A patient walked away from a road traffic accident without harm, but the trauma scan taken afterward held something unsettling: a hooded, skull-faced figure resembling the Grim Reaper, tucked inside one of the bones at the top of the spine.
Stephen Rowlands, a surgical registrar at Wellington Regional Hospital in New Zealand, described the figure in a clinical correspondence piece titled "Grim findings: when the Reaper haunts the radiograph," published in The New Zealand Medical Journal on Feb. 13, 2026. The ghostly shape was not an injury. It was a chance arrangement of bone texture and cyst-like changes that the human brain stitched into a familiar figure.
