‘You’re Here by Accident’: Evie Taylor on the Near-Death Experience That Changed Her Life

At 17, Evie says a routine operation became an experience she could never quite put back in the box — involving family members she believed had died, three “Councils of Light”, and a life plan she says later began to unfold.

“You’re here by accident. You’re not staying. You have to go back.”

That is how Evie Taylor remembers the message.

She was 17 years old and had gone into hospital for what should have been a relatively straightforward operation to remove her tonsils. She says that somewhere during that operation, something happened that changed the direction of her life.

There was no tunnel.

No dramatic journey towards a distant white light.

Instead, Evie describes it almost as though she had simply walked out of one room and into another.

Her granny and grandad were there. So was one of her childhood rabbits. And standing in front of her were three beings she refers to as the Councils of Light.

What happened next, according to Evie, wasn't spoken aloud at all.

“You just knew exactly what they were saying, and they knew exactly what I was saying.”

Their message, she says, was very clear.

Before coming to Earth, she had agreed to help people and “raise the vibration” of the planet.

And they had a question for her.

Why did she keep fighting them? 

For somebody who had spent much of her teenage life desperately trying to shut down experiences she couldn't understand, it was quite a thing to be told.

And that was where our conversation really began.

When seeing things was simply normal

Evie is now an Angelic Reiki master, healer, medium and spiritual teacher based near Sunderland. But listening to her describe her childhood, one thing became apparent very quickly: she doesn't remember spirituality arriving in her life.

As far as she was concerned, it was already there.

“I always felt spirit. I always felt angels around me. It was always quite normal for me.”

She remembers seeing colours around people and sensing what she interpreted as their emotions or thoughts. As an only child, she says the presence she felt around her could even be comforting.

The strange part came later, when she started realising that other children weren't experiencing the same thing.

There were sleepovers where she'd ask friends if they could see the people she believed were standing around the bed.

They couldn't.

There were moments at school when she felt she knew something was wrong with somebody before they'd said a word.

And there was her family.

Her mum didn't dismiss what Evie was describing. Evie says her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother had experienced similar things themselves. Her dad was rather more likely to react with the equivalent of, here she goes again.

One childhood memory has particularly stayed with her.

Her granny and grandad died when Evie was around eight. One winter evening, while her mum was filling a hot-water bottle, Evie looked into the front room and saw what she believed was her grandad sitting on the sofa, watching a television that wasn't switched on.

She turned away, deciding that if he was still there when she looked back, she'd tell her mum.

When she looked again, he'd gone.

She didn't tell her mum for about a year.

Not because she'd been frightened, but because she was worried about upsetting her. 

That tells you quite a lot about Evie.

Even as a child, she says she wasn't particularly frightened by the idea of spirit.

She was far more affected by how everybody else felt.

“Please leave me alone”

By her teenage years, however, it had become too much.

Evie remembers a shell mobile hanging against a pinboard in her bedroom. Once everybody had gone to bed and the house became quiet, she says it would start jangling against the wall.

Her mum would come into the room.

It would stop.

Her mum would leave.

It would begin again.

Eventually, the spiritual world that had once seemed completely ordinary started to frighten her.

“I just wanted to live my life like a teenager.”

She didn't want to constantly feel other people's emotions. She didn't want to see things. She didn't want to wonder what she might be inviting into her life.

So she asked it to stop.

“Please leave me alone.”

And, according to Evie, it did. 

For a while, there was a pause.

Then came the operation at 17.

The experience she kept quiet for years

Evie had suffered badly with tonsillitis throughout childhood and says a locum GP eventually noticed that her tonsils were unusually large and referred her for surgery.

She underwent the operation at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.

Evie says she was later told she had been “gone” for a little over three minutes. The transcript gives the figure as three minutes and eighteen seconds, although this is one of the details I would want to verify before treating it as a documented medical fact.

What Evie herself remembers is waking up knowing something had happened.

“I died. And I saw Granny and Grandad and I've been told my life plan.”

Initially, she says, both a nurse and her mother suggested that what she remembered could have been a dream or an effect of the operation and medication.

Around a year later, Evie says her mum acknowledged that something serious had happened during the surgery and that doctors had told the family they had almost lost her.

For Evie, that was enough.

She had spent months wondering whether she'd imagined the whole thing. 

Her description of what she experienced is vivid.

She remembers warmth, extraordinarily vibrant colours and, most of all, a feeling of belonging.

“I felt like I was back home.”

The three beings she describes as the Councils of Light told her, she says, that her arrival there had been an accident and that she would be returning.

They also told her something she was considerably less enthusiastic about.

She had work to do.

But what about free will?

This was where I couldn't help myself.

If Evie had supposedly agreed to some spiritual contract before arriving here, what happened if 17-year-old Evie simply came back and said:

No.

I'm not doing it.

Free will comes up again and again for me in these conversations.

Evie's answer was that she believes the choice would still have been hers.

She described spiritual calling as being like the tide.

It comes towards you.

It retreats.

Then it comes back again.

Eventually, if and when you're ready, you can choose to step into the water.

I liked that explanation.

I don't know whether any of us arrive here carrying a contract. I certainly haven't been shown mine.

Later in the conversation I told Evie that, if she happened to get in touch with those three beings again, I'd quite like to see mine.

Preferably including the small print.

A glimpse of her future?

According to Evie, the experience didn't only contain a sense of purpose.

She says she was shown parts of her future — but only up to the age of 35.

At 17 she was painfully shy. Even speaking one-to-one with somebody could make her turn bright red.

