(***Note to Editor – I truly did not know what category to submit this under. It actually happened so it doesn’t fit into any creative writing catergory.)
The Ottumwa Paranormal Society has announced that in April it intends to investigate possible paranormal activities that may have taken place at the St. Joseph Hospital in Ottumwa, IA in the past, or may even be taking place at the current time. The socieity plans to shoot a documentary on site and conduct interviews of past employees who have worked in the almost 100 year old building.
Their announcement brought to mind an experience I had in this beautiful old brick hospital almost three years ago, well two experiences, both in the middle of the night. My mother was a patient at the St. Joe Hospice at the time. While the average hospice patient spends less than a week at the facility, my mother was most definitely the exception. She spent almost three months there, and the middle of May she finally returned home.
My three sisters and I arranged to stay with her most of the time she was there, either on an air mattress in her room, or in another bedroom for family down the hall. On rare occasions one of us would sleep on the couch in the family lounge at the north end of the hallway on the third floor.
Only on two occasions did any of us ever notice anything out of the ordinary happening while we were staying, and the one incident is a little blurry in my memory, but the second is indelibly imprinted there and most certainly will be for the rest of my life, I’m guessing.
The first incident happened the Sunday night after my sister Deb, flew back to Reno, which is really too bad, because Deb is the one who is fascinated with things of the paranormal. She watches “Ghosts” the way some people watch soap operas. She can’t miss an episode.
This particular night, my sister Marion was sleeping in a room across the hall from my mother’s with the door shut. My dad had gone home for the night, and my sister, Marj, and I were sleeping on an air mattress at the foot of our mom’s hospital bed. The first thing we heard was a maniacal howl in the room, a single sound, and then a sound like somebody slamming a door shut or perhaps dropping a heavy tray on the floor. Whatever it was, it was a crashing sound, and it seemed to come form the very room we were sleeping in.
Marj nudged me and asked, “What was that?”
We both got up to investigate, and found nothing amiss in the room. Marion was still asleep in the room across the hall, so she obviously hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary, and so I went down the hall to ask the staff person on the night shift if she might know what the noisy was. She raised her eyebrows at me, and said, “I didn’t hear anything, sorry!” I asked who else might have been in that end of the building, and she said, “Nobody was down there that I saw. There’s an aid in the kitchen but that’s in the other wing.” Finally, she gave me a pointed sigh, and admitted, “Sometimes people have claimed to hear things here that we can’t explain. Even the staff, some of us have heard or felt things.”
I encouraged her to continue. “There’s a storage room in the back hallway behind me where some of the staff say there is a cold spot, where the temperature actually drops dramatically. You can stand in one spot and feel normal room temperature, and move a couple of feet and be freezing to death. Some of the staff do not really even like to go back there.”
“I’ve never really put a lot of stock in the idea of ghosts or spirits,” I sort of hem-hawed, “but I can’t explain what we just heard in Mom’s room either. Marj and I both heard it. It woke us up.”
“Interesting,” the nurse grinned, “but it was far enough away it didn’t carry down the hall. I never heard a thing and I was right here.” She winked at me, “Now I’m not saying we have ghosts or anything, but this is a really old building, been a hospital for almost a century, and a lot of living and dying has taken place in here. I just know once in a while, something out of the ordinary takes place here that none of us can explain.”
Marj and I spent the next morning on the phone to Reno telling Deb what she had missed. Nothing further occurred for almost a month, and then, somewhere towards the end of March, as I already mentioned, I was sleeping on the couch in the family lounge. Marj was sleeping in Mom’s room on the spare mattress and Marion was sleeping in the room across the hall.
There was a ferocious thunderstorm going on outside with loud thunder booming quite close, followed by bright flashes of lightning. Sometimes the lightning seemed way too close for comfort, and there was a pounding rain. The wind was howling in the trees outside the window, lashing both the trees and the numerous windows in the room with a volley of raindrops.
The storm had already woken me up when the clanging noise began. It seemed to reverberate around the room and off the walls. My first thought was to dismiss it as noise coming from the radiator pipes. I’ve heard noises in pipes in old buildings before, and while this sound was pretty loud to be that, I was thinking, “Huge building, loud noise. It could be.”
However, the noise didn’t let up. I looked at my watch in a flash of lightning and it registered 4:55 A.M. I shook off my covers and walked over to the radiator to touch it. It was cold. That made sense to me. It was already warm enough outside there wasn’t a lot of need for heat. We’d had Mom outside in a wheel chair that very day with only a light sweater on.
I stepped out into the hall to check on Mom’s room and Marion’s room and all was quiet there. I stepped back into the family lounge and the noise began again, a loud clanging like somebody hitting a hammer on pipes. I sat back on the sofa and pulled the covers around my shoulders, and then I did the dumbest thing.
I announced in general to anybody who could hear it in my vicinity, “Knock it off!” I paused for a second, but if anything, the racket got even louder, and more rapid. So again, I said, “If you think to scare me off, it’s not going to happen. Now knock it off!”
Still the racket continued, the room literally vibrating with it. Finally, I announced with loud authority, “Get behind me, Satan, in the name of God, the Father, Jesus, the Son, and the blessed Holy Ghost! You have no authority over me whatsoever, none! So knock it off!”
There was one more really loud bang, and then silence, total, blessed silence. I looked at my watch and the noise had lasted an interminable 5 solid minutes. I tried to lie down and go back to sleep, but finally gave that up. Again, I traipsed down to the nurse’s station, asking if anybody else had heard the racket going on down the hall.
This was a different nurse than the one I had talked to a month ago. “I didn’t hear anything,” she told me. “What did it sound like?”
“Like somebody banging on the pipes with a hammer,” I told her. “I thought maybe it was air in the pipes, but it was plenty loud for that.”
“They shut the furnace down a week ago,” she told me. “It shouldn’t have been that.”
Oh great, I thought. My one valid reason I could think of to explain my suspicious paranormal experience, and she was telling me that couldn’t have been what I heard.
Fonda pretty much corroborated for me what Billie had formerly said, though. Sometimes people had experienced things out of the ordinary in this old building. Staff members had spoken of unusual things happening to them on occasion too, she said.
I don’t know what it was. It never happened again. I never saw any apparitions of any kind. Two times, however, out of the ninety plus days my mother spent in Hospice, I experienced something out of the ordinary that was difficult to explain. One time, Marj and I experienced it together. The second occasion, I experienced it alone. Nonetheless, I was fully awake on both occasions, and making a conscious effort to investigate where the noises were coming from both times.
I, for one, am looking forward to the Ottumwa Paranormal Society’s April investigation. Word on the street is the St. Joseph Hospital is going to be demolished. If there are lingering spirits in these largely empty rooms, I wonder where they will go when the building comes down?