This is the third and final installment in the Small Town Hospital, Big Time Hauntings story about a little hospital in upstate New York that is simply riddled with paranormal activity. S
O far we have explored the 1st floor of the hospital, meeting noisy ghosts and apparitions in the Emergency Room and a rude old woman's ghost who walks right in between two people while they are having a conversation (with all due respect though, I am certain this ghost or spirit has no idea any of the living are there, it seems). Also, we took a tour of the 2nd floor, with the silhouette of a little girl in the playroom on Pediatrics, a ghost who likes to take the elevator, and something of purest evil in the Medical Records department. The only major area we have not touched on is 3rd floor, which house the Medical/Surgical department (my workplace), as well as the Maternity department.
Now, as for the Maternity Ward, I can say I have heard no stories nor experienced anything myself whilst over there, though I do go over there quite rarely. That being said, the Med/Surg department is FILLED with the paranormal, and then some. Many, many stories have circulated throughout the years, many most of us enjoy retelling again and again to each other.
Again, as previously mentioned in Part 1 of this story where I discussed the 2nd floor, 3rd floor also seems to generate the most activity at either end of the hallways, like a polar effect for the paranormal, a sort of electromagnetic field that attracts the vast majority of them to these places (although, I may add, many of these ghosts have seemed to develop the knack to want to wander about the floor as of late). On the northern side hallway we have rooms 302-316, and there are a few tales to share there.
One of the nurses, who has a particularly keen sense of being able to see spirits as they go about their business from time to time (more so than most of us can say), said she was standing by room 308 one night when she distinctly saw an older woman, completely white, but not transparent, dressed in older style clothing, walk straight into room 308, look about at everything, and she disappeared at the foot of one of the patient's beds. This was the same nurse from Part 2 who had another white ghostly woman, older, walk right in between her and the nursing supervisor while they were talking to one another.
This nurse also saw, in that very same hallway, the figure of a man, though it was no silhouette, but a full-fledged figure, solid to her eyes in every respect, walk into the hallway from where the elevators are located, walk toward the Maternity Ward, and go inside. She distinctly remembered him wearing a dark brown fedora hat, but he looked so real she did not question him being there until she realized how early in the morning it was and that the Maternity Ward was not just letting people walk in without clearance. She did not get a glimpse of his face, but he was certainly not an employee, and if you do not have the code to get into Maternity, which visitors do not, you have to ring the bell to have the nurses let you in. She asked everybody else, but she was the only one to see the man.
Her other major episode took place on this side end of the hallway, when she remembered hearing a high-pitched ringing noise that nobody else seemed to be able to hear, but it was very loud, she recalled and she went looking for the source right away. She went into room 303, which was empty and pitch black, and as soon as she entered the room, where it was indeed coming from, the noise stopped. Nobody else heard this noise.
Farther down this hall, towards the opposite end, patients have told staff before in room 315 that they have heard the giggling and playing of two invisible little girls, though some patients have claimed to actually see them. Given that this is the same end of the building where, just below, the ghost of a little girl has been spotted and heard giggling and playing, it may be safe to assume she/they move about. Mind you, these patients usually are, though in the hospital at night, sick, tired, and disoriented, they do have full mental faculties and are coherent. Moreover, many times some of the televisions in the private rooms, such as 314 and 316 like to turn on by themselves, and sometimes, do not like to power off!
This phenomenon is not just partial to these two rooms, as many of the other private rooms at the opposite end of the hall, as well as the opposite hallway altogether, have this problem. I have personally noticed a TV on in a room that did not have it on five minutes ago. Once I did enter one of these rooms to shut the TV off, but no matter how I pressed the button on the TV or the remote, it would not shut off! I shrugged it off and said to no one 'If you insist on watching TV then, be my guest!'.
According to another one of the nurses who had a particular psychic ability, she also claimed to have seen a young boy who does not really know they are there, but hangs out on this side of the hall by the clean utility room and often times pokes his head out of the wall, looks both ways, and then disappears again, just to check and make sure all is well.
In the opposite south side hall, things tend to get a little a hairier. From rooms 320-322, multiple patients have told multiple nurses about a black shadowy figure that looks like a man who follows them from room to room. They claim to have seen him the hallway, seen him in the windows, and watched as they followed some of the nurses into their rooms and followed them out as soon as they left the rooms. In many given instances, the rooms remained pitch black and no source of light to cast the nurses' shadow were given, giving credibility to these claims.
Another nurse, who seems to also be prone to experiences of the paranormal, had a patient in room 323 who was not doing well. She walked into the room where the light was off, and noticed that the chair at the patient's bedside had been moved to face the bedside itself and it appeared that the shadow of a woman was sitting in it, watching the patient. The nurse immediately flicked the light switch on for the overbed light, which emitted a quick flicker, then went out. Needless to say, she ran from the room and directly to the nurses station where she relayed the tale. She would not go into that room again that night without accompaniment (usually it was me, who also inspected the room and noticed that the chair was certainly sitting as though someone had been sitting over the patient). Two other people, who had been in the room moments before with that nurse, attested that the chair had not been left this way because they had remembered needing to move it out of the way to get to the patient's chest of drawers.