Yet she remembers being shown herself becoming a hairdresser, then standing in front of groups of people teaching others how to cut hair.

Her teenage reaction was essentially: absolutely not.

Years later, she worked for a hair-care manufacturer, travelled around the country and eventually found herself on stages delivering demonstrations and seminars.

Today she also works on platforms as a medium and teaches groups through her spiritual work.

I suggested that perhaps all those years standing in front of people with a pair of scissors had been preparing her for a very different kind of platform.

Evie believes so.

Whether someone sees that as destiny, coincidence, hindsight or something else altogether is up to them.

It's the sort of detail that makes me curious.

The other “earthquake”

Evie describes two events in her life as “earthquake moments”.

The first was the experience at 17.

The second was losing her mum, Mary.

This was probably one of the most human parts of our conversation.

Before her mum died, Evie admits she became almost obsessed with the thought of losing her.

She'd message her:

“Do not die today.”

And Mary would send something back along the lines of:

“Not today, I've got a meeting with a friend for coffee.”

That mixture of love, fear and humour felt very real to me.

When Mary eventually died, Evie was with her. Evie says she sensed her granny and grandad there too, and although the human part of her desperately wanted her mum to stay, she felt it was time for her to go.

Today, Evie believes Mary is still around her.

She says she smells her, senses her and feels particularly close to her while doing spiritual work.

Every evening she lights a candle for her.

And she believes her mother's death marked another change in direction.

“It was like, right, now is the time to really elevate your spiritual work.”

Mary's name comes back into this story later. 

The leaflet she couldn't quite throw away

Even after the near-death experience, Evie didn't immediately become the person sitting opposite me in the studio.

She says it took another seven or eight years before she finally stopped resisting.

By then she had moved north.

One day, in a spiritual shop, she noticed a leaflet for Angelic Reiki.

“That's a bit of me.”

She kept the leaflet.

Looked at it.

Put it down.

Went back to it.

Eventually she booked a treatment with a woman called Linda, who later became her Reiki master.

“That is when it all just went and happened for me.”

Angelic Reiki is a spiritual healing practice in which practitioners believe they work with angelic energy. Evie is very clear about how she personally sees her role.

“It's not me healing you. I'm not the special one. I'm just the bridge.”

That's an important distinction in understanding what Evie believes she is doing.

Reiki and spiritual healing shouldn't be confused with established medical treatment, and personal experiences during a session aren't medical evidence. But within Evie's own spiritual framework, Angelic Reiki became the point where years of resistance finally turned into acceptance. 

Today she teaches Angelic Reiki herself, including through residential retreats, alongside readings, mediumship and other spiritual work.

“I'm not special”

Something Evie said later interested me because it pushes against something you sometimes encounter in spiritual circles: the idea of being specially chosen.

She doesn't particularly like it.

When people describe themselves as “the gifted one”, she says it niggles at her.

Her own analogy is an old-fashioned radio.

Some people are tuned in.

Some are slightly tuned in and need a bit of adjustment.

Others aren't tuned in at all — and may have absolutely no desire to be.

And that's fine.

Evie believes everybody has some capacity for intuition or spiritual connection, but she doesn't believe everybody needs to use it.

Nor does she feel the need to convince somebody who thinks the whole thing is nonsense.

“If they believe, they believe, and if they don't, they don't.”

That fits rather nicely with the reason I enjoy these conversations.

I'm not interested in forcing somebody to believe in mediums, angels, Reiki, near-death experiences or anything else.

I want to hear what people say happened to them.

Then I want to ask questions.

Sometimes I come away with more questions than I started with.

I'm quite happy with that.

Ask the universe

Towards the end of our conversation, Evie said something that stopped me immediately.

“Ask the universe.”

“My God,” I said. “That is my mantra.”

Evie laughed.

She then told me about a trip to Glastonbury.

She'd found herself drawn to a Moldavite ring in a shop but couldn't decide whether to buy it. She walked away, spent the day thinking about it, then headed back.

On the way, she asked her mum for a sign.

If she was supposed to buy the ring, she wanted some sort of indication.

There wasn't much time. She was practically walking through the shop door.

Evie tried the ring again, chatted to the woman serving her and eventually asked her name.

“Mary.”

“Just pack the ring up.”

Evie took that as her answer.

Was it a sign?

Was it coincidence?

I don't know.

Evie knows what it meant to her.

And perhaps that's why these little stories stay with us.

What would Evie leave with the world?

At the end of most of these conversations, I ask the same question.

If you could leave one message with the world, from everything you've experienced spiritually, what would that message be?

Evie didn't talk about angels.

She didn't talk about psychic ability, contracts, councils of light or Reiki.

She talked about living.

“Live your best life. Live your life to the fullest because we're not here a long time.”

She believes that one day there will be a life review waiting for us. Someone else may believe something entirely different.

But the part of her answer that doesn't require any particular spiritual belief was this:

Live your life for yourself rather than living it entirely for somebody else.

And do what makes you happy.

After more than an hour talking about what Evie believes happened when she briefly left this life, her final message was actually about making the most of the one we're living now. 

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my full conversation with Evie Taylor on the Anthony Larkin Podcast, where we talk in much more detail about her childhood experiences, her near-death experience, her mum Mary, mediumship, Angelic Reiki, intuition and the path that eventually led her to the work she does today.

If you enjoy conversations like this, you can subscribe here for future interviews and articles exploring consciousness, spirituality, the afterlife and unusual human experiences — without pretending we already have all the answers.

— Anthony