I soon discovered I could do it fairly well, though I was better able to connect with some people than with others. For example, my friend Joe and I were hired on the job at the same time. Our connection was such that I usually was able to correctly guess whatever color he was thinking. It even got to the point where he would whisper his chosen color to someone and say, “Watch this." More times than not I would guess it correctly.
On September 11, 2001, I was working inside, assigned to a job we called “doorman," which consisted of booking in new prisoners and checking on those already in custody. Joe was the desk officer that same morning. I don't remember if the night was busy but I do remember it was a quiet morning.
It was around 7 a.m. when I thought I’d take advantage of the quiet and try my version of remote viewing [see “Terminology” page], which our government spent millions on in a secret program in the early 1990s. There are many variations as to how to do it. My method was to tell Joe to think of a place, anyplace, but don’t tell me what it was or where it was. Then he was to choose a random number, which he would tell me.
While the secret location he held in his mind was somewhere on the planet, his chosen random number gave me a focal point on which to concentrate. In other words, instead of thinking about the entire world, I concentrated only on the number. Think of it as how a bloodhound uses a piece of clothing to zero in on, say, a missing child, as opposed to focusing on an entire forest.
I then used what is called “automatic writing” [see “Terminology” page] to draw an image, or what many regular remote viewers called, a “pictogram.”
When Joe told me he was ready, I quieted my mind and let my pen go on its own without me consciously thinking about what my hand was putting down on paper.
When the time was up, my hand, that is, my subconscious mind, had drawn what looked like two buildings, one with a line into it and the other with an angular shape off to its side.
When Joe saw what my hand had produced, he said, "Nah, I was thinking about the Empire State building.” Then he added, “But I did think about the Twin Towers for a moment.”
At that point, I didn’t think my picture really resembled either. We finished our shift and went home at 8 a.m.
At 8:46 a.m., the United States was shaken to its core by the worse terrorist attack in modern history. I turned on my television and watched as one of the towers burned before a second plane slammed into the other.
My phone rang. "The towers!” Joe said. “You drew them! … but now … they're not there."
I looked at my drawing. Now I understood it. One building I had drawn with a line into it and the other with an angular shape off to one side without a line. But I could see now that the shape was …
… a plane pointed at the second building.
HOSPITALS
Google “hospital spirits,” and you will find links to sites ranging from “haunted hospitals,” to blogs written by nurses telling of their experiences with the spirit world in the halls of working hospitals and those long-closed. One blogger nurse warns that if people could see what she sees of the spirit world in hospitals, pregnant women would never birth their children in them. To paraphrase: It doesn’t make sense to deliver a child in a place where sick and old people die. If there are no other options, at least first purify the space of wandering spirits, dark emotions, and thoughts.
Then there are hospital security officers, men and women that patrol the busy corridors during the day, as well as at night when lighting is dim and shadows deep.
They too have their stories.
NURSE BETTY, THE “HAINT”
By Hock Hochheim
“Haints” is a deep southern or East Texan word for ghosts. Haint ain’t in the dictionary but back when this incident took place it was in the mind of many a Texan, especially those familiar with that great monolith atop the hill. I say many a Texan but not me. I was a total skeptic. In fact, I was such a skeptic I was even skeptical of my skepticism.
That is, until that lone night when I experienced something up on that hill I never had before and never have since.
The great building was once a major medical facility called Flow Hospital and it reigned supreme high above the center of Denton. Both my kids were born there and nurses wheeled me around in those halls whenever I got busted up as a cop. I fought prisoners inside the place, as well as out on the grounds, and I also investigated shootings, suicides, and killings in and around the parking lots.
Over time, modern hospitals were built around town and ol’ Flow began to lose business. Owners changed but that didn’t help. It shut down, and not long after it was empty. Someone or maybe a business or corporation owned it then and they hired our police department to work security in the mostly empty building; the front office stayed open evenings and nights for a while.
Other officers and I worked it three or four times a month for years, an easy overtime gig that cops everywhere have always loved. Mostly we walked the halls of the three-story building, which included a morgue and a basement. It was a great setting for a horror movie, especially at 2 a.m. on a winter’s night.
Between foot patrols, officers watched TV on small camper-style sets brought from home. When I wasn’t working patrol, I wrote a lot and even practiced my karate katas. It was the 1980s and it was an easy gig.
Easy, except for Nurse Betty.
She was a young nurse who worked at the hospital years earlier, a real beauty who caught the attention of many of the doctors. But she fell head-over-heels for one in particular, and since he was already married they began to secretly date. Then Betty became pregnant at a time when abortion wasn’t legal. So one night the doctor aborted his own child and without the assistance of nurses. Without the right instruments and equipment available to him he didn’t know Betty was bleeding internally. She died in an elevator before she and the doctor had reached the first floor.
