Hospital Happenings

Name:            Anonymous
Email:           
Location:        Sydney, Australia
Type:            Ghost
Date:            Thursday, June 29, 2000
Time:            11:51 PM

I suppose it is understandable that hospitals have ghosts; particularly an old one.

In the early 80s I worked at a major catholic hospital in Sydney, Australia. The original building was built in the mid-1800s and, I am sure, had seen its fair share of misery and tragedy. My stories (of which there are several) concern wards that still existed in the original building.

It was during my nursing training that I worked in the Womens Medical ward. This ward consisted of a maze of rooms within rooms that housed the patients. The Nurses Station was situated mid-way in the ward just behind the grand staircase (which was no longer used and was closed off by frosted glass doors). Each room had very high ceilings (maybe about 18 feet) and suspended by heavy chains from these were large fluorescent lights. Each room contained between 4 to 8 beds. At the end of this ward, and running at right-angles from it, was the Mens Medical ward.

The first supernatural occurrence occurred one night when I was on a late shift. This shift finished at 11 pm and we usually had the patients settled by 9.30 pm. After we had the patients settled we usually spent the rest of the shift in the Nurses Station writing our notes and generally finishing off for the evening before the night shift arrived. This particular night we saw all the patients buzzes go off in the last room. To get to this room we had to walk through two other rooms. Myself and another nurse answered the call. We found the six women in this ward hysterical - they had seen a short, elderly man wearing a tweed jacket and woollen cap walk through the room. None of these women suffered from any form of dementia and, generally speaking, were not of an hysterical type. Of course, we settled the women knowing full well if there had been anyone in the room we would have passed them as they walked out.

The following occurrences happened whilst I was on night duty several weeks later. One night myself and several other nurses were sitting in the Nurses Station having a cup of tea and chatting about how little sleep we had had that day. Suddenly, we heard screaming and the pounding of feet as one of the nurses from the Men's Medical ward came racing down the corridor to where we were. She said she had been checking the drug cupboard when the room seemed to brighten. She looked behind her and saw a large bright green glowing light. We immediately went to investigate. And, yes, there were still the vestiges of this light. It was almost like when you look at the sun and then close your eyes. It was just suspended there in the middle of the room and then suddenly went out.

The next incident occurred a couple of nights later. We came on duty as per usual but a patient had died just at change of shift. The first part of our shift concerned dealing with the patients overwrought family as well as preparing the body for the morgue. As you can imagine with only two nurses on that night, the first part of the shift was very, very busy.

During this period one of the patients buzzed a couple of times. It was several minutes before I could answer the buzzer and when I did the elderly lady said that it was OK now. She had only wanted another blanket and a nice nun in a long gray habit had brought it to her. This seems OK at first, however, there were no nuns rostered on our ward (very few actually worked in the hospital) and the nuns from the convent that ran the hospital dressed in knee length dresses not long gray habits.

As the night progressed bizarre things kept happening. First, I collected all the charts from the ends of the beds and placed them on the desk in the Nurses Station only to find, when my back was turned for no longer than 5 minutes, half of them to disappear. I searched for them all night only to find them 6 am the next morning in the fridge.

All night catheter bags were emptying themselves, IV burettes were filling themselves and soiled bedpans kept mysteriously appearing in the Pan Room. The large suspended fluorescent lights also kept swinging back and forth even though they were far to heavy to be moved by a breeze (not that there was one anyway).

I truly believe the ghost of one of the nuns that worked at the hospital many years ago had decided to help us since we were so short staffed that night!

The final incident was probably the most frightening. We had an Italian women on the ward. She was in her early 50s and was a very nice normal lady. One night we were called to the room where she was staying and found her standing next to her bed naked performing lude gestures to the other women in the room. When we finally got her back to bed it took the four of us to hold her down and then it was still a struggle. She was also spitting and snarling particularly at one of the nurses who happened to be a nun. She also spoke in a strange guttural language. We held her down for about an hour when finally a nursing supervisor came past and alerted both security and the resident doctor. With the help of the security guards we had to manacle her to her bed (for the safety of not only herself but us and the other patients as she had become both very violent and very strong) and were able to sedate her (although it took a large quantity of sedation to finally work).

Several days later when I was back on day duty I saw the women again. She was back to normal and completely unaware of the events of that night and investigations that were performed showed nothing organically wrong with her.

Although I never saw any apparitions (or disturbances) in the main stairwell there was a definite eerie, oppressive atmosphere to it. This feeling persisted during the night (of course) but also on bright sunny days even though the bright sunshine filtered through the large windows there. So to in the staff room that had been renovated from one of the old wards above the medial wards. Although the hospital had gone to much expense to make this room very comfortable no-body (no matter how cynical) could stay longer than a few minutes.