The Horror OF Room 213
A Halloween
Treat:
The Horror OF Room 213
A reader from Lahug, Cebu City shares with us this scary
tale :
When I was a child, I developed a fear of hospitals because
of a terrifying experience I shared with my cousin Zeny when she was recuperating from an appendectomy in one of Cebu’s oldest hospitals, a stone’s throw away from the school I was
attending. Consequently, I spent every afternoon in her sick room where I
awaited my father to pick me up after his office hours.
One afternoon, my father was unusually late in passing for
me. My cousin had fallen asleep and I was left to while away my boredom in the
hospital corridor facing an inner court, an open space atrium with a Grecian
fountain in the centre. Dusk had fallen and the lengthening shadows were
playing eerie patterns on the ground.
A nurse pushing a wheeled table on which some bottles of
medicine and injectabels lay, passed by me to enter a room at the end of the
corridor three numbers away from my cousin’s room. Ten minutes later , she was
rushing out of the door, shrieking hysterically for the male attendants to come
to her rescue. Two did with the head nurse trailing behind them.
The terrified nurse was almost incoherent as she explained
how she found the old paralytic patient no longer in her bed. As she turned to
leave the room to report the matter to the nursing station, she nearly collided
with the now ambulant patient who was
just behind her with outstretched bony arms and claw-like fingers poised to
grab her throat. The patient was a sight from one’s worst nightmare - - her
white, greasy hair stood stiffly around her head like filthy broom sticks, her
dilated eyes were ablaze ; a blackened
serpentine tongue flicked in and out from an open, toothless mouth that now
dripped with smelly, frothing, saliva
that smelled of rotting teeth. In her fright, the nurse had soiled her
immaculate uniform with urine as she dashed out of the room.
I went back to my
cousin’s room and found her seated on the bed, shivering. According to her she
was startled by a wheezy, cackling laughter and when she turned towards the window, she saw this dark shadow running
past the glass shutters. It was the dark silhoute of a stooped person . But how
could that be ? Only a tiny kitten or a pigeon could walk on that very narrow
ledge, much less run?. When I told her what transpired in Room 213, she burst
into tears, and pleaded that my father
and I keep her company for the night. She insisted in going home the next day.
I did a bit of research on hospital hauntings. I found this
a bit disconcerting. It seems there is an element of truth to all these
stories………………….
One night in 1975, Mary McLellan was working as a ward
sister at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow. She was setting up a piece of
equipment in a room facing a well-lit corridor when she became aware of a
"tall, silver-haired man wearing a blue dressing gown and standing near
the doorway of the ward opposite". He stood still and silent for a moment
and then vanished. But she thought nothing of it, assuming he was a patient who
had just gone back to bed. "Almost immediately, the ward nurse came over
to me," McLellan recalls. "She was very upset at seeing the
apparition. She recognised him as a patient who had died two days
previously."
The UK is full of old hospitals, many of which have at least
one and sometimes several ghost stories attached. Veteran ghost hunter Andrew
Green, who died this year, collected dozens of stories of hospital hauntings,
including the experience of Mary McLellan. The stories vary, but a common theme
is a "grey lady" or "woman in white" who made some terrible
medical error and took their own life in remorse, only to reappear at times of
crisis.
Green believed that these apparitions are forms of
electro-magnetic energy - a sort of faded echo of people whose lives were intensely
stressful. Such tales are passed down by word of mouth through generations of
young doctors and nurses and they are considered part folk myth, part
cautionary tale. management.
At the now defunct Mothers Hospital, in Hackney, east
London, drowsy nurses complained of feeling a startling tap on the shoulder.
According to legend, a nurse who was bottle-feeding a newborn baby dozed off
and slumped forward in her sleep, smothering the baby. In a fit of remorse, she
killed herself and was condemned to walk the wards, tapping young nurses on the
shoulder to keep them awake.
A classic of the genre is the "nurse in a bluish-grey
uniform" seen by patients at University College Hospital, London. It
appears only when screens go up around a bed and is said to be the spirit of a
nurse who administered a morphine overdose to a patient and was so upset that
she took poison and killed herself.
Occasionally, a vision manifests itself in a helpful way. At
Stobhill hospital, Glasgow, a student nurse spotted a woman - whom she assumed
was the night sister - "slip into a side ward near the door". She
followed her to ask a question and was surprised to find no one in the ward but
a patient who had lost consciousness and needed immediate help. At Scunthorpe
General, staff say there is a strong smell of old-fashioned violet perfume just
before the appearance of a nurse in long skirts. The visits always occur when a
baby is desperately ill. After her visit, the baby recovers..
Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of
Hertfordshire, has led teams of real-life Ghostbusters on stakeouts at Hampton
Court Palace and Edinburgh Castle. Despite using sophisticated thermal imaging
equipment, temperature probes and video cameras, they have failed to capture
any spirits. Wiseman's theory for unexplained sightings is that hospitals
precondition people into believing the unbelievable.
"The majority of these experiences happen in old
buildings with a tremendous sense of history, and people are aware of
this," he says. "Hospitals are inherently places that are associated
with death. Nurses in particular have to cope with life and death on a daily
basis. At some level, there is a need to believe in ghosts and an afterlife, as
a way of saying death is not final, as a comfort."
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