Soon after, Betty began to haunt the halls of Flow Memorial Hospital. All the veteran nurses and doctors knew about the ghost but because I was a skeptic, I ignored it.
Until something happened to me too.
It was a warm summer evening as I walked into the first floor office, clicked on the TV, and spread several detective cases onto a big desk. I gathered up a handful of reports, stepped into a supply room right off the main office, and headed over to a copy machine. I opened the lid, put in the paper, and hit the button. It was a routine I had done many times before. But this time …
Three things happened at once.
I was struck by a total body, spine-tingling chill that took my breath away.
I knew someone was behind me.
It touched my back. But yet it didn’t.
I spun around, but the thing in the corner of my eye moved too, staying behind me, over my shoulder, and just a hair-width out of sight. I saw something, but I didn’t. I couldn’t have, but did.
I spun about twice in front of the copy machine. Twice, like an idiot.
Then the feelings—the electric feeling and the bone-numbing chill—were gone. Gone as fast as they came.
“What in the hell was that?” I said out loud to no one. No one?
I gathered up my papers and returned to the desk trying to shake off those terrible feelings, ones I’d never had before and would never have again. I hadn’t been concerned about the hospital ghost, or any other haints for that matter. Not even on the lowest subliminal level.
I would work overtime there for years, long after they shut down the front office and moved our headquarters into the empty basement emergency room. Even with Nurse Betty’s legend and my supply room experience, I continued to walk the halls of that building in the dead of night, never once having that feeling again. You would think after my unsettling experience I would be mentally predisposed to feel something, but no. It came only once when I was utterly, completely, thoughtlessly un-predisposed to the idea.
Years later an officer wandering the halls at 3 a.m. heard weird noises and
went searching. No haints that time but rather three burglars, which he caught singlehandedly. I was impressed, not just because he wrangled three bad guys by himself, but because the officer heard weird noises in a suspected haunted building, and like Scully and Mulder in the X-Files, he pulled his gun and flashlight and went forth to investigate.
I only had one file in my personal x-files: that supply-room experience. I was open then and I still am to any explanation from any pro in the paranormal field as to what happened that evening. Haint? Dizzy from allergies? What I can say for sure is that I had zero agenda, no dog in that hunt. It was just weird.
Eventually they ripped the structure down and I heard it was replaced with a University of North Texas dormitory. I wonder where Nurse Betty is now?
Still haunting those grounds?
HOSPITAL MORGUE
By Colleen Formanek
I worked security at two local hospitals before I became a police officer. One of my many duties was to oversee conditions in the basement morgue. It made me a little nervous at first, but it helped that the job was simple: check the temperature of the room every few hours, transport the deceased from their hospital rooms to the morgue, and process paperwork. One night when I was still new, my superior said I had earned my stripes and was ready to work by myself. She advised me that officers at shift change had lodged two bodies in the morgue.
After completing my indoor patrol, I headed down to the basement to make a morgue check. The architects must have had a sense of humor because they had enhanced the creep factor by designing the hallway to the cold room to be dark and maze-like. Once inside, I checked over the “body roster,” opened the heavy door to the walk-in cooler and—froze in place.
Something was inside with the two bodies
It was a dark shadow figure, six-foot tall, yet I could see through it, and it was bending over one of the bagged bodies.
I remained motionless except for the goose bumps spreading over my arms. And I was suddenly cold, more deeply cold than the temperature in the cooler.
Seconds passed before I was able to shut the cooler door and rush out of the morgue, locking the outer door securely behind me. Shocked and in disbelief of what my eyes had truly seen, I hurried down the hall to make distance from that room.
Because I was new and I didn’t know my supervisor well, I decided not to say anything. But after a few weeks of getting comfortable with her, I took a chance and described what I had seen that night. After my story, she smiled and then laughed. Does she think I’m crazy, I wondered.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll have plenty more experiences like that working in this place.” Then she added these words.
“Understand this, a hospital is a gateway between the living and the dead. We’ve all had things happen to us here.”
One night, sometime after my experience in the morgue, I was called to remove the body of a man who had just died. My shift partner hated going anywhere near the morgue because of an experience he refused to talk about, but I needed help, so I called him on the radio to meet me in the patient's room.
I retrieved a gurney and got there first, noting the refreshment cart in the hall outside the door. This typically indicated someone was about to pass on and the hospital was kindly offering something for the family and friends that had gathered to say their goodbyes.
Because the curtains were closed around the man’s bed to allow the bereaved a little more time, I went over to the nurse's station to pick up his paperwork. I asked a nurse how long she thought the family would be and she said they had all left about an hour earlier.
My partner still hadn’t made it to the floor so I wrestled the cart inside the room and pushed aside the curtain. Whoops. An elderly man, a friend or a brother, was sitting on the couch, his head in his hands.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I was told everyone had …”
I closed the curtain and quickly stepped back, bumping into the nurse who had come to help me transfer the body.
“What’s wrong,” she asked. “Why did you step back like that?”
