Haunted Hospitals (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - Faces Of Death - full transcript
Moving objects, lockers doors that shut themselves, staff stalked by an uncanny presence -- something is haunting the 3rd floor of the hospital. As the paranormal incidents escalate, a ...
- The best part of my job
was being able to love people.
- Hi, I'm Meighan.
- Don't touch me, you bitch.
- The secretary said,
"Judith, we've got a problem."
- It's something I'll never forget.
A face as white as death.
It just terrified me.
- Without a doubt, the place is haunted.
- It scared
the shit out of you.
- No, it scared the **** out of me.
The devil was in that room.
- Burn in hell!
- Senior nurse Judith Whalley
excels at maintaining order
and has for more than four decades.
- I have worked all over England.
In the city of Liverpool,
I've worked out in the
country in Yorkshire Dales.
And then, I arrived in
Birmingham and stayed there
and I worked in the same
hospital from 1977 until 2010.
Nursing requires a great
deal of empathy and sympathy.
I suppose what's important
about nursing to me
is the ability to interact with
people, to make them better.
- Judith is hands on.
No detail slips passed her.
- I was working in management,
so I was walking around
the hospital a lot.
I mean, I patrolled the whole hospital
at least three times a day.
My responsibility was for making sure
that both patients and staff were safe
in every aspect of their work.
- Judith is
prepared for every situation,
except for the one she's
about to encounter.
- I was up in the offices
and the secretaries came
up to see me and said,
"Judith, we've got a problem.
"The office is really uncomfortable.
"Somebody is moving our
papers around every night."
And so, they were really
quite upset about it.
- Judith's colleague
Emily finds the papers
in the main filing room
are also disturbed.
- I'm
thinking maybe somebody's
getting into the hospital?
- Well, I mean, I did wonder
if the cleaners were doing it.
But actually the cleaners
were going in first thing
in the morning when the
office staff were coming in
and emptying all the
bins from the day before.
So there had to be some other explanation.
- Many employees believe
that this century-old hospital is haunted.
- It may be that these
are the spirit entities
just trying to make their presence known.
Are they doing this deliberately?
We're not entirely sure.
- Judith,
rational by necessity,
remains open to the paranormal.
- I didn't disbelieve.
My first body, I saw before I was seven.
And that was my father.
And I actually, um, saw
him, about six weeks later,
walk down the stairs and
walk out of the house.
But I'd watched him die.
- With Judith
back on a night shift,
the door to the paranormal
opens once more.
- Now they divided this ward in half.
So there was the half that I used
and the half that was empty.
The thing was this, the
empty half of the ward
had the staff toilets, which
was fine during the day
but at night, very uncomfortable.
It's very difficult to know,
when you're walking through an open space,
what catches your attention
'cause you're just walking
down with one thing in mind.
I didn't see anything.
I just felt something.
Out of the corner of my
eye, something moved.
This was just a movement of
some sort that I was seeing
on the edge of my peripheral vision
in a place that I knew was empty.
- When you have a large
location such as this hospital,
we could be dealing with
numerous spirit entities.
And if you were to find
yourself in the dark,
it's an extremely creepy place to be.
- I understood why my staff
were very uncomfortable.
My assumption was that there
was perhaps somebody there
and when I turned to look,
there wasn't anybody there.
I don't know who that person
was, but I saw something.
- This is plainly some kind of entity
that wants her gone from its turf.
It wants her out, it
wants to be left alone
and it's not shy about telling her that.
- How
did that make you feel?
- Kind of upset.
I could feel somebody who
was quite close to me.
I couldn't see him, but I could
feel something close to me.
- Judith and her
staff continue to feel watched.
Especially Emily, who's
about to start a night shift.
- The hospital changing rooms
were in this large, open space
that had a very high ceiling.
There was always different
people making comments
at different times about not
liking being up there at night.
- A hospital is all of life
in one very concentrated building.
People are dying and passing
from this life into the next.
And that leaves behind a residue.
- Is somebody there?
- She said the locker doors had been shut.
You know, they turn their
back and the door gets shut.
- Some spirits are
notoriously territorial.
They can make their displeasure known
and they can do it very
aggressively if they so choose.
- I wasn't running the ward,
but I was visiting the ward
so I would have been up there.
- What's wrong?
- I feel like you just need
to go and see it for yourself.
- I took their
complaints very seriously.
- Okay, just calm down.
Calm down.
Can you get her a glass of water?
I'm going to go and check.
- They were very unhappy
and very uncomfortable.
- You should just go and--
- I'll go and have a look.
- And I needed to see if I
could do something about it.
- Determined
to protect her staff,
Judith is about to uncover
strange and terrifying secrets
about her hospital.
Something is terrifying
Judith Whalley's staff.
And it's up to her to find out what.
- It's an old hospital.
People were up there late in the evening
and really didn't like it very much.
I felt that I needed to
go and find out for myself
because if you are going to go
and put forward a complaint,
the first thing that somebody says is,
"What have you done about it?"
So I try and find out what the problem is.
And I didn't find anything.
- As we start to see an increase
in paranormal phenomena,
such as light phenomena,
objects being thrown,
things falling, it may be that
these are the spirit entities
just trying to make their presence known.
"Hey, here I am, you can't
see me, but I'm here."
It's equally possible, though,
that they are trying to warn
the living residents that this
isn't a place they should be.
- Whatever
spirit continues to haunt
this hospital is now
Judith's primary concern.
- It's very important that
we keep our staff safe
and they're not frightened either.
- But within days,
Judith's colleague Emily
is working alone in the filing room.
- The door had shut.
Nobody had been in and nobody had gone out
because there was only her in there.
There was not a wind.
There was not a draft.
There wasn't a window open.
- Picture yourself out
of the body, invisible,
nobody can see you
and everyday life is
going on all around you.
Wouldn't you want to
grab the closest person
and say, "I'm still here?"
- I just thought that there
was obviously some spirit
on the ward.
And at that point, that's
when I went to find Sandrea.
- Sandrea Moses,
the hospital's ergonomics advisor,
is Judith's long time
coworker and confidant.
- I met Judith through my work
and Judith had approached me
and asked me if I would come
and have a look at an area
because they were experiencing
some very strange phenomenon
and it was really beginning to spook them.
- So I took Sandrea and explained to her
that the staff were really concerned
and they felt that they were
being watched all the time.
And they were quite frightened about it.
