816. The different general kinds of hatred and vengefulness are beyond counting, the specific kinds still more so, and the hell for one kind is not the same as the hell for another. So it is impossible to list each in order. For this reason, let me simply report on some examples I have seen.

One spirit who seemed to be a noble came to me. (Spirits have appeared to me as if in clear daylight, and even more clearly than that, but to my inner eye, since the Lord in his divine mercy has let me interact with them.) As soon as he arrived, he pretended, by sly nodding, to show that he had many things he wanted to share with me, asking whether I was a Christian. I answered yes. He said he was, too, and asked to be alone with me so that he could tell me something privately. "In this life," I answered, "no one can be alone, the way people on earth think they can. Many other spirits are close by."

He came nearer anyway, stealing up from behind to the back of my head. I could then tell that he was an assassin. While he was there I felt a stab to the heart and then to the brain — the kind a person could easily die from. But because the Lord was keeping me safe, I was unafraid. What trick he was using I cannot say.

Thinking I was dead, he told some other spirits that he had just come from a murder victim of his, one to whom he had dealt a fatal blow from behind. He claimed a skill at keeping people from knowing what was happening until they fell dead, and from suspecting he was anything but innocent. From this I could tell that he had recently departed life, where he had committed the same kind of crime.

The punishment of such spirits is horrible. After enduring ages of hellish torment, they end up with faces so loathsome, so shockingly deformed, that they are not faces but almost like flax, drained of all color. In other words, these spirits strip themselves of everything human; then everyone who sees them shudders at the sight. Consequently they wander in the shadows like wild animals.

1260. Certain spirits overhead at the time, who are quite up-right, were wanting to pass judgment on him, but were not able because they did not know what he was like.

But it was then disclosed what he was like. He was let down into the lower earth, a little in front of the right foot, quite deeply. There he dug a ditch, like those burying dead people do to throw the dead into. So at once the suspicion arose that he had committed some lethal act in his lifetime.

Then a funeral bier appeared, covered with black cloth. The person placed on it did not show, but shortly afterwards, one arising from the bier came toward me, telling me earnestly that he had died, and judged that he had been killed with poison by that person. He had been with him in the evening and drunk wine, and as soon as he had arrived home, he labored with a deadly illness, and thought he had drunk poison there.

He explained that he had thought this at about the hour of death, yet not knowing whether it was just a suspicion. Speaking quite earnestly, he said that he had been a person of low condition, and that if the other person had done it, then he must have done it so as to try out the poison, with which he perhaps wanted to kill others. So he said nothing bad about him, but was content at being dead, because if he had lived longer, he probably would have committed more sins.