Tagged

April 18, 2012 by Jen_Shin

I had a roommate in college who was a nursing student. During her junior and senior years, she spent a lot of time in different hospitals to finish all the required hours for her clinical duties.

Usually, when we had nothing to do, she would entertain me by telling me ghost stories and urban legends about the hospitals and clinics she visited. Most of the stories involved patients who were haunting the hospital rooms, or women who died giving birth, or babies who were subjected to abortion. None of the stories actually happened to her.

One September morning, though, she burst into our room looking frantic. We asked her what was wrong, and she recounted the following experience:

My roommate was up for the night shift that week. It was fine with her, because during the night she could actually rest in the nurses' lounge and catch up on her homework.

That night, it was relatively peaceful. My roommate and her classmates were relaxing and talking to each other. The hospital they were assigned in was not a big one, it was a general hospital near the outskirts of a city, so there were only a few patients. They were looking forward to a stress-free night when suddenly an accident occurred nearby and the victims were rushed to their hospital.

Most of them were dead on arrival. The entire hospital staff poured their efforts in saving the remaining few.

My roommate was asked to get IV fluid from storage, so she ran down to the underground storage basement to fetch them. On her way out, she glimpsed something moving from the corner of her eye. It was a flash of pale blue, blurred by movement. She was intrigued, but she couldn't lag behind so she ignored her curiosity and delivered the IV fluid to the assisting nurses.

She was in the elevator on the way up when she saw a glimpse of pale blue again. This time, she could see clearly--it was one of the people who died from the accident, and he was walking around the hospital following her. By this time, my roommate was trembling badly, her eyes on the man who was heading straight for her.

Fortunately, another man boarded the elevator and punched a floor number, and the door finally closed.

"Why are you so pale?" The man asked her.

"I saw a dead person walking," she blurted out. "I'm not crazy! I really did!"

With a look of disbelief, the man stared at her. "How would you know?"

"Of course I would know! Because you see, when someone dies in this hospital, they are tagged with blue tags. I saw it on him!"

"Oh," the man's expression grew confused. "A blue tag? Does that mean...I'm dead?"

That was when my roommate passed out.