- Sandrea also believes
that hospitals spawn
supernatural activity.
- If you consider how many
people die in a hospital
in a day, in a week, there's
a greater expectation
that you're going to find ghosts.
- So you believe me?
- I do.
I really do.
- A hospital is steeped in history.
It's over 200 years old.
I was not surprised when Judy
said that there were problems,
so I was more than willing to go along
and help Judith to try and
find out what the problem was.
- Three days later,
Judith and Sandrea unite
to confront the spirit.
- We knew that we needed to go
at the end of the working day
when there weren't other people around
who would be disturbed and
it would be relatively quiet.
- Judith and
Sandrea center their efforts
on the filing room.
- One end of it had been
the matron's bedroom
and sitting room
and the offices where the problem arose
had been the matron's accommodation.
- Did you feel that?
I'm cold.
- As soon as you walked in,
there was a distinct
drop in the temperature.
It was suddenly this feeling
that really was quite cold in there.
- It's been theorized by some
that this is the way in
which spirit entities
actually use the energy
of our environment.
They leech the warmth out of the air,
convert it into some other form of energy
and use that to manifest
paranormal phenomena.
- You can sense it,
you can feel that there's
a presence in here.
Something caught my eye.
And I sensed seeing something in there.
- So you thought
the hospital was haunted?
- Yes, haunted.
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Without a doubt, the place is haunted.
- In order to
defend their hospital,
Judith and Sandrea
confront an angry spirit.
- I turned to Judith and I said,
"Can you sense anything here?"
- I had a real feeling
that there was somebody
standing there besides me.
- I could see the outline of them.
I could see from the hair
that they were female.
Judith didn't see it,
but she could sense it.
- We're still not sure
how people see ghosts
or how they perceive ghosts.
There are many instances in
which the person on the left
might see an apparition,
the person on the right might see nothing,
which leads some
investigators to speculate
that we actually perceive
them telepathically
rather than see them with our own eyes.
- This lady, such a strong
sense of power, and importance.
- If this thing is as powerful
as Sandrea fears that it might be,
the consequences could be terrible.
- And I begin to describe her.
- Brown dress, neat, lace hat.
- And Judith says to me--
- It's Anne Gibson.
- And as she said it, in a second,
I turn round to her and I said--
- Miss Gibson to you!
- Anne Gibson was the
first lady superintendent,
who was employed when this new piece
of the hospital was built.
She would have never been anything
but Miss Gibson to anybody.
And the fact that I called
her by her Christian name,
she was not happy about.
- Once I made the communication,
once I established that mediumship link,
we were having a three
way conversation here.
- One of the bigger
challenges is to figure out,
why are they still haunting this location?
Did they leave behind unfinished
business when they died?
Can something be done
to help them move on?
- How can we be of service?
- Miss Gibson talked to Sandrea
and explained that she was
very unhappy about the mess.
- This mess!
Mess, mess, mess!
- All these papers.
All these papers.
Why are they here in my sitting room?
- And I was just relaying this,
because I didn't know
anything about this person.
- So, I explained to her,
in our current health
service, that unfortunately,
everything generated an
awful lot of paperwork.
- This person was here with a
purpose, who was very unhappy
with the way our hospital was being run.
- I'll talk to them about that.
- Judith was placating her
and it seemed to work really well.
Miss Gibson said what she wanted to say
and she was quite happy to
slip back out of our world
and back into her own world
once her voice had been heard.
- I believe that we
gave her the opportunity
to say what she thought and
we tried to explain to her,
so that she would be happy.
- With the spirit
of Miss Gibson at rest,
Judith has secured the
safety of her staff.
- Did this experience
bring you and Sandrea closer together?
- Yeah, we'd made friends before that,
but yes, I believe it did,
because we had a mutual understanding
that perhaps other people that
we worked with didn't have.
- The ghost of Anne Gibson
was never seen again.
- Anne Gibson was one
of Florence Nightingale's young ladies.
She was one of the group of young women
that she first trained as nurses.
A lot of the older nurses,
particularly the nurses
who nursed, if you like,
in the turn of the century,
nursing was their life
and they very often died quite
quickly after they retired.
We, hopefully, put it right,
because after we talked to
her, the movement stopped.
She stopped moving the papers around.
- Yes.
The medical secretaries promised
to try to keep the area tidier
and to try to not leave stuff
cluttered all over the place.
And that was their promise.
- This experience, in
a way, confirmed for me
things that I had thought and felt,
that people who are hanging
around hospital, are sometimes,
they might be the people
with unfinished business.
But I also believe, and this confirmed it,
they are the people for
whom that was their life.
And they don't want to leave it.
- All nurses to the nurses station.
- Meighan Gaubatz
is at the top of her game
and she enjoys every minute of her job.
- I was working at a
skilled nursing facility,
otherwise known as a nursing home in 2014,
as the director of nursing.
I became a nurse because
it comes natural to me
to want to take care of people.
Being a really good nurse means humility.
It's the foundation of nursing.
We have to be humble.
- Meighan, hey.
- I think we have
to speak everyone's language.
Everybody communicates differently.
- You sure this is what
we want to do on this one?
- Yeah.
Yeah, we need to definitely run that test.
- What we did was we helped
people get back on their feet
after they had surgery,
heart attacks, broken hips,
that kind of thing.
The best part of my job was
being able to love people.
But everyone, my staff, our patients
and our residents' family members,
every single person that I met,
I got to love them in a different way.
So the facility was 160 beds.
We gave them physical
therapy, nursing, IVs,
that kind of thing.
- For those closer to the end,
the facility offers hospice care.
- The hospice is patient driven care.
They decide that they're ready.
At that point,
they say, "I'm no longer going
to pursue curative treatment.
"I'm not going to do dialysis.
"I'm not going to do heart surgery."
And they focus on being comfortable
instead of pursuing treatment.
- Both patients in Room 117
have terminated medical intervention.
- This patient was profoundly limited.
She was unable to hold
her body up anymore.
She was nonverbal.
- Hello, my dear.
- One of the things that
we do with Alzheimer's
and dementia patients and
people who are nonverbal
and are not responding,
to attempt stimulation is,
we still treat them like they hear us.
We know that they do.
- Are you comfortable?
- Of course, the patient
is not going to respond.
- You look beautiful.
- What was strange was
that it was her roommate
who responded for her.
- Thanks.
She thinks you look beautiful too.
