Meet MJ

My journey with the unseen began long before I ever understood what it meant to die.

I was just three years old when I began seeing spirits.

I remember lying in my bedroom at night and seeing figures standing in my doorway. One was a little blond-haired boy wearing unusually thick glasses. Sometimes, behind him, stood what looked like a strange white Easter Bunny.

They never came into my room. They simply stood there.

But to a little girl, it was frightening. I didn’t understand who they were, why they were there, or why I could see them. I would often leave my bedroom and make my way to my parents’ room, where I would sleep on the floor just to feel safe.

Looking back, I realize that those were the first experiences in what would become a lifetime of encounters I couldn’t explain.

When I was four years old, something else happened that I have never forgotten.

A glowing orange orb came through my closed bedroom window and hovered above my bed. I remember it communicating with me, telling me to put my nightie back on.

I was only four, but the memory stayed with me.

As I grew older, the experiences continued.

Around the age of eight, I began having unusual, recurring dreams. I remember running down a hallway, climbing through a dryer, and finding myself walking along a beam, looking down at my family below.

There were times throughout my childhood when I felt that something—or someone—was there with me, even when I couldn’t see anyone.

My childhood wasn’t always easy. There were painful experiences and circumstances that shaped who I would become. Yet, even during those difficult years, I had a sense that the world was much bigger than what I could see with my physical eyes.

I wasn’t raised in a particularly religious home, although I had always been curious about God, religion, and what might exist beyond this life.

I didn’t have answers.

I only knew what I was experiencing.

As a teenager, I experienced one of the most devastating losses of my life.

My father was murdered.

But what happened surrounding his death was unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

I remember having an extraordinarily vivid experience of witnessing what was happening to him. I saw his stabbing, even though I wasn’t physically there.

I woke at 5:41 in the morning.

Later, I learned that this was the time associated with his death.

I also remember seeing my father afterward. He appeared translucent, and he was smiling.

At the time, I didn’t have a name for what I had experienced. Years later, I would come to understand that experiences like mine are sometimes described as shared-death experiences.

Losing my father changed my life. But the extraordinary connection I experienced surrounding his passing also left me with questions that would follow me for decades.

How could I have witnessed something when I wasn’t there?

How could I have seen him afterward?

And what does death really mean?

By the time I was eighteen, my experiences had taken another unexpected turn.

I began sensing when someone was going to die.

Sometimes I would look at a person and see their face change. Their features could appear skeletal, or I would notice something unusual around them, almost like an aura.

On other occasions, I would physically feel something that seemed connected to what another person was experiencing, even when they were far away.

One experience has stayed with me throughout my life.

I looked at a friend and saw something terribly unsettling in her face. I warned her not to drive.

Tragically, she died that night.

I would experience similar things again in the years that followed.

These weren’t experiences I had asked for. I didn’t know why they happened, and I certainly didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with them.

For much of my life, I simply carried them with me.

I continued living, raising my family, and navigating all the ordinary and extraordinary moments that make up a human life.

But somewhere beneath the surface, the questions never went away.

In 2017, everything changed.

I had been experiencing uncontrollable heart palpitations, and eventually I found myself in the hospital, facing a procedure to correct my heart’s rhythm.

The doctors explained exactly what they were going to do.

First, they would administer an anesthetic to put me to sleep. Once I was under anesthesia, they would administer medication to stop my heart. They would then use a defibrillator to try to bring me back and restore my heart to a normal sinus rhythm.

That was the procedure as it was explained to me.

But before any of it could happen, I had to sign a consent form.

I remember being presented with paperwork acknowledging the risks of the procedure and stating that the hospital and medical team would not be held liable.

There is something incredibly surreal about signing a piece of paper before allowing doctors to stop your heart.

I knew what they were planning to do. I understood that my heart would be stopped and that they would attempt to restart it.

But nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to experience.

I was placed under anesthesia.

Then I was given the medication to stop my heart, just as the doctors had explained they would do.

The plan was to use the defibrillator to bring me back and restore a normal sinus rhythm.

For approximately three minutes, my heart was stopped.

And during that time, I experienced something that would forever change the way I understood life, death, and everything in between.

The next thing I remember was darkness.

Complete darkness.

There was nothing around me. No hospital room. No medical equipment. No sounds of doctors or nurses.

Just a vast, black void.

And yet, I was there.

One of my guests on The Returned once described an experience in a way that perfectly captured what I remember.

“I felt like a pair of eyes.”

I had no awareness of a physical body, yet I could perceive. I was conscious. I was aware.

And the strangest thing was that I didn’t feel any different.

I was still me.

I didn’t feel transformed into someone else. I didn’t suddenly become aware of some greater identity. I wasn’t questioning where I was or what had happened.

In fact, I thought I had simply woken up.

I had no awareness that my heart had stopped.

I didn’t think about the hospital or the procedure.

And I didn’t think about anyone I had left behind.

Not my husband. Not my children. Not my mother. Not anyone.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love them. They simply weren’t part of my awareness in that moment.

I wasn’t thinking about my life on Earth at all.

I was simply there, existing as myself, without a body and without the ordinary thoughts that usually fill our minds.

And then there was Jesus.

There, before me, was someone I immediately recognized as Jesus.

He was enormous, radiant, and filled with the most extraordinary warmth.

I remember his long hair, his beard, and his light-coloured clothing.

But more than anything, I remember his laughter.

There was such joy in his presence.

We laughed together with the warmth and familiarity of two old friends seeing each other again after a very long time.

There was no need for introductions.

I simply knew who he was.

It wasn’t like meeting someone for the first time.

It felt like being with someone I had always known.

And in that moment, he was my entire focus.

I wasn’t wondering where my family was. I wasn’t thinking about my children or my husband. I wasn’t worried about getting back to my life.

