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.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome to RoundtripDeath everybody and our special guest today, Debra Yates.
How are you Debra?
I'm doing really good, Eric.
How are you this morning?
Afternoon here, good morning there.
Well, for us it's morning for people living all over the world and who knows what day
they're listening to this.
It's all kinds of the day, night, and et cetera, but you're in beautiful Florida and
the United States.
Tell us about where you live and what you do.
I currently reside in a little place called Bonita Springs, Florida.
It's just a little bit north of Naples.
A lot of people know where Naples is.
I originally hail from the Ohio Valley.
Ohio means beautiful river and Native American, by the way.
And almost every state in the United States is named after an Indian name.
So if you're curious about what your state is, just go online and look it up.
But I hail from Ohio.
I was born in a little town called Cambridge, famous for the glass.
And I was really just kind of born there.
I was actually the first survivor that got to stay in the incubator that John Glenn
donated to the hospital that I was born in.
And then we just kind of moved around all over from there.
My father was one of the first welders on the natural gas lines around the northeast
part of the country.
And he was so good, they were constantly bidding on him and luring him away.
So every time we moved about every six months, just needless to say.
And then we settled in a little town called Lexington, Ohio, which is just about smack
dab in the middle of the state.
I'm a retired landscaper.
I was a landscaper for about 25 years.
So I'm pretty well versed in plants.
And I was a farmer as well, dairy farmer.
And then I had about a 14 horse stable, show stable.
So it was a lot of fun.
I rode and trained horses for many years.
Back then I want to say it was 2009.
I found myself having to get a divorce.
I needed to move away because his crazy girlfriend decided I needed to be dead versus live.
Something for another podcast, that story.
Well I hid for a year, year and a half.
Wow.
I moved every three weeks.
Every three weeks I moved.
Spent all my money, but I had a good time.
Some true crime podcast with that one.
Oh yeah.
Anyway, I'm glad you're settled now.
Everything's good, right?
Yes, it's beautiful.
All right.
You knocked off the girlfriend instead.
So I know.
They're still happily ever after living two doors down from my family own.
Thank you very much.
Anyway, enough small talk.
Our listeners are here to learn about near-death experiences.
You've had all kinds of experiences in your life, including a couple of near-death experiences.
So I'm going to jump back in time, just three or four years, to when you were 19 years old.
Okay.
Give us an idea of what was going on in your life and what led up to what happened on that
fateful day.
Well, it was in the 1970s and you know us.
You did not have to divulge that.
It's okay.
I don't care.
I'm 66 years old and proud.
I can't believe I'm here.
I mean, I've almost been dead five times, dead twice.
So it doesn't bother me to tell my age because it all shows.
Okay.
When I was dating a young man that was a basketball center, his name was Craig.
He was like dang near seven foot tall and gorgeous and young and beautiful.
You know how that goes?
Not really, but go ahead.
He was handsome.
I was beautiful and he was handsome.
So anyways, we went down to Columbus for a night of partying, shall we say.
Now, I'm not really sure what all happened at that party if I was slipped something or
how it exactly happened, but everybody was dancing around and having a good time.
And my boyfriend, his nickname was Lurch by the way, and he put on a scary mask and he
had hands that went with the scary mask and he popped around the corner.
And from what I recall, he went and put his hand on me.
I went out.
Instant collapse to the ground.
From that juncture, I can remember feeling like I was walking six feet off the ground
and I'm going, this is really interesting.
Oh, I can six feet off the ground and I'm looking down.
And then all of a sudden I see my friend standing there and I see somebody on top of somebody
kind of like beating on them.
I'm thinking, what on if this is going on?
I guess when he raised up from what he was doing, I saw it was me laying there.
So he was doing CPR?
He was doing CPR on me.
Yeah.
I mean, I was dead.
I was gone.
I had no pulse, no heartbeat, no nothing.
And you know, this old saying, you know, he scared me to death.
It was either that or drugs.
I'm not really sure if somebody slipped me something that night.
Probably a combination is my guess.
It could be what I've been.
So anyways, I just was up there hovering above my body.
And when I woke up, he was on top of me beating my chest and I opened my eyes and I said,
what are you doing to me?
Well, of course, the cheers went around the room because they had taken me from where
I was and drove me to the middle of the room where he could work on me because I was kind
of in a hallway when that original incident happened.
You know, it's like young.
I was like maybe 17 years old and didn't even think about going to the hospital.
I mean, I'm sure I was told to go when I'm going, no, the next day my chest hurt so bad.
I was bruised from here to here.
Just massive bruises where he had been literally pounding on me to get my heart started.
