MERCY FALLS CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL
Location: Known as Vectis during the Roman Empire, the island-county
of the Isle of Wight is the second most populous island in England. Located
about four miles off the County of Hampshire in the English Channel, it was
briefly an independent kingdom in the 15th Century and afterward a part of
Hampshire until 1890. Reached from Southsea near Portsmouth, the island is the
home of Mercy Falls Children's Hospital, located at the end of Mercy Road, a
winding one-lane road on the upper part of the seaside town of Ventnor, ten
miles south of Newport on the B3327 Highway.
Description Of Place: Now since closed down and abandoned, Mercy
Falls is a former two-story clay brick Victorian castle which was taken over by
the RAF during World War One and transformed into a hospital for wounded
servicemen. Retained as a hospital since then, it has been remodeled and
renovated several times, becoming a children's hospital in the Fifties. Although
three stories tall, the second floor was referred to as the first and the top
floor as the second; the bottom floor was kept as the main floor for examination
rooms and offices. It had
the facilities to contain over 300 patients and a staff of almost a hundred, but
over the years, it has deteriorated into ruin with crumbling masonry, decaying
woodwork and recurring electrical and plumbing problems. The location is
now condemned with sections of the top floor collapsed into the second.
Ghostly Manifestations: Among haunted locations, hospitals and
sanitariums rank very high as haunted locations even higher than cemeteries and
historical sites. It seems to have something to do with the number of people who
have died in these structures or perhaps the considerable amount of emotional
and psychological energy poured into these structures. Modern science claims
this type of energy doesn't exist, but then it also can't explain why hospital
and prisons seem to be locations of powerful paranormal events. Science wants us
to believe that there are no such things as ghosts, but then why do so many
people still see apparitions and spirits in the thousands every year since the
dawn of written records?
Registered nurse Amy Nichols never believed in ghosts before she worked at Mercy Falls Children's Hospital. As an American nurse studying in London, she was transferred to Mercy Falls to assist in preparing the under-staffed hospital in moving the children staying there to St. James Hospital in Newport. Attractive, slight of build and endowed with the whimsical child-like presence of a young girl still growing into adulthood, Amy expected a fairly routine relocation process as the old hospital was preparing to close its doors, but as she discovered on arrival, her duties were anything but routine.
"I never believed in ghosts before..." She confesses with a subtle rational voice tinged with defiant logic. "But I have a hard time explaining what I experienced at Mercy Falls as anything but."
"On my arrival," She continues. "There were certain things I noticed that the staff knew something that they didn't talk about. They didn't use the second floor, but they never gave me a strong reason why except that it hadn't been in use since the Fifties so I left it at that. I had been called in to replace the previous night nurse, I would be in that position to take cake of the patients in the children's ward at night and then helping to move them one by one until the hospital was closed. It was through them that I learned the story about Charlotte, a mechanical girl who came down from the second floor, but the staff pretty much dismissed those stories and I didn't have any reason not to... Well, at least in the beginning.
"My first night there was pretty much uneventful. Routine duties, getting used to the procedures, meeting and getting familiar with the staff and children. It's a big building with high ceilings and long corridors. We came and arrived through an elevator from the basement since most of the building had been closed down and locked off. The water wasn't working in the nurses room so I had to go down this long darkened hall to this washroom at the far end. It was this first night that I actually heard what sounded like a loud crash from upstairs. It sounded like someone had knocked over a metal table with instruments, but then I realized that no one was supposed to be up there. I mean, you couldn't even get up there. There's no button for that floor in the elevator. So, while I'm standing there in the dark wondering what this noise was, it's followed by this series of knocking sounds and poundings and rapping noises as if someone is moving around up there. It definitely woke up the kids who had been sound asleep before it all started, and the noises probably terrified them more than they scared me. I'm calling and buzzing and calling for Matt Bellows, who was the orderly on duty that night, but he never showed up. Once the noises stopped, I got the children settled down, and went looking for him. He had head phones on with loud music playing in them and had completely missed the noises. After I finally got done reaming him for not being available, he just looks at me with disbelief and tells me it was just the pipes. That's the same excuse I had told the kids, but to tell the truth, I didn't believe it myself."
According to Roy Gillis, the head of maintenance, several kids going back to the Fifties have either seen or heard Charlotte's ghost coming from the second floor, but she's mostly treated as just a legend in the hospital. She blamed for all the creaks and groans in the building as well as the odd shadows in the building. Amy's predecessor, Susan Morgan, left the hospital after being terrified by something she had seen on the floor. Simon McAllister, one of the children, broke his leg in two places just from falling out of his hospital bed. When pressed for answers as to how it happened, he just answered, "Charlotte did it."
"On my second day in the hospital," Amy continues. "We were getting ready to move Simon so he could be flown by helicopter to St. James. It was early in the day, and I was taking him in his wheelchair down in the elevator when it stopped between floors. Now, I've been in a lot of stopped elevators without believing in ghosts, and I know its an old elevator, but this time, it just felt like something else. I'm in the elevator, and Simon was getting scared so I just started hitting the button and calling for Roy when it started moving again, but instead of moving down to the basement, it started moving up, stopping just short of the second floor. I could actually push the doors open, and look out at floor level at the dark dingy conditions of the floor filled with all these beds stacked against the walls. In the distance, I could hear this strange noise like someone crying... a distant pitiful sound of someone in misery, but before I could turn around and ask Simon if he could hear it, the elevator suddenly jolted and dropped back down to the second floor where Roy was waiting for us. However, I saw Simon's face, and I knew he'd heard the crying too."
