Celebs Who Died And Were Brought Back To Life

Is death final? Not if you're one of these celebs. While a handful of A-listers have been brought back to life thanks to the magic of technology (the Whitney Houston Hologram Tour is a perfect example), there are a select few who have actually been brought back to life. Yes, they've been resurrected.

In 2013, Gizmodo tried to answer the question "How long does your heart have to stop for before you can't be treated?" and found that, although there is no one rule of thumb, brain cells begin to die four to six minutes after blood flow has ceased a.k.a. once your heart has stopped doing its job. Of the seven celebrities we discovered have been brought back from the dead, most fell within that range, but one remarkably surpassed that threshold and lived to tell the tale. While some went knockin' on heaven's door due to drug use, others fell victim to freak accidents, and yet, somehow, they all made it through. It's time to meet the celebs who died and were brought back to life.

Before Nikki Sixx got sober in 2001 and became a passionate recovery advocate, heroin "nearly killed" him. "As a matter of fact, it did," he wrote in a 2017 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "For two minutes in 1987 I was pronounced clinically dead from an overdose." Sixx was partying and "shooting up between snorts of cocaine and shots of booze" at Hollywood's Franklin Plaza Apartments when his heart gave out. "I remember very little," he admitted, "but I know someone called an ambulance."

Newsweek pieced together the timeline, noting it was December 23rd when his dealer injected him with the fatal dose. It took two shots of adrenaline to bring the Motley Crue bassist back to life, but before that, he had an out-of-body experience. Writing about the ordeal in The Dirt, Sixx noted (via Newsweek), "It felt as if something very gentle was grabbing my head and pulling me upward. Above me, everything was bright white," he recalled. "I looked down and realized that I had left my body."

The deadly experience inspired the hit single "Kickstart My Heart," but according to Steven Adler, there were no adrenaline shots. "I dragged him into the shower with a broken hand [...] I put the cold water on [...] and I started slapping him in the face with my cast," he told Australia's Triple M. When paramedics arrived, they "just pumped his chest with their hands and that was it."

It was the early aughts when Slash was partying in San Francisco. All of a sudden, he died. "The night I died was actually a bad ending to a wonderful evening," the legendary guitarist told Louder in 2015. "I had gotten into a massive argument with my fiancée and I thought, 'F*** it, I'm in Frisco,' which is smack heaven, 'I'm going to get loaded,'" he said. "It was fun for a while, then I passed out in the hotel hallway for eight minutes. They told me later that I died."

Sharing more details about that night with The Guardian, Slash remembered "drug dealers came to my hotel room at 5am. They had everything and I took all of it." He later went out into the hallway, asked a maid where the elevator was and "BAM! I collapsed. Little Spanish lady, it freaked her out," he quipped. As the Guns n' Roses alum told BBC Radio 5, "I remember blacking out and then I remember there's a thing that happens when paramedics wake you up out of a deep death thing like that where it's just, like, this huge shock of energy and lights and voices ... it's an unmistakable feeling."

What happened next? "I came round in the hospital and checked myself out because we had a show the next night," he told Louder, joking, "I guess that puts Axl not getting up on stage into perspective."

In June 2014, Tracy Morgan was involved in a major road accident that left him in critical condition when a tractor-trailer rammed into the back of his limo bus, "forcing" it to "rotate and overturn," as reported by CNN. Three other passengers who were in the vehicle with Morgan were also taken to hospital and the SNL comic's longtime friend, fellow comedian and writer James McNair lost his life. According to the Washington Post, Morgan had a broken leg, nose, and ribs and was in a coma for two weeks. Once he came to, he couldn't remember the crash and was suffering from "memory trouble," as well as frequent headaches and nosebleeds.

Morgan eventually made a triumphant return to Saturday Night Live in October 2015 and, as he told Complex that November, was working hard to get back to normalcy. It was then that he revealed he died while in hospital. "You're never going to be normal after you go through something like that," he began. "You don't die for a few weeks and then come back to normal, trust me," he said, claiming, "I went to the other side. This is not something I'm making up," he reassured. "Do you know what God said to me? He said, 'Your room ain't ready. I still got something for you to do.' And here I am, doing an interview with you," he concluded.

