Or at least we thought it was a ghost.
So I’m a dental assistant, and I have been for a while now. The practice I work in is small, run by a couple, one of who is currently working on a government project, which leaves just the one dentist and two assistants, myself and another girl. The both of us take turns between assisting the dentist with patients, being the receptionist, and keeping the practice clean. Ever since we both started here, we’ve experienced lots of little but weird and unexplainable things.
For example: ‘Steri’ is the small sterilisation room off the main hallway, consisting of a U shaped bench split between ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’. Whenever we are cleaning the dirty instruments and preparing them for the autoclave, we have to stand with our back to the open archway. Numerous times, so many that I’ve lost track now, I have sensed someone enter the space behind me, or felt someone touch me on the shoulder, or heard someone softly call my name, but there is never anyone there.
It can’t be the dentist or the other assistant; we’re such a small team in such a small practice that we know where everyone else is at all times.
Or another example: From the reception desk, out of the corner of your eye while looking at the computer, you can see into surgery 2, an unused room set up with a dental chair and computer and everything. The light in that room is always off, and there are no windows in that room like there are in the other surgeries, so it’s always dark, and we leave the door half closed, so patients don’t try to walk in there while walking past to the room we use.
Half the time, while I’m sitting at that computer, I’ll see the outline, the mere shadow, of a person standing in that half closed, darkened doorway. The shape never moves, just stands there, always the same way: half behind the door itself, fingertips wrapped slightly around the edge of the door, just visible. But I can only ever see it in my peripheral vision. And it know it’s not either of the other two.
The dentist has no idea what I’m going on about. Thankfully the other assistant has seen and heard similar things to me, always in the same spots: steri and surgery 2. They have been such a frequent occurrence that the ghost has now become a bit of an inside joke between us. Something isn’t where we left it? The dental ghost. A strange sound in the ceiling? The dental ghost. A shadow moved past the window outside, where pedestrians frequent? That’s the dental ghost.
But I guess the ghost, if that’s really what it is, doesn’t like being the butt of our jokes anymore.
Yesterday, we had a patient in. She comes in pretty regularly, we see her all the time, we know her. She came in for a routine check up and clean, normal, standard. What should have been an easy appointment.
The check up went well, no issues. Then we moved onto the clean. This patient has some quite intense sensitivity around her lower front teeth, so we always prepare ourselves for little jerking movements while the dentist cleans there with the ultrasonic scaler.
This time, before he even reached those lower front teeth, which we always do last, she was jerking around in the chair a bit more than usual. I was watching her hands and facial expressions, like I normally do for all patients, when her hands clenched into fists and all the muscles in her forehead tensed up like I’ve never seen before. The sunglasses had shifted a little bit as she tensed, and as the dentist and I began to pull out equipment out of her mouth, I watched her eyes roll back into her head, making the pupils vanish completely.
For a moment, we both just froze, confused, dumbfounded. In that moment, she appeared to take her chance. I was watching her eyes shift from pure white to pure black, so I didn’t see as she yanked the hand scaler off the tray. But I definitely saw as she brought the sharp metal hook down onto her cheek with a force I was not expecting. The hook went in and then came ripping out of her skin so fast, there was nothing we could do to stop her. Blood spurted across the floor, and she swung the tool back down into her other cheek. The dentist lunged at her, attempting to stop her from mutilating herself again, but he grabbed her arm a second too late. The hook was back in her skin again. All he could do was hold her arm still to stop her from ripping it right back out again.
Watching the blood flow from her face seemed to snap me back into my body. I was up and on the phone to an ambulance in a second. It was while I was on the phone I realised the patient hadn’t made a single sound throughout this whole ordeal. She was eerily, unnaturally quiet.
The operator told me there was an ambulance on the way when the patient finally screamed.
After the panicked almost silence for what felt like hours, the sound was ear-splitting. She shrieked and wailed in a voice I’d never heard from a human in real life before. Looking at the patient I could see her eyes had returned to normal. The colour in her face, which had been ghostly pale under the torrent of blood, had returned to normal again, and the dentist was trying his best to hold her hand still and calm her down.
There is an ambulance station not far from our building, so they didn’t take long. Paramedics sedated her and took her to the ambulance on a stretcher. And we spent the rest of the day after that cleaning blood off the floor, walls, equipment, and off of ourselves.
In this job I’ve seen people have panic attacks, I’ve seen people in pain, I’ve seen children and adults alike fearing the unknown, fearing not being in control. But I have never seen anything like this before. I don’t know if this lady had a nervous breakdown part way through a dental clean, or if there was something else at play. But I also don’t want to jump to conclusions and sound like a crazy person.
While scrubbing blood off everything in that room, the other assistant told me that after the first scream made her almost fall out of her chair, in the brief pause as the patient caught her breath to scream again, there was a faint laugh from behind the door of surgery 2.