NHS calls in exorcist

[scorpiogirly]

That's correct.

An exorcist has been called in by the NHS to a hospice because of many paranormal incidents and sightings of the ghost of a girl in a red dress, witnessed by staff and also patients.

You'd think there has to be something in this right? And if not, what on earth could be going on?

True.

My house is 150 years old. Not had anything spooky happen.

Have never worked at a hospice (and I've worked at a lot) which the nurses didn't think was haunted. Perfectly normal part of the job.

Am going to have to phone a friend about this - especially as the hospice in question was completely rebuilt on a new site a couple of years ago so why is the article out now?

There’s a man who wanders called Archie who tends to visit those who are just about to pass. There’s also stories of a women walking the link corridors and a wee boy in the basement. It’s a creepy old building with a lot of history

Mass hysteria assuaged by an astute manager.

A good ghost story always livens work up a bit.. I think there's been stories in every place I've worked.

I remember an episode of Life Of Grime where a council called in some people to clear a house of spirits. Their tenant had phoned them to report it.

@BundleOfChimneys there’s also a story of a doctor running towards a cardiac arrest and he’s stopped by a man asking for directions out of the hospital. The doctor gives the directions and keeps running only to find his patient has passed but he recognises him as the man he just gave directions to!

not sure how true this is or where it originated but it’s told often on a night shift 😆

My dad was a vicar and he was asked to go to a hospital where there were lots of sightings of a male nurse who had died there.
I asked if he believed there was a ghost and he said he believed that they thought there was a ghost.

Very often church deliverance services are free of charge - so this is highly unlikely to be wasting NHS money. It's something that the Chaplain has arranged in tandem with management to help assuage staff discomfort.

I’ve worked in a similar environment (old burns ward for adults, then children’s cancer ward) and saw and heard many strange things.

I'm pretty sure that I saw a ghost once many years ago, staying in my DH's flat at the time.

I was tossing and turning in bed, and very restless as I had a business trip abroad the next day.

I remember turning over in bed, feeling very awake and suddenly seeing a woman laying asleep next to me, under the duvet, wearing what I can only describe as a kind of headband that a 1920s flapper girl might wear.

At this point, I have to say that I was terrified about it, and sat bolt upright in bed. She stayed there, asleep, laying under the covers, while I think I had a mini heart attack and tried to convince myself I was dreaming or hallucinating or something 😳😅

I then hid under the duvet like a frightened little girl, absolutely scared witless.

So I guess you can say that I am half convinced about ghosts, but I still hope it was just a dream like state of being half awake😑😅

My degree is in physics, so I should be a sceptic, but I've watched too many water board engineers, totally unable to locate pipework off plans resort to divination using a couple of bent metal rods and promptly finding what hours of conventional searching failed to do, to dismiss the paranormal out of hand.

There are loads of potential scenarios with ghosts, including mass hysteria, conditioning, our ability to make human figures out of patters, particularly in the darkness (linked to our hunter gatherer evolution)

Or is there more to it? bearing in mind that not much over 120 years ago we had no knowledge of radiation, and certainly no way to measure it - could there be another, unknown energy force, quite possibly.

Same with Barming Hospital (fun fact: it was the reason we have the word 'barmy'). Was a horrible old institution, one of the last places to have padded cells, and there was an 'apple shed' where particularly unruly disturbed people were taken. All redeveloped into luxury apartments. It must have such bad juju, I couldnt live there!

The power of suggestion is a wonderful thing.

Also the way our brains work isn't perfect by any stretch. If we see something and we can't quite make it out, our brain fills in the gaps. If you already have data related to your whereabouts stored in the old memory chip then your brain will use that data rather than expend energy making something else up which will cost more energy.

So if there's an urban legend of a girl in a red dress, and you don't quite believe it, but you see something out of the corner of your eye or down a poorly lit hallway, and your brain is thinking what the heck is that, it will search for relevant information and use that to fill in the parts your eyes can't quite make out.

You're quite vulnerable to this if you're already in cognitive decline, as some patients may be, but even if you're just a tired, over worked, over stretched NHS worker your brain might lay waste to the cognitive load of processing what you're actually seeing and just fill in the gaps with what it thinks you're seeing.

Not an Exorcism, a simple blessing… it even says that in the article.

Highly unlikely they’d all hallucinate the same thing.

Lol of course it doesn't.

But "Stop blithering on about ghosts and trying to panic the rest of the staff Barbara", probably didn't work.

So they have to be 'seen' to be 'doing something', in the hope the overexcited, will finally shut the fuck up about 'ghosts' and stop scaring everyone else into believing it.

Someone get Danny Robbins on the case!

I need some stories!

Details please!

I thought exorcisms were a catholic thing.

Yeah, the equivalent is a deliverance minister in the COE I believe.

It says nothing except that some people who used to work in a hospital are superstitious.

Exorcists are the kind of Catholic thing believed in by non-Catholics who have watched too many horror films. In reality, not so much.

Do we know that there is a fee?