A story that does not fit the usual script

Robert Evans did not follow the normal timeline people expect. He did not begin acting young. He did not begin writing young. He did not begin songwriting young. By the standards most people use, those windows had already closed.

And yet, after retirement from ordinary jobs, he pushed into Hollywood at 79, kept working into his 80s, stepped away again around 90, moved into writing, and then moved again into songwriting after 92.

That alone would make for a strong late-life creator profile. But Robert’s story does not stop there. Running beneath that life arc is a much stranger thread: an experience he says happened nearly 60 years ago, and the understanding of life, death, character, and the afterlife that he says came with it.

Readers who want the full backstory first can move through the earlier pieces in order: Robert Evans Writer Profile, Robert Evans: “It Is Written” Creator Spotlight Follow-Up, and Robert Evans Started Acting at 79.

After retirement, he started again

After retirement from quite ordinary jobs, Robert Evans — looking for something to do at age 79 — crashed Hollywood. Not as a movie chief like his famous namesake, but at the bottom of the totem pole as an extra. Even so, that late beginning opened a very real chapter of work.

On occasion, he snagged small acting roles in both feature films and television, and also worked in music videos and commercials. At times, he worked directly with names people would recognize: Ernest Borgnine, Jennifer Grey, James Corden and Gordon Ramsay in a Late Late Show skit, along with appearances involving Camila Cabello, Rhea Seehorn, and others. He even worked as Arnold Palmer’s stand-in and body double in a commercial.

That chapter eventually wound down. He retired again at age 90. Then he tried writing children’s stories for two years, but nothing was officially published. After that, he decided to become a songwriter — despite never having written a song before.

He says he had always admired the great songwriters of the past and had read many of their biographies. He even met Hoagy Carmichael in England in the 1950s after one of Carmichael’s concerts.

Four months after his 92nd birthday, Robert wrote his first song — and then wrote roughly 200 lyrics over the following year.

The problem was not output. The problem was access. As with movie scripts, he found there was little chance of getting the work seen by industry executives without an agent — and agents, he says, tend to ignore unsolicited efforts. One of his Oz-based movie scripts was optioned, but stalled because the producer could not find a “name” director.

Then another small opening appeared. He struck up an acquaintance with a part-time songwriter who had published songs, and that person offered to help him improve structure and pitch finished work to industry contacts.

Around the same time, Robert had almost forgotten that he had entered one of his songs in the UK Songwriting Contest. The result was a five-star rating out of five possible, along with a small songwriting-school prize.

His point is not subtle: advanced age should not automatically mean that active life has to end. He acknowledges the obvious realities of age — eyesight, hearing, stamina, physical decline — but rejects the idea that aging should automatically become social and creative surrender.

He also notes something many people overlook: connection matters. He describes close friendships across generations, regular coffee outings with male friends in their early sixties, and the importance of not becoming isolated.

Robert says he has never exercised or watched what he ate, though he does not present that as advice. He simply says he has usually had a feeling of well-being and rarely got sick. For many years, he barely even had a physician. Whether one agrees with his choices or not, his larger point is clear: he never accepted that old age should become passive waiting.

The near-death type experience — in full

It was almost 60 years ago. He says he was then, as now, in good health. At the time, his oldest boy was a baby. During the night he heard him crying, got up, and went to his room to settle him down. When he returned to bed and lay back down, something strange began almost immediately.

His whole body started to tingle like a mild electric shock. He did not feel sick or physically distressed, but he could not understand what was happening. Then he says he felt his consciousness begin to drift away from his body. He was frightened and assumed he was dying.

Yet he also says he had the feeling he could have stopped the process if he had chosen to. For reasons he still cannot fully explain, curiosity took over. He relaxed and let it continue to see what would happen next.

According to his account, he then found himself in a dark tunnel, traveling at great speed. He makes a point of saying that he had never read about people having tunnel experiences before that time, so, in his view, there was no subconscious suggestion shaping what he perceived.

The next thing he knew, he was approaching a very bright light. He says he could hear music, though he can no longer remember whether it was choral, orchestral, or some combination of both.

