Halloween Ghost Stories; Starring Nurses!
Nurses are funny things. Nursing is more than just a job. Nurses deal with life and death of human beings on a daily (and even hourly) basis. So, this tends to make nurses super-dedicated to their profession and their patients.
Nursing is the only profession you can lose your job and your professional liscensure if you call in sick or go home early. Hospitals can legally lock nurses in the hospital if the weather gets too bad for replacements to arrive. Up north, if a blizzard blows in, they send the National Guard out in tracked vehicles to bring in the police and the nurses -- it happens somewhere in the U.S. every single year. It happened in 1999 in Indiana when I lived there.
And the beautiful thing is, most of this is really unnecessary. When the bad weather rolls in, the nurses have already made arrangements for child care and are on their way to the hospitals. When the Hurricane Katrina and Ike and Rita evacuees rolled into town, nurses lined up 7 and 10 deep to volunteer at the shelters.
It's more obsession than profession.
So why are we so surprised when nurses show up at work after they've died themselves?
A good friend of mine, a local author (whose name I won't reveal until he gives me permission to do so) was recently hospitalized at a local county run hospital here in San Antonio. When he woke up after his brief naps, he would have brief moments when, just after opening his eyes, he saw a pretty dark haired nurse dressed all in pink scrubs standing at his bedside tending to him. When he blinked, she was gone.
This happened repeatedly -- even to the point that one time she had several others with her -- and they all disappeared when he blinked. He finally asked one of the nurses about her.
"O, several people have seen her today," she commented dryly, like it happened all the time there. "All hospitals have ghosts."
And it's quite true. The outpatient Dialysis Clinic of the same hospital has a phantom cleaning man who tends the floors night and day. Cleaning staff won't go into the clinic alone after hours. Several of them knew him when he was alive.
The odd part to the story is that this county hospital was built after the old hospital (which still exists as a clinic downtown) began to have so many reports of ghosts and so many frightened housekeepers quitting in terror in the middle of the night that the county supervisors decided to build a new hospital just to keep the peace. So both facilities seem to have their share of eternal staff, it seems.
Another major hospital of a faith-based origin downtown has a medical campus downtown. Originally starting out in a five story building, it has since moved to a larger eight story edifice across the street. The last 24 hour clinical care area at this hospital to leave the original building was the Intensive Care Unit. The ICU moved after several incidents where patients became critically ill or even died when their Intravenous medication lines were all found running wide open, overdosing patients on their medications. When the surveillance tapes were played back, the IV's were clearly seen opening themselves with no staff members present.
That tape is still said to exist somewhere in the hospital security office -- I heard this from an officer who watched it last month.
Since that time frequent noises and voices have been reported from this old 5th floor ICU at all hours of the days and night. It's common to send new officers to investigate these noises without explanation. One officer I spoke with had watched several nurses in old-style white starched uniforms and caps sorting paperwork for 45 minutes from an adjacent floor of the newer building while a rookie searched the old building for these nurses. He even radioed in one time, saying he was in the room indicated, and could see the officers looking at him, but there were no nurses there or lights on -- while the officers could clearly see the nurses.
One of the rookies tells an even stranger story. He was sent to investigate the fifth floor several years ago right after the ICU had moved out. He went up the stairs instead of the elevator and came out to a floor with lights on and a nursing station full of nurses. They looked odd somehow, but he said hello and told them he was just checking the floor, and they smiled at him and told him to go ahead. Each room had patients in the beds, each room was neatly maintained and clean -- each room had the windows open for the clear hot August night.
No air conditioning. Then he noticed there were no televisions either. When he reached the end of the hall at the nurse's lounge he saw an old 1930's Victrola wooden case radio on the desk playing big band music.
He turned and walked straight out of the unit, pausing briefly to say good night to the nurses, who again politely acknowledged him. When he got his supervisor and returned less than 10 minutes later (coming up the elevator this time) the floor was dark, the rooms were locked and stacked with castoff furniture, and the nurses station was piled high with boxes of paperwork.
He was almost fired on the spot. He swears this is true.
My own experience with this type of experience was when I worked at a faith-based nursing home on the near northwest side. As I worked the 3-11 shift and headed home every night at midnight, I frequently saw the nursing supervisor sitting in the nursing station of the adjacent unit reading paperwork. She wore the old-style starched white midi-dress and nursing cap.
A month or two later I heard one of the nurses comment on the "ghost" of the nursing supervisor, and that she was seen on the unit next door where here office used to be. I didn't say anything at the time for fear of ridicule, but made a mental note. Less than a week after that as I drove past those windows I saw her there, stopped the car, and went up to the window to get a better look.
The nurse, when she realized I was there, looked up and waved at me, smiling broadly. Startled, I waved back, then got back in my car.
When I looked again, she was gone.
Never saw her again, either.
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I'll give you this one as well, although it's not Nursing related.
When we were looking at cars last year we took a test drive at a Honda dealer at IH-10 and 1604. Behind the Honda dealer is an old stagecoach stop that is probably 150 years old or more that the dealer restored as part of the deal when they bought the property.
The salesman who we were riding with told us that during the restoration process they lost two night watchmen who ran off the property in the middle of the night and refused to come back. Both of these watchmen swore up and down (and independently of each other) that they had seen the stagecoach come in at 3:00am, complete with driver, passengers, and shotgun rider. The passengers disembarked, and the coach just disappeared.
As he said this I looked at the upper windows of the stagecoach stop building (it was about 9:00 pm) and saw a small child looking back at me from the window on the left. I asked him if anyone lived there now. He told me the building had been locked for years, but that faces were sometimes seen at the window.
. . . . Yeah, I figured that part out.
~~JD~~