A little ways down is room 325, where a couple patients have complained of dark, vivid dreams specifically in this room while they slept. One man, who was older, but definitely had his wits about him, woke up in this room and told his nurse he had a terrible dream about the walls of the room being stained with blood! Another woman awoke in this room one time screaming 'Babies and blood!'. Quite the curious tale this is, who knows why such particular visions are cast upon this place?
Moving down the line we have rooms 328 and 329, which have another odd electrical phenomenon, where the patients beds, with no patient in them and nobody touching them mind you, will sometimes start to go up and down on their own. The head of the bed will raise, or the feet, and go down. I have witnessed this in both rooms on a few occasions. Typically, if one sits on the bed, it tends to stop, but it is wild to see the bed move all about with no input whatsoever.
Farther down is room 332, where the same nurse who had the ghostly experience in room 323 once recalls being in the room with a patient, nobody else, and a trash bin that was located against the wall suddenly moved and toppled over in front of her eyes on its own accord. This bin was heavy and there was absolutely no draft, nor anything nearby that could have caused it to fall. Again, she came out to the nurses station quite frantically and had me accompany her down there for the rest of the night.
Now, at the end of this hallway is room 335. 335 used to be a patient's room, but is now an office for the two assistant managers, but it is probably the most well-known room on the floor. When my wife and I first began training as nurse assistants on this floor, we were told 335 was haunted big time. My wife recalls documenting on a computer in this room and feeling the distinct urge to run and get right out of the room.
On a few occasions, we have had patients down in this room, fully well aware of what is going on around them, complain of unseen hands reaching out from under the bed and touching them, tugging their blankets off of them, and sometimes chucking them across the room. One old woman, weighing no more than 90 pounds, was calling for help one night and when we went down to see her, a huge pile of heavy blankets lay all the way across the room by her bathroom door. She could not get up on her own and there is no way this woman launched these blankets that far on her own, either. She had called us to help her get her blankets back, and when questioned as to how they got over there, she said there was a little man who smiled and was mischievous, who was running about her room creating havoc and he was the one who kept stealing her blankets. We wound up moving her to another room and the blanket tossing and hysteria ceased. This was not, however, the only claimed account of this invisible little man, however, as we have had patients in room 325 and 310 complain of the same little man, running about and causing chaos.
For quite some time, however, this has been converted into an office, but the mischief has not ended. One night, one of the assistant managers came zooming down the hall to the nurses station, claiming that she was in her office and something touched her on the back of her head, not a bug, not the wind, but a distinct feeling of two or three fingers scratching the back of her head. She is a believer in the paranormal, and was not thrilled to return to her office, though I accompanied her as well, but no further disturbances happened after that.
That being said, we all one night were able to catch a rare glimpse into how much activity was actually going on around us. A couple of years ago, one of the hospitals generators went down, so they ordered a new one, and the following night ordered a temporary blackout for 2-3 hours while they hooked up the new generator. It was during this time the floor went entirely black, as black as anyone had ever seen, and we were left with lanterns and flashlights. One of the nurses took out her smartphone and switched it to camera mode. While looking at the phone screen while in camera mode, one could see all of the ghost lights (orbs mostly) that plagued our floor (the lens was clean too, mind you). We watched orbs flit under chairs, fly all around us in this thick swarm, and, down by room 335, we saw a large orb going in and out of the room. Oddly enough, we noticed that when I approached the room, the orb retreated, though this was only for me. As soon as I backed off and hid myself, the orb reappeared. Another orb even dropped down from the ceiling right in front of somebody's face. Unfortunately, when the camera was switched to record mode for video, the same footage could not be seen or recorded, and oddly enough, when a picture was taken, no orbs appeared. It certainly made for one of our most wild nights.
The final phenomenon happened recently, in the end break room on 3rd floor, while a bunch of the nurses and nurse assistants were in the room getting report and doling out assignments. The charge nurse was sitting in a chair at the table, and behind her was a very large, very heavy plastic trash bin that did not move easily. In fact, you would really have to lift this bin and put a minor amount of effort into dragging it around. Without warning, the lid to this bin flew up on its own (it's a very heavy lid too!), and the bin came careening forward, slamming right into the back of her chair. Though the trash bin is on wheels, again, moving it is not easy, and nobody was near it at the time. Everybody in the room jumped as they watched this happen, and it still has no real explanation.
Well, that about ties this tale up everyone. There are many other places to this hospital, from a Primary Care Center, a nursing home, and a Medical Arts building, as well as the ground floor, though I have heard not enough (or anything for that matter) about these places to constitute writing a tale about them. Though, if I hear more, I will be sure to share it with you all. Thanks for reading!
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