The Hospital

Hospitals are institutions that are peculiarly suited to ghostly activity. First, within them matters of life and death are permanently pressing issues; they are also places where people go to die. Inevitably, some will die with a grievance – a basic starting point for ghosts. Second, hospitals have morgues with dead bodies. In INTO THE MIRROR, a pathologist says they removed all the mirrors from the morgue because the staff kept being spooked by the ‘dead people’ they saw in them. Third, hospitals also have histories and secrets, preserved in archives. Such hospital records may well include troubling details: signs of mistakes, of malpractice, even of more sinister actions. The medical past tends to be seen as less enlightened and more primitive than the present, and its practices may seem disturbing from a modern perspective, e.g. the electric shocks given to the teenage Vivian in IN DREAMS. Barry Curtis notes that, as characters seek to uncover ‘the trauma that initiated the haunting’, there are often scenes of ‘delving in archives, discovering news reports or documentary or photographic evidence which is metaphorically “buried” somewhere’ (2008: 84). Hospital archives are investigated in IN DREAMS and THE RING as well as the two films in this section. Fourth, patients in hospitals tend to be vulnerable: in particular, those on the cusp between life and death may be more sensitive to the paranormal, as with the children in DRAGONFLY. Fifth, hospitals tend to occupy the sort of premises favoured by ghosts: old hospitals in large Gothic buildings; modern hospitals in labyrinthine complexes with basements, lift shafts and wards with lots of beds. Hospitals, like prisons, orphanages and boarding schools, are institutions where people sleep, so there are plenty of subjects available to be haunted. Sixth, there can be something inherently spooky about a hospital ward at night. It is when Cole in THE SIXTH SENSE is in hospital that he finally confides in Malcolm: ‘I see dead people’. Seventh, hospital technology is readily amenable to supernatural manipulation. The scenes in RINGU 2 in which Masami causes a monitor to show fragments of the curse video are extreme examples of this. In one scene, she is wired up like a patient undergoing medical tests, but the supernatural elements simply take over.