Care Home's Ex Residents Come To Visit

This story happened in 1995 when I was a 15 year old girl working nights as a care assistant in a local nursing home. The nursing home was a large old stone Edwardian house with three main floors and a small fourth, housing two bedrooms in the attic (always a horrible feeling in those rooms). Set amongst a few acres of wooded ground, it can be entered by a long winding driveway leading up from a relatively busy (a car every few minutes) road leading off into the country and the local 12th century castle.

My shift started at 7pm and ended at 7am but the night would go relatively quickly. I worked with a staff member on my floor and we had responsibility for the ground and the second floors and another two staff members dedicated to the critically ill on the third floor, with another lady who worked on the third floor office who was the resident nurse to cover all floors in case of emergency.

Once the residents were all in bed about 10pm we would undertake some cleaning and hourly round checks. We'd do them on our own, taking one side of the house each and moving from room to room, floor to floor and then we'd relax a bit in the open lounge area doing crosswords or reading. Every now and again an alarm from one of the rooms would go off and we'd pop along to see who had rung it and if we could assist.

As in probably every care home, ghost stories abounded, from a disembodied leg seen wondering the corridors on the second floor to cold spots, odd feelings, shadows, noises and a cat who would walk the gardens. On this night it was the same as any other, we would hear people shuffling up and down the corridors and opening doors but there was never anybody there when we looked (it would take us about 15 seconds at most to go from the lounge to the corridor on the ground floor).

On this particular night an alarm from a ground floor room began to ring. We walked up to the room together, which was the last room on the right of the ground floor, and quietly entered the room. The resident was fast asleep so we gave her a quick check over, switched off the alarm and left the room. Ten minutes later the same alarm went off again, so up we went, suspecting a fault but when we arrived there the resident was wide awake pointing to the back of her door saying "Will you get him out of my room? He's come in here and is making a nuisance of himself again"

Now, the ground floor was for residents who were very much in charge of their full faculties and were permitted to wander to their hearts content (locked doors where needed of course). So we checked the room and the bathroom, even the room next door but no-one was there. Our resident was growing impatient with us, pointing at this unseen gentleman and actually having an irked conversation with him. At this point she threw her hands up in the air and looked over towards the other corner and began speaking to someone else, asking another unseen entity to tell us to stop staring about us and to get the gentleman behind the door away so she could sleep. We were beginning to think she was hallucinating and poured her a glass of water and tried to calm her down.

At this point the curtains at her window puffed out quite a bit (no open window), then the door slammed closed then reopened. We were stunned. Our resident then stated in a slightly exasperated voice that at least Mavis could get rid of unwanted visitors in the middle of the night and what use were we? She then turned around and told "Mavis" that she was glad she'd come to visit to get rid of that pestering old man and she was ready to sleep.

The resident in that room died a week later, early and without any illness that would have caused death. She just drifted from us in the night. I later learned that Mavis was her best friend in the home and had died a year before, and the room she occupied was earlier occupied by an old man that had always had the nurses and care assistants running up and down the corridor with some prank or another. I wonder to this day if they had come to ease her passing and take her with them.

This was undoubtedly the point in my life when I stopped wondering if there was some kind of life after death and just accepted that there was. My co-worker was as equally stunned and at a loss for what happened... It was just accepted as another story to add to the collection at the home.