0230 - Hospitals Apparitions
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0230C-2025 - L.Bellg - Near Death in the ICU
0230C-2025 - L.Bellg - Near Death in the ICU
How a Mysterious Hospital Visitor Led Her to Believe in Near-Death Experiences
Laurin Bellg has practiced medicine for more than 20 years, specializing in critical care. While working in intensive care units, she has encountered several patients who’ve had near-death experiences (NDEs). Her book, Near Death in the ICU, focuses on the importance of doctors listening to their patients’ mysterious experiences. Her interest in the value of these stories started with two inexplicable experiences: that of one of her first patients—and her own.
The little girl looked familiar. She sat in the corner of my hospital room, staring out the window. She wasn’t looking at me or saying anything. She seemed serene. I found her presence uplifting after a harrowing week of being severely ill. But who was she? And what was she doing here in my hospital room?
I’d been admitted to the hospital a few days before, diagnosed with septic shock from a urinary tract infection. I was in my mid-twenties and too focused on my job in viral research to pay attention to my symptoms. It didn’t occur to me that I had an infection that moved to my kidneys until I became sick. Really sick. My husband, J.C., came home from work to find me barely conscious, with a fever of 105°. I don’t even remember going to the hospital.
The doctors immediately started me on antibiotics and monitored my condition closely. Those first few days, I was improving but still pretty out of it, drifting in and out. One afternoon, I was awake and lying on my side, facing the window. I was hooked up to an IV, the medicine slowly infusing into my veins, the heart monitor making steady beeps. J.C. sat nearby. That’s when I noticed the little girl.
She was about 10 years old. Her short red hair was parted on the side and pulled back with a plastic barrette. She wore a simple cotton dress, cardigan and white ankle socks with Mary Jane shoes. It was similar to outfits I’d worn as a child, growing up in the 1960s.
“Who is that?” I asked my husband.
“Who?” he asked, looking up from his magazine.
“The girl in the corner.”
J.C. glanced over, then looked concerned. “There’s no one there.”
Was I hallucinating? I could see her; he couldn’t. It didn’t make sense. I’m a fairly logical person. It’s what prompted me to go into research, what made me want to be a doctor. I’d just been accepted into medical school at the University of Tennessee. I’d been waiting for the first semester to start when I got sick.
When the doctors heard I was seeing things that weren’t there, they performed various tests and mental health assessments on me. They double-checked my medication to make sure none of it caused hallucinations as a side effect. Nothing appeared to be wrong.
“We’re not sure what could be causing her to see this,” I heard them tell J.C.
The little girl appeared a few more times during my stay at the hospital. Sometimes she’d be sitting at the window. Sometimes she was standing nearby, looking at me, a subtle smile on her face. Even though I didn’t understand what I was seeing, even though it should’ve terrified me, it didn’t. I let go of the need for a logical explanation.
The little girl’s presence actually became a source of comfort. Because I was the only one who could see her, I felt as if she were there just for me. As if she’d been sent to keep me calm and to reassure me in the midst of this scary illness. It got to the point that I would look for her. But why a little girl? And who or what had sent her? Whatever the answers, her presence there just made sense somehow.
Judging by everyone else’s reactions, though, I decided to keep her recurring visits to myself. When the doctors asked how I was doing, I didn’t mention her. Still, it felt as if an important part of my healing process was being ignored.
After about a week, I was released from the hospital. J.C. and I stopped at a diner on the way home. While enjoying my first nonhospital meal in a while, I suddenly saw the girl. She sat curled up alone in the booth across from us, with that same soft smile on her face. I felt a familiar calmness wash over me and couldn’t stop staring at her.
“Everything okay?” J.C. asked.
“Yeah,” I said, returning to my meal. We left the diner for home, and I never saw the girl again.
Memories of my hospital stay and the little girl faded. For the next four years, medical school consumed me. It was grueling and intense. Countless hours of study. Sleepless nights with lots of coffee. A packed class schedule, rigorous exams and shifts in busy hospital wards.
Before I knew it, I’d graduated and was walking into my first day of residency training in internal medicine. It would be my first time taking care of patients outside medical school. Though I was still working under supervision, as a resident I’d be taking on a new level of responsibility. When patients were ill and afraid, when they needed attentive care and their families needed reassurance, I’d be one of the first people they’d see. The encounters were going to be emotional and sometimes messy. But I was excited to help heal people.
One of my first patients was a friendly elderly man named Samuel, who came in with a serious abdominal condition. He needed surgery. As a resident, it was my job to prep him and get his consent. I explained the specifics of the procedure. Samuel, usually lively and talkative, grew suddenly quiet.
“Sorry, doc,” he said. “Can’t do it.”
Maybe I wasn’t being clear enough. I explained again that the surgery was necessary to save his life. Samuel shook his head.
