto Accident

0:00 From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes. They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped. And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else. The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't anything else to be felt. I was greeted by people I'd known in the past. On back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. Welcome, welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody.

0:41 And I want a warm welcome for our special guest, Willow Kaelin this morning. How are you, Willow? I'm doing well. Thank you. How are you, Eric? I'm good. It is a beautiful morning here. Actually, it's afternoon for you, morning for me. But are you East Coast of the United States? I am, yes. Do you have an idea of where you live and what you do? I live in Michigan and I am a mother to three amazing children that I love. And I work my own business that I created because of necessity and it's turned into an absolutely amazing experience. So. How old are the kids?

1:21 12, 10 and 5. You don't look that old. So I'm going to give listeners a little heads up here. We're going to be talking about your near-death experience, what led up to it. And man, it was a horrific car crash that we're going to be getting into. So let's see. You were, remind me, you were 17 years old. This was a few years ago. What was going on that day? What put you in that car at that place? I was hunted to a second job. I had just finished my first job for morning shift and then I was headed to a second job at a horse stable. And I was waiting to turn onto a side road because there was cars coming toward me.

2:06 And so I was stopped in my lane just sitting there waiting. I had seen anyone behind me until I had just glanced up in my rear view mirror. I was about to turn and I saw a truck directly in my rear view and that's when it all happened. So it was quite the experience with that. I don't know how much more in depth you want me to get. I want a little detail. You see this truck coming and it's just not stopping? Yeah. There was nothing behind me when I had stopped. There's a curve in the road right there that I had come through before stopping. So I didn't see any cars. And as I glanced up to look before I turned, this truck was literally right behind me.

2:51 I had like 0.2 seconds to think through what was about to happen. And I had this realization that they're not stopping. And so right after thinking that they just rammed right into the back of my car and launched it about 40 yards to 50 yards inch. Okay. So half a football field here. This was a small car? It was. It was a Nissan 1987 stick shift. I used to call it a tuna can when I was in high school.

3:32 So a pretty small car. Yeah. It was. Yeah. I was all steel. I think that's one of the things that truly saved the situation just for the fact that it wasn't completely crushed because I was hit by an F-350 which is a massive pickup truck. Pick up. Yeah. That's the biggest one semi-car in the state outside of commercial cars. So was anybody coming the other way that you got launched into the path of? Yeah. Actually a semi-truck. So when I had been pushed into the oncoming traffic lane, there was a semi-truck coming toward me and I realized it was Jeff Knifey trying to stop from hitting my car.

4:16 And at that point is when my memory blacked out right as it was about to hit my car. So I had everything. I'm sorry. I'm not laughing because it's funny. I'm just like, holy cow. I mean you were just sitting there. Yeah. It's not like you were distracted driving or something. You're sitting there minding your own business. Oh my gosh. Okay. What happened next? The next thing that I remember was it was a very much an out of body experience of I didn't have a physical form. It was very calm and relaxing. There were no worries.

4:56 It was just kind of this in between limbo state of physical and not physical. It was just like there. It was very peaceful. I remember it feeling warm and comforting in some way. And it felt like it lasted quite a while. Like I was, it was just a state that I was in for quite a while is how it felt. And then from there I dropped back into my body. But when I dropped into my body, I was on the side of the road in the ditch. So the interesting part about this is that there's no realistic way that I could have ended up there.

5:41 The doors in my car were closed. The windows were closed and were somehow not shattered from the impact. I didn't have any airbag in my car from my memory of it. So nothing deployed to help me in that situation. And logically speaking, there's no way that I should have ended up outside of my car because I would have ended up outside of my car on impact, right? Like I would have gone through the windshield or something. But I had my seatbelt on also. So I was in this limbo state of nothingness and just calm, peace, serenity, and then all of a sudden I'm dropping into my body in the ditch. That was about 15 feet away from my car. Okay, we're going to come back to that cool, peaceful state.

6:26 I want to hear about your body now. Do you have any explanation for how it got out of the car? And do you feel like your life was saved because you ended up outside the car? I definitely feel like my life was saved ending up outside of the car. I do not know at all. That part of my memory is entirely blank. I remember everything after dropping back in and before the semi truck would have hit my car. I don't remember that little part of how I ended up outside of the car. I walked away from the accident, I was able to walk, but I had a compacted spine by about two inches and then I had a dislocated shoulder that was partially torn and a massive concussion.

7:18 But I still remember what happened during the accident. So I feel like there was some massive form of divine intervention in that whole situation. Yeah, definitely. So are you... Again, I'm sorry for laughing, but I'm just picturing. You must have been walking around like help. Was there an ambulance there soon after? Not too long after, and yet there was actually a construction site right at that intersection that I was trying to turn at. And the bystanders that had seen what happened estimated the truck that hit me to be going around 70 miles per hour and a 55.

