This ghost story is a short story but has stuck in my mind & I remember what happened vividly. It happened during one of my hospital stays when I lived in Fareham, Hampshire, England.
Hospital Ghost.
After the car accident I had in 1990 I spent many months in hospital having operations, having treatment, recovering & having physiotherapy. It may be difficult to understand how ill I was if you didn't know me then & didn't visit me during my lengthy stay in the hospital but I was a very lucky man to be alive & I am even more lucky to be as well as I am now.
I had been pronounced dead on three separate occasions, my parents were told that I would be paralysed from the neck down & that if I did live I would be like a vegetable because of the brain damage I had suffered. During my long stay in the hospital, my family were always with me & I owe them more than I could ever repay them. During this time I was in a large ward recovering with about 7 other people. As people recovered they would leave the hospital but I remained, receiving treatment for my injuries & over a period of time I started to recover & became more aware of things going on & also became friends with many of my long-term nurses, caregivers & tea ladies. So much so that I was given a bit of extra support & care, some of the nurses would bring me food or visit me on their days off & they would respond every time I needed something or just wanted a chat.
One evening I was sleeping for a bit then waking for a while & I would call a nurse in from the nurse's station outside the room, just to talk to me. They would talk to me for a while whilst they had a break or until I fell asleep again, all the time making sure I was comfortable. Opposite me, they had wheeled in an old man who was being released back to his care home soon. The geriatric ward he was in was full so he had been moved into the intensive care unit I was in, for a few days until he went home, just to make room for more patients to be brought into the geriatric ward.
Sometime in the evening, I woke & everyone else in the ward was asleep, it was not nighttime but early evening, the lights were on & I could see everything in the room perfectly. As I looked across at the old man in the bed opposite me I just knew that he had just died & as I looked at his body I could see what I can only describe as a ghost, floating slowly out of his body & up through the ceiling.
I rang my emergency bell to call the nurses to him. They came in to see what was the matter with me but when I told them that the man had died they told me that he was asleep & to be quiet or I would wake everyone else up. I kept insisting that he had just died as they went back to the nurse's station outside. I kept ringing my emergency bell & calling for them to come back. To quieten me down, as I had started to wake other people in the ward, they came back to see me. I told them that I knew he had died & that I had also seen his ghost or spirit leave his body & float through the ceiling.
By now I was getting agitated because they didn't believe me & I had woken the rest of the patients in the ward. To prove to me that he was alright they said they would wake him up so I could speak to him. The nurse went over to the other man's bed to wake him & to ask him to reassure me he was alright. When she tried to wake him she quickly realised he was not just sleeping & she rang an alarm. Doctors & nurses came running in with a crash cart & tried to revive him for quite some time but they could not. After they had finished trying to revive him & he was pronounced dead, the curtains around his bed were pulled around so that his body could not be seen. His body remained there until quite late at night when porters removed it after people visiting other relatives in other wards had left & wouldn't be upset by the site of a body being removed.
The nurses & Doctors both asked me why I had called them to say he had died & asked how I knew. I told them again that I just knew he had died & that I had seen his ghost or spirit leave his body. No one believed my story but no one could explain how I knew he had died. I was still bed-bound & couldn't have checked on him & he passed quietly in his sleep so there was no outward sign that he had died until the nurse checked on him.
Most of the nurses knew about my "out of body, death experience" & it was just accepted that I had seen what I had seen & none of the nurses or Doctors ever asked me about it again.