In addition to Simon, another patient who said she often saw and felt Charlotte was Maggie Reynolds. She had confirmed that Susan had been so terrified of Charlotte's ghost that she had quit her job because of it. In fact, several of the children had supposedly seen or felt her presence in the children's ward and were terrified of her.
"That night after the elevator incident," Amy proceeds with her encounters. "I was checking on the children and were making sure they were comfortable. As I was passing Simon's bed, I noticed that someone seemed to be in it so I turned to Maggie who seemed to be in it and asked her, "Did Simon come back already?" She said "No" so I started wondering who was in his bed since everyone else was accounted for, but at the last minute, I started getting this very real feeling of dread. I mean, if it was not Simon, I started to fear who it might be so I reached to pull the sheet off, but it pulled right off the bed from my hand. No one was in it, and I had never touched it. By this point, I can seriously admit that I was starting to thing there was something not normal going on there."
After this incident, Amy wanted factual evidence that the hospital was haunted and asked Roy to search for any files of patients named Charlotte that had died there. Although there was no files recorded for deceased patients named Charlotte, Roy did learn that since the Fifties there were several records of children who had died under strange and suspicious accidents. Young patients with clean bills of health and about to be discharged often died of inexplicable incidents with little to no medical evidence of the causes. It seemed whatever was in the hospital was capable of hurting them, particularly in light of Simon's bizarre injuries. Shortly after that realization, Roy was packing up the playroom when one of the wood blocks the kids played with flew off the table and struck him hard to the face, breaking his nose and knocking him cold to the floor. When he came to a few days later, he said he seen a tall ghastly figure in the room wearing metal braces and plates. It was also revealed days later that the kids often received messages from Charlotte through the blocks.
"That last day was a very trying experience for me." Amy continues. "Maggie went into convulsions and had to be put on an air tank for a while, and Roy's injury meant we'd be one more person short in getting the kids ready to leave. Fortunately, Maggie improved enough to show me where Susan had been catching the kids slipping upstairs to look for Charlotte. It was a floor opening in a storage room once used as an elevator lift and I went up there looking for proof that she existed. It was very dank, dusty and ruined up there with very little light. It had this feeling of being frozen in time because of all the toys and objects left behind to collect dust plus I couldn't get over the sensation I was being watched. In a medical cabinet from the nurse's station, I found a canister of film with a photo in it and I brought that down with me to show Richard along with Maggie who had followed me up there.
"Before leaving from up there, I think I saw Charlotte for myself. She didn't look like what I expected a ghost to look like... just a tall thin dark shadow with a bluish-gray face on top of it and like Roy said... imprisoned in this frame work of steel pins and metal plates holding her together.
Since the hospital closed, there have been two more stories from Marcy Falls. In October 2005, a news reporter with a cameraman drove out to the sight to film a story about the supposed ghost. While they were walking up the staircase to the first floor where Amy worked, they suddenly heard a wailing sound coming down from somewhere above them and then turned to race from the building as a discarded wheelchair came tumbling down the stairs behind them.
In 2008, a group of students down from St. Catherine's Academy turned up at the location trying to
provoke the activity. According to the story later passed on, one of them found
the old elevator lift opening and climbed up to the second floor. With his
friends coming up to join him, he suddenly came charging from around a corner
and pushing everyone back down the ladder in a hurry to leave the ruined
edifice. It's claimed he ran straight into Charlotte... or possibly something
else no one else has encountered...
History: Possibly built in the Tenth or Eleventh centuries, the
structure was once the home of an English lord whose family lost interest in the
property or abandoned it. Because of its location on the English Channel, it was
a prime location to be converted into a war hospital during World War One and
World War Two, later staying in capacity as a children's hospital through the
Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.
Decaying into ruin over the ages, it is believed the incessant rain during
May 2005 with the moisture pouring through the cracks in the structure lead to
the final collapse of the top floor. Much of the roof and second floor ceiling
started crumbling into the first floor. Matt Bellows was searching for a blood
pressure cuff when the storage room collapsed on him, and Amy Nichols came
stumbling down from the second floor after retrieving Maggie, who had gone up
there to reclaim a blanket she had left behind up there. Although it is convenient
and sensational to blame the collapse of the structure on Charlotte's ghost, Amy
doesn't think it's a coincidence that the top floor came down right when the
choice came to evacuate the kids from the structure.
Identity Of Ghosts: According to records, Charlotte Rivers was not a
patient at the hospital but a nurse or care worker for Mandy Philips, a patient
with osteoporosis at the hospital in 1959. Charlotte was deeply fond of Mandy,
and when the girl started getting better, Charlotte started breaking her bones
on purpose to keep from being taken away from her. When she was discovered, she
smothered Mandy in her sleep then put on the child's metal braces and threw
herself into the elevator shaft to her death. Over the years, her ghost
reportedly became fond of the children staying in the hospital, making them sick
or injuring them to keep them bedridden.
Source/Comments: Fragile (2005) - Loosely based on the events in the
movie and
on Athens Mental Hospital in Athens, Ohio, Bennett high School in Millbrook, New
York, the Old Danvers Children's Hospital near Collinwood, Tennessee and
Severalls Hospital in Colchester, England.