I imagine for most people, a hospital is one of the most stressful places you can be. Most of the time, you don’t go to the hospital unless something’s wrong. Especially during these times when a global pandemic has killed millions of people worldwide, there are fewer places I can think of I’d rather avoid than the hospital. So when I saw the headline, “Hospital Patient Terrified after ‘Eerie Figure Stares at Her’ from Air Vent in Ceiling,” I knew I had to check it out. Maybe here was one more good reason to be wary of hospitals!

The earliest report comes from a January 1, 2021, article on 7News.com.au (although as I will argue later, there’s reason to believe the story originated earlier). According to the article, a Brisbane woman named Kitt Williams shared two photos on her Facebook “on Sunday,” presumably December 27. The photos are credited to Ms. Williams’s mother-in-law, who allegedly took them during her stay in a Queensland Hospital. Both photographs are of an air vent in the hospital room ceiling. One of them shows the top part of the curtain divider in the room and the top half of an exterior window, as well as a clock on the wall, a TV hanging from the ceiling, and the aforementioned vent. The other photograph is a close-up of just the air vent.  

The photos in the article are credited to the Facebook group Australian Paranormal. After scrolling through their posts, I determined that it was originally posted sometime between December 27 and January 1, when the 7News.com.au article was originally published. However, it had since been taken down because, according to one of the admins, “the original Author was being harassed!”

The 7News.com.au article quotes Ms. Williams’s mother-in-law as stating that she took the photos after saying she felt as though “something was looking at her” and that “It would blink move and look around the room … some times it was there … other times it wasn’t.” I presume the 7News.com.au article is quoting from Ms. Williams’s Facebook post; however, I haven’t been able to confirm that because neither the author of the article nor Ms. Williams—to whom I reached out on Facebook—have responded to my inquiry. The article further quotes Ms. Williams as saying, “She could feel something looking at her/ keeping an eye on her. She would think the nurses were coming around to check her as she could feel people touching her, waking her up … but there was no one there.”

While I can’t say for sure what the woman did or did not experience because I was not there and have not spoken either to her or to her daughter-in-law about the events, my attention was immediately drawn to the fact that these experiences were reported as occurring as the person was “waking her up.” They might be considered a hypnopompic hallucination, (sensory illusions that occur during the transition from sleep to wakefulness) a fairly common phenomenon that, according to the American Sleep Association, occurs in as many as 25 percent of the population. Without knowing why the woman was admitted to the hospital or what her treatment regimen consisted of, it’s difficult to speculate as to what might’ve caused her sleep disturbance or whether she herself is someone who frequently experiences such phenomena. Certainly, as I noted, hospital stays are inherently stressful. That being the case, it’s not implausible to imagine that a person’s normal sleep patterns may be disrupted or, if they happen to experience waking dreams normally, that such phenomena may be interpreted in a more threatening light.

The photographs of the vent are difficult to decipher. According to the 7News.com.au article, the second photo “appears to show a ghostly pair of eyes,” although I cannot see any such Kilroy-like personage. Members of the Australian Paranormal Facebook group speculated that it could be insulation surrounding the vent or a reflection or perhaps an animal trapped in the vent such as a possum. Personally, my initial reaction was that it was merely dust. Working in an office with similar ventilation, I’ve seen firsthand how dust can accumulate in the vents. However, I am not a photographer, so I reached out to my friend CSI Fellow and investigator Kenny Biddle, for his expert analysis. When I brought up my theory that it was dust, Kenny countered that it “looks more like a reflection inside the duct work … coming from the lights to the left.” 

With this in mind, we set off to find examples of similar air vents with similar reflections. Biddle found a website selling ceiling AC diffusers (indiamart.com), and the webpage contains a photograph of the ceiling vents in which you can see, in the vent second to the right, a pair of “eyes” similar to the one in the photographs from the 7News article. In both cases, the “eyes” may be a reflection from the light adjacent to the vent, as going back to the original photo that shows the entire ceiling of the hospital room and not just the vent, you can see the glow of the light reflected on the ceiling. Biddle went further: “However, there’s also the light on the right that is sending light in. The vents are slated towards that light too. As long as some light is getting in there, it’ll illuminate the inner duct work. Just takes the proper angle of the camera to look through the slats and catch the illuminated parts inside.” 

Not content with only one example, I began looking for more examples “in the wild” and ended up acquiring a photograph of an air vent very similar to the one in the original photos. With Biddle’s help editing, you can see the inner workings of the vent behind the slats. Unfortunately, the lighting in the room in which that picture was taken was not similar to the hospital room in the original. However, it’s plausible to assume that if there were lights adjacent to the vent, they would illuminate the inner workings of the vent as can be seen both in the original photographs and in the example found online. 

One thing bothered me about this story though. If the woman genuinely believed that someone or something was watching her, even touching her, without her knowledge or permission, you would expect that she’d be very upset by this and that her first reaction wouldn’t be to text photos of the ceiling vent to her daughter-in-law but instead call for a nurse, a doctor, or even security. That being the case, it would be reasonable to assume that if she had alerted a member of the hospital staff, someone at the hospital in which she stayed might remember what happened. With that in mind, I reached out to all of the hospitals in Brisbane, asking if they were familiar with the story or recalled a patient complaining of being touched or seeing something in the air vent of their room. Unfortunately, several hospitals did not respond to my request for clarification, and those that did stated they were unfamiliar with the story and could not identify, based on the photos provided, whether or not the hospital in question was their own.

So, is this another reason to be apprehensive about a hospital stay? I would argue not likely. This “creepy discovery” that is allegedly “dividing the internet”—a rather hyperbolic claim considering it doesn’t seem to have gone much further than a single paranormal Facebook group and a few tabloid websites—is more likely the result of naturally occurring visual illusions caused by a disrupted sleep pattern and general unease. I do not doubt that the person who originally took the photos may genuinely have felt as though something or someone were watching her and touching her. However, it’s more likely that she was simply mistaken in her belief that she wasn’t alone in the room. Based on what Kenny Biddle and I have demonstrated with similar vents and in similar lighting, it’s more reasonable to believe that lighting conditions can produce an effect easily mistaken for a pair of eyes, fingers, or what have you than to believe something or someone is creeping on you from a ceiling vent. Now we can all go back to being afraid of the usual things like hospital bills, insurance headaches, or COVID-19!