“If you don’t have this surgery, Samuel,” I said, “it’s likely that you’re going to die.”
He took a deep breath. “I’ll never have surgery again,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because the last time I had surgery, I could see the whole thing. I saw them cut into me. I saw it all from up above my body, looking down. I won’t do it again.”
I’d never even heard of anything like that. I’d seen on his chart that he’d had abdominal surgery years before. From what I’d read in the report, everything had gone fine. Had his anesthesia somehow worn off?
“Were you in pain?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I was floating above my body. I couldn’t tell them to stop. I won’t do it again. I can’t.”
Tears rolled down his cheeks. I sat down with him and patted his arm, comforting him until he calmed down. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to help him. I felt useless. Why hadn’t my years of medical training prepared me for something like this?
I jumped at my pager going off.
The surgical team was ready. When I told my supervising resident what Samuel had said, he advised me to write that Samuel had refused surgery. “I wouldn’t mention the other stuff,” he said. That’s when I learned it wasn’t safe to talk about such things in medicine.
Samuel remained resolute in his decision not to get the surgery. He died a few days later, his family by his side. Afterward, his wife came to speak to me.
“You know why he refused to have the surgery?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
She nodded. “Have you ever heard of anything like that before? Like what happened to him?”
“No,” I admitted. “But just because I haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
“Now that you know, maybe…” she said. “Maybe you can help someone else.”
I pored over Samuel’s medical charts, trying to understand what had happened. But nothing in the file or my medical books gave me any indication of what it could’ve been. I thought back to when Samuel had said no, how scared he had been. He’d had a profound experience, something he couldn’t fully describe. And there was no one to talk to about it. I couldn’t imagine how isolating that felt.
Except, in fact, I could. It all came flooding back. My hospitalization four years before. The little girl with the red hair and Mary Jane shoes. How she’d been there to comfort me as I recovered. And how I’d felt unable to share her repeated visits, isolated from those who could not see her.
Maybe I couldn’t explain what happened to Samuel with my medical knowledge. But if there’s anything I learned from my own experience, it was that maybe I didn’t need to. I’d been steeped in an atmosphere of medical logic for so long that I’d forgotten how to respond when faced with an unexplainable experience.
After all, when I kept seeing that little girl, I had to keep her a secret, afraid of being deemed mentally unstable. And yet she’d been such an important part of my recovery. I wondered if being able to discuss Samuel’s experience with him in a more in-depth way would have changed the outcome for him. I decided that if I wanted my life’s work to be helping people heal, I had to be open to their spiritual process as well.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve listened to many patients’ stories. I’ve seen how acknowledging their experience can be a profound part of helping them heal, not just physically and psychologically but emotionally and spiritually as well. It’s an important part of good patient care. Sometimes my logical self still struggles to make sense of their experiences.
But I don’t have to understand it to acknowledge its importance. I still wonder about my own experience. Who was that little girl in my hospital room all those years ago? I may never know. But I’m forever grateful for her and the lesson she taught me: There’s space for mystery in healing.
Days passed, or so I’m told. I don’t really remember. What I do recall, and quite vividly, is a visitor I saw that apparently no one else did. She was a child, age nine or ten, and although I didn’t know her, she was vaguely familiar to me. I just couldn’t place her. She had red hair that was in somewhat of a short frizzy bob and held to the side by a small white barrette. It was a bit of a mess. She rarely made eye contact but on the few occasions that she did, I registered on some level that she had brownish eyes – not deep brown, probably more hazel. When she did hold my gaze, however briefly, it was with an impassive expression, showing no particular emotion that I could detect.
The child was wearing a distinct burnt-orange, gingham-check dress, bobby socks and a white cardigan sweater. Really, she looked like she could have stepped right out of the 1950s. The first time I saw her she was sitting on a straight-back chair that was in the corner of the hospital room, along the wall just off to the right side of the end of my bed. She had her legs drawn up underneath her with one hand holding her ankle and the other resting loosely in her lap. She was looking out of the window as if she were lost in thought.
I tried to clear my head, thinking it was a waking dream, but after shifting in bed and rubbing my eyes, I still saw her. It’s hard to recall now, some twenty-five years later, why I thought this, but I wondered if she was real. Was she a ghost? Was I hallucinating? I didn’t know. Was she a child who had somehow lost her way and wandered into the wrong room and didn’t realize she was lost? I tried talking to her but there was no response, so I just watched her.
She looked real. I could see the light from the window glinting off her red hair, but she said nothing. When she turned and looked at me in that almost blank way I offered her a weak smile, but she did not return it. Her look was hard to read – neutral but not unkind. She only held my gaze for a brief moment before turning her head again to resume looking out of the window.
Again, I noted that she seemed familiar somehow, but I could not figure it out. When my husband returned, I asked him, “Who is that young girl?” I pointed to the corner.
“What girl?” he asked.
