Johnny Houser: My Extraordinary Life

In August 1971, two young girls played on a second story hotel landing in Lincoln, Nebraska. Eleven-year-old Cheryl became bored with their game and suggested they try something else. She looked over at the hotel dumbwaiter, a service lift rigged to transport laundry, and suggested they ride it down to the basement. Chrissy hopped in first and scooted to the back. As Cheryl ducked her head inside, Chrissy pressed the button, causing the dumbwaiter to slam down on Cheryl’s neck, pinning her against the frame. As Chrissy screamed, Cheryl lost consciousness but recalls, “I was encompassed with white light, then I hit a dimension where I was in total darkness. I passed through into a place where I saw the ancestors of my family, and I could hear
In her first line she said she was contacting me because she had a real story to tell. Intrigued, we began a month long email correspondence that resulted in a four hour video interview. As a self-described medium, psychic, and clairvoyant, Cheryl doesn’t just have one story; she has many.
According to “The Science of Near-Death Experiences” written by Gideon Lichfield and published in a 2015 issue of The Atlantic, “Many NDErs report that their experience did not feel like a dream or a hallucination but was, as they often describe it, ‘more real than real life.’ They are profoundly changed afterward. ”
For Cheryl, that change was the beginning of a new kind of sight. Later that same year she had a premonition of her older brother’s death. She told me, “It was like if I turned over right now and switched on a movie reel, like the building of vision. It’s a feeling like being pulled or magnetized to something. You just have to go there. I started to see a dark box, a casket, and there was my brother Pat, in the casket. I wondered why it was happening, so I told my mom. She thought I just had a bad