The Demons In The Hospitals
Regardless of where man kind's many civilizations and religions originated, there is a prevailing notion that death is not the end for us. The belief in some form of afterlife is almost universally accepted amongst the cultures of this world. In almost every religion, there are theoretical realms which mirror the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell, with morality being the arbiter of our final destination, all dependent on how we elect to live our lives. And contained within those two opposing kingdoms, there are escorts and emissaries waiting to usher the deceased onwards into the spirit world.
Counterbalancing the depiction of angelic beings, there are writings and drawings of far more malevolent entities. Dark creatures dispatched by their masters to lay claim to the souls of those who have been selected to continue their existence in a place of purgatory and punishments. There exist countless reports regarding the actions of such entities. Testimonies from those who claim to have survived attempts to remove them from the living world, from witnesses involved in near-death experiences, or others who have been present during the passing of those dearest to them. And if such accounts are to be believed, regardless of your own personal interpretation of heaven and hell, it is clear that these beings are utterly indifferent to our wishes and desires. Be they evil in nature or mere servants to the instruction of a higher power, they will inevitably achieve their goal.
Commonalities in the physical description of such beings across the ages make for troubling reading, adding credence to the arguments that they have always moved amongst us, claiming our loved ones. Features such as glowing red eyes, horns, and jet black skin seem too recurring across the various cultures to be mere coincidence. And nowhere else such stories are more prevalent than inside the corridors and side rooms of countless hospitals located around the globe, where so many people find themselves in a kind of limbo when they are at their weakest and most vulnerable. Sometimes, receiving a visitor who is both unexpected and most definitely unwanted.
Martin Kirk's near death experience
In late 2019, a British man in his late 60s named Martin Kirk was admitted to a hospital in Staffordshire for heart surgery. Obviously, due to the nature of the operation, he was required to remain in hospital as an inpatient for several days after the procedure, so that the doctors could monitor his recovery. On the first night after the surgery had been completed, Martin awoke in his hospital bed, dazed, confused and in quite a lot of pain.
It took a few minutes to get his bearings and remember exactly where he was. Although it was dark, he had an overwhelming sense that someone else was with him in the small room, and for some reason did not feel safe or comfortable with that presence. So vivid was this feeling, that he reached across with heavy arm and fumbled with the switches next to his head, until he found the one that turned on the bedside lamps. In the dim light, he began to see movement in the shadows being cast against a nearby wall. At the very edge of these shadows, there was a strange shimmering as if something was shifting around within them. The more Martin stared in bewilderment, the more intense this movement became till something began to stake out from it onto the wall.
Martin is still feeling the effects of his anesthesia, found it difficult to move, but seeing this strange phenomenon redoubled his efforts to find the emergency button. As he pressed it, the shadow immediately retreated and a nurse arrived shortly afterwards. She was understanding what he had seen and made a show of searching the area he had indicated. When she found nothing, she left him with some words of reassurance stating that he had been heavily sedated and that this could sometimes cause hallucinations.
Despite his overwhelming anxiety, the surgery had taken its toll and he couldn't help falling back to sleep. Later that evening, he was awoken by faint ticking sensation on the calf of his right leg. Opening his eyes, he was horrified to see a jet black hand, snaking up from underneath the bed and touching his leg with its slender and clawed fingers. Screaming in terror, Martin kicked weakly at the appendage, which promptly retracted. With a great and painful effort, he managed to shuffle himself up into a sitting position and called the nurse in once again. She left after telling him that there was nothing under the bed and that it was probably just a bad dream, but he was so haunted by this experience that he remained awake for the rest of the night, only allowing himself to sleep when daylight came.
The following evening, terrified of what the darkness would bring, Martin tried to stay awake. But such was the trauma of surgery and the fogginess of pain numbing medication that he inevitably fell asleep. When he awoke sometime later, he found himself in complete darkness, but again, he felt someone was nearby. Locking over to the corner of the room, he
saw what looked like a pair of red eyes staring at him. As his sight adjusted, he soon saw the outline of a figure standing there. He could not make out any features, other than the red eyes, which remained focused upon him.
Suddenly, he felt restricted. Looking down, he could see several pairs of deformed hands coming up from under the bed, grabbing at his limbs. He could feel their coldness through his bedsheets. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, straining under the effort as he squirmed to free himself, until finally, he felt something like a sledgehammer blow to his chest and then everything went black.
When he woke, it was the afternoon of the following day. One of the nurses informed him that his heart had stopped during the night and that they almost lost him. For the rest of his stay, Martin continued to see dark shapes moving around inside his room, but they kept their distance and gradually ceased to visit him. He rarely slept at night, constantly terrified that they might return. As soon as he was well enough, he was discharged and he never saw those shadows again. Martin had never been particularly religious prior to his experience, but has maintained since his stay in hospital, that there is definitely a dark place to which the dead and dying are sometimes taken, and that he worries about what he will see when he takes his final breadth on this earth.