- The roommate responded
by saying, "Thank you.
She thinks you're beautiful, too."
And it was in a very
sing-songy, almost mocking tone,
which I ignored, and continued
to focus on the patient.
- In the beginning was the word.
And the word was with God.
- She recited the book of John.
The very beginning of John 1.
I know that as a nurse,
it's very common when you
have psychiatric disorders
for people to have a religious fixation.
It was very startling and
unexpected for this patient
to be able to suddenly do
what she did in my presence.
The patient had had a profound
traumatic brain injury.
She didn't have the attention span
to focus on reciting the
Bible or memorizing it.
I continued to assess my
patient and talk to her
and just, you know, use therapeutic touch,
to try to interact with her.
The roommate was escalating.
This was something that was
completely unexplainable.
- The word was with God.
The word was God.
- When my patient's
roommate's voice changed, it--
- It
scared the shit out you.
- No, it scared the **** out of me.
- Nurse Meighan Gaubatz
can't explain the abilities
her brain damaged patient
has suddenly gained.
- She was acting very strange.
She had an instant change to her voice.
It sounded more male
and it was also much more
insistent and aggressive.
I've got the two different
sides of me arguing.
My intuition says,
"Run, this is not good."
But I'm not gonna jump up
and leave because I'm scared
or because there's
something crazy going on.
I'm gonna stay with the patient
and keep her safe and do my job.
- The light shines in the darkness.
And the darkness does not overcome it.
- I was definitely freaked out.
I thought to myself,
am I in a horror movie?
- Are you a prophet?
Are you a prophet?
- Someone with a cognitive
impairment may be able to speak
and they read the Bible a lot,
they may have that stored in their brain.
In other cases,
where the individual may not
have been very religious,
or very close to their
religion, and they can do that,
that could be an indication
of a demonic possession.
It's mocking God.
- There was fear in this moment.
The whole time she's very aware of me.
She's watching me intently.
Her eyes are not moving from me.
- Are you a prophet?
No, you are not!
No, you are not!
- That's when my fight or
flight instinct kicked in.
As a human being, you get
to a point where you say,
"Okay, I'm not safe.
I gotta go."
- If there is something demonic involved,
it may not give itself away right away.
In other words, it may not
speak in tongues or it may not,
you know, change the facial features
of the individual that's possessed.
It may be much more subtle.
- At the end of her shift,
Meighan remains disturbed.
The next day, Meighan
attempts to go about her job
as if nothing has happened.
- I was methodically
going from room to room,
administering medications to
our patients for the evening
and I came to this particular patient
who we had admitted the night prior.
So, I had never seen this
patient before in my life.
I had no idea who they were.
They were brand new to me.
Immediately when I came into the room,
it felt heavy and thick.
Something changed, as soon as
I set foot over the threshold.
Something just wasn't right.
- Hello there!
Hi, I'm Meighan.
I'm Meighan.
I wanna...
- Don't touch me, you bitch!
Come any closer and I'll kill you!
- I absolutely know that hospitals
and other medical
facilities, nursing homes,
anywhere that there are strong emotions,
where seasons pass from life to death,
that they are much more
susceptible to paranormal activity.
And I've seen that.
The evidence is anecdotal,
but I've seen it over and over again.
As she stood up, she was very
deliberate in her movements.
One of my major concerns was
that I was going to get hurt.
I don't know this patient.
She may be aggressive.
She may even attack me.
So, these are all concerns.
I realized that I was
definitely in danger.
I felt threatened and I
ran the hell out of there.
- Remaining professional,
Meighan is nonetheless
shaken by the experience.
- I went to the nurse's station,
and I asked for the charge nurse
to find out what the
history was on my patient.
- Meighan seeks
answers at the nurse's station.
She describes the disturbing
incident to a unit manager.
- I told him,
"Listen, the patient got
up out of her wheelchair.
"She was staring at me very intently.
"And she would not take her eyes off me."
- That's not possible for
her to get up or walk.
Didn't you read her admission report?
- He verbalized, "Are you sure?
"Because you don't just start walking
"if you've been paraplegic for 30 years."
- All I know is she stood up.
I swear it.
- When you are in a motor vehicle accident
and your spinal cord is
severed rendering you unable
to use any of your limbs
from the waist down.
It didn't make any sense
that that woman was
able to do what she did.
- Meighan knows what she saw,
but must return to the patient.
- She backed herself up against the wall
with her eyes fixed on me.
- For this woman to
just, who's a paraplegic,
to suddenly be able to stand up,
that's not something
that's medically possible.
This is someone who, potentially,
really is possessed by something.
It's mocking God, by saying,
"See, I can make the crippled walk too."
- It felt like her gaze was
coming from somewhere else.
It was very piercing.
She was full of rage and full of hate.
There's something evil in this room.
Something malevolent.
I do believe in the devil.
What I learned from Bible college
is that demonic possession,
when it does happen,
can be very dramatic,
and it can manifest very
suddenly, without warning.
My focus is not looking
for demons in people,
it's that when I encounter them,
I have to take it seriously.
It was at this point that
I did think to myself that
this woman has a demon in her.
This woman is possessed.
The devil was in that room.
He was in this patient.
- It's okay, I'm right here.
- I needed help.
I couldn't take care of her
by myself because of the risk
that I'd be hurt or
somebody else would be hurt.
I went to get one of my unit managers.
Not all people who
believe the way that we do
necessarily believe in demonic possession
but I knew that he did.
- Come on.
- There was not an idea that
I needed to get in there
and exorcise demons the way
that people think of exorcism.
However, I do have the authority
to tell them what to do,
so we did need to go in there and pray
and let them know, we know you're here
and you don't have the
permission to do this.
- She doesn't look possessed to me.
- Talk.
- Burn in hell!
- Are you a prophet?
- Meighan Gaubatz has witnessed
demonic possession and must
now confront the devil.
- Burn in hell!
- I knew that whatever it
was meant to do me harm.
I could see in her eyes that she hated me.
- Burn in hell!
- And that she wanted to hurt me.
- I know who you are, and
you're not allowed to come here.
- When you're dealing with
exorcism, with demonic cases,
it's a battle of faith.
The exorcist is not doing it.
This is something a lot of
people don't understand.
God is channeling his power through them
because of their faith in him.
It's not the individual that's doing it,
it's God that's doing it.
It comes down to a battle
between good and evil.
