The Attendant Ghost of Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia

On October 3, 1975, disaster occurred at the Burrard Terminals in North Vancouver. A horrific explosion in a grain elevator killed one worker and left sixteen others severely burned. The Burn Unit of Vancouver General Hospital treated the victims.

One of the most severely burned was a twenty-eight-year-old young man. He clung to life tenaciously and survived against the odds for one week...two...then a month...then another. After three months of intense suffering the young man gave up. He told a nurse he was going to die. "I'm very tired, and I've had so much pain." The next day his heart stopped.

But he did not leave. Not long after his death a night nurse from another ward was assigned to work in Room 415, his old room. She saw the covers of his bed shift as if a body had turned over and heard the sounds of a sleeper breathing.

Nurses began to report the feeling that someone was with them when they entered Room 415. One saw a distinct shape move slowly around the end of the bed and out the door.

Nurse Denny Conrad and another nurse entered Room 415 with a load of laundry bags one night to make up the bed. Conrad, busy making the bed, was aware of his companion standing by holding a dressing tray. But when he turned to speak to her the tray crashed to the floor. No person was there. It had been the ghost trying to help by holding the tray of dressings.

Soon the young man's ghost found better ways to be helpful. He began to visit the other burn patients at night to comfort them. A woman in an adjoining room told a nurse about the strange young man who had visited her. No one had heard or seen a young man around. A badly burned young man told his nurse one morning, "I'd like to thank that young doctor who took the time last night to come in and help me with the pain." Puzzled, the nurse checked and found that no doctor had been on the ward the previous night. She asked the patient to describe the doctor who had visited him. He described the young man who had died there. The nurses didn't tell their patient that the "doctor" who had helped him through the night in his pain was really a ghost.

The ghost remained in residence until the building housing the burn unit was torn down and the unit moved to a new facility. He kept his presence known by constant small acts ... suddenly turning up the radio to full blast, flushing the toilet, pushing the call button on Room 415 when it was unoccupied. One nurse told of a friend who confronted the ghost. When she was hanging an intravenous solution bottle in Room 415 one night, "suddenly she felt strange, and then very cold, like she was covered in "ice." Displaying remarkable courage, she said in an even voice, "Look, I know you're here, but I'm really busy tonight, so please don't interrupt me." Then suddenly the coldness lifted and she was able to go on about her work.

Clearly this is one ghost who just wanted to be helpful.