So thank God, James Maynard was, he was a paramedic in Vietnam.
He knew what to do.
He knew exactly what to do and brought me back because I'm not sure if who knows, you
know, it was just, you know, God has his hand in everything.
He had his hand on me going out or somebody did and he had a hand in bringing me back.
So, you know, I can't recall anything other than the feeling like I was not walking because
I wasn't walking on the ground.
It was the weirdest feeling, but yeah, it was a little interesting.
Well, you were outside your body looking down at it.
Yes.
That's a very unusual place to be.
And just to remind people, every NDE is completely different from each other.
So your first one was very simple and short, but also taught you something.
We're going to talk about your second one in a minute, which has a whole bunch more detail.
Did you feel like you learned anything from that first one?
Wasn't afraid of death anymore.
Wasn't afraid of it.
I wonder if my two younger experiences, of course I don't remember the baby one, but
I had a near death experience at three where somebody had, you know, attacked me and beat
me up and was trying to drown me.
And you know, like I told you before, I remember looking out of that water, thinking this is
the last thing I'm going to see and thinking I needed an angel.
And the angel came in the form of a nine-year-old girl that knocked that boy off my back.
I think I've always, you know, out of more spiritual side to me than maybe other folks
because even as a young child, I was visited frequently by, for lack of another word, ghosts,
spirits, whatever you want to call it, I had an undeniable faith in God that was obvious
to everybody that I knew.
At six years old, I went to my pastor, six, almost seven, and told him I needed to be
baptized.
And he said, oh no.
And then at seven, between seven and eight, I went to again and I said, I need to be baptized.
And he said, Deborah, you're too young.
You're not at the age of accountability.
And I said, you got to baptize me.
You just got to baptize me.
And so I'm being noticed to me, there was a meeting set up and my pastor and three other
pastors from the Southern Baptist faith came to my home and questioned me.
Well, I would have been in second grade, second and third grade.
You know, there's no way I'd read the Bible, but I had details and knowledge that I shouldn't
have had at that age.
And at the end of that one hour meeting, they all concurred, I needed to be baptized, that
I most definitely was the age of accountability, that I understood the Bible.
And I knew things that I honestly, I shouldn't have known.
I shouldn't have known a lot of those things they were asking me.
But you know, God has a way of working in your spirit.
And I knew that I needed that confirmation that when I left this earth that I was going
to go be with the Father.
That's a good explanation.
Let's jump forward just a few years to, wow.
We just barely had someone on the show recently that had a horrible electrocution.
You were electrocuted too.
I guess that's the theme of the month or something.
I don't know.
But tell us what happened.
You were what, 24 years old now?
I believe I was right at 24.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would have been 24.
I had gone through a bad breakup again.
The guy tried to kill me.
Oh my God.
I was with him to my life.
And he put me in the hospital for about three weeks.
And when I came out of the hospital, I immediately packed up and I moved to Dallas, Texas from
Lexington, Ohio.
My girlfriend, you know, she opened her home to me and allowed me to move in.
And you know, I felt really kind of saved me because I just knew if I stayed, he would
get me.
He would get me and kill me.
So I moved in with her and then my very first apartment, I'd been living there about four
or five months at a beautiful place and had a great swimming pool and I was an avid swimmer
as a young person.
I was on a swim team and dive team.
So you know, how when you do a lapse, you do kick turns and you come off the walls and
I would go down and do about 50 every other day, come back on my last lap that I took,
I think probably forever.
And as I raised my hand up out of the water and looked, I could see what looked like a
megaphone with wires sticking up on top of the water.
It was just laying on top of the water and my hand came down in it.
It was too late to do anything.
I just hit it.
So let me make sure I can picture this situation.
There was some kind of an electronic megaphone microphone speaker, whatever.
How did it fall into the water?
Well, it wasn't, it would come unloose from the back in the long time ago.
They didn't have wireless anything and somebody had the screws worked out of the light fixture.
It was actually a light fixture that had come out of the wall and floated to the top of
the pool.
And so when I hit that, everything in the black, black, black, black as can be.
And I blinked my eyes a few times and I heard someone say, Debra, Debra.
And I looked up and it was my grandmother who had passed away about seven years before
that.
She was my everything.
I, I adore this woman just about anything more than anything in life.
And she was my girl.
I was her girl and she was my girl.
You know, she taught me how to cook and not how to clean, but she taught me how to cook
pretty good.
You know, it's, it's hard to explain.
It didn't look like her first day in the face.
She had on what I would consider maybe a robe, a whitish robe that with maybe like even a
hood on.
You know how people say the eyes are the window to the soul?
I recognized your eyes and then I could smell her, I smelled her.
