Hospital House Haunt

(NOTE: These series of encounters took place over the span of a few years, as I didn't actually live in this particular house. However, just about every time I visited, something would happen. It wasn't by any means subtle either, in that it could be easily debunked as something else. What I experienced in this house was as bluntly obvious as they come as far as a ghostly encounter goes.)

My best friend's (Paul) family's house located in Port Perry, ON was a 200+-year-old century home that was at one time Port Perry's first hospital. The rest practically writes itself. They don't live there anymore and haven't for some time now. This goes back to when I was in high school so in the late 90s. The big yellow brick house didn't really look like a hospital from the outside, but once inside you could see the evidence of a manor-like hospital. It was a beautiful house, quite big, and they decorated it with a very old Victorian antique look....but it was still very creepy. If anything, the décor made it creepier in some ways.

The first few times I visited nothing really happened that I can recall, but the place felt weird. A very heavy energy was in that house and in some spots felt thick enough that you could almost physically feel the space and energy around you (if that makes any relatable sense). I didn't know the house was haunted (though I had my suspicions) but I definitely didn't know it was a hospital. I found that little nugget of detail AFTER I spent my first night there.

My friend's bedroom (more like an apartment) was on the top floor (3rd). You'd walk up a flight of stairs to that floor (with a landing that had a single bathroom about halfway up the stairs) and when entering his room you would walk into a TV/living room area with a small bachelor-like kitchen on the one side of the room. When you entered, on your immediate left was his actual bedroom that had a closet door that would open to a hallway-like walk-in closet that leads to another door, that would lead into the attic. I only describe this because some encounters I'll be talking about took place within that space.

So the first night I spent there, I had a hard time sleeping. There was a strong feeling of being watched. I'd crashed on his couch in his apartment's living room area and at one point I sat up to readjust my pillow. As I was about to lay back down I saw something that had me frozen in shock. There was a woman standing at the end of my bed. She was wearing white - what looked like an old nursing uniform, right down to the little hat nurses used to wear a long time ago. The creepiest part of all (as if THAT wasn't scary enough) was she had no face...it was just blank. The whole experience lasted a lot longer than I wanted it to. I don't know exactly how long, probably just seconds, but it was long enough where I got to study what she looked like as well as analyze what I was actually seeing...a ghost or something else that was tricking my eyes. Then she raised her hand and with her index finger gave the "come here" motion. I wanted to scream at that point but I was so scared I couldn't get a whisper out. Her arm lowered and she faded away. I didn't really sleep much the rest of the night. It was after that incident that I found out that the house was once a hospital and that the room I was in was once the nurse's quarters.

That encounter was, believe it or not, tame compared to my later encounters in that house. There was once a time when I was walking down one of the flights of stairs (they had a grand staircase in the front entrance and a narrow winding staircase in the kitchen that led to the opposite side of the upstairs.) I was in that winding staircase once when suddenly a man's voice spoke right in my ear saying "Where are you going?" My friend and I were the only ones in the house at the time and he was still up on the third floor.

Another time I went over to hang out and play some vids, Paul was the only one home and told me to just walk in when I got there. I went to the side door that leads into the kitchen (which we usually use as the entrance) and it was locked. So I went to the main front door (a big heavy wooden door that had a big window on the top half that would portray anyone that approached from the chest up) and it too was locked. I knocked a few times. No response. I knocked again, harder this time. Suddenly I heard the door unlock. I didn't see anyone approach the door though (as I said, with the size of the window I should have seen someone). So I then thought maybe Paul wasn't home alone and it was his nephew - who was maybe around 5 at the time so I wouldn't have been able to see him in that window. I then watched the doorknob turn. The door opened slowly and stopped about a quarterway. I poked my head in nervously calling out, "Hello?" There was no one there. The only thing in front of me was this creepy old antique stroller that had 4 old dolls sitting in it; their faces all facing forward (so looking at it, they were looking off to my right.) This stroller was always in the entrance - another one of my friend's mom's antique collections. I called out "hello" again and this time Paul responded from upstairs saying to come one up. I asked who else was there, who let me in - to which he assured me we were the only ones in the house. I was about to walk up the stairs when I noticed the dolls in the stroller were now all looking directly at me. I didn't see their heads turn unfortunately (or fortunately?), but I know for certain they weren't looking at me when I walked in. I just tried to ignore it and continued upstairs.

