The Haunted Hallways Of October

Some say in October the veil between the physical and spiritual realm thins; for nurses, not only do they deal with patients throughout this month, but the spookiness of the paranormal too. 

Jennifer Avalos, UTRGV alumni and current nurse at Valley Baptist Medical Center, said when she first started working as a nurse in the mother and baby ward unit, she was taking a baby out of the nursery and exiting through the back doors that stored rocking chairs. As she was exiting, one of the rocking chairs was moving back and forth by itself.

Avalos said, “It was the way that it was moving back and forth like somebody was there. I’m like, ‘that’s so weird’ … so I was pushing the baby in the bassinet, and I stopped right in front of the rocking chair… it stopped moving.”

She kept pushing the baby, but went through the front doors instead because of how strange that encounter was. 

Avalos added, staff members have said that room 1038 is haunted. She remembers a time around Halloween, two years ago, when she and other staff members were sitting at the nursing station when a call bell rang from the room. All the rooms have a bell that is connected to the call bell, so if a patient rings the bell, then a nurse has to answer.

“We got a call from 1038, so I picked up the phone… and nobody answered, then I hung up… then I looked at who was assigned [to the room], and nobody was there because there was no patient,” she said.  

An older nurse who worked there longer told Avalos it was a normal occurrence for calls to start ringing from that room and having nobody there.

She said another nurse told her of a patient that was assigned to room 1038 and the nurse asked the patient if they needed anything. The patient said that they didn’t, but asked about the nurse that came before her. They explained another nurse who was there before her opened the door; she didn’t say anything, she just peeked in and left. The patient didn’t see her face, but remembered her wearing white scrubs. 

“Just for context, nobody wears white anymore, that’s like an older nurse thing… maybe some hospitals still do, but ours wear royal blue and black, “ said Avalos. 

A paranormal encounter Avalos’ patient had was in another room where the patient kept complaining about her neighbor banging and scratching on the wall, preventing her from sleeping with all the noise. 

“She said there was constant banging on the walls and scratching … and I just looked at her and said there’s no one next to you, she was the only one in that cubicle … she was very freaked out,” she said. 

Italia Bazaldua, previously a medical assistant at Valley Baptist Medical Center, said she worked in the medical surgical area where she encountered supernatural occurrences. Such as on the third floor where the back door emergency exit is. If someone were to open the door, then an alarm system would go off.

“We would sometimes hear people knocking… see their shadows, and nobody would be there,” Bazaldua said.

She added, her first encounter was when she was in the back rooms next to the emergency exit, and she heard someone yelling ‘Help!’ coming from one of the rooms. She looked through the rooms and saw nobody.

“A couple of hours passed, and we heard a complaint from a family in one of the rooms. They said there’s people yelling, they’re making a lot of noise… can we keep them quiet, I’m like, there’s nobody in that room,” Bazaldua said.

She goes with a group of her other co-workers to the room the family complained about the noise coming from. As they walked in, they noticed a bunch of stuff was moved around, but nobody was there.

“For a while, that room was not used… I had only been there for a couple of months, so I was freaked out,” Bazaldua said.

The medical assistant said on Día de los Muertos in the year 2019, before COVID, she experienced another paranormal event. She was working in the outpatient area when she went into the public bathrooms when a lady walked in too.

“That bathroom has only two stalls, I was just fixing my hair… the lady was in one of the stalls, two other people came in and they went into the stalls and I’m like, one of them was busy.”

Bazaldua said she remembered the lady walked in there before her and went into the stall, but there was no one in there. 

“I saw that lady in there right before I did, and she did not leave; I would have seen her,” she said.

Avalos and Bazaldua said during a full moon the hospital gets busier. 

“I don’t know what the science behind it is, but a lot of babies tend to be born on the full moon … if something [paranormal] does happen it flies over my head because you’re so focused on your task,” Avalos said. 

Bazaldua said another superstition that the nurses always say is that, it always comes in threes. 

“This is pretty sad, but every time we had a patient that sadly passed away, somehow another passes away and then another one the same day…it’s something that the hospital knows,” she said.

Avalos believes Halloween is more charged during that time, for more paranormal experiences to occur. 

“Working at the hospital is very interesting, there’s a lot of stories and you can ask around anywhere… somebody is going to tell you a story, and that’s what I love about the hospitals,” Bazaldua said.