Then he saw a figure waiting to greet him: a man in a robe and sandals, with long hair, appearing very much like someone from biblical times.

He makes a point that might surprise some readers. Despite the appearance, he says it never occurred to him that the figure was Jesus. Somehow, he says, he simply knew it was not.

He says they stood and talked for what seemed like a long time. He does not recover every detail of that exchange, but one realization remained vivid:

“If people on earth could witness this, they would stop all the bad stuff they do.”

In that moment, he says, he somehow knew he was not on Earth.

Then, just as suddenly, he was back in bed — in exactly the same position, lying on his left side. His body was still tingling, but the sensation was gradually subsiding. He lay there in wonder, thinking about what had just happened, and considered waking his wife to tell her, but decided to wait until morning.

He later regretted not checking the time before and after the event, because he has never known how long it lasted.

What his wife said she saw

The next thing Robert became aware of was waking up, still drowsy, when he heard his wife gasp loudly as if frightened. When he asked what was wrong, she told him something that deeply affected how he interpreted the experience.

She said that the little blue furry boy doll from Bobby’s crib had been floating above his head, bathed in a blue light, and then it was suddenly gone.

Robert is careful about how he frames this. He says that if anyone else had told him such a thing, he might have assumed they were delusional or under the influence. But he insists that neither he nor his wife would ever take drugs like LSD, and that they barely drank at all. He also describes his wife as practical and down to earth — not the kind of person who sees things that are not there.

For him, that detail mattered because it seemed to place part of the event outside his own private perception.

What he considered proof

Robert says skeptics will not accept what he counts as proof, and he understands that. In his own words, what follows was proof to him, not necessarily proof that would satisfy those who reject the very possibility that consciousness could exist apart from the body.

Three days after the incident, he had a prearranged meeting with a trance medium named Richard Zenor. Robert describes Zenor as a man who had reportedly been in trance states since childhood, and says that others had investigated him long before Robert ever met him.

Before Robert’s private sitting, he had already attended public demonstrations where Zenor would enter trance onstage and call out names of people in the audience, along with deceased loved ones supposedly connected to them. Robert says the sessions were free and that the information coming through often appeared highly specific.

During Robert’s own experience, the medium said his father was present. Robert notes that he was only in his early thirties at the time, so there would have been no obvious reason for a stranger to assume his father had already died. But in fact, his father had died in his fifties in an accident.

Then came details Robert says the medium could not have known: his father addressed him not as Robert or Bob, but as “Roy,” a childhood nickname unknown in that country. His father had never lived there. Even more striking to Robert, the voice came through in his father’s Scottish accent — an accent Robert himself had largely lost after leaving Scotland at around age five.

Whether a reader accepts any of this or not, Robert presents these details as central to why he stopped treating the earlier event as a dream or hallucination.

What his father told him

Robert says what interested him most was not merely that his father appeared to come through, but what his father actually said.

His father referred to the accident that killed him by tapping his head and saying he had no more pain. When Robert asked where he was — whether he was in heaven — his father smiled and answered in a way that became foundational to Robert’s later beliefs.

“Son, you are going to be amazed when you come over here.”

According to Robert’s account, his father said that life basically continues on much as before, but without all the complications of a biological body and a physical world.

When Robert asked whether he lived in a house, his father answered yes — a pretty little house with flowers all around. He also said he was going to school, and that Robert’s mother was there as well, along with “all the old folk.”

For Robert, this suggested not static rest, but ongoing life, learning, development, and relationship.

The teacher, the guide, and what came through later

Robert says that during a private meeting with Richard Zenor, the same figure he had encountered in the original experience came through again. He believed it was the same being because, according to him, the figure referred to the earlier encounter without prompting and said he was the one Robert had met.

The figure asked how much Robert remembered of the experience, including details of his appearance. Robert says he remembered the robe and sandals, and thought there had been a beard. The figure reportedly confirmed that, describing it as a Van Dyke type beard.

More significantly, Robert says the figure told him he had been his spiritual teacher long ago and was still with him, along with other spirit guides.

He also says the figure gave a full name that sounded Middle Eastern, though Robert does not preserve it in the account provided here.