One of the most incredible experiences I had at this house, if not in my entire life as far as the paranormal is concerned, took place one hot July afternoon. The year I can't completely remember, but early 2000. Paul and I walked over to his house from my house to meet some friends who were meeting us there. The house was empty of any other people, but they didn't usually keep their doors locked. We approached the front door, but it was locked. So we went to the side door, which had a wooden screen door before the main door. As Paul reached for the screen door's doorknob, the doorknob started to turn on its own. It wasn't a functioning doorknob, just something to grab. It spun in circles faster and faster, followed by the screen door then opening on its own, then slamming shut. Then opening again, then slamming shut. It began to pick up speed until it was just rapidly opening and closing all on its own; then suddenly stopped altogether. Paul turned to look at me, but I was already at the end of the driveway, shakily lighting a cigarette (I smoked back then, quit for 10 years now, yay!) and saying "FUCK THAT NOISE!" Paul tried to convince me that it was nothing but the wind...but I knew differently - things were going to get worse if we went inside. I tried to shrug it off as he did and walked back towards the house when suddenly we saw the light turn on through the basement window. I asked him then if he was sure no one was home and he confirmed that everyone was gone. I'll add that the basement was really just used for storage, so no one ever really went down there, and it was at one time the hospital morgue. It had a dirt floor, old brick arched doors, and creepy as fuck! After I questioned about the basement light, we watched it and then turn off. Then as Paul reached for the doorknob, it started to spin again and the door began to rap back and forth. He grabbed the doorknob and yanked the door open. We walked inside only to be greeted by the sound of the TV in the front room turned on full blast! Like, I'm talking FULL VOLUME LOUD! So we ran to the source, but to get to this room you had to pass by the front door....which as I mentioned, was locked. Well, now this front door is unlocked and wide open! We close the door and then enter the TV room to see the TV on and cranked. A short time later a friend of ours, Rory, showed up. As we're telling him the weird goings-on, Paul's sister-in-law Karen showed up. She and Paul's brother Scott had a full-size apartment upstairs...As I said, it was a big house. We filled her in on the details as well, then she went up to the apartment with her groceries. Minutes later we hear Karen screaming! We run up to her and Scott's apartment only to see water everywhere and every faucet on full blast. Some of them turn on and off, on and off all on their own. After a few long seconds, everything came to a stop. We helped Karen clean up all the water, but she didn't stick around after that. We did...for SOME reason. So we headed back down to the main living room and the room was freezing cold. So cold that Paul said he'd start a fire in the fireplace; again it was July...shouldn't have been this cold. As he worked on that, Rory and I went out for a smoke. We were outside for not even two minutes when we heard Paul yell out in pain. The fire poker had flown across the room and hit him in the leg, leaving a red welt. We told him to wait to start the fire because we weren't going to be staying much longer at this rate. Rory and I continued our smoke outside when suddenly I felt two hands grab my shoulders tight and then claw down my back, scratching me hard. I jumped out of my seat with a panicked yell. There were distinct scratch marks all down my back that were bright red. We didn't go back into the house after that....at least not that night. In fact, if my memory serves me I think we took off scared out of our minds to Coffee Time down the street and told Paul to meet us there.

