Читать книгу Real Hauntings 5-Book Bundle - Mark Leslie - Страница 11

Spirits of former patients, the echo of footsteps and voices down deserted corridors, lights flickering on and off all on their own, and nurse call buttons being activated with nobody in the room to press them: these eerie events have all been reported in the Royal Victoria Hospital. Though it moved to a new location in 2015, the original buildings of the “Royal Vic,” as it has been affectionately known, have been an iconic city landmark near the bottom of Mount Royal. It has links to doctors such as Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (author of the beloved Canadian war poem “In Flanders Fields”), and was the site of the first injection of penicillin and the first kidney transplant in the Commonwealth.

The Scottish baronial–style hospital was originally built in 1893. It was lauded as one of the finest and best-equipped hospitals in North America and was intended by its founders “to be for the use of the sick and ailing without distinction of race or creed.”

Over the years, the hospital has received worldwide recognition for the multitude of positive work done out of it, but not everyone has been so kind in their descriptions of the original hospital buildings. Indeed, Jolene Haley, an author and writer at the Midnight Society, said that the place offered “a creepy Arkham Asylum vibe.” Haley’s reference to the fictional psychiatric hospital made popular through the Batman comics might, of course, be alluding to the hospital’s links to the Allan Memorial Institute and the controversial secret brainwashing experimentation that took place there in the 1950s and early 1960s (see “Unspeakable Torture and Mind Control”). Or, Haley may have been referring to some of the other dark tales associated with the Royal Vic prior to the 2015 relocation of the hospital to the Glen site of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC).

The original buildings of the Royal Victoria Hospital, sitting near the bottom of Mount Royal, are an iconic city landmark.

A few of those tales appear in an October 2013 posting on the MUHC’S website. The first tells the story of a nurse who experienced something eerie in the staff room. During a break on one of her long and tiring overnight shifts, she headed to the staff room to take a quick nap on the couch. At one point during the nap, she opened her eyes to see an odd, white smoky substance floating in the air just a foot or so above her. She rubbed her eyes, not sure what she was looking at, and tried to focus on the hazy vision; that’s when she realized the transparent wisps of white were in the shape of a person standing over her.

A chill ran down her spine as she slowly sat up and slid her legs to the floor. “Go away,” she said quietly. But the smoky figure remained where it was.

The nurse carefully reached toward the figure, but her hand went right through the smoke. As she moved her hand back and forth, the figure and the foggy wisps in the air began to disperse. She sat there, wondering where the smoky haze could have come from and curious if she was hallucinating due to being overtired. She contemplated lying down for a bit longer and getting some more rest.

That’s when the foggy figure rematerialized … except this time it wasn’t alone. There were two other similarly sized human shapes formed out of white wispy haze standing with it.

Too frightened to scream, the nurse slowly stood and left the staff room. She never saw any of the three smoky figures, or anything remotely similar, ever again. But she did confirm that no matter how tired she was during a long shift, she was never tempted in the slightest to lie down on that couch again.

Another tale concerns a painting of a beautiful house and surrounding landscape that once hung on the wall in the Ross Pavilion. It was well liked, part of the relaxing ambiance of the space. But every once in a while when somebody was looking at the painting, small things about it would change. Sometimes there appeared to be an old woman peering out from one of the home’s windows. Other times she came out of the doorway of the house, stood there, looked around, and then went back inside. The old woman appeared enough times that people began to complain, and speculation led to the painting eventually being removed from the wall.

What happened to the painting once it was taken down was never revealed.

A former staff member shared her tale about a patient who passed away in the M5 cardiac ward of the hospital. After declaring the man’s time of death, the staff carefully arranged his body, left the room, closed the door behind them, and waited for the man’s family. When the family arrived, the staff tried to let them into the room, but they found the door bizarrely locked from the inside.

Security was called. After they unlocked the door, they confirmed that there was nobody else in the room other than the recently deceased patient. The staff member who shared the story speculated that perhaps the man who had passed away had not been comfortable with his family seeing him in that condition.

* * *

A woman who identified herself only as DB (who we will call “Debbie”) posted her story about the Royal Vic on the Haunted North America website.