- You are not allowed to confuse
the mind of this patient.
Otherwise you will be severely punished
by the holy spirit of God.
- I reminded the demon
that, in the name of Jesus,
it had no power, authority,
or control in this building,
or over anyone in it.
- The demon's will is strong.
But Meighan's faith is stronger.
- I knew that my prayers were effective
because I could see the patient
did not attempt to move.
She wasn't attempting to get away from me.
She was staying still and
doing what I told her to do.
She didn't speak a word
after that to anyone
and she did not put one finger on anyone.
- Free from possession,
the patient finally finds peace.
- When someone is finally
relieved of their possession
through an exorcism, it
really comes down to the demon
has had enough, it's giving up.
It's releasing the individual.
By the faith of God,
it's being driven out.
- A few days
later, the patient's family
takes her out of care and into their home.
She spends her final days
surrounded by loved ones.
- I didn't see any point in
telling the patient's family
that this event had occurred,
because I didn't have a way
to explain it scientifically
or biologically
and there's no point in upsetting them.
I was very relieved that she was gone.
- Meighan Gaubatz
fought the devil and won.
But Meighan and her colleague
know the devil never stays down for long.
March, 1999, a hospital, southern Germany.
36-year-old Nicole Kobrowski
is experiencing excruciating pain.
- The pain in my back
went all across the back
and it radiated across
the front of my abdomen
and it was just excruciating
to the point where I would double over.
- Nicole recently
immigrated to Germany
in order to get married.
- The language barrier
that I had in the hospital
was a huge problem.
I spoke some German,
but not enough medical
German to be effective.
From the outside, it's this hospital.
It didn't look completely
menacing, but once you got inside
and you saw the dark corridors
and the very little light that came in,
it was pretty creepy.
- Nicole is diagnosed with kidney stones.
She requires emergency surgery.
- I was in severe pain, worse than labor.
The intent was for me to
have the kidney stones
removed via lithotripsy.
They told me that they would
be scheduling me for surgery
and that's all.
I was very unsettled.
It took me a while to get to sleep
but when I did I had this
horrifying nightmare.
I could see myself being
wheeled into this room.
That someone had taken my
kidney out and left me on ice.
- Our subconscious is what's
in control when we're dreaming
and in our dream state, we
are much more open to spirits.
- When I woke up, the first thing I did
was check to see if my
kidney was still there
and luckily, it and everything
else was still attached.
But I was still extremely uneasy.
I closed my eyes
and tried to get back
to sleep but I couldn't.
So I sat up in bed.
When the lights flickered,
it was extremely odd.
The lights went out, came
back on, went back out,
came back on and it
did this several times.
I thought that was very strange.
I was watching the lights flicker.
I just kept thinking to myself,
"There's something just not right here."
And yet, no one was
moving to find out why.
There was no generator
turning on alternate lighting.
Falling asleep in a hospital is not easy.
As I was laying there and I
was trying to go back to sleep,
I opened my eyes.
And I turned to the left.
And that's when I saw him.
This entity standing in the doorway.
Something that would haunt
me for the rest of my life.
- Plagued
by nightmares and pain,
Nicole Kowbrowski is visited
by a mysterious stranger.
- I thought maybe he might be a patient.
But I also thought, "Wow,
they're pretty strict here.
"Why are they just
letting him roam around?"
And I felt like he wanted me
to know that he was there.
I was a little bit scared, I
was also kind of intrigued.
- Ignoring her fear,
Nicole feels oddly drawn to the stranger.
- He did start walking down the hallway.
You were only allowed to
get out and walk around
with the okay of the people on staff.
I decided to get up.
I was tired of the regimented standards.
I wanted to go follow him.
The curiosity got the better of me.
I started following him
at what I thought was a
safe distance, for me.
And I watched him continue
to walk down the hall.
It had occurred to me that
this might be a hallucination,
but I knew that this had to be real.
- Pursuing
the mysterious figure,
Nicole is lured deeper into the hospital,
further away from the safety of her room.
- It was almost hypnotic for me.
It was very, it was very much
like I was just following him,
and he was almost like the Pied Piper,
I couldn't do anything but follow him.
- But what happens
next is hard to explain.
- Spirits draw energy in order to manifest
and as they're manifesting,
they're putting out energy.
So that's why sometimes
you'll see things turn on,
because they're emitting an energy
that's going through
that electronic device.
- The fan ceases operation
once the stranger has passed.
- As I was watching him approach the door,
I expected him to open it,
just as he had the other one.
- Something unseen
forces the door to open.
Nicole is chilled by the realization
that what she is following is not human.
- Did you get
a sense that he was aware
that you were following him?
- It occurred to me that maybe he knew
that I was following him and leading me,
for whatever purpose, with him.
I thought at that point
that he wasn't just a man
who was a patient, I thought
maybe he was a ghost.
I was terrified.
But yet, I couldn't do
anything but follow him.
I was totally focused on
this being in front of me.
I noticed this pattern,
the lights on the ward were
flickering as he went by them.
- In Nicole's case, with this spirit
presenting itself to her,
it's drawing from the energy
that's within the building,
electronics, the lighting,
the wiring, it's drawing all
this so it can manifest itself
for her to see.
- It looked like he was the one
that was affecting the lights for sure.
I wanted to know who he
was, and what he was doing,
and how he could do this.
But it totally freaked me out.
Suddenly, that's when I saw his face.
It's something I'll never forget.
A face as white as death.
It just terrified me.
- Nicole stares
into the face of something
from the other side, and runs.
- It's very possible
this whole event occurred
because of this individual
trying to express to her
what they went through
and what happened to them.
They're desperate to
get somebody's attention
and Nicole may have been just susceptible.
She could be someone
who's sensitive to this.
- I had the feeling that, at some point,
he had been abandoned.
And I felt like he wanted
me to know he was there.
- And then, what happened?
- He disappeared.
I was in the hospital for one more evening
after this event took place and
I did not see the man again.
I did not mention it to any of the nurses.
But my husband came to visit,
and I told him about it
and he did ask if,
"Hey, have you ever heard
any stories about ghosts?"
They poo-pooed him.
They said that that was a bunch of
as they call it, nonsense.
- The
experience changes the way
that Nicole views life and death.
- There are too many
things in the universe
that we don't know about, and so for me,
it's one of those instances
that I catalog away,
and when I have other experiences,
or people come to me
with their experiences
and trust me with their stories,
I try to relate back to
them to let them know,
you're not crazy, these things happen.