You know, we all have our own scent that we, you know, exude.
William Grandma, she went, Debra, honey, I miss you.
I love you, but it's not your time.
I said, no, Grandma, I want to come be with you.
And she says, no baby, you got to stay here.
You got things to do.
People need you.
But I said, grandma, yeah, but I can't have babies or nothing.
And she goes, it's not your time.
And that was the end of the conversation.
And she took her honor and she went like this.
And when she went, Ross, where my body was, that light let me go because I was getting
shocked.
So you were, you were paralyzed.
Yes.
Shocked to this thing.
Yeah.
It was explained to us in our podcast with Ryan just recently how your muscles completely
lock up.
Well, they do.
And so you can't let go.
I mean, we've seen this in the movies.
It really happens that way.
It's true.
You cannot do a thing about it.
And as she moved her hand across like this, that thing let me go.
It let me go just as quick as can be.
And my arm flew around.
As my arm flew around me and my whole body hit the side of the pool.
I think I still have it ducked from it right here.
I swear, and it knocked me backwards about 15 feet in the water.
I knew that I was alive again when I stopped because everything in my body hurt so bad.
I mean, unbelievable, unbelievable pain.
My brain went racy.
So at this point, I'm kind of still looking ahead of me because it's not always straight
backwards.
And I'm still looking ahead of me and I can see that light going, it's smoking, it's
sending up sparks, it's going, it's rocking in the water.
That's the whole, the water was rocking.
It was that intense of a thing that happened in that pool that day.
So I started swimming towards the ladder and I got just about to the ladder and I heard,
no, don't touch the ladder.
So I veered to the side of it and I don't know how I did it to this day.
I'm not sure how I did this, but I got up, one the side of the pool to my waist and I
was a strong chick back then.
And I flattened up like a board and it inched my way out of that, away from that walk.
The man that was sitting there, well, he was asleep with earphones in his head.
Listened to music, I'm sure, he didn't budge and because I was hollering for somebody to
help me.
So I got up and I went to the rod iron fence that went all the way around the pool to get
a fence and a pool, grabbed onto that fence and my body just racked and racked and racked.
My body racked so hard that fence, all four sides, all the way back around to me, the
whole fence was moving, I was racking that, I swear it was moving now hard.
Howard, explain that, were you still feeling electricity or were you just in so much pain
that you were shaking it?
Yes, I couldn't let go of it.
I could not let go of that fence for love and money.
They had to pry my, the EMTs, the ambulance people literally, pry my hands off that fence
because you know how those ornate rod iron fences, they got the little pretty deally
dews on them, my hands were right below those and I just racked, racked.
I didn't stop doing this for I don't know, I didn't sleep for a week, I couldn't fall
asleep every time I didn't think about falling asleep, my body would jerk and jerk me right
back away.
Anyways, come to find out later, there was two little girls, I did notice the two little
girls after I was you know rocking the boat there, they went and got help, that's how
I got, I ended up getting help.
I met the girls, one of the girls' mothers a few weeks later, you know she came to check
on me to you know see how I was doing.
I said, did the girls notice anything and she goes, no they really didn't notice much
but they said you were talking a foreign language.
And they said a foreign language, she said oh yeah and I said, but languages, they didn't
know, they'd never heard the language before and they go, well do you speak a foreign language?
I said, I can barely make sense out of English, let alone a foreign language.
So I don't know if they heard me talking to my grandmother and that's what they heard,
you know they were little girls, probably seven, eight years old, roller skating around
so that's about all I know about that.
That is insane.
The ambulance attendants did arrive, like I said they pried my hands off there and you
know they're asking me questions and what happened and all this other stuff.
Please tell me you went to the hospital this time.
So this time I actually went to the hospital, they had no choice, they drugged me away or
I probably wouldn't have gone on myself.
But so they got me to the hospital there in Plano, Texas.
The next thing I know I got doctors, I got nurses, I had maintenance men, hoping in to
rob me.
So can we rob you, can we touch you?
I'm going to open it.
Okay.
Yeah, it's a little strange.
You know what I said, so finally I looked at the nurse, I said, so why are all these
people coming in to touch me?
She goes, oh you should be dead.
There is just absolutely no reason on earth, you're alive, none.
You must have a purpose.
I never understood that I got a purpose.
I just, you know, how to relate that and deter that you got a purpose.
Now I kind of think I know that I was meant to save some lives in this lifetime.
I was meant to write a book.
You can see my grandmother there, my seventh great grandmother.
I'm an author, I wrote a book called, or not called, Woman of Many Names.
We're going to get to that in just a little while by the way.
Yeah, I sort of let a parallel life with her as well.
