As the title says, a White Lady resides in an old hospital on the Island of Guam.
For the uninitiated, a White Lady is the ghost of a woman who met a tragic end because of a terrible betrayal or act of violence (usually at the hands of a man who purported to love them). There are White Ladies all throughout folklore and urban legends, spanning dozens of different cultures and settings.
This White Lady was murdered by her husband, stabbed brutally dozens of times in her face until she died. Not a particularly original concept, but there’s a reason these stories are so persistent (the same reason stories of dragons and creature from secret places abducting children are so ubiquitous) sometimes the truth isn’t original or unique.
But it’s true and that’s potent.
This is the first account I’ve written that has scared me. Ghost stories are tragedies, first and foremost. The thing that makes them scary is when we ask ourselves if all that sadness leaching from the spirit world is starting to become anger. I’m writing this at three in the morning, with my back to a darkened room. Normally, this wouldn’t make me uncomfortable but as I write this out I find myself peering over my shoulder and twitching unpleasantly at every little sound.
My fingers are halting at the keyboard while I consider whether to write the name of the ghost out onto the page.
Rowena.
This story is true. My wife, Christine first shared it with me in a lonely little café booth at a different three in the morning nine years ago. Many of you have been in the same situation and I dare say that conversations like the one that happened between my Wife and I that night are the reason you read ghost stories now. There’s a lull in the pleasant conversation, and someone at the table grows thoughtful for a moment before leaning in conspiratorially. “Hey,” They’ll ask, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
A thrill runs under your skin (screw it, let’s go with the cliché) a chill runs down your spine. This is going to be good. Then, faces in and throwing glances over your shoulders you all share your stories. You whisper about strange sounds in your childhood home; Faces in the mirror; The boy at the screen door asking to come inside, who only your son can see.
My wife leaned in close, her toffee-colored eyes sparkling with fear and excitement. “Hey… Do you believe in ghosts?”
As always, I’ve changed the names of the people involved (as well as toyed with the wording a bit to make it more readable). I know these people well, and I have no reason to distrust them. The protagonists in these stories are all nurses: Those put-upon, worn-out poor stepchildren of the medical community.
If you’re reading this and you’re a nurse, know that I raise my coffee to you. Salud!
Let’s begin.
In a labor and delivery ward, the patient is usually in and out. They’ll show up, have their baby, and leave provided everything has gone smoothly. If a patient is in that ward for a long time, it’s because something has gone wrong. This patient had blood pressure issues severe enough to require regular doses of magnesium sulfate. Nurses would be in round the clock to administer the drug and this patient, Ruth, was quite fastidious about keeping track of her dosages. Every time she would receive her medication, she would scribble it down in a little green notebook which she kept at her bedside table.
Christine’s mentor, Mira, was the charge nurse (literally the nurse in charge) on the night in question. At around three in the morning, one of her nurses had returned to the nurse’s station with a puzzled expression on her face. When Mira cocked an eyebrow in question, the young nurse asked of the room, “which of you guys gave Ruth her medicine an hour ago?”
The nurse’s station was all shoulders. Nobody had given Ruth her medicine. Ruth wasn’t their patient tonight. What the hell was she even talking about? But the young nurse was insistent, and Mira had to solve the mystery.
“Mira said the room was cold,” Christine said across the table at me.
When Mira entered the room she said that her skin immediately shuddered into goosebumps, but
Mira found Ruth in good enough spirits. However, when Mira offered the paper cup Ruth refused. “No, I already got it.”
“Nurse says you didn’t.”
Exasperated, Ruth indicated the little green notebook. “Am I just making this up?” She indicated a line and sure enough, and sure enough there was an entry for two forty-five. Magnesium Sulfate. Okay, fine.
Mira gathered all the nurses into Ruth’s bedroom and had them stand at the foot of her bed like suspects in a line-up. “Will you please tell me which of these nurses gave you your medicine?”
Ruth studied them all for a moment before saying, “None of them. Also, her uniform was different.”
Later, at the nurse’s station, one of the old nurses shouldered up to Mira and said quietly, “It’s March fourth.” Mira waved her away.
A couple of weeks later Ruth was on her way out with her new baby.
