I wrote this up for a local ghost hunting group asking for ghost stories from our area over a year and a half ago...I haven't been at the Lodge for 3yrs now. Hope you enjoy! :D
I've been working at the Lodge, beside the hospital, for the last year and a half. I started on Night Shift for the first 8-9 months then went to days. At night, we definitely experienced a number of incidents that we couldn't explain. Things would happen during the day as well, but they aren't as noticeable because of the noise of ‘living’. *smile*
A very common occurrence usually happened just after the evening shift would leave…about midnight…and my coworker, Amy, and I were still sitting in our staff room. We’d be chatting away then one of us would hear the sound of a teaspoon clanging in a coffee cup, like someone was stirring their coffee, in the dining room next door. When we went in to see who was up, no one was ever there…or even in the surrounding hallways. We always took that to mean we’d better get to work! LOL
Something else that happened often on night shift was the sound of slamming doors in the old section of the Lodge. Our senior staff would tell us that it was ‘Fred’ the boiler system in the basement starting up, but on MANY occasions, Amy and I would test that theory…as soon as we heard the ‘slam’ we’d listen carefully by the stairway to hear if the boiler system would kick in. I’d say at least half the time it wasn't ‘Fred’!
We've all had individual experiences as well. Usually one of us would stay in the kitchen to bake and the other would go around the rest of the Lodge cleaning. I was dusting down by the shuffleboard area one night…at about 3:30 am. All of a sudden I could hear a couple of female voices, chatting and laughing. I couldn't make out what they were saying, they were quite muffled. I just assumed that someone had left a TV on in their room, so I listened at the door of all the surrounding rooms, but there was no noise coming from any of them. I was so unnerved by that incident that I wore my MP3 player every night after that so I wouldn't hear anything like that again!
There was another time, within a week of this experience, that Amy was doing our 2 hour 'check' walk around the Lodge. She came back to tell me that while she was rounding the corner at the shuffleboard area, she looked up just as she was walking through a mist. She said it completely caught her off guard because she had her head down, singing away to her iPod. It reminded her of walking through fog. She was freaked right out when I told her about what happened to me at that spot! We also had one young girl who worked on nights who said she saw the silouette of a woman sitting in the chair once in that area. I never would have believed her that easily if we hadn't had experiences there ourselves....and we never told ANYONE about it! It was frowned upon by management for staff to tell 'ghost stories', they didn't want us scaring their new staff! ;D
Another time when I was working by myself during the Norwalk Virus outbreak in Mar 2008, I was baking muffins at the rear of the kitchen. I was listening to my headphones so I didn't pay much attention to my surroundings. I turned around to get something from the fridge and stopped dead in my tracks….the kitchen door was CLOSED!! I was completely stunned! The door was always held open with a wooden wedge…I’d never seen it close on its own…and I was the only one in the building that was awake! Needless to say that was a LONG night…
Amy and I were talking about our experiences one time during a coffee break we took with one of our residents who was always up at 4am, he looked at us and asked “You believe in ghosts?” I thought he was just gonna make fun of us, but then he said “I've seen two since I moved in here. I haven’t told anyone because I figured they’d just think I was crazy!” Surprisingly, he told us that he saw a woman with a child at the end his hallway….by the shuffleboard! Leo’s a very friendly man, so he said he’d walked about half way down to greet her when she and her lil boy just disappeared! Another time, Leo said that when he first moved in, he'd met a lady just outside his room after breakfast who he thought was another resident he hadn't met yet. He's a real ladies' man, lol, so he invited her into his suite for coffee. He closed the door behind them and started chatting away while he was filling the kettle with water. He said he turned around and she was GONE! The only people he ever told that story to was us! He said he didn't wanna look like a nutcase, being so new. Amy and I started working there at about the same time he moved in...in Feb'08. Curious about this, we looked back in the resident records to find that there was a woman who had just passed away in the room next to him the month before. The strangest part of this tale is that rumblings among the staff blamed our manager's lack of management skills for this woman's death. When I was being interviewed for the job, it was -38C outside and they were having a lot of problems with the heating system in the new area of the building. Some of the evening staff told me that this lady's room was always freezing, to the point of ice building up on the walls around her bed. She died from pneumonia just before my first week. :-(
After I had moved to days, we lost one of our favorite old guys to cancer. He was such a trouble maker...when we were on nights, he'd always try to spook us because he knew about our ghostly chats and thought it was hilarious to scare us at 3 or 4am when we never expected him to be up. I had taken over the head cook position and had been cooking for a while before that day when our housekeeper found him in his room as she went to call him for lunch. We were quite upset by the news, we all loved him! For the next 3 days...just before lunch, very weird things started to happen in the kitchen. The freezer and fridge doors closed on me when I was the only one there, serving utensils would go missing just as we were in a rush to serve, and on the third day, in front of myself and the dining room staff, a steel pot lifted up off the pot rack on the island and dropped with this huge BANG onto the counter! The hooks face upward so it wasn't possible for it to have fallen off by itself! Haha...the entire dining room when dead silent, then I heard one of the ladies at the first table say to the lady next to her "Did you see that?! Nobody touched that pot!" I'm so glad the residents saw it too...I felt like I was starting to go nuts or something! That was Mel's final performance...he got EVERYONE'S attention with that one, he was happy and didn't need to scare us anymore!
Just last week, one of our residents claimed that some paramedics walked into her room at 4am. She was startled and got out of bed to greet them. The taller of the men asked her if she had called 911. She said she hadn't and they asked her if she was in room 230. She told them that 230 was across the hall, and closed the door behind them as they left her room. In the morning she asked us if the night shift workers had let the paramedics into her locked room…we told her that there were no paramedics called that night. She was very concerned that people other than staff might have access to the master keys to the building. We told her there was no way anyone could even come into the alarmed outer doors, let alone into their rooms without our knowledge. We managed to convince her that it was just a dream. It wasn't until later that afternoon that we realized room 230 was the room that a new resident had fallen in a couple months ago and had died in the hospital the following week. It was around 4:30am when the paramedics left with her! That room has been empty since then.
