Hospital Ghosts

See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/river-ghost.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/10/real-ghost-train.html

I’ve had another peculiar experience that might come under the category of ghostly, in the same sense as the two background articles above. This happened at work, the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. I was on a Friday late shift, February the 18th, and it was about 6.30PM. I was tired because it had been a busy spell in the Accident & Emergency department and I was also slightly drowsy from a disturbed sleep the previous night. I entered the inpatient X-Ray reception area, which was closed at this hour, and sat down in one of the waiting chairs to relax for a moment. Then I saw behind the reception desk a sudden bright explosion of light, like a camera flash bulb going off. This was accompanied by a hissing, cracking sound. I jumped up and moved over to the desk, which you can see in the photo above. It looked normal; there was nothing I could see that explained what I’d just perceived. The following Monday I asked one of the receptionists who regularly man that desk if they’d noticed anything unusual there and they said no.

There are a lot of myths about ghosts. One is that they only appear at night. Not at all, ghosts can appear 24/7 and there are some very significant daylight sightings reported, including a famous encounter in a lift with a full-body, solid, speaking, dead President of Finland! Another contradiction to popular belief is that ghosts are not always identifiable as deceased people. Ghosts of living people are sometimes seen, known as “Doppelgangers” (I’ve got an interesting story to tell you about that in a moment, bear with me!). They often appear in completely unrecognizable forms or as amorphous clouds of vapour or blobs. Another falsehood is that ghosts are best sought after in graveyards; not true. One can certainly go ghost-hunting is cemeteries if you want, but these places are not the most likely place to be haunted. Ghost sightings seem to occur mostly in places linked to human suffering, especially people who’ve died by violent and/or painful deaths. Murder scenes are often reported as haunted, or houses where a depressed person committed suicide. Battlefields are another common ghost location; but from what I can gather, the absolute number 1 place to find ghosts is in hospitals. This is fortunate for me because I spend 40 hours every week inside one.

I think before I go on any further I should make it clear by what I mean when I write down the word “ghost”. This term has been used to describe what I reckon could be a number of very different phenomena. Ghosts also appear in the traditions of all cultures across the world. So what is a ghost? The popular conception is that on occasions when a person dies some remnant of their presence remains behind in this world, like a shadow, imprint or afterglow which causes the ghost effect. This might well be what some ghosts are, but not all of them fit into this category by any means. Ghosts sometimes simply appear as “recordings” of past events. A witness might be walking down a modern street in London and see a column of Roman soldiers march past. These soldiers will be oblivious to the surroundings of the witness. Some of these kinds of apparitions are “insies” rather than “outsies”, in which the witness will see the troops marching and look around to suddenly find themselves on an old Roman street with the buildings and people transformed. As with the “outsie” sighting, the people in the vision will usually not react to the presence of the witness, indicating that they can't see them. This kind of ghost is something very different. It’s as if the witness' mind flips into a state of consciousness where it can perceive events long past in the area its senses are observing. This might be what I experienced when I saw phantom horses in a local park near my home. This happened in January 1989. I was sitting in the rec of the park at about 6AM waiting to meet my then-girlfriend Jenny who used to go jogging in the early morning (Believe me nothing else would get me up at that time to go jogging on a cold winter’s morning!). Then I saw 3 horses walking calmly nose-to-tail out from the darkness behind me. They looked strange, kind of transparent like chalk engravings. They walked out of the park gates and off down a road. Jenny was walking up the road at the time and saw them too, but she was much more disturbed than I was and refused to talk about the incident. A week later she terminated our relationship. Another kind of ghost sighting is when one sees something that does not fit in with any known individual or occurrence in this world at all. This could be because they’re related to events of which no living person has any knowledge, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. Another kind of ghost is when a recognizable person appears in the exact same form as they did when alive, with a solid-looking body and normal voice. This is what took place with the sighting of the President of Finland. In this case the apparition looked exactly as he had when alive. He was able to speak in his usual voice and was capable of touching things, like the lift buttons… and yet he had died previously! (Janet and Colin Bord Modern Mysteries of The World). So we’re dealing with an entire syndrome of phenomena that might have little or no relation to each other. Ghosts are not all “dead people”.