According to Robert, the teacher then said that “they” would be bringing him back again, this time during sleep, to observe the various levels of consciousness — some lower in a spiritual sense, some higher.

His model of the afterlife: levels of consciousness

This is where Robert’s account becomes most developed.

He says that each level is created by the collective minds of the inhabitants. In that sense, judgment is not imposed from outside, but emerges from the character and condition people carry with them.

“We take who we are with us when we die.”

In his framing, if someone exists in a hellish state of mind — selfish, greedy, unkind, angry, hateful, mean-spirited — that person gravitates into a reality with others like themselves. By the same token, those who have cultivated kindness, empathy, compassion, and spiritual calm move into more peaceful states.

He stresses that he does not see this as divine punishment in the usual sense. Rather, it is self-inflicted continuation. One carries inward reality outward.

He also says most people are neither saints nor monsters, and that most will likely find themselves somewhere in between — not at the highest level, but not at the lowest either.

He describes the highest spiritual level he experienced as so beautiful that he knew without a doubt he was not there yet. He was told, as he remembers it, that the experience was given as inspiration — a glimpse of where he and, eventually, everyone else might one day arrive, even if it took many lifetimes.

In that view, reincarnation remains necessary until one reaches a level where no further return is needed.

What he says he observed on the lower levels

Robert says the lower, hellish levels were not pleasant places. On one level, he says even people’s faces appeared distorted, as if reflecting their inner condition.

On another level, he says he observed ordinary-looking people — some priests, another group in prison garb, another group of gay men. He is explicit that, in his view, they were not there because of labels such as being gay, but because of inner character and consciousness.

He says they stood in small groups talking to one another in what felt like a hot, stuffy, unpleasant environment, yet they seemed blissfully unaware that they were on a lower level. He says he was later told that when people on such levels seek a higher path, they rise.

That led him to a broader reflection: perhaps earthly life itself is one of many levels of consciousness, and perhaps what we do to others, we do in another way to ourselves.

The Cherokee test

Robert also describes a later test he devised for Richard Zenor. He brought a piece of paper with a passage copied in Cherokee from a book on American Indian history, along with the English translation.

He says that when his Indian guide came through again — a guide who had previously identified himself as Cherokee — the guide not only repeated what Robert had written in Cherokee, but did so rapidly and in what Robert took to be a more authentic-sounding dialect. He also gave the English translation.

For Robert, that was another layer of confirmation.

Another medium, another description

A year or so later, while on a trip to England, Robert and his wife attended a service led by a spiritualist medium. During the service, the medium looked directly at him and said there was a spirit standing next to him, then described his spirit teacher exactly as Robert said he had seen him during the original experience.

Robert includes that as another external confirmation point, though again he recognizes that skeptics will reach different conclusions.

The philosophy he draws from all of it

Robert says he is not religious in a narrow sense, but he is convinced there is an afterlife. He believes life goes on much as before, minus the problems imposed by the physical body and the physical world.

For that reason, he says he has no fear of death at all. He sees the future as another big adventure.

But that lack of fear does not lead him toward carelessness. Quite the opposite. He says it is important to strive to become a better person, even if one fails at times.

He rejects the notion of sudden enlightenment granted merely because someone claims the right religious identity. In his view, if one is troubled, hateful, negative, or angry, that state continues. If one has cultivated compassion, kindness, empathy, peace, and the habit of helping others, that state continues too.

“We take who we are with us.”

He also says that if he is wrong about the larger metaphysical claims, the practical outcome remains the same:

“Being a good person, never hurting others by word or deed as much as possible, makes for a happier life right here on earth.”

His closing thought is simple and memorable: heaven is neither here nor there — it is within.

Final reflection

Whether a reader accepts every detail in Robert Evans’ account is not the only question this story raises.

There is also the fact of the life itself: acting after 79, writing after 90, songwriting after 92, and continuing to think, reflect, create, and articulate a worldview at 93.

In that sense, his story is not only about an experience near the edge of life. It is about refusing to become passive before the edge arrives.

The deeper lesson may not be whether one agrees with Robert Evans. It may be whether one is still willing to keep living, learning, and creating while there is still time.