In 1996, Debbie was spending the night in hospital after a surgery. She woke up in the middle of the night and was shocked to discover she was lying in a large pool of blood, her pyjamas and the bed sheets completely soaked with it.

Horrified by the sight, and fearful that her stitches had opened in the middle of the night, Debbie rang for the nurse. When the nurse arrived, Debbie was beside herself with fear and anxiety, sickened by the feel and sight of all the blood on her clothing and skin.

“One nurse came, then a second, then a third,” Debbie wrote. “They were baffled. My bandage was intact, no blood anywhere on my skin. So they decided to remove my bandage, thinking perhaps there was a leak somewhere around it. Once they removed it everything was fine. I wasn’t bleeding from anywhere, it was so very strange. My entire body showed no sign of blood at all, yet my pyjamas and bed was full.”

Later, during tests, it was discovered that Debbie was anaemic and needed two pints of blood transfused. Debbie speculated that the appearance of the mysterious blood was an omen about her condition.

A short time later, Debbie became frustrated by her long post-surgery recovery stay, reflecting on her scheduled release date and how far away it was. To alleviate her anxiousness, she took a morning walk down one of the corridors, longing for the end of the lengthy hospital visit that seemed never-ending. As she was reflecting on this, she looked over to her right and noticed another patient that she didn’t recognize. The older woman was standing in the doorway of one of the rooms and looking directly at Debbie, her frail hand clutching a tall intravenous pole. Debbie wondered if she was newly admitted.

The old woman smiled at Debbie and said, “You really want to get out of here, don’t you?”

Debbie was inexplicably chilled by the woman’s presence and found herself unable to utter a single word in response. This stranger appeared to know exactly what Debbie had been thinking.

As she glanced down the hall toward the nurses’ station, another odd notion struck Debbie. “A strange feeling went through me, like, I just knew I shouldn’t be replying.… I just felt this,” Debbie shared. “For some strange reason I knew I shouldn’t be talking to her. The nurses’ station was close by and it was more like a feeling that the nurses shouldn’t see me ‘talking’ with her.”

Much later Debbie realized her real worry had been the idea of the nurses seeing her talking to nothing.

Still not saying anything to the woman in the doorway, Debbie quietly nodded her head in acknowledgement.

“Straighten your back,” the old woman said, “and walk as fast as you can to the nurses’ station. It’s going to hurt, but then you’ll be out in no time.”

Debbie looked at her, considered the suggestion, and contemplated the dozen or more steps it would take to do exactly what the stranger said. Then she took a deep breath, pulled her back as straight as she was able to manage, and walked as quickly as she could past the nurses’ station. Though pain shot through her body with every single step, she managed to complete the task. A few hours later, Debbie’s doctor came with the good news that she was healing quickly and would be released from the hospital early.

Debbie never saw the strange old woman again. However, a few months later when she returned to the hospital for a follow-up appointment, the elevator she was on stopped on the floor where she’d encountered the old woman. She hadn’t pressed the button for that floor.

The first thing Debbie spotted when the elevator doors opened was the intravenous pole, in the same spot in the doorway where the old woman had been clutching it. Upon seeing it, Debbie shook her head, wondering if there were supernatural forces at play.

Debbie shared her belief that there was some kind of presence in the hospital, appearing in the guises of the old woman and the pool of blood that had coated her, and this presence had constantly been looking out for her.

* * *

On April 26, 2015, as part of the Royal Vic’s move to its new location, 154 patients were transferred the few kilometres west. It was cited as “the biggest hospital move in Canadian history.” The Black Watch Royal Highland Regiment paid tribute to the event in a bagpipe ceremony, as 122 years of operation in the original building came to an end.

The old building itself remains empty, abandoned. And though the McGill Campus Planning and Development webpage mentions an ambitious plan to transform the site into a world-class pavilion dedicated to the study of research of sustainable development and public policy, none of the plans for repurposing the old building have come to fruition. A special report by Salimah Shivji of CBC News indicates that the MUHC is on the hook for 7.5 million dollars of annual costs for heating and maintenance of the vacant buildings. One of the methods used to help offset the costs is to allow film companies to use the buildings for a nineteenth-century hospital setting. The MUHC has accommodated filmmakers by keeping several of the rooms filled with old medical equipment.