The problem with ghost-like phenomena is that if you want to study them in a proper manner then it’s extremely difficult. Very few universities take the subject seriously. It’s regarded as a “fringe science” or even a pseudoscience. There are only a small number of academic institutions in the world who have departments which will pay for you to investigate ghosts. Even parapsychology faculties like the Arthur Koestler Unit in Edinburgh, which studied my mother for her precognitive abilities (See: http://www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/index.html), don’t really go there. A scientist may be unwilling to take on studies into ghosts because of the significant peer-pressure scientists live under. Mainstream scientists seem to have a very nasty streak in them towards other scientists who have unconventional ideas and interests. The late John Mack relates the emotional trauma he suffered when former friends and colleagues disowned him simply because he thought, and expressed the thought, that alien abductions were scientifically real. Therefore it’s privately-funded, amateur organizations and individuals who do most of the work in this field. In one sense those who reject ghost-hunting as a proper science have a point; this is because it’s so difficult to gather data from these phenomena. Most sightings are eyewitness testimony only. Occasionally, as in the case of my horses sighting, more than one person will see the same ghost, ruling out hallucination to most researchers. There are many films and photographs of ghostly activity but these are almost always denounced as fakes by academia; sadly in this day and age with Photoshop it’s hard to prove the academics wrong on that. One useful alternative is to record environmental changes with specialized instruments; you can purchase toolkits with these instruments from magazines like Paranormal, see: http://paranormalmagazine.co.uk/ , and any serious ghost-hunter would need one of these. (My friend Brian Allan, see the HPANWO Links column, now writes for this magazine) Sadly ghost investigation has been given a bad name recently by a number of very popular but highly sensationalistic TV shows that use stagecraft and fictionalization to produce bogus ghost phenomena. This has led to an explosion of “paranormal tourism” in which groups of young people visit haunted locations for entertainment purposes, often misleading the house’s residents into thinking that they are serious researchers, taking advantage of the lack of regulation in this practice. “Never be tempted to fake anything!” said another friend of mine, a well-known supernatural researcher, when I last spoke to him a few weeks ago. Some investigators do fake data, not because they never really experience genuine ghostly events, but in order to boost their profile after a run of unsuccessful studies. They justify it to themselves with platitudes like: “I’m only going to do it just this once. Just one little fake ghost to get my research grant; after that I’ll never fake anything again, I promise!” My friend said that we must never ever let ourselves fall into this trap; it’s simply not worth it. We must be totally honest in our conduct or else we’ll taint our own careers and ghost-investigation in general for years to come, with its existing rather shaky public image; researchers faking results is exactly what the debunkers love! Let’s not play into their hands. The frustration of this kind of research is what generates this dilemma because real evidence is so tenuous and exclusive. I also feel as if we’re being tantalized as well, because all the most striking events will inevitably occur when it’s not possible to prove them. I myself have seen, along with the horses, an image of Ustane’s father on a train, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/10/real-ghost-train.html . I’ve been in a car that was paced by a cloud of sand-like substance, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-trip-to-haunted-house.html , I’ve seen a “cut-out” apparition by the River Thames, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/river-ghost.html and several other incidents... But it was when there was no way I could prove them! If there had been a way to prove them then maybe they wouldn’t have occurred in the first place. The great South African paranormal researcher Lyall Watson, who died in 2008, came up with a theory which he christened “The Cosmic Nanny”. He believed that there is some kind of overseer to all supernatural phenomena that doesn’t want humanity to ever know, with absolute certainty, that they are scientifically real. In his books Watson relates his frustration that many times a decisive piece of evidence goes missing or instruments fail at crucial moments. He always recommends posting such data in Special Delivery mail so that at least when it gets lost, as it invariably will, you can make a bit of cash in compensation! It's as if the phenomena themselves don't want to be proved. The cryptozoologist Jonathan Downes (See the Centre for Fortean Zoologogy in the HPANWO Links column) also relates what he calls “The Psychic Backlash”. He found that when he investigated ghostly incidents he was struck down by a run of serious misfortune: ill health, the death of both of his cats, the breaking down of his car and other things. I think Watson’s and Downes’ experiences are related.

