Stephen King Stories about What Happens After We Die

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]What happens after we die? Do we go to heaven or hell? Do we blink out of existence? Do we come back to Earth as a dolphin? Stephen King expressed a few thoughts about this while he was on a book tour of his 2014 novel Revival.

[00:00:18]Here's what he said. Well, I think that it might be that we are wired up in a certain way to certain circuits open when you're dying and give you a lift. Uh that seems to me that it would be part of the organic survival mechanism. And that would explain this white light phenomenon that people have. As far as what's after, there's no downside in believing that there's a heaven or an Elysian Fields.

[00:00:44]Is that right? I mean it's a win-win, isn't it? It's a win-win situation. If there isn't, we're not going to know.

[00:00:49]It's a rather agnostic perspective, a let's wait and see sort of attitude, and not nearly as terrifying as the afterlife featured in several of his works, including Revival, which offers a cosmically horrific description of what might happen to our souls after we take our final breath. And of course, there are many characters in the Stephen King universe who die and come back as ghosts, giving us just a glimpse of the many possibilities of what may lie beyond. In the hard case crime novel Later, protagonist Jamie Conklin has the same power as the kid from The Sixth Sense. I see dead people. And he can also talk to dead people. And whatever questions they are asked, the ghosts are compelled to tell the truth. What's perhaps most interesting about this version of ghosts in Later is that they are emotionally detached from everything they used to care about. And they seem to only hang around the Earth for a short while until they transition into that undiscovered country. There's another Stephen King tale that features characters conversing with the dead, Mr. Harrigan's Phone. During the ultimate long-distance phone call, the dead cannot only communicate with the living, but they can get involved. They can even do our bidding. But not all ghosts are helpful in the Stephen King universe.

[00:02:18]In fact, it's usually the reverse. In the short story You Know They Got a Hell of a Band, just about every rock star legend from the 1950s through the 1970s, the ones who have died at least, are now residing as phantoms in one little town, a sort of rock and roll heaven that turns hellish when the sun goes down.

[00:02:41]But all of these spooky tales are more like twisted Twilight Zone episodes.

[00:02:46]Tonight, we're going to be focusing on three stories that take place in the afterlife, all with main characters who come to realize that they've crossed over. And you'll want to stay until the end of this video because that's when we're giving you a choice. Just like a certain Stephen King character, you'll get to decide where you'll go after you die.

[00:03:11]And if that hasn't scared you away, then welcome to the Stephen King Book Club.

[00:03:18]>> [music] [music] [music] >> For our first stop in the afterlife, we arrive at a train station in Wyoming.

[00:03:48]This is the opening setting of the story called Willa, written of course by Stephen King and featured in his collection Just After Sunset.

[00:03:59]At this train station, there are many passengers just milling about waiting for a new train. You see, there's been some sort of a vague accident which took place on the railway line. How long have these passengers been waiting?

[00:04:15]They aren't sure, but David, our protagonist, will eventually discover that he was on a train when it derailed 20 years ago. The passengers that are waiting are all casualties in that accident, and their spirits have been hanging around this station ever since, all of them existing in denial, all of them but the title character Willa, David's fiance.

[00:04:44]By the time the story begins, she has already figured out her ghostly identity, and she has decided not to dwindle away her eternity at some dusty old train station. Instead, she chooses to haunt a honky-tonk bar a couple of miles away from the station, where there are lights, music, and lives dancing around her. David eventually leaves the station as well and finds her in that honky-tonk bar. And once he talks to her, he slowly realizes the truth of their phantom existence. One of the reasons why it becomes so obvious is that sometimes when he looks in the mirror in the honky-tonk bar, he can see his reflection. But other times, he and Willa just aren't there. Once David is on board, he and Willa try to convince the others to leave behind both the train station and their state of denial.

[00:05:40]But all of the passengers refuse, except for Pammy, the poor little ghost girl who, unlike the others, clearly remembers their train derailing and plummeting into a gorge. At the end of the story, Willa and David return to the lights of the small Wyoming town, choosing to dance into eternity together and leaving behind the others at the derelict station that is just weeks away from demolition. And we're left to wonder just how long will their spirits be lingering on Earth? This type of ghostly existence is pretty common in other stories and TV shows as well. In Stephen King's Willa, the living have a vague sense of a chilling presence whenever the ghosts are nearby them.

[00:06:28]Fellow Constant Reader, does the idea of becoming a ghost fill you with dread or delight? Personally, it makes me wonder how many centuries it would take before I become utterly bored. Or maybe there's no boredom in the afterlife. The thing about these ghost stories is that they still take place on Earth. They're not really set in the great beyond. But what about this spellbinding story from King's collection Everything's Eventual?