8:01 And construction workers see traffic all the time. So personally, I'd probably believe their judgment on that. And they actually changed that whole intersection after this accident occurred because there was no passing lane at that point to go around somebody waiting to turn. But just a few short months after this, they put one in. And nobody came and checked on my car at all. Nobody thought that there was somebody that could survive what had just happened to that car. So nobody came and checked on me. But I remember waking up in the ditch and remembering I needed help. And it was pretty disoriented. I tried to walk like I was able to get up and I tried to walk in between the semi truck in my car because that seemed like the shortest distance to get to the other side of the road to get help.

8:52 But I couldn't fit my leg in between the space that was there. It was probably 82 inches in between where the semi truck stopped and where my car was. So I was leaning on my car and got around it and then ended up on the other side of the road and just I remember collapsing on the other side. And the lady who hit me, I remember her being frantic and seeing me drop over there and come to try to help. I was not in a state of wanting to be around her. I remember her saying that she was talking to her mom on the phone. She didn't see me and she was crying and she was super upset. And it was very, my body was very painful so I didn't want anybody to touch me.

9:36 But then there was some EMT from the construction site who had seen what obviously what happened. And they rushed over to me and essentially carried me into one of their pickup trucks and held my head really still before the ambulance got there because they thought I probably had fractured my spine. It was quite a crazy day. This ditch, how far was it from where your car came to rest? It was about, I would say 12 to 15 feet. It wasn't insanely far but at the same time it was far enough that it didn't make any sense how I ended up there. On the semi truck that was coming in a direction to T-bone you that was two inches from your car, had it hit the car or did it actually stop in time?

10:27 My recollection is two different things. It's both. So when I blacked out, I remember seeing that semi truck right at the front of my car because it was coming toward me at that point so I had been pushed into the oncoming traffic lane and it was coming at me. I remember seeing it at the very front of my car and then I blacked out. But when I came to, there was about two inches in between this semi and my car. The only reason I know that is because I tried, for whatever reason, tried to walk in between because it seemed like a closer distance. So I had both memories of that. It's very interesting. There's no way for me to try and differentiate the two, I guess, they're both there.

11:13 Yeah, that's okay. Let's go back to, you talked about coming back into your body. So you obviously felt like you were out of body. Now as you know, the typical NDE and it's not even that typical because every single one is different but people talk about going through a tunnel towards the light and this kind of cool stuff and maybe meeting relatives or loved ones or something. Yours wasn't like that. That doesn't make it any less real or anything else. Give me more detail about what it was. Did you ever see anything or was it all feeling? It was all feeling really. It was like thinking back on it, it feels overwhelming, the amount of peace and serenity and connection that I was feeling.

12:00 But at the time that I was feeling it, it just felt natural and it was the best way they could describe it is how people describe the overarching source energy of the planet where it's everything is connected. And that's really how it felt is that there was a connection to everything and everything was one all in the same and it was so incredibly serene and peaceful and comforting and just this overwhelming feeling of love for everything, so unconditional love. But there was no visuals to it for me. It was just all feeling and emotion that was coming through and it was the most peaceful I've ever felt in my entire life.

12:42 So long did you feel like it went on? Do you have any feeling of time and space? That's a great question. It felt like it went on forever but then when I got back into my body it felt like it had only been moments. I mean time wasn't a thing. It was just I was there and that was it and the only thing was that moment. But then when I had gotten back into my body it felt like a flash of time but still very powerful, like present. Yeah. It sounded like it was all good feelings so you didn't feel any stress, any pain, any fear, any danger. No and I mean you can imagine being in a car accident and seeing yourself getting hit.

13:26 I saw the truck coming at me in the rear view mirror and then I saw the semi truck coming at me and right at the front of my car thinking this is it. This is it. And the fear and the stress that went through me in such a rapid rate and so strongly going from that to instantly just not feeling any of that and feeling everything that was a higher vibration, a more comforting, peaceful state, like quite literally instantly. It was such a profound experience. I don't know entirely how to explain that feeling of everything being connected and everything being one but individual at the same time and honestly just this massive feeling of peace and ease and no worries or stress at all.

14:12 That's not something I've ever experienced being conscious in the physical. That's a lot of good adjectives. Good job. Did you feel like, how can I put this? Let me back up just a little bit. I've had some other people on the show that have been in horrific accidents and have told me that they actually left their body prior to the moment of impact. Now these were people that did have some visuals and saw what was going on and they felt like they were spared from having the trauma of the impact. Do you remember the impact or do you feel like that happened to you also like you were out before?