The dead buildings have also been the birthplace of other creative works. A Montreal Gazette article from November 2017 by Susan Schwartz entitled “Portraits of Montreal’s Now-Empty Royal Victoria Hospital” describes an art show called Entr’Acte, which is a nod to the fact that the hospital is “between vocations.” One of the portraits, entitled “Diane’s Escape,” by Marie-Jeanne Musiol, is an image named for someone Musiol accompanied on her journey from this life. Marie said she knew she wanted her image to reflect a personal approach and not something that was strictly architectural. “My work has always been about energy and capture of energy in various places,” Musiol said. She found that energy while searching in a tenth-floor room in what was once the breast centre of S Block. She came across an intravenous pole in the basement and taped the tubing to the window in the tenth-floor room. “It is the representation, in a certain way, of life going out of the body.… I see the tubes and the swirls as representing the various convolutions of life and death. And finally, the little tube goes out through the window. And the other window is something of an escape route, giving insight into a dimension beyond.”

In the fall of 2017, CBC Radio Canada sent Hugo Lavoie on assignment to explore the Old Royal Victoria Hospital for a French language segment of Gravel le matin. The piece he recorded is entitled “Visite du tunnel de la mort de l’ancien hôpital Royal Victoria” (“Visit to the Tunnel of Death at the Old Royal Victoria Hospital”). A February 2018 article entitled “Old Royal Victoria Hospital” on the Haunted Montreal blog describes the program about Lavoie’s visit:

The Tunnel of Death connected the hospital to the autopsy room at the Institute of Pathology via an underground corridor that passes under University Street. Interested in recreating the experience of what happens when a patient dies, Lavoie was taken by Dr. Jonathan Meakins, who oversees heritage of the old building, to the former emergency room, the resuscitation chamber, an old surgery room, and through the infamous corridor to the autopsy room.

“It’s a bit disturbing,” Lavoie explained.

Another reporter, Alyson Grant, a former Montreal Gazette journalist, was inspired by some of the stories about the old hospital to write an absurdist play in honour of the building and its ghosts. Her play, Progress!, premiered in the fall of 2015 and features two ghosts who, in the tradition of such classics as It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, persuade a suicidal patient, the hospital’s very last patient, that her life is worth living after all.

Grant was thinking about the hospital’s closure during the year the play premiered and she found herself wondering what would happen to all of the ghosts in a building like that after it is abandoned.

“The original idea of the ghosts being like caretakers was based on something my sister, who was an ICU nurse at the Children’s Hospital here, told me,” Grant said in a Montreal Gazette article. Grant relayed the story of a teenage boy who lay dying in the hospital and received visits from a mysterious red-haired girl who would speak to and comfort him. Yet, despite all the stories the boy shared about this girl, nobody else in the hospital had ever seen her. It was only after the boy died that one of the staff members remembered a young girl with red hair who’d been a patient in the same ward … and who had died there.

“I couldn’t help thinking,” Grant said, “what’s going to happen to the red-haired girl when this hospital is closed? Where is she going to go? What’s going to happen to all those other people who died here?”

In a CBC article, Grant spoke about the play and its celebration of the ghosts from the past. “It’s my attempt at paying homage to these buildings and to our sense of what they’ve been in our lives. Many Montrealers have walked these halls and had profound experiences here, either of healing or giving birth, or of death.”

Grant is correct. Hospitals are places of healing, places of birth, places of hope. They are also places of trauma, places of suffering, and places of death. Intense emotions and many of the extremes of the human condition are experienced in hospitals. If it is possible for human spirits to be trapped on our earth by trauma or unfinished business, what better location for that to occur than a hospital?

What better location in Montreal than a castle-like building that has stood for more than 125 years, the site of such highs and lows of human experience, and stands, empty and foreboding, overlooking the city below, echoes of the past behind the now-dark windows?