It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these, but now that season 2 of Haunted Hospitals is airing on Canadian and American screens, it feels like a good time to offer up some more commentaries on one of the shows I’m involved with. Please note that any opinions offered up here are mine and mine alone, they do not reflect the views of Bristow Global Media, The Travel Channel, or any of the fine people involved with the making of Haunted Hospitals.
We’re starting out with the season opener. The first segment takes place in Connecticut, where internal medicine physician Dr. Carmine Crispino is about to have a brush with the otherworldly.
It always impresses me when an M.D. comes forward to share an experience that may be paranormal in nature. As a paramedic, I work with doctors on a daily basis — primarily those who specialize in emergency medicine. By and large, they tend to be a no-nonsense, skeptical bunch, not given to flights of fancy and making up stories. This may well be a by-product of their chosen profession, because a doctor is the final line of defense between life and death. They are expected to assimilate a massive knowledge base over a relatively short period of time, then apply it in a high-pressure situation in which they usually lack adequate information on which to base their decisions. There’s a very good reason why the physician holds such a respected, almost revered place in our society: they’ve earned it.
A tremendous amount of courage is required for a doctor to come forward and share experiences such as Carmine’s. When I read through the interview notes prior to filming my commentary on his segment, I was impressed that he would run the risk of being ridiculed by his peers and other members of the medical profession for being “one of those people who sees ghosts.” There can be a definite stigma attached to expressing a belief in the paranormal when one works in the medical field, though strangely not for holding religious beliefs — something of a double standard, I feel. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Carmine has no reason to be making this stuff up; he’s unlikely to be delusional, given his professional situation; and with no disrespect to the makers of Haunted Hospitals, he definitely isn’t in it for the money. (Ask anybody who appears in paranormal reality TV, unless your initials happen to be Z.B, you aren’t getting rich from it). I find Carmine to be a very compelling and credible witness.
While delivering end-of-life care to a terminally ill cancer patient, Carmine determines that the poor man has very little time left to live. This is something he has done numerous times before, and is one of the most sacred and important phases of care that any practitioner can perform: administering palliative (aka comfort) measures in a patient’s last days and hours is an act of great mercy. There is no curing such patients; all that a doctor can do is bring them some relief.
After assessing his patient, Carmine is suddenly overcome with a sense of overwhelming dread. Instantly, his patient sits bolt upright and points toward a corner of the room, screaming, “My God! They have no eyes!”
Carmine looks, and sees nothing. The patient expires, going into sudden cardiac arrest. The experience weighs on Carmine over the course of the next few days, despite his best efforts to put the experience out of his mind. Visiting another terminally ill patient, he is shocked to find that his stethoscope is yanked violently from around his neck and tossed across the room. Simultaneously, both doctor and patient feel a heaviness descend upon the room, something that is completely palpable.
Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a dark, shadowy shape materializes inside the hospital room. About the same size as a tall man, the shadow figure balloons to full size — and then vanishes. Both Carmine and his patient see the same thing, and neither can believe their eyes…but they know what they saw.
Trying to make sense of it all, Carmine shares his story in confidence with a friend (described as ‘a paranormal expert’) who voices the opinion that the doctor has somehow “opened a portal” and allowed something through. What that ‘something’ is, exactly, is impossible to say. As the two men talk, Carmine begins to feel ice cold, as if the temperature is dropping rapidly — yet nobody else but him seems to feel it. Just like the stethoscope, Carmine’s phone is thrown across the room by an unseen force.
After witnessing this activity for himself, Carmine’s friend tells him that he may well have some kind of spirit attachment…an attachment that wants to tell him something. While the doctor is on the phone with his wife, who is still at home, her pocketbook is hurled across the room. Whatever is attached to Carmine seems to have taken an interest in his family as well. That’s a bridge too far for Carmine, who runs to the car and heads straight home to confront it.
He instantly recognizes that the atmosphere in the house has gotten every bit as heavy as it did in the restaurant where he shared his story with his friend, and the dying patient’s room before that. Going upstairs to investigate, a frightened Carmine opens the door to his daughter’s room and sees the same shadow figure standing there. Unsurprisingly, he feels that the entity is now threatening his wife and daughter. It has left the hospital and followed him back to his sanctuary, the one place where we normally feel safest: home.
Desperate to restore the peace and security of his home, Carmine reaches out to his ‘paranormal advisor’ again, and is told that conducting a blessing may make things better. As somebody who grew up a Christian, the doctor can employ this belief system to his advantage in what is beginning to look like a spiritual battle of wills. Willing to try anything at this point, Carmine goes from room to room, carrying out a cleansing ritual as best he knows how.
Things calm down for a while, but this isn’t a Hollywood movie. The entity is not gone, as Carmine learns a few weeks later when he encounters it once again in his daughter’s bedroom. It refuses to leave the Crispino family alone, and rather unusually for Haunted Hospitals, we’re featuring a story that has not yet ended. At the time of his interview, Dr. Carmine Crispino and his family were still dealing with the effects of this unwanted and uninvited intruder in their lives.
