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."