Friday, March 29, 2024

How ghosts sacked me from work – Mortuary guard

This may sound eerie and incredulous but it is real. Mr. Samuel Okem had in 2013 secured a job as a security guard in the popular St. Gerard ‘s Catholic Hospital in Kakuri, Kaduna State to make ends meet but a series of strange occurrences at the hospital forced him to quit barely one year after.
Before he was engaged by the hospital, Okem, who hails from Ogoja in Cross River State, had for years engaged in one menial job or the other after his elder sister brought him to Kaduna in 2005. He at first began work at a security company as a guard. He quit the job in 2006 and engaged in other menial jobs before he secured appointment with the Catholic hospital.
Okem was posted to the mortuary section of the hospital to work as security guard by the hospital’s management. But his joy and dream of having a means to eke out a living and also fend for his family were soon cut short by the series of strange experiences that followed his being deployed to the mortuary section.
When he broke the news of his new appointment to his sister, Okem said she objected to it, warning him that he might not find it comfortable to engage in such a delicate job meant for older people, who must be equally willing to patronize ‘spiritualists’ for protection and to ward off the consequences of working in such an environment.
According to him, when he told his sister about his new job at the hospital mortuary, she sternly warned him, saying, “I did not bring you to Kaduna to work in the mortuary. If anything happens to you, I will not be held responsible because there are other meaningful jobs around which you can engage yourself in”.
Shortly after Okem resumed duty at the hospital mortuary, things took a different dimension at his duty post. He claimed that sometimes he would feel some strange current course through his system with his head ‘swollen’.
He also noticed, after a short while, that the mortuary attendants would always knock three times on the door of the facility before opening and going inside to either deposit a new corpse or bring out an old one for preparations for burial.
Okem also claimed that he noticed that some conversation drills usually took place among the dead bodies inside the mortuary, which, at first, he could not comprehend.
He said his investigations of the strange voices later revealed that the corpses usually interacted with one another whenever the mortuary doors were not opened. Okem said part of their conversation drills he eavesdropped on included questions on the circumstances surrounding their demise.
“What was responsible for your death? Where did you hail from? Who and who did you leave behind? These were part of the questions I would usually hear them asking one another,” he said.
Okem, however, had to hurriedly quit his job at the hospital mortuary in 2014, barely a year after he secured the appointment as a security guard.
A strange incident that still beats his imagination and gives him sleepless night whenever he remembers forced him to throw in the towel at his duty post.
This scary incident, which he said was quite different from his usual hearing of strange voices from inside the mortuary and eerie feeling all over his body, occurred when the ghosts of two female corpses went out of the morgue to buy goods on credit outside the hospital premises in the name of a popular mortuary attendant known as Anayo. UntitledOkem said Anayo was an Idoma from Benue State and before his strange death in 2014, he was the most popular among the mortuary attendants working at the hospital, as he was charged with the washing and dressing of the corpses brought to the mortuary. This, he said, therefore, gave Anayo some measure of respect among the relatives of the deceased persons kept in the morgue, who usually greased his palm often for quick attention.
Anayo’s sudden death when he was knocked down in front of the hospital while trying to cross the road by a hit-and-run driver, barely two weeks after the occurrence of the incident in which the two female ghosts went to buy goods on credit in his name, forced Okem to immediately resign his appointment as a guard at the hospital’s mortuary.
Narrating his ordeal, he said, “I have seen so many strange things since I started work in the mortuary but the last two really baffled me, which made me to leave the job immediately.
“After Anayo closed from work on the day in question and departed home, the ghost of two women left the morgue and crossed to the opposite side of the hospital, where some people were selling items such as beverages, fruits, sachet water and the likes. On getting to the traders, they informed the Mallam selling banana that Mr. Anayo, who was popularly known to the sellers, directed them to collect N 200 worth of banana each and that Anayo would come and pay by the next morning when he resumed work.
“They did not stop at that, the two ghosts also got back to the entrance of the hospital with the same approach and collected a bottle of soft drink each from another seller and left.
“When Anayo was sighted the following morning while entering the gate, the banana seller beckoned to him and requested for his money but Anayo argued that he did not send anybody to buy any item on credit in his name. Knowing the nature of his job, he sensed danger and that made him to take the banana seller and his friends inside the mortuary. After the normal salutation of banging the door three times, Anayo opened the door with the sellers and they found banana peels and two empty bottles of soft drink by the side of the two female corpses. He, therefore, directed the sellers to demand their money from the corpses but which they could not do as they were scared”.
Okem, said shocked and scared by the development, the sellers immediately left the mortuary and about two weeks after the incident, a hit-andrun vehicle snuffed life out of Anayo while crossing the road in front of the same hospital.
He concluded that the incident, coupled with his sister’s earlier warning, forced him to immediately leave his job as a security guard at the hospital’s mortuary.
Some spiritualists, however, confirmed that such occurrences were not totally strange, adding that the ghosts were angry probably because Anayo, who had for long been feeding fat on the extra money he was making from working as a mortuary attendant had revealed their secrets to the living by bringing the traders into the mortuary.
Okem now works as a security guard in a church in Kaduna.

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