To his great credit, the good doctor has not allowed this negative experience to put him off practicing medicine. All he wants is for himself and his family to be left alone…
I have never met Dr. Crispino in person, so my views on his case are based purely upon the information provided during his interviews. it is not remotely unusual for terminally ill patients to report seeing entities — usually loved ones that have already passed on — in the hours and minutes before their death. Such experiences are usually joyful and positive, but not always…there are a number of cases on file in which people claim to have encountered dark, malevolent shadow figures, usually in the hospital setting. It might be tempting to dismiss these experiences as being nothing more than the random firing of neurons in a brain that is actively dying (and therefore unreliable) except for the fact that in some cases friends, family members, and healthcare workers at the bedside have reported seeing them too.
Skeptics often write off such deathbed visitation experiences, but it’s a whole different kettle of fish when objective physical phenomena take place. Hallucinations do not yank stethoscopes from around the neck of a doctor, or pitch his phone across the room. Carmine has to be either lying, hallucinating, or telling the truth…and we have no reason to suspect the first two of those things. He is a reliable and trustworthy eyewitness, in my view.
Carmine and patient both saw the shadow man at the same time — this pretty much blows the hallucination theory out of the water. They also experienced the change in atmosphere inside the room simultaneously. A skeptical explanation for that might be that one of them was ‘suggesting’ it to the other, influencing him thusly: “Hey, do you feel that?” “Feel what?” “It just got really heavy in here…” “Yeah, it did!” While this does offer up a possible rationale, I would argue that doctors are generally not as prone to suggestibility as most people are. They are trained observers, detail-oriented and dependable historians, for the most part.
For me, the most fascinating aspect of the case is this: what, exactly, is the origin of the entity? The explanation offered up by Carmine’s friend (“a portal was opened”) seems both incomplete and unsupported by me. Portals are a notional gateway between dimensions, through which spirit entities are supposedly able to pass in one direction or the other. Many people in the paranormal research community believe in their existence. Personally, I’m on the fence; there is a lot of anecdotal testimony concerning them, but not a lot of actual evidence. Do portals truly exist? Maybe. The jury’s still out. How do you open one? That’s another very good question. I don’t know whether the death of a patient would be enough to do it — otherwise, we would encounter portals everywhere. Hospitals and nursing homes should have hundreds of them! The entity that latched on to Carmine definitely came from somewhere…I just don’t know exactly where.
I can only imagine how chilling it must have been for Carmine to be talking to his wife on the phone, only to realize that paranormal activity was now taking place at home as well. The idea of spirit entities acting in two places at the same time (or as close to simultaneously as makes no appreciable difference) is fairly well-documented in the literature of paranormal research. Many mediums will tell you that spirit entities are not bound by the same laws of time, space, and physics that we are; to them, everything is ‘now.’ If that is indeed the case, it makes complete sense that the entity in question would be able to be at Carmine’s home and in his direct presence at the same time.
Haunted Hospitals is a scary show, it has to be said. We don’t tell too many feel-good ghost stories; many of our cases are on the darker side, and some can be quite frightening. I’m always a little wary when it comes to the portrayal of shadow figures in the media. A slew of Hollywood horror movies (and, to be completely honest, paranormal TV shows) have portrayed shadow figures as objects of fear, something with a malign agenda that we need to be wary of. Not all cultures around the world subscribe to this point of view. Some cultural belief systems contend that shadow figures can be the spirits of the departed, coming back from the next realm in order to watch over us or to try and impart a message. They are said to appear as shadows because they are backlit by the blinding light of the God-source energy, and mean us nothing but good. (Thanks to my friend John E.L. Tenney for making this point). In Carmine’s case, he truly feels that the entity is malevolent in nature…yet when push comes to shove, no harm is inflicted on he or his family. Yes, phones and stethoscopes are thrown, but nobody is physically hurt. Could this be the spirit of a deceased patient, doing its very best to communicate with the doctor who treated them in their final hours? It’s impossible to say, but I do feel it best to keep an open mind on the subject.
Friendly spirit or not, Carmine is well within his rights to want the entity gone from his home. When it comes to the protection of family, most of us will go to any lengths in order to keep them safe. Carmine has been raised a Christian, and as such, the advice given by his friend is sound. Belief can indeed be used as a tool to protect oneself from unwelcome spiritual visitors. As an agnostic myself (I used to say atheist, but a wise man hedges his bets) I was once highly embarrassed by having to bring in a friend who is a Catholic priest in order to bless my house. I had brought back some kind of spirit entity from one of my paranormal cases, and now we were seeing shadow figures around the house and hearing a woman’s voice calling from empty rooms. When picture frames began jumping off the shelves, we decided that enough was enough and called the priest, who had the decency not to give me a hard time for being an agnostic that called in some Catholic ‘spiritual artillery’ when the going got tough. After an in-depth blessing of each room of my house, the paranormal activity stopped as quickly as it had started, and has never flared up again since. To this day, I have no idea whether the entity that followed me home was good, bad, or something in-between — I just wanted it gone from my home, and I completely sympathize with Carmine’s desire to achieve the same thing.
I’m saddened to hear that the blessing ceremony didn’t work in Carmine’s case, and hope that he gets the help he needs in order to restore his home back to its normal state of equilibrium. I have a lot of respect for any doctor, but even more so for one who is willing to step forward and share a controversial experience like this with the world at large.
Until next time…
One Response
He’s my cardiologist!