Anyway, back to hospitals. I once saw an intriguing interview with an American doctor called Mitchell Gibson. The interview is no longer available online but here’s another one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EvJs6VKPT8 . Dr Gibson, the black man in the photo above, was a doctor at a hospital in Philadelphia, but his psychic abilities allowed him to see the ghosts of patients who’d died wandering the corridors of the hospital. This led him into the field of the noetic sciences and spiritual research. Presumably if the patients’ ghosts were wandering the corridors of Gibson’s hospital then they must also wander the corridors of the John Radcliffe, only I usually can’t see them. Is there any way I could? Well to carry out an official ghost investigation I’d need permission from the hospital’s management and I doubt if they would entertain such an endeavour. The study would inevitably involve using the working areas of the hospital which are highly restricted. However there’s no reason why I can’t make efforts to discover ghostly goings on unofficially and privately during my periods on duty. I’ve written several times about electrosmog; mobile phone masts, HAARP etc. One of the theories connected to electrosmog is that it is designed by the Illuminati to suppress the increasing ability of humans to perceive things through the sixth sense as the energies of the world change as we approach December 2012. As I have said on many occasions, the Illuminati know that the Supernatural is real; they just don’t want us to know that. The theory is that the HAARP and mobile phone masts are how they maintain that secret. I’m not sure if I agree with that or not, but supposing it is true; how would we overcome this blindfolding of our spiritual eyes? It would be to go somewhere where there is no electrosmog. Unfortunately nowadays there is no place on the entire surface of the Earth which is not contaminated to some degree by electromagnetic poisoning; HAARP affects the entire world from its transmitters in the north polar regions of the planet. However, there are locations where electrosmog cannot reach. One is underground. It’s true that HAARP's ELF- Extremely Low Frequency, transmissions can penetrate a certain way into the ground and ocean, in fact one of its publically-acknowledged purposes is to communicate with submarines; however this is limited in the ocean to a few hundred feet and underground, which is many times denser, the range is probably much less. Underground is one possibility; in fact scientists searching for illusive subatomic particles have to set up laboratories down deep mines: to eliminate electronic noise, because nowhere else is radiologically pristine. The Homestake Experiment to detect neutrinos for the core of the sun was done in a deep gold mine for this reason. But a thought occurred to me just a few days ago that you don’t have to go underground to find somewhere where electrical noise can’t reach you. There are certain places that are “radio-shielded”; these are spaces surrounded by a layer of heavy metal, usually lead, to prevent radiation from passing through. Usually this is because the space contains a source of dangerous radiation that its users don’t want to get out, like a nuclear reactor or radiotherapy head, but when that source is switched off the interior of the space becomes a place where radiation from outside can’t get in, because the shielding is two-way. Luckily hospitals contain several such places: X-ray chambers. These have a thick layer of lead shielding built into the walls, ceiling and sometimes the floor in there are rooms beneath it. The doors are shielded too and I know because they’re extremely heavy to open and shut. I was trying to call one of my Brother or Sister Porters the other day in one of these chambers on the walkie-talkie radios we use to communicate and I couldn’t get a signal at all. I wonder if maybe I should keep an extra special eye out for incidents of high strangeness when I’m working in these areas. It’s a shame I can’t enter the radiotherapy chamber at the nearby Churchill Hospital as this has even thicker lead shielding because the radiation levels inside get much higher than those used in radiography. My hypothesis is that being in a radio-neutral environment will enhance a person’s psychic abilities. We’ll see what happens.