"There is still a family member in there with him. He’s mourning. I wanted to give him some more time and privacy."
“What?” She pushed past me and pulled the curtain open. "No one is in here. See?"
The sofa was empty; on the bed lay a zipped closed body bag.
At first I was startled. Where had the man …? Then I could feel something there in that space, some kind of presence and I knew, I could feel, that it was … watching.
My partner finally showed up and the nurse left. After we wrestled the bag over onto the gurney I asked him to wait a second. Because of what I had seen in the morgue and just now on the sofa, I felt a compelling need to look into the body bag. I slowly moved the zipper down far enough to move the material aside to see the face.
I sucked in my breath. It was the man I had seen sitting on the couch a few minutes earlier.
I looked up at my partner. “I …” I struggled to collect myself. “I wanted to see—”
"I know,” he said, as if he knew what I was going to tell him. “I’ve had the same thing happen to me.” His eyes moved around the partially curtained off area.
“Let's get outta here,” he said. “We’re being watched."
OTHER HAUNTED PLACES
To state the obvious, each person is an individual with a unique personality, life experiences, inter relationships, and so on. Many paranormal investigators believe the individual takes these unique factors with them when they die. This means that each experience with a spirit is also unique because of what the deceased has retained after death. Likewise, the location of the spirit or ghost presence is also unique.
Why is one place haunted and another not? Sometimes it’s based on the distinctive spirit of the deceased and its reasons to remain in a given location. Other times, there is no clear reason, at least not to the living.
Hotels, apartments, hospitals, factories, and prisons that have had a long history of occupancy—and all the fluctuating physical pain and emotions that go along with the human condition—are more likely to be haunted than, say, newly constructed sites.
Which brings up these questions.
Why has this five-story apartment building, which was constructed in the late 1800s, never had a reported haunting?
Why is this house, in which an elderly woman died of influenza, haunted while that house over there, where an entire family was butchered, not affected at all by ghosts and spirits?
Why does it seem that there are so many hauntings where someone died 80 years ago, when millions have died since without associated paranormal events?
Who knows? No one, which is why the study of the paranormal is at once frustrating and fascinating. That said, many paranormal investigators feel that spirits remain in certain locations so they can let the living know their story. They often do this by making noises or moving objects. Sometimes the strange sounds or the relocated things are particular to the person that passed, such as a moved hairbrush, a tool dropped from a table, or something slid across the floor. These actions might be done so a loved one knows who it is, while other times it’s done to a stranger, even a person that doesn’t believe in the paranormal.
Some paranormal investigators believe that while we often associate hauntings with houses, statistics show they occur more frequently in other locations. This is because, as some investigators contend, spirits need great energy to be seen, but the average home doesn’t produce enough. Therefore, larger places, such as museums, churches, hotels, offices, and others that produce a lot of energy, are locations more likely for hauntings.
It’s believed that sensitives are better able to experience an invisible presence or see a visible one, even when a location has been declared free of them. Some experts claim a cemetery is the last place to find a spirit, but nonetheless there are sensitives that see and feel them on the grounds and in the mausoleums.
One paranormal investigator
made a list where he has found the most hauntings, the first one being the greatest and the last one the least. Remember, this is just one sensitive’s experience. Not all are the same.
Battle sites, such as Civil War fighting locations
Places where disasters or mass killings have occurred
Hospitals
Jails and prisons
Houses with a history of violence and emotional strife
Graveyards
COFFEE AND CUPS
By Loren W. Christensen
It had been called skid row forever, but in the mid 1980s Portland’s politicians and developers began referring to the 12 square blocks of rundown buildings, flops houses, gin dives, and wino-populated sidewalks as Old Town. The name didn’t change the horrid place where so many down and out men and women wasted away from cheap wine and bad dope, slept in doorways every night, fought the cops and each other with fists and broken bottles, and bled out on rundown sidewalks and potholed asphalt.
Beneath this wretched part of Portland that many a beat cop called “the place forgotten by God,” lies what the historians called Underground Portland, a series of catacombs and tunnels winding about just below skid row, er, Old Town. From 1850 to the beginning of World War II, the tunnels were used during the days to deliver goods to businesses from ships in the harbor. But after the sun went down, they were used for drugs, illegal booze, prostitution, gambling, and human trafficking. Many a man’s drink was drugged, and upon losing conscious the hapless soul was dropped through a trapdoor into one of the tunnels. When he awoke, he would find himself at sea, having been sold to the highest bidder among various captains. Not all men survived; many died in the tunnels.
Bill and I had just cleared the precinct and were on our way to morning coffee when dispatch changed our plans with a burglary call “with curious circumstances” at Allan’s Café, Second and Davis Street. It’s not good to keep cops from their morning caffeine but duty called.
Cops' True Stories of the Paranormal: Ghost, UFOs, and Other Shivers Page 7