You're gonna be okay.
was being able to love people.
- Hi, I'm Meighan.
- Don't touch me, you bitch.
- The secretary said,
"Judith, we've got a problem."
- It's something I'll never forget.
A face as white as death.
It just terrified me.
- Without a doubt, the place is haunted.
- It scared
the shit out of you.
- No, it scared the **** out of me.
The devil was in that room.
- Burn in hell!
- Senior nurse Judith Whalley
excels at maintaining order
and has for more than four decades.
- I have worked all over England.
In the city of Liverpool,
I've worked out in the
country in Yorkshire Dales.
And then, I arrived in
Birmingham and stayed there
and I worked in the same
hospital from 1977 until 2010.
Nursing requires a great
deal of empathy and sympathy.
I suppose what's important
about nursing to me
is the ability to interact with
people, to make them better.
- Judith is hands on.
No detail slips passed her.
- I was working in management,
so I was walking around
the hospital a lot.
I mean, I patrolled the whole hospital
at least three times a day.
My responsibility was for making sure
that both patients and staff were safe
in every aspect of their work.
- Judith is
prepared for every situation,
except for the one she's
about to encounter.
- I was up in the offices
and the secretaries came
up to see me and said,
"Judith, we've got a problem.
"The office is really uncomfortable.
"Somebody is moving our
papers around every night."
And so, they were really
quite upset about it.
- Judith's colleague
Emily finds the papers
in the main filing room
are also disturbed.
- I'm
thinking maybe somebody's
getting into the hospital?
- Well, I mean, I did wonder
if the cleaners were doing it.
But actually the cleaners
were going in first thing
in the morning when the
office staff were coming in
and emptying all the
bins from the day before.
So there had to be some other explanation.
- Many employees believe
that this century-old hospital is haunted.
- It may be that these
are the spirit entities
just trying to make their presence known.
Are they doing this deliberately?
We're not entirely sure.
- Judith,
rational by necessity,
remains open to the paranormal.
- I didn't disbelieve.
My first body, I saw before I was seven.
And that was my father.
And I actually, um, saw
him, about six weeks later,
walk down the stairs and
walk out of the house.
But I'd watched him die.
- With Judith
back on a night shift,
the door to the paranormal
opens once more.
- Now they divided this ward in half.
So there was the half that I used
and the half that was empty.
The thing was this, the
empty half of the ward
had the staff toilets, which
was fine during the day
but at night, very uncomfortable.
It's very difficult to know,
when you're walking through an open space,
what catches your attention
'cause you're just walking
down with one thing in mind.
I didn't see anything.
I just felt something.
Out of the corner of my
eye, something moved.
This was just a movement of
some sort that I was seeing
on the edge of my peripheral vision
in a place that I knew was empty.
- When you have a large
location such as this hospital,
we could be dealing with
numerous spirit entities.
And if you were to find
yourself in the dark,
it's an extremely creepy place to be.
- I understood why my staff
were very uncomfortable.
My assumption was that there
was perhaps somebody there
and when I turned to look,
there wasn't anybody there.
I don't know who that person
was, but I saw something.
- This is plainly some kind of entity
that wants her gone from its turf.
It wants her out, it
wants to be left alone
and it's not shy about telling her that.
- How
did that make you feel?
- Kind of upset.
I could feel somebody who
was quite close to me.
I couldn't see him, but I could
feel something close to me.
- Judith and her
staff continue to feel watched.
Especially Emily, who's
about to start a night shift.
- The hospital changing rooms
were in this large, open space
that had a very high ceiling.
There was always different
people making comments
at different times about not
liking being up there at night.
- A hospital is all of life
in one very concentrated building.
People are dying and passing
from this life into the next.
And that leaves behind a residue.
- Is somebody there?
- She said the locker doors had been shut.
You know, they turn their
back and the door gets shut.
- Some spirits are
notoriously territorial.
They can make their displeasure known
and they can do it very
aggressively if they so choose.
- I wasn't running the ward,
but I was visiting the ward
so I would have been up there.
- What's wrong?
- I feel like you just need
to go and see it for yourself.
- I took their
complaints very seriously.
- Okay, just calm down.
Calm down.
Can you get her a glass of water?
I'm going to go and check.
- They were very unhappy
and very uncomfortable.
- You should just go and--
- I'll go and have a look.
- And I needed to see if I
could do something about it.
- Determined
to protect her staff,
Judith is about to uncover
strange and terrifying secrets
about her hospital.
Something is terrifying
Judith Whalley's staff.
And it's up to her to find out what.
- It's an old hospital.
People were up there late in the evening
and really didn't like it very much.
I felt that I needed to
go and find out for myself
because if you are going to go
and put forward a complaint,
the first thing that somebody says is,
"What have you done about it?"
So I try and find out what the problem is.
And I didn't find anything.
- As we start to see an increase
in paranormal phenomena,
such as light phenomena,
objects being thrown,
things falling, it may be that
these are the spirit entities
just trying to make their presence known.
"Hey, here I am, you can't
see me, but I'm here."
It's equally possible, though,
that they are trying to warn
the living residents that this
isn't a place they should be.
- Whatever
spirit continues to haunt
this hospital is now
Judith's primary concern.
- It's very important that
we keep our staff safe
and they're not frightened either.
- But within days,
Judith's colleague Emily
is working alone in the filing room.
- The door had shut.
Nobody had been in and nobody had gone out
because there was only her in there.
There was not a wind.
There was not a draft.
There wasn't a window open.
- Picture yourself out
of the body, invisible,
nobody can see you
and everyday life is
going on all around you.
Wouldn't you want to
grab the closest person
and say, "I'm still here?"
- I just thought that there
was obviously some spirit
on the ward.
And at that point, that's
when I went to find Sandrea.
- Sandrea Moses,
the hospital's ergonomics advisor,
is Judith's long time
coworker and confidant.
- I met Judith through my work
and Judith had approached me
and asked me if I would come
and have a look at an area
because they were experiencing
some very strange phenomenon
and it was really beginning to spook them.
- So I took Sandrea and explained to her
that the staff were really concerned
and they felt that they were
being watched all the time.
And they were quite frightened about it.
- Sandrea also believes
that hospitals spawn
supernatural activity.