“That one,” I said, pointing again to where I could still see her sitting on the chair in the corner.
“There’s no one there,” he replied. The tone of his response conveyed a lot – concern, confusion and a firm implication that what I was experiencing wasn’t real.
“But I see her. She’s right there!”
He shook his head. “No.”
I was more confused than alarmed, because I could see her so clearly. Rather than become entangled in what seemed to be the truth of my seeing something he couldn’t, and afraid of what that might mean, I settled back into the pillow and just watched her. I had tuned in quickly to what I perceived to be my husband’s unspoken judgment of my experience and turned away. Her presence was comforting to me and if somehow she wasn’t real, I didn’t want to know. I watched her until my eyes became heavy and I drifted off to sleep.
When I opened my eyes again, she was no longer there. I did see her one other time, however, before being released to go home. This time, perhaps a couple of days later, she was leaning against the wall with her arms tucked neatly behind her back, appearing to be lost in thought. She didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular, as far as I could tell. There were a few other people that I knew in the room at the time. Family and friends who had stopped by to pay respects brought flowers, magazines and other tokens of sympathy. But after the reaction from my husband the first time I saw her, I chose to say nothing.
Feeling tired from the buzz of conversation and wanting to give more attention to the anomaly of the young girl in the corner – the girl I saw but apparently no one else did – I rolled over to face her. Against the backdrop of people I knew to be real, she was different somehow but I couldn’t sort it all out. After looking at her for a while I once more began to grow sleepy. There was a weariness I felt from company who had stayed just a bit too long. I wanted to sleep. Right before I closed my eyes, her gaze swung toward me and met mine. It was the one and only time I saw her smile. It was such a faint curl of her lips, but her impassive nature softened for an instant. I felt comforted by it.
When I was finally discharged from the hospital several days later, my husband and I stopped on the way home at a diner for an early lunch. It was mid-morning and the place was relatively empty and quiet. I wasn’t hungry and could barely touch my food, so I toyed with a piece of toast, tapping it on the side of the plate and watching crumbs collect in a small pile. Then something caught my attention. I looked up and there I saw her once again – curled up in a booth by herself across the aisle a couple of rows down from ours in the nearly empty restaurant. I stared at her, disbelieving, but it was definitely the same girl I had seen in the hospital – the same hair, the same dress. I saw again that familiar something but remained unable to name it. I did not draw my husband’s attention to her. I somehow knew he would not be able to see her, but she was very real to me. Strangely, I found myself thinking that, for a lot of reasons, if she wasn’t real I didn’t want to know.
It wasn’t until I was writing this book, writing this very passage in fact, that a curious awareness quietly rose to the surface and gave me pause. Years ago, before my life in medicine, I was in a theater company. I hadn’t worked there long before I met Jill and we became fast friends – soul sisters, really. Our connection was instant and strong. She was from Australia but our company headquarters was in the United States, so during her time off she used my mother’s place as a home base between tours. Her parents sent letters and packages to my address to hold for her until she came through to collect them. She was an easy member of our family – for me, my mother and both of my brothers – and over time she left more of her things behind each time she swept through her American home, as she came to refer to our place.
When she returned to Australia it was before the days of the Internet, so we wrote often and saved up money for the occasional phone call. Our connection remained strong as we circled around her dream of moving to the United States. We played out several scenarios of doing some kind of work together – forming a theater company perhaps. We never had the chance. At twenty-three years of age, two months after what would be our final call, she was killed in an automobile accident. I was devastated.
Learning of her death, I recalled something with chilling clarity that she had said when we talked for what would be the last time. She told me that when she looked into her future, all she saw was a blank space, and as hard as she tried to see beyond that blankness, she couldn’t. It was so different from our usual, upbeat chats of scheming and planning how we could live closer together. It didn’t make sense to me until she died. Perhaps she could not see beyond that blank space because there was nothing there for her to see.
Jill was an actress. She had been somewhat of a child star in Australia, even landing the leading role in a stage version of Annie when she was nine or ten and gaining some national attention because of it. Thinking back to that time, and knowing it was a highlight for her, I wonder now about the young girl I saw in my hospital room when I was so sick. Jill had reddish hair. When she was younger, it was distinctly redder – that much I knew. She also had hazel eyes. I don’t have any pictures of Jill from her role as Annie during her moment of transient fame, but now I can’t help but wonder if that is why the girl I saw, whom no one else could see, seemed so familiar.
We were in our late teens when we met, and remained deep friends until she died in her early twenties, three years before I was hospitalized. Losing her was hard for me – it still is. I’ve not experienced that depth of friendship since knowing her, and I can’t help wondering if that bond survived her death – and in my own moment of hovering so near the edge, if she was there for me. No matter the truth of that, it offers me comfort to think so, and it set me up to eventually be there for my patients in ways I don’t think I could have been without having had that personal experience.
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