Dr. James is a board-certified internist with thirty years of practice. He publishes in peer-reviewed journals, teaches evidence-based medicine, and considers himself a rigorous scientific thinker. He also believes in ghosts—not because he read about them, but because he saw one.
"I was rounding at 2 AM," he recalls. "I saw a woman in a white gown walking ahead of me in the corridor. I assumed she was a patient who'd gotten out of bed. I followed her around the corner—and the hallway was empty. Dead end. No doors. No one there."
He told no one for twelve years.
He's not alone. In anonymous surveys, a surprisingly large percentage of physicians report experiences they classify as paranormal, supernatural, or simply inexplicable. The gap between their public skepticism and private experiences is striking.
Why physicians struggle with these experiences:
Medical education is built on materialism—the philosophical position that everything can be explained by physical processes. There's no diagnostic code for "saw a ghost." There's no treatment algorithm for "felt a dead patient's presence." So physicians do what they're trained to do with anomalous data: they ignore it.
But ignoring an experience doesn't make it go away. Many physicians carry these encounters for decades, convinced that sharing them would invite ridicule or damage their professional reputation.
A 2021 survey of 563 physicians published in Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing found that 44% had experienced at least one event in a clinical setting that they could not explain through conventional science. Of those, 78% had never discussed it with a colleague. The most commonly reported phenomena included sensing a presence, unexplained equipment behavior, and visual apparitions that correlated with patient deaths.
What changes when they finally speak:
Relief. Physician after physician describes the profound relief of finally telling someone about an experience they've carried alone. And invariably, the response is: "That happened to you too?"
The recognition that these experiences are shared—that credible, scientific professionals across specialties and geographies report similar phenomena—creates a space for honest inquiry that doesn't require abandoning scientific thinking.
Dr. Scott Kolbaba created that space with Physicians' Untold Stories. The book gives voice to physicians who've experienced the inexplicable, validating their accounts while respecting both their scientific training and their personal truth. If you've had an experience you've never shared, you're not alone.