- If you consider how many
people die in a hospital
in a day, in a week, there's
a greater expectation
that you're going to find ghosts.
- So you believe me?
- I do.
I really do.
- A hospital is steeped in history.
It's over 200 years old.
I was not surprised when Judy
said that there were problems,
so I was more than willing to go along
and help Judith to try and
find out what the problem was.
- Three days later,
Judith and Sandrea unite
to confront the spirit.
- We knew that we needed to go
at the end of the working day
when there weren't other people around
who would be disturbed and
it would be relatively quiet.
- Judith and
Sandrea center their efforts
on the filing room.
- One end of it had been
the matron's bedroom
and sitting room
and the offices where the problem arose
had been the matron's accommodation.
- Did you feel that?
I'm cold.
- As soon as you walked in,
there was a distinct
drop in the temperature.
It was suddenly this feeling
that really was quite cold in there.
- It's been theorized by some
that this is the way in
which spirit entities
actually use the energy
of our environment.
They leech the warmth out of the air,
convert it into some other form of energy
and use that to manifest
paranormal phenomena.
- You can sense it,
you can feel that there's
a presence in here.
Something caught my eye.
And I sensed seeing something in there.
- So you thought
the hospital was haunted?
- Yes, haunted.
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Without a doubt, the place is haunted.
- In order to
defend their hospital,
Judith and Sandrea
confront an angry spirit.
- I turned to Judith and I said,
"Can you sense anything here?"
- I had a real feeling
that there was somebody
standing there besides me.
- I could see the outline of them.
I could see from the hair
that they were female.
Judith didn't see it,
but she could sense it.
- We're still not sure
how people see ghosts
or how they perceive ghosts.
There are many instances in
which the person on the left
might see an apparition,
the person on the right might see nothing,
which leads some
investigators to speculate
that we actually perceive
them telepathically
rather than see them with our own eyes.
- This lady, such a strong
sense of power, and importance.
- If this thing is as powerful
as Sandrea fears that it might be,
the consequences could be terrible.
- And I begin to describe her.
- Brown dress, neat, lace hat.
- And Judith says to me--
- It's Anne Gibson.
- And as she said it, in a second,
I turn round to her and I said--
- Miss Gibson to you!
- Anne Gibson was the
first lady superintendent,
who was employed when this new piece
of the hospital was built.
She would have never been anything
but Miss Gibson to anybody.
And the fact that I called
her by her Christian name,
she was not happy about.
- Once I made the communication,
once I established that mediumship link,
we were having a three
way conversation here.
- One of the bigger
challenges is to figure out,
why are they still haunting this location?
Did they leave behind unfinished
business when they died?
Can something be done
to help them move on?
- How can we be of service?
- Miss Gibson talked to Sandrea
and explained that she was
very unhappy about the mess.
- This mess!
Mess, mess, mess!
- All these papers.
All these papers.
Why are they here in my sitting room?
- And I was just relaying this,
because I didn't know
anything about this person.
- So, I explained to her,
in our current health
service, that unfortunately,
everything generated an
awful lot of paperwork.
- This person was here with a
purpose, who was very unhappy
with the way our hospital was being run.
- I'll talk to them about that.
- Judith was placating her
and it seemed to work really well.
Miss Gibson said what she wanted to say
and she was quite happy to
slip back out of our world
and back into her own world
once her voice had been heard.
- I believe that we
gave her the opportunity
to say what she thought and
we tried to explain to her,
so that she would be happy.
- With the spirit
of Miss Gibson at rest,
Judith has secured the
safety of her staff.
- Did this experience
bring you and Sandrea closer together?
- Yeah, we'd made friends before that,
but yes, I believe it did,
because we had a mutual understanding
that perhaps other people that
we worked with didn't have.
- The ghost of Anne Gibson
was never seen again.
- Anne Gibson was one
of Florence Nightingale's young ladies.
She was one of the group of young women
that she first trained as nurses.
A lot of the older nurses,
particularly the nurses
who nursed, if you like,
in the turn of the century,
nursing was their life
and they very often died quite
quickly after they retired.
We, hopefully, put it right,
because after we talked to
her, the movement stopped.
She stopped moving the papers around.
- Yes.
The medical secretaries promised
to try to keep the area tidier
and to try to not leave stuff
cluttered all over the place.
And that was their promise.
- This experience, in
a way, confirmed for me
things that I had thought and felt,
that people who are hanging
around hospital, are sometimes,
they might be the people
with unfinished business.
But I also believe, and this confirmed it,
they are the people for
whom that was their life.
And they don't want to leave it.
- All nurses to the nurses station.
- Meighan Gaubatz
is at the top of her game
and she enjoys every minute of her job.
- I was working at a
skilled nursing facility,
otherwise known as a nursing home in 2014,
as the director of nursing.
I became a nurse because
it comes natural to me
to want to take care of people.
Being a really good nurse means humility.
It's the foundation of nursing.
We have to be humble.
- Meighan, hey.
- I think we have
to speak everyone's language.
Everybody communicates differently.
- You sure this is what
we want to do on this one?
- Yeah.
Yeah, we need to definitely run that test.
- What we did was we helped
people get back on their feet
after they had surgery,
heart attacks, broken hips,
that kind of thing.
The best part of my job was
being able to love people.
But everyone, my staff, our patients
and our residents' family members,
every single person that I met,
I got to love them in a different way.
So the facility was 160 beds.
We gave them physical
therapy, nursing, IVs,
that kind of thing.
- For those closer to the end,
the facility offers hospice care.
- The hospice is patient driven care.
They decide that they're ready.
At that point,
they say, "I'm no longer going
to pursue curative treatment.
"I'm not going to do dialysis.
"I'm not going to do heart surgery."
And they focus on being comfortable
instead of pursuing treatment.
- Both patients in Room 117
have terminated medical intervention.
- This patient was profoundly limited.
She was unable to hold
her body up anymore.
She was nonverbal.
- Hello, my dear.
- One of the things that
we do with Alzheimer's
and dementia patients and
people who are nonverbal
and are not responding,
to attempt stimulation is,
we still treat them like they hear us.
We know that they do.
- Are you comfortable?
- Of course, the patient
is not going to respond.
- You look beautiful.
- What was strange was
that it was her roommate
who responded for her.
- Thanks.
She thinks you look beautiful too.
- The roommate responded
by saying, "Thank you.
She thinks you're beautiful, too."
