Dr. James is a board-certified internist with over thirty years of clinical practice. He has published in peer-reviewed journals, teaches evidence-based medicine at a respected academic medical center, and considers himself a rigorous, skeptical scientific thinker in the tradition of the mentors who trained him. He also believes in ghosts — not because he read about them in a book, not because his faith tradition taught him to expect them, but because he saw one. In a hospital corridor. At two in the morning. While he was completely sober, fully awake, and in the middle of a routine rounding shift that he had performed thousands of times before.
"I was walking down the east corridor of the old wing," he recalls, his voice shifting to the careful, slightly hesitant register that physicians use when describing something they know will sound implausible. "I saw a woman in a hospital gown walking about twenty feet ahead of me. White gown, gray hair, slight limp — I assumed she was a patient who had gotten out of bed and needed to be redirected. I followed her around the corner at the end of the corridor — and the hallway was empty. It was a dead end. No doors. No stairwell. No place she could have gone. I stood there for what felt like a long time, checked every alcove, and finally walked back to the nurses' station. I didn't mention it to anyone. Not that night. Not for twelve years."
He is not alone. In anonymous, confidential surveys conducted over decades, a surprisingly and persistently large percentage of physicians — the exact figures vary by methodology but consistently range from substantial minority to clear majority, depending on how the question is framed — report having experienced at least one event in a clinical setting that they would classify as paranormal, supernatural, or simply, stubbornly inexplicable. The gap between their public-facing skepticism — the physician who dismisses ghost stories as unscientific in conversation with patients or colleagues — and their private experience is one of the most underrecognized fault lines in medical culture.
Why physicians struggle so profoundly with these experiences goes to the philosophical foundations of modern medical education. Medical training is built, explicitly and implicitly, on materialism — the philosophical position that everything that exists can be explained by physical processes, that consciousness is a product of brain activity and nothing more, and that experiences which appear to contradict this framework must be, by definition, misinterpretations, hallucinations, or artifacts of an unreliable nervous system. There is no diagnostic code for "witnessed an apparition of a deceased patient." There is no treatment algorithm for "felt the unmistakable presence of someone who died in this room three hours ago." There is no morbidity and mortality conference format for discussing the event that does not fit into any recognized category of clinical experience. So physicians do exactly what their training has taught them to do with anomalous data that does not fit the existing explanatory framework: they ignore it. They file it away as "unexplained — probably stress" and they do not speak of it again. For years. Sometimes for a career.
But ignoring an experience does not make it go away. Many physicians carry these encounters — the corridor apparition, the impossible monitor reading, the voice that called their name in an empty stairwell, the patient who described events in the room during a cardiac arrest that the patient could not possibly have perceived — for decades. They carry them in silence, convinced that sharing them would invite professional ridicule, damage their reputation among colleagues, and potentially affect their career. The isolation compounds the psychological weight of the experience itself.
What changes when physicians finally speak about these experiences is, in account after account, a profound sense of relief. Physician after physician, in Dr. Scott Kolbaba's interviews for Physicians' Untold Stories, describes the almost physical sensation of release that accompanied finally telling someone — a trusted colleague, an interviewer who would not judge, a book that would protect their anonymity — about an experience they had carried privately for years or decades. And almost invariably, the response from the listener was not ridicule. It was recognition: "That happened to you too? I thought I was the only one." The discovery that these experiences are shared — that credible, scientifically trained professionals across specialties, geographies, and belief systems report remarkably similar phenomena — does not settle the question of what the experiences represent. But it creates a space for honest, rigorous inquiry that does not require abandoning scientific thinking or adopting any particular metaphysical framework.
Dr. Scott Kolbaba created that space with Physicians' Untold Stories. The book gives voice to physicians who have experienced the inexplicable — validating their accounts as genuine testimony from credible witnesses while respecting both their scientific training and their personal truth. If you are a physician who has had an experience you have never shared, or a reader curious about what happens when the most skeptical minds in society encounter something they cannot explain, these stories are a reminder that you are not alone — and that the boundaries of what we think we know may be wider than we have been taught to believe.
