Haunted Hospitals

About Midnight Stories: October is the month of spooks and things that go bump in the night, so what better than a series of scary stories to get you in the mood for Halloween? Have a spine-tingling story to share? Email them at submissions@gmanews.tv. Read on.

Art by Jannielyn Ann Bigtas

In Manila, is a hospital built by an American architect in the neo-classic style that follows the plan for the city by an urban designer who was innovative and radical by the standards of the time.

He was a regular Howard Roark, the protagonist in the first major literary success of author Ayn Rand in 1943. But of course the hospital predated Rand's novel by a good 36 years.

So it was expectedly haunted, the entire area occupied by its 1,500 beds.

Even at high noon when one visited the tertiary state-owned hospital, its hallways were always gloomy and chilly, the lift, creepily creaky like you were stepping into the morgue or mausoleum.

Nurses pulling the graveyard shift would always scurry down its halls and watchers were afraid to venture out of their patient's room at night.

A mother and her two young children visited her father—their grandfather—there one day close to Christmas. Of course they went at night after she got off from her job.

Their first encounter was the ghostly silhouette of a man on the stairs. The mother navigated her way around him because she saw him as solid, like a real person but her children saw a hazy silhouette like a swirling mist or fog.

When they took the creaky elevator, her daughter was unusually quiet. It took them quite a while to get to her father's room because the elevator would stop at every floor although no one got in.

When they got to her father's floor, her daughter finally regained her tongue. It seems she could not speak because she was transfixed with horror for at every floor they stopped, the doors would open to reveal the same woman standing just outside it, her arms wrapped around herself, wearing a hospital gown and looking most anxious.

The daughter was sure that even if the woman tried to beat the elevator before it got to the next floor, why would she when she could have just got in at the first? And besides, she didn't look like she ran or was breathless or exerted herself before the doors opened at the next floor—she was just standing there, clutching her sides and looking anxious like she did the first time the girl saw her.

The third entity the mother would encounter on a separate visit to the hospital was coming down the stairs as she was about to ascend it. Referring to it as "It" is right because this creature looked like cousin It, the Adams family character. It was covered with brown hair not unlike the shape-shifting Puckwudgie of the old Native American legend. She didn't quite know what to make of it and so ran off to the nearest nurses station to ask for help.

The same mother would visit another hospital—this one established in 1955 for military personnel. She was freelancing at the time and was conducting a study that required her to interview the medical staff as well some of the patients so there she was, on her way home when she passed one of the medical ICU rooms.

The last one on the right side of the hall towards the exit was dark and appeared unoccupied until she glanced up and saw a man seated at the foot of the middle bed in the darkness. All she saw was his outline from whatever light was seeping in through the windows from outside. It looked to her like he was lost in thought, looking down at the floor, sad. She made a mental note to check in on him the next
day.

But when she returned and asked one of the nurses for the name of the patient, or if he was a watcher, if there were any recent deaths as she described the sad figure, what the nurse told her gave her the goosies.

There were no recent deaths in that wing of the hospital and that, in fact, the room she was referring to had been empty for over a week!

I had stories of my own to share about a hospital established by Episcopalian missionaries in 1903. The year was 1992 and I was miscarrying my second pregnancy and had been scheduled for a dilation and curettage (or D&C) to clear my uterine lining of the remaining tissue.

Because every room in the new wing was occupied at the time, I was given a room in the old wing, or part of the original building when the hospital was built. I didn't really care because I was just going to sleep off my local anesthesia with intravenous pain medication. I shooed off my husband and told him to go to work because I would not need any company that night. I had already been through a previous procedure just seven months earlier and knew the routine.

I woke up with a jolt at around seven o'clock that evening to hear the sound of the shower going in the bathroom.

Mine was a private room and I was sure my husband was at work, so who was taking a bath behind the closed bathroom door?

I forced myself to stand and go knock on the door, thinking it could be housekeeping but no one answered. So I opened the door and sure enough the shower was switched on. I switched it off, got back into bed and promptly fell asleep still groggy from the ativan or whatever it was they gave me.

The next morning, same thing. Shower going again but this time I buzzed for someone from housekeeping to check it and sure enough, the shower was on and this time, the shower curtain was drawn close too! But of course nobody was there.

Same thing happened in 2014 at the 5th floor of the hospital's main building when a special nurse and I were keeping my ill husband company. First we heard a loud thump like something fell off the over-bed table behind me. The overbed table is that narrow table on wheels that adjusts to fit over a hospital bed and when not in use, we used Larry's to stock his adult diapers and other supplies.

When I heard the thump, his special nurse and I both checked: nothing there. So we surmised the sound probably came from the room next door. Next we heard voices outside the door so we thought that perhaps the new shift of nurses had arrived and were debating whether to take his vitals then or later. The voices trailed off then came back a few minutes later.

When the shift nurses came into the room, we told them we had heard them earlier and wondered why they didn't come in since the patient was awake. They looked at each other and said no one had ventured in our part of the hallway earlier because all the other rooms were unoccupied and were under renovation and that, in fact, only ours was occupied!

That's why hospitals always give me the heebie jeebies. — LA, GMA News

• The 'icicle' people
• The house on the ridge overlooking Taal lake