So I want to go back a little bit and get a little bit more detail from this experience
with grandma.
You mentioned to me the other day, you also saw colors.
Explain that.
Where were the colors and what were they like?
I have to tell you that when you cross over to the other side for me, it's here.
Evan, the next life, it's all right here on this planet.
We're not going to fly off to someplace in the sky unless that happens after the rapture
or something.
I don't know, but it's here.
What I saw was heaven.
And the colors were so bright and so vivid and everything was clean.
When you step over, it's just clean.
It's not dirty.
It's not, there's no trash.
It's just like we're seeing it at what it was meant to be at the creation.
The colors were so alive that you could like almost taste them.
I want to say it was just very vivid, very bright.
It smelled good.
I could smell my grandmother.
I could smell the earth.
I could, from a far away, I could smell the flowers that were there.
And the sunlight was just perfect.
Everything is perfect there as far as that all goes.
So you're seeing colors in what?
Are you seeing the sky?
Are you seeing a landscape?
The sky, the grass, the flowers, the trees, the vibrancy of all of it was incomparable.
Like I said, I'm a retired landscaper.
I grew up to work with all those materials.
I could never match that site that day.
It's hard to explain to people what something's like if they've never experienced it.
It's hard because you're going, oh yeah, whatever.
But it changes you.
It changes the way you feel about, right, darn near everything.
I'm not afraid to die.
I, you know, I look forward to it.
If you can say that, you know, I know it's not going to be a scary place.
It's going to be a place we go to be with our family.
They're going to be there to get us.
They're going to be there to get you.
Tell me more about Grandma.
You said she looked different in what way.
She did.
It wasn't like you could see the full face.
It was, you know, there was a face there somewhere, but you just couldn't quite make it out.
But I could see her eyes.
All I could see was her eyes.
And when I heard her voice, I knew it was her.
And with that voice came her smell, what she smelled like.
I think it reassured me.
It let me know for sure it was her.
Okay, I appreciate it.
I know you can't go any deeper.
So, so we will move on.
How has this, you said this changed your life, that you've found a purpose.
Give me an idea of what some of those things are.
I knew I needed to make the world a prettier place and to take care of animals and to just
be a better person, be a kinder person.
I always had an affinity for animals.
Animals have always been drawn to me from, you know, little bitty right on up, all except
for that buffalo.
That wasn't a good deal.
But other than that, even wild animals, you know, just don't seem to be afraid of me.
You know, you always have to have a, especially when you're interacting with wild animals
and wolves and stuff.
You have to have a healthy respect for them.
If you're afraid, they're gonna sense that fear.
And because you admit, you know, a smell when you're afraid.
I mean, a lot of people don't believe in that, but you do.
You literally admit an odor that they can smell.
All right.
You've already told me of no fear of death, which takes away one of the questions that
I often ask people.
So thanks a lot for stealing my thunder.
Tell me a little bit about the book.
Because we get all kinds of people on here that write books about their near-death experience.
It's a great way for them to share it.
That's not what your book is about.
Tell us about it.
Well, I'm a little bit Cherokee Indian.
I'm actually a Cherokee citizen, recent Cherokee citizen.
I just got my citizenship about last October, October of 23.
And I'm, you know, of course, very proud of that.
My ancestry was hidden from me until I was around 12 years old.
And I, I'm a dreamer.
I've always had very vivid dreams and sometimes they're so vivid, I think they're real.
There's been times that I have difficulty discerning what was a dream and what was real
after, you know, you wake up.
I kept having a repetitive dream about a Native American woman standing on top of the
hill and she's looking down at a valley.
And in that valley, you can see, you know, dwellings, Native American dwellings.
And after the second time I had the dream, I said to my mom, I said, I keep having this
dream.
And she said, oh, well, that's interesting.
About the fourth time I had the same exact dream, I went to her and I said, Ma, I keep
having the same dream.
I've had it like four or five times down my, why am I having this dream?
She was all right.
You're Cherokee Indian.
And don't you tell a soul, don't you tell a soul?
I said, oh my gosh, it's like these click, click, click, click up.
Whoa.
Cause about that time I had learned it, not everybody saw ghosts, not everybody felt
presences, not everybody had my precognition and so on and so forth.
I said, oh, okay.
So I absolutely, I went to school the next day.
I told anybody that would listen.
I was Cherokee Indian that I'm not Italian.
It was, oh, you must be Italian.
I don't know.
I don't know what we are.
Scotch and Irish is all I know.
So anyways, Scotch, Irish and Indian, a dozen other secret ingredients, don't you know?
So how did you write a book about your seventh great grandmother?