I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that I might be dead.

All of my attention was on Jesus.

Nothing else seemed to exist or matter in that moment.

I was completely myself, and yet everything that normally occupied my thoughts was absent.

There was only this extraordinary encounter.

The warmth, the laughter, the familiarity, and the overwhelming sense of love.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my physical life.

Then Jesus showed me something I have spent years trying to understand.

A wall of balloons.

They were green and yellow.

Somehow, I understood that I had a choice to make.

I chose a yellow balloon.

I punched through it.

And in an instant, I was back.

I woke on the hospital table, gasping for air, surrounded by the medical team.

I was confused.

I couldn’t understand how I had just been somewhere so extraordinary and was suddenly back inside my body.

I remember thinking:

“I just died.”

People often imagine that having a near-death experience means returning with all the answers.

That wasn’t my experience.

I came back with more questions than I had ever had before.

What had just happened to me?

Why had I seen Jesus?

What did the balloons mean?

Why had I chosen yellow?

And why had I been sent back?

For years, I tried to make sense of it.

I wondered whether the green balloon represented going with Jesus, while yellow represented returning to my life here.

I still don’t claim to know exactly what every part of that experience meant.

What I do know is how profoundly it affected me.

I had experienced what felt like awareness beyond my physical body. I had felt a love and familiarity that words could never fully capture.

And I could no longer look at death in quite the same way.

My experiences didn’t end when I returned from the hospital.

There were dreams, unusual encounters, and moments that seemed to carry messages I couldn’t immediately understand.

One dream in particular stayed with me.

I remember a grey-haired, bearded man dressed in a tan suit. He presented me with red and yellow roses and a piece of paper.

He told me:

“Here’s your winning ticket.”

At the time, I didn’t understand what that meant.

Months later, I began my YouTube journey.

But starting a YouTube channel was far more challenging than I ever imagined.

I was learning everything from the ground up. The technology, the recording, the editing, the endless details that go into creating and running a show.

It was overwhelming at times.

I was stressed, frustrated, and questioning whether I was capable of doing it.

One night, I was lying in bed, thinking about everything I was struggling with.

I remember saying to myself, silently, in my own mind:

I don’t think I can do this anymore.

I was seriously considering giving up on my YouTube channel.

And then something happened that I will never forget.

I heard a rumble.

It came from my right side.

The sound was unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was like thunder, but it was also a vibration, a frequency, and music, all somehow combined into one extraordinary sound.

It wasn’t simply something I heard.

It felt as though it moved through the space around me.

The rumble approached from the right, growing closer until it came directly over the top of me.

And then, within that powerful vibration, came a voice.

Deep. Resonant. Unmistakable.

“You will not stop. You will keep going.”

I was stunned.

I hadn’t spoken my thoughts aloud. I had only been thinking about quitting.

And yet, in that moment, the voice seemed to answer the very thing I had been struggling with inside my own mind.

I remember almost jumping back down into my bed, like a little girl who had just been given very firm instructions.

And my response was simply:

“Okay.”

That was it.

I wasn’t going to argue.

But something about that experience stayed with me just as deeply as the words themselves.

For the first time, I found myself seriously wondering whether our thoughts might be heard in ways we don’t understand.

I had always considered my thoughts to be private, something that existed only within my own mind.

Yet this experience left me with the extraordinary feeling that what I had been thinking had somehow been heard.

Was someone listening?

Was there something about consciousness and thought that we simply don’t understand?

I couldn’t explain what had happened.

I could only describe what I heard, what I felt, and how precisely it seemed to arrive at the moment I was ready to give up.

And I kept going.

As the years passed, I began looking back over my life—the spirits I saw as a child, the orb, the experiences surrounding my father’s death, the premonitions, my near-death experience, and now this remarkable encounter in the middle of the night.

For the first time, I began to see how all those moments might be connected.

What once felt like separate, unexplained experiences began to form a larger story.

My story.

Approximately seven years after my near-death experience, something began to shift.

I felt drawn to create a space where people could share the extraordinary things they had experienced without fear of judgment or ridicule.

A place where near-death experiencers, people who had experienced shared-death encounters, out-of-body experiences, spiritual awakenings, and other profound moments could speak openly.

And a place where people who were grieving, questioning, searching, or afraid of death might find comfort.

That became The Returned™.

I didn’t create this show because I believe I have all the answers.

I created it because I know what it’s like to experience something that changes your understanding of reality—and then try to find the words to explain it.

I know what it’s like to carry questions for years.

And I know how powerful it can be to hear someone else describe an experience that resonates with your own.

Every person who sits down with me brings a different story, a different perspective, and a different understanding of what they experienced.

I don’t believe we all have to agree.

I believe we can listen, remain curious, and respect one another’s experiences.

Because sometimes the most meaningful thing we can offer another person is simply the space to be heard.

Today, when I look back at the little girl who saw spirits standing in her bedroom doorway, I see her differently.

She didn’t know that one day she would experience death herself.

She didn’t know that decades of unexplained encounters would eventually lead her to conversations with people around the world.

And she certainly didn’t know that her story might someday help someone else feel less alone.

But perhaps that’s the beautiful mystery of life.

Sometimes we don’t understand the significance of an experience until many years later.

I don’t claim to know everything about what happens when we die.

I’m still learning. Still questioning. Still listening.

But I believe that love is far greater than we understand, that our connections may reach beyond physical death, and that there is so much about consciousness and existence we have yet to discover.

If you’ve found your way here because you’ve experienced something extraordinary, because you’ve lost someone you love, or simply because you’re curious about what lies beyond this life, I hope you feel welcome.

I’m MJ.

This is my journey.

And this is why I created The Returned.