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The Haunted Hospital
By Patricia Hagen
FATE :: August 2005
Twenty miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, is the town of Gastonia in Gaston County. Gastonia has several unique aspects, some of which the locals brag about and others they try to hide. But not many people know that in their midst sits a group of old buildings full of ghosts.
These buildings are located on what I was told is the highest point in Gastonia. Since Gastonia is a town full of hills, the view is pretty spectacular. There are two large red brick buildings with white columns, like something out of Gone with the Wind, with several smaller, more recent buildings behind them
The original complex was built in the early 1920s as an orthopedic hospital for crippled children. When the hospital closed, the Department of Aging took over, then the Department of Social Services, and now it is a mental health facility.
It was during the buildings’ incarnation as the Department of Social Services that I first saw the complex and heard of the ghosts. My daughter Gail was hired as a social worker there in 1991. Knowing that I was interested in the paranormal, she told me some of the tales she was hearing. People didn’t talk about their experiences without prompting, but some told hair-raising stories if asked.
One informant was the janitor for the Adult Services building in which Gail worked. One of his new helpers was cleaning one night in the area where the old hospital’s morgue had been located. As she came to the morgue’s ramp, she saw a being with a large hat, a long cloak, and no face. That was her first and last day on the job.
One day, as a social worker passed a small office in the morgue area, she heard someone talking on the phone—or so she thought, because she heard only one side of the conversation. Upon inspection, she found that the office was empty.
The elevator sometimes went up and down without people, and once in a while a rest room on the lower floor locked itself, requiring the janitor to pry the door open from the outside. The janitor once heard the rustle of clothing while he was cleaning a conference room. When he turned to see who it was, he got a glimpse of a white skirt passing the door. When he checked the hall, it was empty.
The Family Services building is even more active. Janitors there were constantly leaving. When it was a hospital, this building was a residence hall for nurses. One nurse, so the story goes, was depressed over a love affair and hung herself in that building. Maybe it was the ghost of that nurse whom one of the recent social workers heard following her in the Family Services building. The employee turned to see a woman in an old-fashioned white nurses’ uniform and cap who vanished in the middle of the hall.
Gail has witnessed several strange things over the years, some of them so constant that she hardly noticed after a while. For instance, when going into the Adult Services building after most people had left, there was often a murmur of voices in a distant hall as if a meeting were taking place just out of earshot. But there was no meeting, no people.
The lights constantly malfunctioned, going on and off at will. Approaching the building one evening, Gail noticed all of the lights were on before she got to the door; then all of the lights went off. When Gail was in a different part of the building one day, she saw a man in a white shirt sitting in a chair beside a desk in an otherwise empty office. She turned to give him a second look, but the man was gone ...
Read the rest of this article in the August 2005 issue of FATE
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