And it was in a very
sing-songy, almost mocking tone,
which I ignored, and continued
to focus on the patient.
- In the beginning was the word.
And the word was with God.
- She recited the book of John.
The very beginning of John 1.
I know that as a nurse,
it's very common when you
have psychiatric disorders
for people to have a religious fixation.
It was very startling and
unexpected for this patient
to be able to suddenly do
what she did in my presence.
The patient had had a profound
traumatic brain injury.
She didn't have the attention span
to focus on reciting the
Bible or memorizing it.
I continued to assess my
patient and talk to her
and just, you know, use therapeutic touch,
to try to interact with her.
The roommate was escalating.
This was something that was
completely unexplainable.
- The word was with God.
The word was God.
- When my patient's
roommate's voice changed, it--
- It
scared the shit out you.
- No, it scared the **** out of me.
- Nurse Meighan Gaubatz
can't explain the abilities
her brain damaged patient
has suddenly gained.
- She was acting very strange.
She had an instant change to her voice.
It sounded more male
and it was also much more
insistent and aggressive.
I've got the two different
sides of me arguing.
My intuition says,
"Run, this is not good."
But I'm not gonna jump up
and leave because I'm scared
or because there's
something crazy going on.
I'm gonna stay with the patient
and keep her safe and do my job.
- The light shines in the darkness.
And the darkness does not overcome it.
- I was definitely freaked out.
I thought to myself,
am I in a horror movie?
- Are you a prophet?
Are you a prophet?
- Someone with a cognitive
impairment may be able to speak
and they read the Bible a lot,
they may have that stored in their brain.
In other cases,
where the individual may not
have been very religious,
or very close to their
religion, and they can do that,
that could be an indication
of a demonic possession.
It's mocking God.
- There was fear in this moment.
The whole time she's very aware of me.
She's watching me intently.
Her eyes are not moving from me.
- Are you a prophet?
No, you are not!
No, you are not!
- That's when my fight or
flight instinct kicked in.
As a human being, you get
to a point where you say,
"Okay, I'm not safe.
I gotta go."
- If there is something demonic involved,
it may not give itself away right away.
In other words, it may not
speak in tongues or it may not,
you know, change the facial features
of the individual that's possessed.
It may be much more subtle.
- At the end of her shift,
Meighan remains disturbed.
The next day, Meighan
attempts to go about her job
as if nothing has happened.
- I was methodically
going from room to room,
administering medications to
our patients for the evening
and I came to this particular patient
who we had admitted the night prior.
So, I had never seen this
patient before in my life.
I had no idea who they were.
They were brand new to me.
Immediately when I came into the room,
it felt heavy and thick.
Something changed, as soon as
I set foot over the threshold.
Something just wasn't right.
- Hello there!
Hi, I'm Meighan.
I'm Meighan.
I wanna...
- Don't touch me, you bitch!
Come any closer and I'll kill you!
- I absolutely know that hospitals
and other medical
facilities, nursing homes,
anywhere that there are strong emotions,
where seasons pass from life to death,
that they are much more
susceptible to paranormal activity.
And I've seen that.
The evidence is anecdotal,
but I've seen it over and over again.
As she stood up, she was very
deliberate in her movements.
One of my major concerns was
that I was going to get hurt.
I don't know this patient.
She may be aggressive.
She may even attack me.
So, these are all concerns.
I realized that I was
definitely in danger.
I felt threatened and I
ran the hell out of there.
- Remaining professional,
Meighan is nonetheless
shaken by the experience.
- I went to the nurse's station,
and I asked for the charge nurse
to find out what the
history was on my patient.
- Meighan seeks
answers at the nurse's station.
She describes the disturbing
incident to a unit manager.
- I told him,
"Listen, the patient got
up out of her wheelchair.
"She was staring at me very intently.
"And she would not take her eyes off me."
- That's not possible for
her to get up or walk.
Didn't you read her admission report?
- He verbalized, "Are you sure?
"Because you don't just start walking
"if you've been paraplegic for 30 years."
- All I know is she stood up.
I swear it.
- When you are in a motor vehicle accident
and your spinal cord is
severed rendering you unable
to use any of your limbs
from the waist down.
It didn't make any sense
that that woman was
able to do what she did.
- Meighan knows what she saw,
but must return to the patient.
- She backed herself up against the wall
with her eyes fixed on me.
- For this woman to
just, who's a paraplegic,
to suddenly be able to stand up,
that's not something
that's medically possible.
This is someone who, potentially,
really is possessed by something.
It's mocking God, by saying,
"See, I can make the crippled walk too."
- It felt like her gaze was
coming from somewhere else.
It was very piercing.
She was full of rage and full of hate.
There's something evil in this room.
Something malevolent.
I do believe in the devil.
What I learned from Bible college
is that demonic possession,
when it does happen,
can be very dramatic,
and it can manifest very
suddenly, without warning.
My focus is not looking
for demons in people,
it's that when I encounter them,
I have to take it seriously.
It was at this point that
I did think to myself that
this woman has a demon in her.
This woman is possessed.
The devil was in that room.
He was in this patient.
- It's okay, I'm right here.
- I needed help.
I couldn't take care of her
by myself because of the risk
that I'd be hurt or
somebody else would be hurt.
I went to get one of my unit managers.
Not all people who
believe the way that we do
necessarily believe in demonic possession
but I knew that he did.
- Come on.
- There was not an idea that
I needed to get in there
and exorcise demons the way
that people think of exorcism.
However, I do have the authority
to tell them what to do,
so we did need to go in there and pray
and let them know, we know you're here
and you don't have the
permission to do this.
- She doesn't look possessed to me.
- Talk.
- Burn in hell!
- Are you a prophet?
- Meighan Gaubatz has witnessed
demonic possession and must
now confront the devil.
- Burn in hell!
- I knew that whatever it
was meant to do me harm.
I could see in her eyes that she hated me.
- Burn in hell!
- And that she wanted to hurt me.
- I know who you are, and
you're not allowed to come here.
- When you're dealing with
exorcism, with demonic cases,
it's a battle of faith.
The exorcist is not doing it.
This is something a lot of
people don't understand.
God is channeling his power through them
because of their faith in him.
It's not the individual that's doing it,
it's God that's doing it.
It comes down to a battle
between good and evil.
- You are not allowed to confuse
the mind of this patient.
Otherwise you will be severely punished
by the holy spirit of God.