14:54 I remember the impact of the truck from behind me. I remember that feeling of like, it's almost like a firework, a really big firework that goes off right next to you. It's a huge shock wave and it does, I could understand how that people would feel like it pushed you out of your body. It hits so hard. By that moment, I don't remember physically feeling myself. We're here and we feel very grounded in the physical. After that impact, I don't remember feeling very grounded in my body. So I could understand how people would explain that. It's almost like the impact pushed you out. What was it like coming back in your body?

15:35 Oh my gosh. Do you know, maybe you've experienced when you're sleeping and it feels like you're dropping onto the bed, like you're falling back onto the bed. It felt like that except it was a harder slam. So instead of the bed being there to catch you, it was very much like smashing onto the ground and then it was just, it was numb. Like I was numb at first, physically. And then the pain started to seep in all through my body and it was overwhelming. Yeah, it was overwhelming to the point of my mind was numbing it out and couldn't think like hardly.

16:15 I was very disoriented. I didn't have a clear stream of thought in my mind. It was very disjointed, which is why I think I was trying to go between the truck and my car. Because I wasn't thinking super clearly that it would have been more logical to go around the back. Well, you were in shock of some sort. Yeah. Certainly. Tell me about the rest of that day. So you finally got some help. I assume they took you to the hospital. What happened? Yeah, I was rushed to the hospital. They did a MRI. They did a bunch of x-rays. They did testing for neurological testing. I only remember spots of that part. I do remember the ambulance ride was agonizing. They had me so tightly strapped to the backboard because they thought that I had maybe fractured my spine, potentially in a few spots, that I couldn't move.

17:03 But I remember causing such a bad migraine. I was like begging them to take me off of the backboard. But once I got there, it was a very spotty memory of the day. For three days after, I don't remember a whole ton. I do remember being rushed back to the hospital because I couldn't keep food down from the concussion that I had sustained. It was causing issues. I don't remember what they did once I got to the hospital. But after all of that, when my memory started coming back more fully, I remember that people around me seemed very different. They looked the same, for the most part. But their mannerisms, how they spoke, their beliefs about me were very different from what I remember prior to the accident.

17:48 Similar to myself, I had a lot of people telling me that I acted very differently and not necessarily that somebody with acute brain damage would be acting, slurring words, not being able to speak, that kind of stuff. It was along the lines of my mannerisms to them were different. The words that I used high spoke was very different. I had a few very close friends to me and actually my own family telling me that I seemed like a different person. It was very strange to them. How do you make of that? What's your explanation besides a brain injury? The fact that I don't know how I ended up outside of my car, the fact that I remember seeing the truck, the semi truck, at the very front of my vehicle and not stopping and then landing in a ditch somehow and the semi truck had stopped in front of my car in that memory in what had happened overall in the accident.

18:45 To me, that seems like what I've heard described as a timeline jump. So I had potentially died in one timeline but wasn't finished with what I was supposed to do here. So instead of going back to source, going up to habit and going to where we go in the afterlife, I was pushed into another timeline to continue on with my journey here. That's the only information that I've come across that explains what I experienced is having jumped timelines into one where I survived somehow. So to you, that explains not only the changes in you but the change in other people as well?

19:29 Yeah, because when we look at this, this whole experience launched me into the study physics, pretty hardcore, specifically quantum physics and it's a very big passion of mine. So when I had come across this idea of jumping timelines, physics actually has a huge impact on me. It's a huge theory where there are infinite amount of parallel timelines along the side of the one we're currently living. And in an event such as this, there is a possibility of your consciousness jumping to one of those parallel timelines where you survive. So with that understanding, little things can be very different.

20:09 It might be somebody's appearance that you notice is very different or it might be the culture around you is slightly different but everything looks very similar. Just little things that add up like that. And it wasn't something that I came to a conclusion of myself. It was something I experienced firsthand and then dove into science to try to figure out and explain. I've always been very scientifically minded. I went to college for a biology degree and a minor in chemistry. So that's my background with that and why I decided to try to explain what I had experienced, in some sort of scientific grounded way. And that was the conclusion that I had come to as most probable.

20:51 In addition to that, you were only 17. Yes. You know, that's young. It really changed you above and beyond, I imagine. Tell me in what ways. Oh my goodness. It was like the world opened up in a way. And this sounds kind of cliche to say. I've read other people say this but this was actually my experience was that color seemed a lot brighter to me. Almost like when you're a child and everything looks really new. Everything was very much brighter. I had this ambition to experience all the things that I had wanted to and was pushing to the side to work and to accomplish goals.