There was another time that had a taste of deja vu with the re-occurrence of some weird activity involving the side door of this house. Paul, his family and I had all gone to see the movie Fahrenheit 911. We went and met with some friends after the movie, so when Paul and I returned back to his house it was long after the rest of his family had already returned. Like the last time, we went to the front door to get inside, but it was locked. So we went to the side door - it too was locked. So Paul found a hidden spare key and we went back to the front door. For some reason, even after unlocking the door, the door still wouldn't open. So as Paul went to the side window to try to open it and crawl in, his mom came downstairs to see what all the noise was about. As I mentioned before, this front door had a big window so I could see his mom at the door. Paul made it through the window and was now standing next to his mom at the front door. The door was unlocked, but we then learned no one had locked it in the first place. Paul tried to open the door but it wouldn't budge. I even tried to push the door as he pulled and it wouldn't move at all. It was like pushing against a brick wall. No one could explain it as the door never stuck. I'm then told to go back to the side door and they'll let me in there. I meet Paul at the door and now this door won't open either! He pulled on the door and I pushed as hard as we could when the door began to crack open. However, the second we'd let up on the tension, the door would slam shut. So we pulled/pushed harder and it would open a little more, but it felt like some force was fighting against us to keep it closed. Then it got to the point where the more open we could get, the more a force would work against us to keep it closed. It felt like a game of tug-of-war. Suddenly, the kitchen lights (to which this door led into - the kitchen) began to flicker on and off, on and off. We backed away from the door and it then just slowly opened halfway and the lights stopped flickering. We tapped the door and it loosely swung on its hinges like it normally did. We went back to check the front door and it too loosely swung on its hinges, like nothing ever happened.

There were many other weird encounters members of that family experienced. Like objects going missing only to show up months later if ever at all. Things moving on their own, a black shadow of a man with red eyes and a wide-brimmed hat, and one of the scariest encounters I'd ever heard of. There was a closet in Scott and Karen's apartment that, for some reason, the electricity never would work in and was always freezing cold. They had many electricians come in to try to figure out why the lights wouldn't turn on in there but no one could figure out why. This one time Karen came home and went to put stuff away in this closet when suddenly a woman appeared in the closet face to face with her. Karen ran out of the house screaming and refused to be in her apartment alone after that.

Then a couple of years after these events, Paul's family moved away to another house but kept this house to rent out. They'd done some renovations that broke the house up into multiple apartments; which some of our friends had rented out. So we'd still end up hanging out at this house on occasion. One night a big group of us went back to the house to hang out after a night at the bar. Yes, we had a few drinks in us, but alcohol cannot be the reason for what we ALL witnessed. Everyone knew the house was haunted and it was someone's bright idea to bust out the old Ouija board....probably my idea to be honest. There were 7 of us that witnessed these next events happen. We made contact with one of the spirits of the house...or so we were led to believe. We asked for a sign of its presence and to do something/move something. Suddenly the ceiling, which was a series of panels, all lifted up across the length of the room in a wave-like manner as if something dragged along them. We asked for another sign and the planchet spelled out the word "CAT". Seconds later a black cat came tearing into the room...but no one knew whose cat it was. No one even knew there was a cat in the house! Assuming it was just another tenant's cat and it was a coincidence (a pretty big one if you ask me), we then asked for another sign (as if the previous signs weren't good enough). Paul was on the other side of the room in the kitchen making a drink with his back turned to us and made some sort of snarky comment about the ghosts in the house, can't remember exactly what he said, but that's not the point. At that moment the rest of us six all witnessed a mug that was on the table we were sitting around levitate off the table, hang in the air for a second, and then go flying across the room, smashing into pieces against the wall next right next to Paul's head! He spun around angrily asking who through that mug at him...to which we were all sitting stunned, wide-eyed, and speechless.

