There’s no shortage of ‘evidence’ for the afterlife, should you know where to look. Quite a few near-death experience survivors have reported out-of-body episodes after being pronounced clinically dead, and others have narrated walking down a corridor of heavenly light. Funnily enough, though, you rarely hear anyone admit to being turned away on the gates of Heaven, or dropping straight into the fiery pits of Hell. 

Enter: Gerald Johnson, a Michigan man (and a priest, no less!) who says that he temporarily died in 2016 on account of a heart attack, and located himself within the realm of Devil. Why would a priest find yourself there, you ask? Who knows – actually not Gerald himself, who was surprised on the turn his afterlife was taking, especially when he realised that Rihanna was Hell’s headline act.

“My spirit left my physical body,” the priest says in a recent TikTok. “I believed I used to be going upward, because I believed that I had done a lot good on this lifetime and helped so many individuals, and made so many choices that were Godly decisions. But versus me going up, I went down. I went literally into the centre of the Earth. That’s where Hell is.”

Once he got to Hell, Gerald apparently saw incidents of such pain and torture that, he says, “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy”. This included scenes lifted straight out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, resembling a person walking on all fours like a dog while being burned from head to toe. Gerald recalls: “His eyes were bulging and worse than that: he was wearing chains on his neck… it was a demon holding the chain.”

One of the vital bizarre punishments that Gerald was subjected to for his sins, though, was a rendition of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”. Unfortunately, it wasn’t performed by Ri herself, but by a demonic cover band. “It just blew me away,” says Gerald, adding that there was a complete section of everlasting damnation dedicated to musical torture, with other hellish hits including Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Completely happy”.

Actually, Gerald seems to suggest that demons got here up with Rihanna’s lyrics – alongside another earthly songs – in the primary place, and transmitted them to the singer when she gained “illegal access into the spirit realm” by… smoking weed. When Rihanna said: “You may stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh”? Yeah, that was the spawn of Devil talking.

In the long run, Gerald says: “Every lyric to each song is to torment you [for] the undeniable fact that you didn’t worship God through music while you were on the Earth… you selected to worship Devil by repeating the lyrics that he inspired to come back into the Earth.”

So what happened to Gerald next – how did he escape the Superbowl show on the centre of the Earth and continue to exist? Unsurprisingly, the small print aren’t too clear. “I lifted up out of Hell, and I got here back on the Earth,” says Gerald. There, God began to talk to him in the shape of the “real Jesus”, saying that he sent him to Hell for not forgiving those who did him unsuitable.

So what can we take away from one Michigan priest’s journey to Hell and back? Well, if we don’t wish to go there ourselves, we’d best get forgiving those who have wronged us. On the plus side, if we do find yourself within the fiery pit, we’d have the ability to persuade a demon to bash out a recent Rihanna album and send it as much as her on a cloud of smoke – and when it’s finally released, we’ll have a front row seat.

Join Dazed Club and be a part of our world! You get exclusive access to events, parties, festivals and our editors, in addition to a free subscription to Dazed for a 12 months. Join for £5/month today.