My Job At The Hospital

When I was 19 I was studying accountancy at the University of South Africa, part time. I also worked as a bookkeeper for a medical company. Our offices were situated on the premises of a rehabilitation hospital in Auckland Park in Johannesburg. The hospital specialised in rehabilitation ranging from addicts to people learning to use prosthetics after amputations and such. Before that it was an old mining hospital. Our offices were situated in what we believed was the old laundry area of the old hospital.

One of my tasks included supporting the Financial Manager with the monthly reports. This often included working late hours around month end. Sometimes even until 12am. Very often when working these later sessions, I was the only person present. Only occasionally was the manager present.

Our offices were basically one large hall, with dry wall offices built along one side for people like myself, and the department heads, who dealt with confidential information. The rest of the hall was an open-plan work-floor.

Very often when sitting alone at night I would see a shadow pass by my open office door at least once and sometimes twice first moving in one direction and then the other. Sometimes I would even hear footsteps but not all the time. I perceived the shadow, which was often only seen in my peripheral vision in the space above my monitor, to be about the height of a human and shaped like an upside down egg. The shadow was black with a semi transparent aura for want of a better word.

I never felt any fear when I saw this movement and I always felt that the figure was moving purposely and not just randomly passing by. I never felt any temperature changes or any strange feelings that anything at all was out of place. I did experience the same feeling of sensing a presence outside my door when the shadow passed as I would when a colleague passed by.

The first couple of times I even got up and walked to my office door and surveyed the entire open-plan work-floor which was always well lit. I would of course not see anything and I would return to my desk very puzzled but since I felt no fear, I would soon be working again.

I once mentioned these experiences to my manager. I was asking if there was any way that lighting from a car or something could be causing what I thought I saw. She told me that although she did not believe in these things or had seen or felt anything herself, she had also heard similar stories from some of the department heads who also had offices in the same row as mine.

I, of course, went to them as soon as I could and I took heart in hearing that they had seen and felt exactly what I had experienced. One lady, the department head for accounts receivable, had been so spooked by the passing shadow among other strange occurrences (each of which I will recount separately in future posts) that she refused to work a minute past 5pm and she would never enter our offices alone or with only one other person. Nothing had ever physically happened to her but she was very nervous and weary of anything vaguely hinting at the paranormal.

I still wonder, and probably always will, if the shadow that I saw was the ghost of an old employee or patient. I have the feeling that, and I honestly can't explain why, that the shadow was the ghost of a motherly old black lady who was an employee of the hospital. I don't think I will ever know for sure, but I'd love to read your comments.