Chapter 7
Lewes, Delaware
A residual haunt, while it can be quite shocking, will not exhibit the same characteristics of an intelligent haunting. If you witness the apparition, it will not interact with you or appear to notice you at all. It’s merely a recording of a past event. Such appeared to be the case in the story below.
Our group was invited to set up a vendor table at a haunted pop-up in Lewes, Delaware, one Halloween season. The short, one-day event featured vendors selling Ouija boards and books about ghosts and the like. Actually, I wasn’t selling much of anything but was sitting fairly idly at my table when a man approached me. I asked him if he’d like to fill out our survey, which he respectfully declined to do.
“So you investigate hauntings?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s what we do. We’re paranormal investigators.”
“Well, I have a story for you. It’s my story.”
The author outside the haunted pop-up in Lewes, Delaware.
As he leaned in conspiratorially toward my table I found that was all the precursor I was to get before he launched into a truly amazing story.
He’d been a laboratory technician working a night shift in an old hospital. He was busy one night spinning his centrifuges and filling test tubes and doing whatever else lab technicians do when alone in the dead of the night. Suddenly, he spotted a nurse, a very determined nurse, walking down the hall. The old hospital had large semicircle arched windows separating the lab area from the hall, so he could clearly see the nurse walking past one archway after another, walking quickly as if on an errand. Her skirts flowing past her and the click of her heels on the floor were evidence that she had a job to do, and she was going to get it done.
One of his duties as a lab tech was to check out blood, as needed, to the nurses. He recalled that she was wearing a gray dress and a sort of white cap on her head as she headed toward the blood bank.
Not wanting to get in trouble, he left his post at the laboratory and headed quickly to the blood bank, only to find no nurse waiting impatiently for him when he arrived. He was worried. So he went upstairs and asked the first nurse he found what had happened to the nurse he’d seen walking toward the blood bank. She looked confused; apparently, there’d been no recent need for blood. She asked him what the nurse he’d seen had been wearing. He told her she’d been in a gray dress with a white cap.
The nurse looked at him oddly.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Really, if there was a nurse that needed blood, I need to find her and make sure she gets what she needs.”
“Are you sure you saw a nurse in that kind of uniform?”
“I know what I saw. Can you please tell me which nurse on which floor is looking for blood?”
“You do understand that nurses haven’t worn that type of uniform in at least forty years,” she said.
He was perplexed to say the least. Apparently, the nurse he had witnessed had been so solid and lifelike, not to mention determined, that he’d never even questioned in his mind that what he had seen was real, despite the fact that her garb was exceptionally odd by modern medical standards.
Final Assessment
“That was my experience,” he said and left without giving me his name or any other information. Sometimes gifts such as this simply fall into your lap. What do I take from his experience? The nurse was probably a residual haunt. The fact that the specter was so real in appearance that he never questioned her existence is remarkable. But I feel our lab tech was probably in the right spot at the exact right time to witness this nurse from the past.
A quick perusal of the history of nursing uniforms seemed to indicate that the nurse was probably dressed as an American nurse around the time of World War I. At the time, nurses wore a gray cotton crepe material uniform with a double collar or wing collar and white cuffed sleeves.
Although my witness didn’t mention it, they also often wore a Red Cross insignia on their cap, pin, or brassard to make them easily identifiable on the battlefield or in battle hospitals.
At the turn of the twentieth century, nurses wore head coverings reminiscent of nuns’ with a full cap and veil. As this can’t have been practical to wartime nursing, the fashions eventually gave way to the classic winged white cap that many of us still associate with nurses.
Consider also the hem length of the skirt. Dress lengths were becoming shorter by necessity, as a nurse needed maneuverability in a war zone. So dress lengths shortened first to the lower calf and eventually to midcalf. I wonder if this isn’t close to the nursing uniform the witness described. Nursing uniforms didn’t become predominantly white until World War II, if you’re wondering. World War I, the Great Depression, the Roaring Twenties—all these eras with their residual energy might have been prime contributors for embedding energy into the edifices of an old hospital, and our unwitting lab tech became witness to a snapshot out of time.