While most rock stars on this list experienced death due to drugs, Josh Homme was having surgery on his leg in 2010 when complications arose. As he told NME, "I died on the table." Although the Queens Of The Stone Age founder kept quiet about the ordeal for a long time, he eventually revealed on the WTF podcast (via SPIN) that he had contracted MRSA, which he called "an antibiotic-resistant staph," and "couldn't shake it because my immune system was so destroyed. People die of that all the time," he explained... and so did he.

It happened as doctors were trying to put an oxygen tube down his throat and, as he described it, "there was no 'tunnel,'" so he "kind of choked to death." Although doctors brought him back and completed the surgery, when he woke up, Homme "knew something was wrong. I've always heard music in my head since I was a little kid," he explained, "and when I woke up this time, I heard nothing for a couple of years."

Today, he's thankful for the experience. As he revealed on the podcast (via Rolling Stone), being bedridden changed his life for the better. "I was stuck in a room for four months and I had all these tubes in my leg," he admitted, but "it did the greatest thing it could ever do to me ... I'm really thankful for it because I know what's important," he said.

Ozzy Osbourne has experienced more crazy moments in his life than any other celebrity (like when he bit off a bat's head during a concert in 1982), but the wildest was when he died in an ATV accident in 2003, then came back to life.

Sharon Osbourne recalled the ordeal to the Daily Mirror (via CNN), revealing, "[Ozzy] had stopped breathing for a minute and a half and there was no pulse." The moment was caught on-camera by the MTV crew filming The Osbournes and shows Ozzy lying next to his ATV after riding across the fields of his British country estate. As Sharon later told reporters (via E! News), Ozzy "was on his quad bike and he hit something, and he fell and the bike landed on top of him." Luckily, a security guard was close by and it's thanks to him that the legendary rocker survived. "Thank God the security guard was there to revive him," Sharon told the Mirror. "He resuscitated him and got him breathing and his pulse going again."

According to E! News, Ozzy was rushed to the hospital and treated for "six broken ribs, a fractured collarbone and a broken vertebra in his neck." He also underwent emergency surgery to "lift his collarbone in order to restore blood flow to a major artery and alleviate bleeding in the lungs" and was placed on a ventilator post-op. He eventually made a full recovery.

It was July 13, 1996, when after a show in Dallas, Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo injected himself with heroin and "died for four to five minutes." The singer recalled the ordeal in an official press release (via Exclaim) that followed his resurrection, writing, "There were no lights, no beautiful music, just nothing ... After 20 minutes (from what I heard later) my friends slapped me and poured water over my head." After that, "the paramedics finally arrived and all I remember is waking up in the back of an ambulance."

It took an adrenaline shot to save him, but as he told MTV at the time, "It didn't really shake me up. I overdosed and killed myself for about four minutes and I think it shook everybody else up," he proclaimed, admitting, "I was in bliss, actually. I was gone. Don't remember anything." Noting that he felt "embarrassed," he vowed to never touch drugs again and assured that he had "truly learned from my mistakes."

Speaking with Andivero in 2018, he proclaimed, "I have died before, there's no faking death." Asked if he remembers anything from his brush with death, he said, "If you can imagine how you felt before you were born, it was that level of insignificance and impossibility, so I stand hard by my anti-theist views." Unfortunately, Anselmo has continued to battle addiction over the years, but in September 2018, he celebrated nine months of sobriety.

The founder and frontman of industrial metal band Ministry, Al Jourgensen, is in a league of his own. Jourgensen, who battled with heroin addiction for nearly two decades, told Loudwire in 2013 that he's been legally dead more times than he can remember. "Three. That I know for sure," he said, revealing that Jon Wiederhorn, who penned his biography, "did research at the hospitals and got actual reports from the emergency rooms and things. There's been three times where I've been dead," he continued, explaining, "One of them I truly recognized as a life-changing kind of spiritual thing where you know there's an afterlife. The other two, I think I was just too f***** up to know I was dead."

In the end, however, it wasn't dying that motivated him to get clean — but an arachnid. As he told Louder, "I was sleeping on some heroin dealer's couch, clinging onto the one last guitar that I hadn't pawned yet, and I got this spider bite. The doctor wanted to take my f***ing arm off," he recalled. "I was at death's door [...] I had a $500 a day habit, I'd gone through all my savings and pawned off all but one of my guitars. I'd hit rock bottom." So he decided to turn things around. "A light bulb went on over my head and it all made sense: s*** now or get off the pot. If you want to die, die today," he concluded.