[00:07:00]It's called That Feeling. You can only say what it is in French. At first, it seems like these characters are here on Earth, but maybe they're somewhere else.

[00:07:13]Carol and Bill are on a trip to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

[00:07:19]The marriage isn't ideal. Bill cheated on Carol with his secretary. But on the positive side, they're a wealthy couple who can afford fancy vacations and private jets.

[00:07:31]At least, that's what Carol is thinking to try to stay positive as they drive down a Florida road anxious to begin their vacation. Except during the drive, she can't shake the bewildering sensation of déjà vu. She keeps noticing dreadfully familiar details, certain road signs and pedestrians, like she's seen all of these things before. And of course, she has. As the story continues, both the reader and the protagonist discover that this poor couple never arrived in Florida. Their private jet crashed into a Delta passenger plane.

[00:08:12]And now, Carol's afterlife is an endless cycle of waking up from a nightmare, finding herself on the airplane, landing, walking down the steps of the Learjet, sliding into the passenger seat of their rental car, and driving down the road to a vacation destination they will never reach because every time, right before they arrive, she feels burnt paper in her hair, and she looks over at her husband to see his melted face, and then poof, she wakes up on the plane, and the endless cycle begins again. As a brief afterword, Stephen King blatantly explains his goal for this story. He writes, "I think this story is about hell, a version of it where you are condemned to do the same thing over and over again.

[00:09:05]Existentialism, baby, what a concept.

[00:09:08]Paging Albert Camus. There's an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition. Hell loops have appeared in other tales before. The TV show Lucifer basically describes hell as an endless repetition of your worst moment. Well, maybe it's not quite endless because in that storyline, you can escape if you learn how to forgive yourself. And in Stephen King's story, it seems that Carol might be trapped by her own sense of guilt, as well as by her own expectations.

[00:09:44]In a flashback scene, Carol recalls a late-night conversation with her husband. She asks him what he thinks happens after death, and he replies, "You probably got what you'd always thought you would get. That if Jerry Lee Lewis thought he was going to hell for playing boogie-woogie, that's exactly where he'd go. Heaven, hell, or Grand Rapids, it was your choice. Or the choice of those who had taught you what to believe.

[00:10:15]It was the human mind's final great parlor trick, the perception of eternity in the place where you'd always expected to spend it. Having been raised in a Catholic family, going to a Catholic church and a Catholic school, the idea of sin has been burned into Carol's mind. And it seems the one choice in her life that she considers the most sinful, perhaps the one she never repented for, is when she had an abortion and claimed it was a miscarriage. But what's fascinating about this hell loop is that Carol isn't reliving an event from her life. Instead, it's as though after death, she has conjured up a scenario of what was supposed to happen next if the deadly plane crash hadn't ended her life.

[00:11:08]It isn't hard to dream up the idea of a heavenly loop, a day spent in comfort and relaxation, spending time with loved ones. It might be very pleasant to have that day repeated over and over again without the tedious sense of repetition or the unnerving feelings of déjà vu.

[00:11:28]You wouldn't get bored because you would have no idea that you were in a loop.

[00:11:32]Unfortunately, that is not Carol's fate.

[00:11:36]One of her childhood recollections is a skip rope song, one she can't quite remember completely until the story's end. It's about the Virgin Mary and it goes, "Hey there, Mary, what's the story? Save my ass from purgatory." Does Carol ever leave purgatory? It feels unlikely. It feels like she's stuck there, stuck sort of like this chump, Isaac Harris, who is featured in the last story that we are discussing.

[00:12:10]And it's the story that happens to be my favorite among Stephen King's variations about what happens when we kick the proverbial bucket.

[00:12:21]The plot of this story also incorporates a time loop of sorts, but it's a little more elaborate and it also offers a chance of escape.

[00:12:32]Imagine you've just died. For better or for worse, your life has just come to an end. But your mind doesn't just switch off. It is still intact and your soul is not roasting on a skillet, nor is it being fitted for angel wings. Instead, you find yourself in a hallway with a scuffed tiled floor. Any pain or discomfort you felt while alive is all gone.

[00:13:01]Behind you, there are stairs leading up to a door that reads locked in painted red letters. In front of you is another door. This one reads Isaac Harris, manager. So you walk in that direction.

[00:13:18]On the wall is a framed photograph of a company picnic. A banner displays the year of your birth. In this photograph, you recognize a few people, family members, acquaintances, a neighbor or two, a couple of celebrities. Of course, it's quite impossible that all of these people could have known each other, let alone work at the same company. It's surreal, to say the least.

