A few years ago, I fell ill and had to be hospitalized. It was just a run-of-the-mill municipal hospital, and I was admitted to the internal medicine ward.

My stay lasted about a month. The ward was full of elderly patients with dementia, and it was pretty normal for people to wander the halls shouting at night. I was assigned to a four-person room, but luckily I was the only occupant, so I had the whole spacious room to myself.

A week into my stay, another patient was admitted to my room. I didn't know what illness he had, but he was an elderly man who looked quite lively. He loved to chat, and since I had nothing else to do, talking with him became my daily routine. I was in the hospital for a condition called spontaneous pneumothorax—where a hole suddenly forms in your lung—so for a while, I could barely move. Until he arrived, I had enjoyed the peace and quiet, but I'd also been feeling a bit lonely, so I was glad to have someone to talk to.

I don't have a sixth sense, nor do I really believe in ghosts. But I've always loved horror movies and videos. Thinking it would be extra terrifying to watch one in a hospital room, I asked my family to rent some horror movies for me, and I'd watch them in the dark after lights-out. As silly as it sounds, watching horror in a hospital was far scarier than at home, to the point where I became too terrified to go to the bathroom at night. I even shared this foolish story with my roommate.

There was a nurse at the hospital who claimed she could see spirits, and I'd heard rumors that a child's ghost frequented a private room a short distance down the hall. Sure, that room had a creepy vibe to it, but since I couldn't actually see anything myself, I wasn't overly spooked. Though I was still too scared to go near it at night...

About three weeks into my stay, just as I was recovering enough to move around, my roommate's condition started to decline. He seemed to lose his appetite, eating less and leaving more of his meals untouched with each passing day. He used to come over to my bed every day and chat for hours, but those visits grew shorter and less frequent. His health deteriorated so rapidly that even a layperson could tell something was terribly wrong. Eventually, he couldn't even sit up on his own, and his skin began to take on a yellowish, jaundiced hue. He was clearly in no state to converse, pressing his call button over and over in anguish to summon the nurses.

A few days later, he was transferred to that private room—the one supposedly haunted by the child's spirit. Once again, I was left alone in the large room, feeling lonely and worrying whether he would be all right. That night, I could tell the call button in his new room was ringing constantly. Whenever a nurse call goes off, a chime sounds from the nurse station and a red light illuminates outside the patient's door.

A few days before I was scheduled to be discharged, I found myself unable to sleep. Suddenly, the nurse station became frantic. Nurses and doctors were rushing equipment back and forth into his private room. A short while later, people who appeared to be his family went into the room, and I heard sobbing and wailing. From the commotion, I realized he had passed away. Though we had only known each other for a short time, tears welled up as I remembered spending whole days chatting in our shared room.

The next day, time passed in the ward as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I felt deeply saddened by my roommate's death, but I tried to stay positive as my discharge approached. Then came that night.

The nurse call chimed from that private room—"Ding-dong"—and a nurse walked over to turn it off. I wondered if a new patient had already been admitted, and I casually watched as she opened the door... only to reveal a pitch-black, completely empty room. As I happened to walk past, I noticed there was no nameplate outside the room. The nurse muttered, "Why did it go off when no one's in here?" She turned to head back to the nurse station, but just as she was about to close the door—

"Ding-dong."

The call button chimed again from inside the pitch-black room.

I hurried back to my bed. The call button from that room chimed twice more after that. I tried to convince myself it was just a mechanical malfunction or something, and as I was settling down to try to sleep...

"Ding-dong."

The nurse call chimed yet again, and the red light outside the room lit up.

Both the nurse and I knew for a fact that no one was in that room anymore. Yet, right before our eyes, the call button kept ringing from inside it. Even as a horror fan, I was thoroughly chilled to the bone. Fortunately, the button didn't ring again after that, and I was able to get discharged without further incident. I had never believed in ghosts before, but that experience left me wondering if there really is a world beyond human understanding.