This ghost story is a short story but has stuck in my mind and I remember what happened vividly. It happened during a hospital stay when I lived in Fareham, Hampshire, England.

Hospital Ghost.

After the car accident I had in 1990, I spent many months in the hospital undergoing operations, having treatment, recovering and having physiotherapy. It may be difficult to understand how ill I was if you didn't know me then and didn't visit me during my lengthy stay in the hospital, but I was a very lucky man to be alive, and 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 and 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, and I owe them more than I could ever repay them. I was in a large ward recovering with about 7 other people during this time. As people recovered, they would leave the hospital, but I remained, receiving treatment for my injuries. Over time I started to recover and became more aware of things going on and also became friends with many of my long-term nurses, caregivers and tea ladies. So much so that I was given extra support and care. Some nurses would bring me food or visit me on their days off, and they would respond every time I needed something or just wanted a chat.

One evening, I was sleeping for a while, then waking for a while and calling 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, ensuring I was comfortable. Opposite me, they had wheeled in an old man who was soon being released back to his care home. His geriatric ward was full, so he was moved into the intensive care unit I was in for a few days until he went home to make room for more patients to be brought into the geriatric ward.

Sometime in the evening, I woke, and everyone else in the ward was asleep. It was not nighttime but early evening; the lights were on, and I could perfectly see everything in the room. As I looked across at the old man in the bed opposite me, I just knew that he had just died, and as I looked at his body, I could see what I can only describe as a ghost floating slowly out of his body and 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 and 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 and calling for them to come back. As I had started to wake other people in the ward, they came back to see me to quieten me down. I told them that I knew he had died and that I had also seen his ghost or spirit leave his body and float through the ceiling.

By now, I was getting agitated because they didn't believe me, and I had woken the rest of the patients in the ward. They said they would wake him up so I could speak to him to prove that he was alright. The nurse went over to the other man's bed to wake him and to ask him to reassure me he was alright. When she tried to wake him, she quickly realised he was not just sleeping, and she rang an alarm. Doctors and nurses came running in with a crash cart and tried to revive him for quite some time, but they could not. After they had finished trying to revive him and 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 and wouldn't be upset by the site of a body being removed.

The nurses and Doctors both asked me why I had called them to say he had died and asked how I knew. I told them again that I just knew he had died and 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 and couldn't have checked on him and 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", and it was just accepted that I had seen what I had seen and none of the nurses or Doctors ever asked me about it again.