[00:13:42]You continue down the hall and knock on the door and a voice within says, "It's open." Once inside, you meet Isaac Harris, sitting at a desk with stacks of files piled up around him and a laundry basket nearby filled with yellow papered memos. You don't recognize Mr. Harris at all, but he knows you. He's met you several times before because you've lived and died before. And at the end of each life cycle, at least according to Mr. Harris, you appear in the same hallway and enter the same office and ask the same questions. At first, you might assume that Mr. Harris is revealing a cosmology based upon reincarnation, the idea that your soul will return to Earth and live in a different body, maybe human, maybe animal. But Mr. Harris explains that it is not like that at all. There's not much variety here and in this particular room, there are two other doors. Here's how your manager explains them. The deal is this. Leave through the left door and you get to live your life over again, A to Z, start to finish. Take the right one and you wink out, poof, candle in the wind type of thing. Now, before you make your choice, Harris wants to be clear. If you do choose the door on your left, you will not be returning to Earth knowing what you know now. You will be starting again as a little baby bundle of blank slate and you won't be able to make different choices. However your life has played out the first time around, that's how it will happen again, exactly. So, have you enjoyed your life?

[00:15:35]Does the good outweigh the bad? Or maybe that's not a fair question. Does the good need to outweigh the bad in order for your life to be worth a repeat visit? Or do you simply need one moment, one moment of beauty, one moment of joy or love to make it worth doing the whole thing over again?

[00:15:59]Or would it be pointless to go through life more than once? After all, King himself imagined hell as a sort of repetition. We've learned a little bit about what Stephen King believes or what he thinks might happen to us after we die. But what does he want? He says this in his notes in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. "What I'd like, I think, is a chance to go through it all again as a kind of immersive movie so I could relish the good times and good calls, like marrying my wife and our decision to have that third child. Of course, I'd also have to rue the bad calls. I've made my share.

[00:16:43]But who wouldn't like to re-experience that first good kiss or have a chance to relax and really enjoy the wedding ceremony that went by in such a nervous blur. This story isn't about such a rerun, not exactly, but musing about the possibility led me to write about one man's afterlife. The reason fantasy fiction remains such a vital and necessary genre is that it lets us talk about such things in a way realistic fiction cannot. So Stephen King's idea is to relive one's life but with a different vantage point, sort of like a moviegoer sitting in the theater, which reminds me a bit of the film Defending Your Life. But now let's get back to these two doors. Before you make your choice, let's think a bit about punishment and purgatory. And let's take a closer look at Isaac Harris and his office. You see, there's a calendar on the wall that reads March 1911.

[00:17:49]And perhaps you will recall a tragic bit of history related to that time because here Stephen King draws upon actual events. On the 25th of March in 1911, there was a disaster in New York City known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Over 140 workers, most of them young women and girls, perished.

[00:18:15]Some of them died in the fire, but many fell nine or 10 stories, leaping to their deaths from windows in order to escape the flames. Why did so many die?

[00:18:28]In part because the employers would lock the workers inside the factory, preventing them from leaving during business hours. The factory was owned and operated by two men, Max Blanck and none other than Isaac Harris. They were both in the building that day, but they did not die. They escaped by running up to the top of the roof and then eventually getting down a fire escape.

[00:18:54]But of course, escape was possible for these two men because they weren't trapped behind locked doors. So Isaac Harris is now the man sitting at the desk in front of you.

[00:19:08]His afterlife does not include a choice.

[00:19:12]He is stuck here with hundreds of clients besides yourself. And like his former employees, it doesn't seem like he gets to take a break either. What's interesting is that his punishment doesn't involve hellfire or even a recreation of the factory fire.

[00:19:31]It's just simple, boring, repetitive work. So I guess you should be thankful that you've apparently led a better life than Mr. Harris.

[00:19:41]At the very least, you've been given a choice.

[00:19:45]But before you continue or end your cosmic journey, I would love to read some of your thoughts in the comments.

[00:19:53]Based upon various versions of an afterlife, anything from tales of mythology or religion or pop culture, I want to know if you have a favorite depiction of life after death.

[00:20:05]Personally, I am more than fond of the afterlife showcased in the final episodes of The Good Place. But, if I had to choose something from the Stephen King universe, I like the comforting idea of moving on to some continued form of higher consciousness hinted at in Doctor Sleep. And I definitely like the idea of someone kind serving as a guide.

[00:20:29]But, enough about me. If you would, share your ideas in the comments. And as always, thank you for watching and listening to The Stephen King Book Club.