So far all the ghost stories at my hospital have occurred outside the X-ray rooms. There are several I’ve heard, but two in particular are very convincing. One took place in the A&E Department about two years ago. There’s a side ward to the department that’s called the EAU, Emergency Assessment Unit. This is where we keep patients who’ve been in A&E for long periods. One evening at about 7PM a nurse ran out of the area screaming with fear. She’d seen a ghostly apparition in there while looking after the patients. I came on duty at 10PM and a few people were still talking about it. The sighting had taken place at the same time that an attempted resuscitation was going on in the Resus room; could this be a Mitchell Gibson-type experience? The second significant incident occurred at night on a temporary corridor linking the main hospital the Trauma Unit. A nurse who serves in the West Wing Operating Theatres was walking along it when a humanoid phantom walked straight into the corridor through one wall and crossed perpendicularly out through the other wall. Understandably the witness fled the scene and reported her encounter to her colleagues. I’ve managed to track down the witness to the first event, but the second incident is still an ongoing study; I’ll keep you posted as much as possible.

I spoke above of how some people see ghosts of living people; well it has been reported that my own Doppelganger, a German word that literally means: “your walking double”, has been sighted. One of my Extremely Proud and Dignified Brother Porters told me that he saw a man in Oxford city centre who looked exactly like me, not just a slight resemblance; he actually looked just like me in every detail. There are a number of possibilities: maybe he actually saw the real me. No, I was definitely not in the area at the time this sighting took place. Also this person was dressed in a very smart suit and carrying a briefcase; anybody who knows me would never expect me to wear such a Conformist attire! It could of course be another person who looks just like me; they say everybody has a double, and indeed I’ve been compared in physiogmany to both William Hague and Al Murray- the Pub Landord. However my Brother Porter saw this person up close and swears that he was exactly like me; my Brother Porter almost went up and greeted the alleged Doppelganger. There are many disturbing urban legends associated with Doppelganger sightings, legends that inspire a plethora of horror films including the 1970 classic chiller The Man Who Haunted Himself, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066053/ . One of the legends associated with a Doppelganger is that its presence is a portent of the individual’s own death. This doesn’t scare me one bit, as such omens like this tend to be dramatic hearsay and meaningless in the course of real events. I’m in good health right now and not planning to do anything dangerous so I’ve every reason to hope that I’ll be around for many years to come! Don’t worry.

I had another experience in 1996 that was very influential in my views on what some ghosts are. It was the depths of the night, what Roald Dahl called “the Witching Hour”. I awoke suddenly from a shallow sleep to find that there was a small boy kneeling on my bedroom floor a few feet from my bed. He wasn’t solid, in fact he was translucent in appearance like those horses; I described him at the time as looking as if he were made of smoke, but smoke which kept its shape. He was about 4 feet tall, the size of a 5 or 6 year old. He was kneeling up, facing the bed with his hands clasped in front of his face as if saying his prayers. I stared at him for a number of seconds, then he slowly levitated into the air and drifted away. He began to fade away, but as he did so he turned and looked at me and our eyes met. Then he vanished completely. As I’ve said above this experience is impossible to prove; it could be a hypnopompic effect, this is where dreams continue for a short time after you wake up, but it’s something that I’ve never seen before or since; what if it was real? I’ve come to the conclusion that some ghostly phenomena are actually “bleed-overs” of events from parallel universes. I’ve written about parallel universes before and even serious scientists are taking the idea seriously with their “M-Theory”, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7SDrj4Tjvk . This idea is also the background to the excellent and worryingly feasible horror movie The Mist, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/11/mist.html and also one of my favourite books, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/02/northern-lights.html . What if two universes, with a similar physical makeup, ended up touching each other on their movement through the hyperspace medium? The result might be similar to those strange instances when your TV set (In the pre-digital era, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/12/digital-tv.html) goes out of tune and picks up two channels at the same time. You get an unearthly blend of two separate pictures and soundtracks on the same screen. Usually one is more distinct and the other is fuzzy and tenuous. Maybe this is what I saw in my bedroom in 1996. I wonder who the little boy was and what his world is like. Does it look very like ours or is it totally different? To me he appeared very and formless; made of smoke as I said, but perhaps that how I looked to him.

Finally, here’s an article and video about other hospital ghostly goings on. See: http://www.angelsghosts.com/hospital_ghost_stories
And: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMk3kh-URHQ

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