He couldn't say why or what it was that made him feel so uneasy down there. After all, he didn't believe in ghosts and the like. It was just the thought of all those corpses on ice only a few hundred feet away that gave him the willies.

Corpses of people he had seen every day in the course of his work. It was somehow unnerving. Mikhail shook off the feeling as he approached the intersection of the hallway leading to the morgue.

He glanced at the convex mirror. One just like it hung at most of the hospital hallway intersections. They were there to prevent collisions with crossing traffic.

He stopped when he saw someone reflected in the mirror, figuring it was someone headed his way. He waited a moment then realized the person was headed away from where he was. He took a few more steps then looked in the direction where he had seen the person. He could see that it was a woman. Long gray hair flowed down the back of her gown.

She was almost to the end of the hallway now, about 20 yards or so away from him. Something about her seemed strange. She was dressed in a nightgown and was obviously a patient.

�She shouldn't be down here,� Mikhail thought to himself, �she must have gotten lost.�

He decided he had better find out who she was and where she belonged so he could call her nurse to come and retrieve her.

He walked down the hallway toward the woman and called out to her. �Hello, can I help you? Are you lost? Sometimes the hospital hallways all start to look alike.�

Suddenly the woman stopped and turned to face him. Mikhail realized that he could not see her feet beneath her gown. She moved toward him a little but she wasn't walking; it was more like she was gliding.

�Mikhail,� the now-familiar whisper floated toward him from her location. �Mikhail,� she held up her right hand beckoning to him.

Mikhail could not have moved from where he stood to save his life. He was paralyzed with fear. Then, without warning, her image began to fade as she moved sideways to her left disappearing through the closed morgue door.

Mikhail crossed himself and ran to the emergency stairwell. He did not want to waste any time waiting for the elevator. He ran up the stairs, three flights, opened the door to the main floor and ran past no fewer than six employees as he headed to the cafeteria. He didn't see any of them.

He slowed to a brisk walk when he entered the sparsely populated cafeteria and went through the opposite door to the patio without speaking to anyone. He sat near some of his department co-workers and lit a cigarette. He was grateful that no one spoke to him. He wouldn't have known what to answer in return. He sat and smoked and tried to lose the image of what he had just seen by listening to the conversations around him.

�Al fantasma pasar,� Sebastian one of his Spanish speaking co-workers was saying. Mikhail didn't speak Spanish but he could put the sound of the word, �Fantasma,� together with his own knowledge of the English word phantom and without an understanding of the rest of the Spanish words a chill ran up his spine.

�Ghosts? Sebastian you have seen ghosts? Where?� Mikhail asked.

�Aqui Mikhail, here in the hospital,� Sebastian answered.

�Please,� Mikhail pleaded, �please tell me more. Where and when and what did you see?�

Sebastian told him about the time only a month earlier when he was all alone in the Step Down Unit where ICU patients reside before going to the regular medical care floor. He said that the unit was empty as he cleaned when the call bell at the nurses' station rang. It was from a bed in an adjacent area; an unoccupied area.

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