Jessica Martinez's near death experience
A similar story was related by an American woman named Jessica Martinez, who was admitted to hospital in the mid-2000s for a protracted period of essential medical treatment. Unlike Martin, Jessica was placed on a ward with several other patients and as a result of her treatment found it difficult to get any meaningful amount of sleep. As she lay in bed staring at her surroundings, Jessica had suddenly caught sight of an unexpected movement to the far end of the ward. With all the other patients apparently asleep and no medical staff in sight, she was curious as to what this movement might be and peered through the darkness in an effort to identify it. At first, she saw nothing. Then, as she watched on, a slender shape suddenly unfilled itself from the shadows and slowly made its way across the room. It's outline was blurry, but she could see the definite contours of a head, arms and legs as it wandered from one end of the ward to the other.
It was a brief sighting, but she was disturbed by how slowly and deliberately it moved and it was tall, at least 8 feet. Finally, it passed out of the doorway and down the corridor right of sight, leaving a stunned Jessica in a terrified silence.
Nothing else took place that night. But over the coming days, she began to notice more of these shadowy figures moving around the hospital. She would observe them out of the corner of her eye, traveling along the hospital corridors and slipping into rooms through doors that were only open ajar. The doors never moved. They simply slipped through the cracks.
However, the most disturbing aspect of her visions was when she would observe them wander onto the ward and then bend down to whisper in people's ears. The other patients, doctors and nurses apparently couldn't see them, as they didn't react to their presence whatsoever. They never approached Jessica herself or gave any indication that they knew she could see them. One evening, she saw one of these entities bending over the patient opposite, apparently whispering in their ear and within a few seconds. They had cried out and sat up in their bed, as if awaking from a terrible nightmare. The figurehead then casually wandered out into the corridor.
Jessica could only wonder what these beings were whispering to these people, but the thought chilled her to the bone. When she was well enough to leave hospital about a week later, she shared her experiences with her family, who told her that they were most likely just side effects from the pain relief she had been given in the aftermath of her surgery. But she disagreed, saying that apart from some sleep deprivation, she was in full control of her faculties.
The Scotland Hospice demons
Another account involving such entities came from an anonymous nurse working palliative care at a hospice in Scotland. She wrote about her experience in an online nursing forum and was shocked when other nurses also wrote that they had either heard similar stories from their colleagues or experienced such things for themselves.
The author described how an elderly patient had been admitted to her care, who was expected to pass away within the month. It was the nurse's job to ensure that the woman was as comfortable as possible during her final days, but she found that this particular lady spent very little time awake, and instead slept for lengthy periods of time. One morning, the nurse was doing her rounds when she heard a pain scream coming from room 2B in which the new patient had been sleeping. She hurried over and opened the door to find the patient sitting upright in bed, mumbling about a dark shape, which had tried to drag her away.
The nurse calmed and reassured the patient as best she could. But even as she began to relax, she repeated over and over, "Don't let the darkness take me." She sat with the older woman for an hour or so before she fell back into a deep sleep and then left the room. Little did she know that this would be the last time she saw the old woman alive.
Several hours later, she had been sharing a coffee with another nurse, when they were disturbed by the sound of a heart monitor flatlining and being broadcast to them at the nurse's station. It was coming from room 2B. Putting down her mug and hurrying across the corridor, she opened the door to see a dark shape next to the patient's bed. What looked like an arm is reaching down from what she assumed was its torso, with its hand disappearing into the older woman's chest where her heart was situated. The nurse took a step back in shock and then ran forwards out of concern for her patient, at which point the shape promptly dissipated.
Attempts were made to resuscitate the old woman, but unfortunately to no avail. The nurse couldn't quite believe what she had seen as she had entered the room. In her post, she did entertain the idea that it was a momentary visual anomaly, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something else was afoot, given the fact that her patient had mentioned the dark shape prior to her passing. When she spoke to her colleagues about it, some of them confirmed that they had seen similar figures around the hospice and in particular, next to the patient's bed at or at least close to their time of their death. Others on the forum also share this experience, especially those who worked in palliative care.
Conclusion
Much like the assumption made by the family of Jessica Martinez, such experiences are almost universally put down to the effects of medication on the human brain. Such a large amount of drugs like morphine that are injected into patients can cause hallucinations and other emotional side effects. These visions can be caused by a hormone imbalance in the brain, even in milder pain killers, which do not list hallucinations as a possible side effect.
This could go some way to explain why such visions are a regular occurrence within a hospital environment. But how do we explain instances where the staff who are not on any form of medication have also reported seeing these entities? Egyptians believed that these entities targeted specific areas and points within the body.
They believed that they were key parts of the human nervous system designed to combat evil, similar to chakra points or energy intersections. When a person was close to death, it was believed these points became weaker and less functional. And it was at this time that a demon would attack and take control of the person's bodies, shutting it down and then taking their soul. As such ancient Egyptian medicine centered around the various channels which circulated through the human body and efforts were made to keep these channels and energy intersections free from interference, which would otherwise allow an entity to exploit such an obstruction and use it to cause death.
With this in mind, it might come as no surprise that patients of heart surgery, in particular, report seeing these so-called demons more than any other and subscribers to the concept of chakra points would argue that it's because the heart chakra- the body's main energy intersection-has been severely disrupted. It is perhaps interesting that religious belief seems to play a little part in the existence of these proposed entities. Regardless of whether those involved accept the existence of a higher power, encounters with these so-called demon take place across the world. In any case, these demons are no less terrifying to the person seeing them. If they are imagined, it is still an extremely disturbing vision to experience and maybe to investigate why so many people have such similar hallucinations.