21:35 But now it was more along the lines of wanting to experience life and everything that I had to offer versus just trying to accomplish goals along a path set out by society. So I became slightly reckless after all of this in an interesting way of wanting to experience people, wanting to experience places, wanting to overcome fears. I became recluse at first to try to figure out what had happened and then very outgoing after that because I realized that you never know what's going to happen in your life. And we wake up and we take all these days for granted. We wake up and we take our ability to learn and our ability to comprehend truly for granted in an everyday situation.

22:21 We get comfortable and complacent in what we find ourselves in. And that comfortability to me feels more like settling than it does being able to experience the world around us. So that became a huge push for me to be able to experience everything that I could possibly experience in this lifetime. That sounds like a great shift a lot of us could use. Yeah, it was. It was quite the wake up call. Yeah. Do you mind giving me a fun example of one of those reckless things you just referred to? Yeah. When I went up to college, I went to Michigan Tech University and instead of playing small, I bit off way more than I could choose.

23:03 So I started an enterprise business under the college for a product called Terrapreda and was starting after about two years was starting contracts for taking the kiln designs that we had come up with to Brazil. And I was heading the whole situation. I hadn't really spoken too much to public. I had some experience with it, but within that position, I was speaking to two and three hundred people, crowds from faculty to students all across the MTU and local community members as well, all about the project that we were putting on and how we were going about doing the design work for the kiln and the different contracts that were coming up through businesses that wanted to deploy these kilns in third world countries.

23:49 That was one of the ones that was maybe more productive, but in a reckless way because I didn't care how it affected my schoolwork. That seemed more important to me. Another one that was more along the lines of a 17 year old, the 18 year old was I decided to go cliff jumping and I was very shy with that kind of an endeavor before this entire experience, but I decided, nope, I'm going to go do it. And I jumped off a 50 foot cliff into the water in a place where everybody goes to do that kind of thing. It was not something I would have ever even thought about doing before this experience, but I wanted to overcome that fear so strongly that it pushed me to experience it, which was phenomenal, by the way. I highly suggest that in a safe space.

24:32 And experiencing parties and people and communities that I was incredibly what my community would have said street edged before having this experience. I was straight A student. I did not go to parties. I did not drink. I did not do anything that would have put me in any kind of danger. And after this experience, I was joining up with sailing teams with people that I knew from college while I was still a senior in high school and going with them all the time to go sailing and experience life to more of a full state, I guess. Albeit I was doing it responsibly as well. So that's a that's a good thing. But definitely getting out there to experience it.

25:15 Yeah. Most people that have had really profound NDEs, and I'm talking about the more classic NDEs, come back with absolutely no fear of death. And most of them had a lot of fear of death prior to what's your level of that fear now now. I have. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I don't have a fear of death or dying. My biggest fear is what would happen with my children. But that's not something I can control. So that's one of those things that I have to learn how to relinquish control over. But yeah, absolutely. I really don't fear dying. I see it as a transition into the next part of life because that's that's how it felt.

25:57 It was a transitional thing. There was no pain to it. It was just I was here one minute and they're the next. In addition to some of these personality shifts, did you come back with any special intuition, spiritual gifts, anything like that? Yes. So prior to this happening, I was very in tuned. I had a really unconventional childhood. I was raised in homeschooling out in the middle of nature without any neighbors around. So the people that we saw, we went and traveled to see each week and we were involved and I was social. But my closest friends growing up were forest animals.

26:41 I would sneak out in the forest and try to see how close I could get to raccoons and deer and just sit there and watch them. That was something I loved to do. And I had animals and I had always been able to tap in with the animals and communicate with them. Well, at that point in time, I thought I just had a very active imagination and I was talking with them because I didn't have friends nearby all the time. After this experience, I had a profound understanding of what was actually taking place. It wasn't just me. It wasn't just me communicating with animals and nature around me. Like thinking that it was an imagination kind of play thing.

27:23 It was actually occurring. You know, when I had that realization, a lot of things changed. We had horses and we had other animals. So I started practicing utilizing that because I was training horses, trust training horses before this accident, just my own personal horses. But after this accident, I realized that I could really utilize that ability to help train them. And I entirely went on and did that with my horses and friends' horses then, including through the equestrian team. The teacher of the equestrian team, our coach, employed me to help teach her horse who other people were having a really difficult time with, but I was able to breathe through with. Including dogs and other animals, I decided that I was going to utilize that gift and help train the animals through the community society so they could find better homes.