- I reminded the demon
that, in the name of Jesus,
it had no power, authority,
or control in this building,
or over anyone in it.
- The demon's will is strong.
But Meighan's faith is stronger.
- I knew that my prayers were effective
because I could see the patient
did not attempt to move.
She wasn't attempting to get away from me.
She was staying still and
doing what I told her to do.
She didn't speak a word
after that to anyone
and she did not put one finger on anyone.
- Free from possession,
the patient finally finds peace.
- When someone is finally
relieved of their possession
through an exorcism, it
really comes down to the demon
has had enough, it's giving up.
It's releasing the individual.
By the faith of God,
it's being driven out.
- A few days
later, the patient's family
takes her out of care and into their home.
She spends her final days
surrounded by loved ones.
- I didn't see any point in
telling the patient's family
that this event had occurred,
because I didn't have a way
to explain it scientifically
or biologically
and there's no point in upsetting them.
I was very relieved that she was gone.
- Meighan Gaubatz
fought the devil and won.
But Meighan and her colleague
know the devil never stays down for long.
March, 1999, a hospital, southern Germany.
36-year-old Nicole Kobrowski
is experiencing excruciating pain.
- The pain in my back
went all across the back
and it radiated across
the front of my abdomen
and it was just excruciating
to the point where I would double over.
- Nicole recently
immigrated to Germany
in order to get married.
- The language barrier
that I had in the hospital
was a huge problem.
I spoke some German,
but not enough medical
German to be effective.
From the outside, it's this hospital.
It didn't look completely
menacing, but once you got inside
and you saw the dark corridors
and the very little light that came in,
it was pretty creepy.
- Nicole is diagnosed with kidney stones.
She requires emergency surgery.
- I was in severe pain, worse than labor.
The intent was for me to
have the kidney stones
removed via lithotripsy.
They told me that they would
be scheduling me for surgery
and that's all.
I was very unsettled.
It took me a while to get to sleep
but when I did I had this
horrifying nightmare.
I could see myself being
wheeled into this room.
That someone had taken my
kidney out and left me on ice.
- Our subconscious is what's
in control when we're dreaming
and in our dream state, we
are much more open to spirits.
- When I woke up, the first thing I did
was check to see if my
kidney was still there
and luckily, it and everything
else was still attached.
But I was still extremely uneasy.
I closed my eyes
and tried to get back
to sleep but I couldn't.
So I sat up in bed.
When the lights flickered,
it was extremely odd.
The lights went out, came
back on, went back out,
came back on and it
did this several times.
I thought that was very strange.
I was watching the lights flicker.
I just kept thinking to myself,
"There's something just not right here."
And yet, no one was
moving to find out why.
There was no generator
turning on alternate lighting.
Falling asleep in a hospital is not easy.
As I was laying there and I
was trying to go back to sleep,
I opened my eyes.
And I turned to the left.
And that's when I saw him.
This entity standing in the doorway.
Something that would haunt
me for the rest of my life.
- Plagued
by nightmares and pain,
Nicole Kowbrowski is visited
by a mysterious stranger.
- I thought maybe he might be a patient.
But I also thought, "Wow,
they're pretty strict here.
"Why are they just
letting him roam around?"
And I felt like he wanted me
to know that he was there.
I was a little bit scared, I
was also kind of intrigued.
- Ignoring her fear,
Nicole feels oddly drawn to the stranger.
- He did start walking down the hallway.
You were only allowed to
get out and walk around
with the okay of the people on staff.
I decided to get up.
I was tired of the regimented standards.
I wanted to go follow him.
The curiosity got the better of me.
I started following him
at what I thought was a
safe distance, for me.
And I watched him continue
to walk down the hall.
It had occurred to me that
this might be a hallucination,
but I knew that this had to be real.
- Pursuing
the mysterious figure,
Nicole is lured deeper into the hospital,
further away from the safety of her room.
- It was almost hypnotic for me.
It was very, it was very much
like I was just following him,
and he was almost like the Pied Piper,
I couldn't do anything but follow him.
- But what happens
next is hard to explain.
- Spirits draw energy in order to manifest
and as they're manifesting,
they're putting out energy.
So that's why sometimes
you'll see things turn on,
because they're emitting an energy
that's going through
that electronic device.
- The fan ceases operation
once the stranger has passed.
- As I was watching him approach the door,
I expected him to open it,
just as he had the other one.
- Something unseen
forces the door to open.
Nicole is chilled by the realization
that what she is following is not human.
- Did you get
a sense that he was aware
that you were following him?
- It occurred to me that maybe he knew
that I was following him and leading me,
for whatever purpose, with him.
I thought at that point
that he wasn't just a man
who was a patient, I thought
maybe he was a ghost.
I was terrified.
But yet, I couldn't do
anything but follow him.
I was totally focused on
this being in front of me.
I noticed this pattern,
the lights on the ward were
flickering as he went by them.
- In Nicole's case, with this spirit
presenting itself to her,
it's drawing from the energy
that's within the building,
electronics, the lighting,
the wiring, it's drawing all
this so it can manifest itself
for her to see.
- It looked like he was the one
that was affecting the lights for sure.
I wanted to know who he
was, and what he was doing,
and how he could do this.
But it totally freaked me out.
Suddenly, that's when I saw his face.
It's something I'll never forget.
A face as white as death.
It just terrified me.
- Nicole stares
into the face of something
from the other side, and runs.
- It's very possible
this whole event occurred
because of this individual
trying to express to her
what they went through
and what happened to them.
They're desperate to
get somebody's attention
and Nicole may have been just susceptible.
She could be someone
who's sensitive to this.
- I had the feeling that, at some point,
he had been abandoned.
And I felt like he wanted
me to know he was there.
- And then, what happened?
- He disappeared.
I was in the hospital for one more evening
after this event took place and
I did not see the man again.
I did not mention it to any of the nurses.
But my husband came to visit,
and I told him about it
and he did ask if,
"Hey, have you ever heard
any stories about ghosts?"
They poo-pooed him.
They said that that was a bunch of
as they call it, nonsense.
- The
experience changes the way
that Nicole views life and death.
- There are too many
things in the universe
that we don't know about, and so for me,
it's one of those instances
that I catalog away,
and when I have other experiences,
or people come to me
with their experiences
and trust me with their stories,
I try to relate back to
them to let them know,
you're not crazy, these things happen.
You're gonna be okay.