A man who spent three years of his life on death row after being wrongfully convicted revealed the chilling recurrence whenever an inmate was executed.
The death penalty is currently legal in 55 nations across the world, of which 22 have used it in the past decade, according to 2022 data published by the BBC.
Included in this list is the USA, which executed 25 prisoners in nine states last year.
However, not every person who faced the death penalty was guilty.
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While there are no statistics on the number of people who've been wrongly executed in the US, around 200 inmates have been exonerated after being placed on death row since 1973 (via Death Penalty Information Centre).
One of those individuals was Herman Lindsey.
The 52-year-old had been sentenced to death in 2006 for the 1994 murder-robbery, a conviction which would be overturned three years later.
Now a free man, Lindsey has opened up about what it was like to live as an innocent man on death row.
Part of his three years behind bars in Florida State Prison included encounters with the paranormal, with the criminal justice reform advocate telling MailOnline that several inmates have reported seeing what appeared to be spirits whenever a person was due to be executed.
"On the night of someone being executed, you will see a spirit walk down the hallway," he told the outlet, adding that it was not a hallucination and that he wasn't the only person to witness it.
"That is something that's not a tale. The majority of people on Death Row will tell you they have seen it themselves."
Lindsey then chillingly confirmed that many inmates believe the ghostly apparition to belong to an executed inmate.
The father-of-seven went on to explain that the legend has been attributed to an inmate who passed away several years ago and that it would always appear before an inmate was scheduled to have their sentence carried out.
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Stories about ghosts being spotted near or around death aren't uncommon, with end-of-life nurses often reporting instances close to patients in the final hours before they pass on.
However, the argument is widely debated, with others brushing off the stories as hallucinations.
Despite scepticism, Lindsey remains adamant that he witnessed ghostly apparitions while he was incarcerated.
"You can't be hallucinating when you got 12 other people seeing the same thing that you're seeing," he added.
"That is virtually impossible, and that's what made me believe in spirits because you actually see it."
Brenna Cooper