28:11 And so that was something that I did after school on days I didn't have other things planned as I would go spend time doing that and I would be able to train them, majority of what they needed to know, going into a home within a week. This is something that's been ongoing and I've helped other people with their pets. It's actually something that I offer now as a service for my clients, being able to communicate with their animals and have seen really fun results with that. It opened me up to an understanding that with the idea that we are all connected and all one living individual lives, we can connect in with anybody and anything. And science right now is finally starting to prove that plants have consciousness and that they physically feel things.

28:56 They communicate with each other through various different ways and you can actually, if there's intention behind it, connect in with them consciously and learn about what properties they have, what they can offer. And if you do this consciously, you can go now online and double check the information that you were receiving if it's true or not for what science has discovered about that specific type of plant. More often than not, you're going to find that a lot of the information coming through is correct. So it's really profound how after this experience, it's opened up my ability to be able to connect in with plants, animals, and people to help overcome struggles and blockages and help them overcome emotional states even.

29:40 So that's been quite an experience I've learned to embrace. That is very cool. I like that. Well, have you ever had any other experiences that were sort of like this one? I have actually. One of the ones I experienced involved internal issues with my body going wrong and I ended up collapsing on the floor at, oh gosh, I was about 14 when that happened. And my brother had to carry me to the car and rush me to the hospital because we didn't know what was happening. I was in a huge amount of pain to the point where I couldn't think. And there was no, I had no understanding what was going on at that point. I had collapsed on the ground after getting up to actually let my dogs outside for the morning.

30:24 It was very early in the morning about eight o'clock and I was walking down the stairs when this massive pain hit my stomach and I didn't know what was going on. And it dropped me to my knees and I fell down half the flight of stairs that I was on. And I was in so much pain that I couldn't even call out. I started having to hit the stairs to try to get somebody's attention. And my brother woke up and came down and got me and just trying to figure out what was happening and just decided that we were going to rush to the hospital. So he picked me up and put me in the car and off we went. And when I got there, my mom met us there and at that point, they rushed me into the back of the ER.

31:06 They didn't know what was happening either. I'm being attached to all these different cords and different things and IVs and they're trying to get me calm and I'm having these waves of pain come through to the point where I was throwing up. So they gave me a medication to stop the nauseous feeling. And when they gave that medication to me, I had a very severe reaction to it immediately because they had died intravenously. And that reaction in my mind was so confusing because I felt my body tensing, my whole body tensed to the point where my hands were like this and I couldn't move them. But in my mind, I could still move.

31:47 That was very confusing to me. And then I remember my mom looking at me and saying, you need to breathe. And she was yelling at me. And I felt very distant to what I was seeing around me. It felt like I was kind of receding, like the, the, it was going black. And I remember thinking, but I am breathing and being slightly annoyed that she was yelling at me about it. And then everything went dark. And at that point, I had started to experience this feeling of being like sucked into what I would describe from the first NDE is avoid, of just nothingness and peacefulness.

32:28 So it was being pulled into that. But then I remember just really quickly like launching back into my body and taking a massive breath. And I was shaking and crying and I didn't understand what was going on. And from the information that I was given by my mom was that I had cut out. Like I was not there. I was very blue. And I had started to flatline on the monitor and she had been able to call the nurses and they administered a reversal drug. Thankfully, that was the only prescription that they had given me at that time. So they knew exactly what to do to bring me back. And yeah, that was my first experience of a pretty severe NDE.

33:11 When I came back from that, it was just a very traumatic experience at the hospital in general at that point. And I was young enough that I wasn't understanding how to emotionally work through it all. Feel like the one that I had when I was 17, they kind of compiled like compiled on top of each other. So I feel like the one I had when I was 17, in a sense helped me work through the emotions because there was no avoiding that happened. It was such a profound experience. You couldn't push it to the back of your mind and just pretend like it didn't actually happen. And which is what I ended up doing with the first one. I can tell it's still very difficult to talk about. When you were talking about the car crash and stuff, yeah, just the look on your face, I could tell there's still a lot of trauma there.

33:58 There is for sure. I don't feel like when you go through an experience like that, the trauma leaves entirely. I do feel like our body, when we bring up these memories, our body remembers, and it definitely affects our emotions. However, I have gained a lot of understanding and a lot of lessons from both of those to move forward in life and how to handle traumatic situations and also how to help other people through them. I don't feel at this point in my life I would have had the empathy, understanding, conscious awareness within myself to be able to help other people through severe trauma without having experienced it to that level.

34:38 Hey, if anybody wants to get ahold of you, how do they find you? WillowsQuest.com is my website. I'm also on TikTok and Instagram, WillowsQuest111. Okay. Thanks a lot, Willow. I appreciate having you on today. Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate it also. It's a wonderful meeting you.