Hospitals and Ghosts

At the Borderlands of Life and Death: Haunted Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities

When we consider what has taken place behind the closed doors of hospitals since the inception of the medical profession, it should come as no surprise to discover that so many of them should turn out to be haunted. The typical hospital happens to be a microcosm of the very best and worst extremes of the human experience, providing the perfect stage for the high drama which occurs in even the most stable life at some point in time.

Love. Hate. Fear. Anger. Excitement. Relief. Heartbreak. Depression. Anxiety. All these, and so many more emotions, are played out against the backdrop of a house of healing. Human beings enter the world in the labor and delivery departments, often kicking and screaming, born in a welter of blood, pain, and blinding light, delivered into the reassuringly stable hands of doctors and nurses.

Others are rushed there at high speed by paramedics such as myself, their bodies broken and bleeding; some are shot, stabbed, or otherwise brutalized by the events of a largely uncaring world. My colleagues and I do our best to keep them alive, stabilized as best we can while the lights flash and sirens wail, before entrusting their care to the highly-skilled trauma teams who will do their best to save yet another endangered human life.

And finally, hospitals are where so many breathe their last. Surrounded by family, friends, and caregivers, a hospital bed is often the place in which the final scenes of a human life are played out, the last lines of that particular book are written, before the cover is closed and the person moves on to whatever it is that comes next.

Life, death, and the entire spectrum of human experience that lies in between those two end points…just another day in the life of a hospital facility.

Many people believe that ghosts tend to arise in places where death has taken place, and there is much evidence to support that particular contention. But it is also fair to say that some spirits return to places in which they were emotionally invested during their lifetime, especially those places in which they experienced either great happiness or sadness. Consider the numerous cases of ghostly nurses and doctors who are still making their rounds, sometimes many decades (in some instances, even centuries) after passing away; or the patients who seem to linger on after their deaths, walking the halls and rooms of the hospitals in which they stayed.

I recently had the good fortune to investigate an abandoned former hospital in Utah, where (amongst many other ghosts) I learned that one of the rooms was said to be haunted by the ghost of a former patient. This tragic soul suffered from the cruel and debilitating disease known as Alzheimer’s, a malady which strips away the sufferer’s dignity and personality in the worst way imaginable. According to the owners of the former hospital (now converted into a Halloween haunted house!) the spirit of this kindly old man returns with some frequency to the room in which he spent many of his final days upon this Earth, interacting with staff and paranormal investigators alike on occasion. Those who have encountered this ghost say that it appears to be prone to the sudden and unpredictable emotional swings that characterized his behavior in life – if true, what might that say about the survival of consciousness after death. Is it possible that we might take some of our disease processes with us? Most psychic mediums state emphatically that this is not the case, but who can truly say for sure – until we each find out the answer for ourselves?

Wandering the long-abandoned hallways and patient care rooms of a massive sanatorium just last week, I was struck by the sense of sheer melancholy which pervaded every single brick of the place. Tens of thousands of people had died in that particular hospital over the years when it served as a fortress on the front lines of America’s war against tuberculosis. So great was the rate of patient loss that a body chute was used to transport the bodies of the newly deceased in a discreet manner, affording them a little additional dignity in death and at the same time helping to reduce the drop in morale experienced by those remaining patients who would otherwise be spectators to a seemingly endless parade of body bags passing them by.

With death and suffering having taken place on such a monumental scale, it is no wonder that some trace, some essence of it has remained down through the years, perhaps imprinted on the very structure of the hospital itself. No wonder then, that such a place should be the scene of phantom footsteps, disembodied voices, mysterious shadow figures, and a host of other paranormal phenomena, reported by scores of reliable witnesses.

Nor is it just the hospital facilities which cater to diseases and injuries of the body which are prone to being haunted – we must also take into account those which deal primarily with the human brain and mind. And so it is that mental health care institutions (once referred to in a crueler turn of phrases as “madhouses,” or the only slightly more palatable term “asylums”) also have their ghosts. Patients were often locked up in such places for years on end, if not decades in some cases, sometimes in conditions which bordered upon the inhumane. Procedures such as frontal lobotomies performed with ice picks and hammers were commonplace, inducing some of the most horrific symptoms and side effects in the misguided quest to restore sanity to those judged insane.

Hauntings of mental institutions tend to be rather disturbing in nature, perhaps a reflection of the torment endured by the residents of such facilities. Some poor souls spent the majority of their lives incarcerated, sometimes on the flimsiest of pretexts – if a husband wanted an easy divorce, it was not beyond the realms of possibility to have his wife declared insane, and having her carted off quickly and conveniently to the closest institution, perhaps never to see the freedom of the outside world ever again.

Such misery abides, leaving behind a permanent mark or stain upon its environment, perhaps to be experienced again and again by those with suitable abilities and temperament, when the conditions are right for them to do so.

The first hands which ever held you.

The last hands that will ever touch you.

There is a good chance that one or both will take place within the walls of a hospital. Of course they have their ghosts…