The World's Most Haunted Hospitals: True-Life Paranormal Encounters in Asylums, Hospitals, and Institutions

157 Pages·2016·3.447 MB·English

by  Richard Estep

The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals
True-Life Paranormal Encounters in Asylums, Hospitals,
and Institutions
The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals
Richard Estep
Copyright © 2016 by Richard Estep
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written
permission from the publisher, The Career Press.
THE WORLD’S MOST HAUNTED HOSPITALS
TYPESET BY KRISTIN GOBLE
Printed in the U.S.A.
Front cover images: Surgery room photo by kre_geg/iStock; Hospital ruins photo by Sean Pavone/iStock; Wheelchair
photo by stuart renneberg/iStock; Back cover image by Patrick Foto/shutterstock
To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848-0310) to order using VISA or
MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press.
The Career Press, Inc.
12 Parish Drive
Wayne, NJ 07470
www.careerpress.com
www.newpagebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Estep, Richard, 1973-
Title: The world’s most haunted hospitals : true-life paranormal encounters
in asylums, hospitals, and institutions / by Richard Estep.
Description: Wayne : Career Press, Inc., 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037787| ISBN 9781632650269 | ISBN 9781632659729 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Haunted hospitals. | Asylums—Miscellanea.
Classification: LCC BF1474.4 .E88 2016 | DDC 133.1/22—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037787
This book is dedicated to those who do not accept themselves as being in a dead end, but are able to change their
path regardless of age, experience, and background. These are the people who challenge themselves, renew, relearn,
and take the rest of us into new and wonderful places with them. The author should recognize himself as one of these
exceptional people.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If you are thinking that the dedication of this book was a little self-important, particularly
the phrase “the author should recognize himself as one of these exceptional people,” you
should thank Ade Barwick. Ade won my charity auction by donating a significant amount
of money to The Teenage Cancer Trust (www.teenagecancertrust.org) in exchange for
writing the dedication himself (and embarrassing the author into the bargain!).
This book would not have been possible without the time, passion, and assistance of the
many individuals who contributed to its writing, generously sharing their stories of
haunted healthcare facilities from around the world. All credit goes to them, and any
errors made are the responsibility of the author.
• Dr. Alison Leary
• Annie Lindsay at the National Health Service
• Kelvin Tan of 360 Snapshots and Amber Moose, photographers extraordinaire, and
the kind uploaders to Wikimedia Commons, for brightening up the book
• Hung of www.Hungzai.com for graciously sharing stories of Changi
• Marcus Lindsey and Clare Benavides of Paranormal EXP
• Jason and Angela Arnold of Contact Paranormal
• Darren from Ghost Research International
• Paranormal investigator Joe Mendoza
• Rob Calzada and Golden Crescent Paranormal
• The Old Yoakum Hospital Group
• Media maestro Noel Boyd and the crew from “Ghost Files Singapore”
• Author Robin Saikia
• Hazel Bishop and the West Houston Paranormal Society
• Russell Rush and his “Haunted Tour” team
• Author Marty Young
• Susan Wallner of Final Dimension Paranormal
• Matthew Didier and John Savoie at PsiCan
• Jim “Harry the Horse” Dale
• Urban explorers Robert Joe and Brian J. Cano
• Mike Sculley
• Andy Laird of the Rhode Island Paranormal Research Society
• Laura Giuliano from the Para-Boston Team
• Bloggers Shuko K. Tamao (“Reversed View of Massachusetts”) and J.W. Ocker
(“Odd Things I’ve Seen”)
• Kimm and Cami Andersen, Misty Grimstead, and Dusty Kingston of Asylum 49
• Barry Fitzgerald of “Ghost Hunters International”
• Marcelle Hanauer and Chuck Thornton of St. Albans
• Chris Balassone of Tri-State Paranormal
• Michael Cardinuto of L.I.P.I.
• Zak Bagans, Nick Groff, and Aaron Goodwin
• Author George Dudding
• Laura Estep, Jason and Linda Fellon, Sean Rice, Mike and Caren Kraft, Charlie
Stiffler, Catlyn Keenan, Kira and Seth Woodmansee, and the investigators from
BCPRS
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
1 Asylum 49
2 RAF Hospital Nocton Hall
3 The Clark Air Base Hospital
4 The Spencer State Hospital
5 The Aradale Mental Hospital
6 The Linda Vista Community Hospital
7 St. Thomas’s Hospital
8 Poveglia Island
9 The Rolling Hills Asylum
10 University College Hospital
11 The Yorktown Memorial Hospital
12 The Danvers State Insane Asylum
13 Grace Hospital
14 Metropolitan State Hospital
15 The Old Changi Hospital
16 The Old Yoakum Memorial Hospital
17 St. Albans Sanatorium
Notes
Index
About the Author
FOREWORD
Some people may ask the question: “Why would an old hospital be haunted?” Well, I ask:
“Why wouldn’t it be?” As someone who has been in the medical field for more than 20
years, which includes being a Licensed Practical Nurse working on a Med/Surg floor and
my current position working as a paramedic in the field, I can tell you that it makes a lot
of sense. Look at all the trauma that comes into the hospitals, for instance, the sudden
deaths and the near-death experiences (NDEs). That’s not even including the specialty
hospitals such as the psychiatric hospitals and tuberculosis hospitals. There are so many
old hospitals around this country that have been deemed haunted; for instance, Old South
Pittsburg Hospital, Rolling Hills Asylum, St. Albans (my favorite), and that is just to name
a very few.
There is a lot of energy that is left over from when these hospitals were active, where
people have passed away. Energy never dissipates, so it is possible that the energy is still
within the walls and is released at certain times. You can also think of it as souls who feel
that they are stuck in these buildings and don’t know how to move on. No matter which
side you lean toward, you have to admit hospitals are good places to start looking for
paranormal activity. Some of the hospitals around the world are conducting a type of
paranormal research. These hospitals are researching NDEs by putting certain words up
near the ceiling, in places where nobody on the floor can see them. If they have a patient
that “codes” (dies) and comes back, the patient is asked whether they experienced an
NDE. You have to admit that is pretty cool for modern medical science to be looking into
the paranormal!
There are also a number of medical conditions that can explain certain paranormal
experiences. For instance, there are people who will smell something specific and believe
that it is a loved one letting them know that they are there. It has actually been proven that
if it is just one single person in a group that smells it then they are probably having a
micro-seizure in the olfactory part of the brain, which is in charge of processing smells.
Think about those patients who claim that they see something or someone, only for the
nurse to just dismiss it due to pre-existing medical conditions, which may be inducing
hallucinations. But what if it wasn’t a hallucination; what if there was genuinely
something there that the nurse simply couldn’t see?
The specialty hospitals, such as psychiatric wards and tuberculosis hospitals, have an
even greater chance of being haunted than a regular hospital does. The conditions in
psychiatric hospitals that were operating years and years ago were inhumane, to say the
least. Patients would be locked in small rooms and sometimes even chained to the wall.
Then the doctors would perform horrible procedures, such as lobotomies. When they
would perform this procedure the doctor would usually take a very long thin metal rod and
put it up the patient’s nose and continually ram it around. That would destroy the frontal
lobe of the brain and most of the time make the patient a zombie, if it didn’t kill them.
Then they started using electricity to try to cure these poor people, shocking patients over
and over repeatedly, at incrementally higher doses each time. Now that these hospitals are