“Hey! That’s her.” Ruth turned to Mira, pleased. She was indicating a picture on the wall near the ward’s exit. Ruth was indicating an old staff picture from about a decade ago, and Mira felt sick, cold dread sink into the pit of her stomach.
Ruth’s finger was perched beside a slight, short-haired Filipino woman standing near the front of the staff photo. Rowena.
Hold on, Be right back. I just heard something.
Nothing. Where was I?
Rowena had been a nurse at this hospital at some point in the nineties. Stories of her had changed somewhat as her legend started to fade (intentionally) into obscurity. I’ll recount what’s left. Rowena had emigrated from the Philippines as a young woman or girl to work at the hospital as a nurse. I wish I could tell you more about what the woman was like in life, but there are fewer and fewer people left alive who knew her and those can’t be persuaded to speak about her. They believe that saying her name too much will invite her in some way.
Rowena had a nasty husband. He was a drug addict, and a dealer. He was apparently prone to violent outbursts and his mood would often swing wildly from drug-induced placidity to rabid fury. By all accounts he was your typical, abusive piece of shit and she met the tragic end of so many women throughout history who found themselves trapped in abusive relationships.
One night, she called into the hospital to say that she would be late, and then she never showed up to work at all. In the morning, they all got the news that Rowena’s husband had murdered her. He had stabbed her, over and over again, in her face. Only in her face. This part of the story is very clear, and one of the only things which remains consistent. That’s how she died, and I don’t care to imagine how grievous a face injury must be to kill someone.
Her seven-year-old son found her the next morning and called the police.
Nobody knows what caused Morena’s husband to explode that night (drug addicts aren’t exactly known for their consistency or stability). We don’t know what happened to him, but I like to think that he was stabbed in prison.
The next story is the worst one, I think. It happened to Christine directly, before she had ever heard this story.
Christine was a new nurse at the time and was having a rough week. Adjusting to the night shift is difficult, and she wasn’t sleeping properly.
Be right back, dogs are acting up.
Anyway, Christine says that nursing shifts are feast or famine. They’re either slammed with patients, unable to get off their feet for hours at a time, or there’s nothing to do and they sit around fighting boredom until their shift ends. This shift was the latter, and Christine was trying not to doze in front of her charting.
Christine asked Mira if she could take a nap for a few hours in the recovery room and Mira obliged. They don’t keep a bed in there, so Christine went to sleep on an old stretcher. I think it’s cruel that they let her do that, because all the old hands were afraid of that room. None of the old nurses said “boo” when she suggested sleeping in room that none of them would deign to go in on their own.
At this point Christine shuddered a little bit in the warm cafe, and rubbed her shoulders as if she felt a chill. “I slept for a few hours, I think, but I had a dream that my stretcher was being shaken. I thought someone was grabbing my shoulders and screaming in my face. It was so violent and scary that I woke up.”
She woke up in the dark recovery room and tried to get her bearings. The room was mostly dark with only a line of light from under the door peeking through, and she was being shaken violently.
The stretcher she was sleeping on was rattling so hard that one the latches had come undone. The normally flat stretcher was angled downward so that Christine’s feet were planted on the floor, forcing her into an awkward semi-reclining position.
A nurse was at the foot of the stretcher, hands on its sides and shaking it furiously. The nurse’s tiny arms were outstretched, and her face was dangling towards the floor. Christine started flailing, assuming that there had been an emergency and one of her coworkers had come in to wake her up.
Christine came close to crying when she told me that the nurse had looked up at her and where her face should have been there was only a flat and featureless gray mask. Christine doesn’t remember how she got out of the recovery room, only that she screamed out of there. When her heart slowed, and she felt safe back at the nurse’s station she was able to recount what had happened. The old nurses looked at one another, knowing and ashen. It was March fourth.
Christine urged me not to tell this story, or to at least change the name of the ghost. I think that Rowena deserves to have her story heard, at least a little. It’s terrible that her memory has faded, and she’s relegated to the terror she inflicts on others after her death. Maybe I’m just a cheap huckster using her memory for entertainment value.
Hold on, my back door is open. That’s weird, I know I closed it.