Where did you find research for this?
Well, what happened was, was as soon as I found out I was Cherokee, I went to my grandpa
and I said, why haven't you ever told me that you are Cherokee Indian?
He says, well, you know, Debra, he says, you know, we had a really hard time.
They killed off a lot of our family.
They locked us up on a reservation in the middle of nowhere where we were not meant
to thrive or survive.
He goes, and the reason, you know, that I don't talk about it is he says, because if
the United States government declares war on us again, I got to go back to that reservation
and let it.
I have no choice.
He says, so I've held it secret for a long time since we moved to Ohio.
I figured nobody needed to know we were Native American because I lived prejudice.
Your mother, I didn't want that for my kids.
And at that point, he started telling me stories.
So my grandfather was telling me the stories about his mother, his father, and his famous
grandmother.
He called her Nani all the time.
He just called her Nani.
And he said Nani was famous and that she worked to help save the people and that she did great
things in her lifetime and that she was a sensitive.
Basically, he said, you know, she had the gift of sight and would tell me these stories
about Nani.
He never called her Nancy Ward.
He always called her Nani or Nani, and which he used as like a grandmother word.
At some juncture, I just felt that it was important for him to tell me these stories.
And I'd have him say, tell me these stories again, Grandma.
Tell me the stories again.
So he repetitively told me those stories of his grandmother.
And then when I was just on my way through Oklahoma to my way to Texas, I stopped there
and in the Okmogi area and broken arrow and met my other aunts and uncles.
And they told me more stories.
So it's like, you know, how you just put things away in your brain and you think, you know,
these stories, you know, are important to me, but my brother wasn't interested in our
ancestry.
My mother most certainly was not.
She was.
I hate to say it, but sometimes I felt like she was ashamed, you know, and then there's
me, you know, all proud and happy about it.
So she was very famous.
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Would you call this book strictly historical or is it more of a historical novel?
It is a kind of like a biography in a lot of ways.
Like I said, I'm telling things that were passed down in my family for generations, as
well as what I could glean, you know, from from white man's literature and so on and
so forth.
So it's actually historical fiction, which I had to do.
Never one because the Smithsonian got me thinking and then I talked to my attorney and he said,
well, just to be on the safe side, you are going to go historical fiction.
It's fine with me.
I don't care.
So as long as this story is out there, I don't care.
Yeah.
I want to ask you one final question.
You've lived a life full of adventure and learning and some really hard experiences and well
as well.
Do you have any last thoughts or message that you'd like to leave our listeners?
I'd love to be able to give people some kind of nice breath of hope today.
Don't give up.
Just don't give up.
We all endure pain and I've been part of it a lot on you.
I've as a spiritualist, as a portal person, as somebody that's seen the other side and
not afraid of it.
I've wanted to go several times with my own help and the pain that we feel when we're
at our lowest, you just, it's so hard to see past.
You cannot imagine that in two days, three days, three weeks, three months, three years
that you're not going to feel that pain that makes you want to go.
Hang on.
Work your way through those times that you don't feel like you belong here because you
do.
You do.
We belong here until the Lord calls us home.
I made promises after my last attempt to never, to try to go again.
And I've lived up to that promise even though there's days that I wanted to go so bad and
I beg God, please, please, please, please take me home.
I just want to be with you.
I want peace.
I don't want any more hurt.
No more hurt.
And I remember after one time I took off running and I took off running barefoot and I went
probably a good half a mile barefooted on a stone road.
In the days and weeks following that, of course, I was in a lot of pain because my feet were
completely bruised from running on rocks.
And as clear as day, I heard the Lord say, be thankful that you can feel that pain.
Don't ever do it again.
And he has brought me through times that I just didn't think anybody could survive.
I've had one of those lives like Nancy Ward had.
You have tried to kill me multiple times.
And I don't know why because I'm really a decent person.
You know, I won't say I'm the greatest person.
I'm a decent person.
And people have wanted me different.
You know, it is hard sometimes to wrap your brain around not only my wanting myself gone,
but that somebody else would want me gone when I did nothing but try to help them and
make their lives better.
So hang on, hang on even through those tough times because God has a purpose for you.
Well, Deborah, thanks so much.
And let me ask you one quick thing.
Someday in the future, will you introduce me to your grandmother?
She sounds awesome.
Oh, I wish I could.
I wish I could.
You'll be able to.
We will.
We'll all come in together one day.
That's right.
We'll be amazing.
We'll be amazing and be beautiful.
Thanks for being on the show.
Thank you, Eric.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtriptest.com.
If you want to share your near-death experience or if you have questions or comments about
the show, send an email to Eric at roundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.