The last big encounter I recall with this house was also during the time that it was being rented out as apartments. I was part of a group project (5 of us) while in college to make an interactive CD ROM (again, back in 2001 when interactive CD ROMs were more of a thing). We decided to do it based on haunted locations near us and we called it "Ghosts of Durham". We investigated the Ghost Road of Scugog Island, a well-known haunted restaurant in Port Perry called Jester's Court and ended it all off by investigating Paul's house. We arranged it so that no other tenants were in the house at the time of the investigation so as to not have any interruptions or contaminated/misleading evidence. We went up to Paul's old room, where a lot of activity in the past would happen; and it didn't take long for it to happen again! We had two fully charged video cameras with us and a few photo cameras. Minutes after entering his old room's living room area (as I described above his room was like a small apartment) we suddenly heard and felt heavy HEAVY banging on the floor below our feet. It felt and heard like someone banging the ceiling from the floor below us. BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! It went on for a while. We grabbed the video cameras to record it, but all the batteries were suddenly drained. The banging continued and started to move across the floor towards the wall, then climbed up the wall and into the ceiling; sounding as if someone was trapped between the walls and trying to get out. The banging traveled to above our heads and then stopped as suddenly as it began. The second it all stopped, our cameras all turned on with full battery charge. We left the living room area to the bedroom which had a door to a long walk-in closet that had another door that leads to the attic. This attic door was locked. Fortunately, we had a key and were able to get in fine - a detail that we'll circle back to. The second we walked into the attic, Mary (one of the project teammates) and I both saw a tall black figure stand up from a crouched position in the far corner of the attic, take a step forward, and then vanish. Unfortunately, it was too dark to catch on the camera we had. We all took a seat on the attic floor and broke out the Ouija board to hopefully entice some ghostly reactions. We ended up making contact with a woman who said she was a nurse when the house was a hospital and that she died over a hundred years ago...accurate to when it was a hospital. After a short while, we weren't getting any more responses from the Ouija board so decided to move the investigation elsewhere. As we left the attic, we weren't able to close the attic door. It was as if something was keeping it held open. So we left the door open for a moment as well left the room back to the living room area, and I left to use the bathroom which was just outside the apartment down a small flight of stairs on a landing before another flight of stairs. The landing was illuminated by a single pot light in the ceiling, to which the switch for it was down that second set of stairs. The light was on when I went to the bathroom and on when I came out. I went back up to the apartment and Paul then left to use the bathroom himself. During the time he was gone, we then noticed the attic door that we couldn't close minutes before was now not only closed, but the lock we took off was back on it and locked. At that moment Paul left the bathroom and called out to us asking why we turned off the hall light. To which we told him we didn't, nor did we notice it went out. He went to hit the light switch and the light didn't turn on. We then looked at the pot light thinking the bulb just happened to die at that moment, but what we saw defied any logic. The entire pot light was literally torn out of the ceiling! Frayed wires were all that remained hanging out of the ceiling alongside the broken drywall. We are talking about just a few minutes that had gone by since I had been in that same part of the hall when the light was on. No one heard any noise of anything happening and even more puzzling, the pot light itself was nowhere to be found! We decided whatever it was that was giving this evidence was getting violent if it could do something like that to a light fixture, so we decided to wrap it up and get out of there. We got to my car and Paul realized he didn't have his gloves with him (it was winter at the time). So he ran back into the house and the rest of us waited outside. Some time had passed...quite a bit of time for just having to grab gloves. Suddenly Paul comes running out of the house, white as, well, a ghost, and into my car saying, "GO! JUST GO!"

We asked him, what happened? What took so long? He said he looked everywhere in the house and couldn't find his gloves...they weren't where he remembered leaving them. When he went up to his old apartment, he saw the attic door was open (as I mentioned it was mysteriously closed on us), the attic light was on and his gloves lying in the middle of the floor where we'd sat during the Ouija session. As he went into the attic to retrieve his gloves, the light suddenly turned off and the attic door slammed shut. He ran to the door to open it and it wouldn't budge. He pushed and it would open a little, but something was resting on the other side. Putting his shoulder into it, he forced the door open only to see what it was that was pushed up against it making it so hard to open - 3 other doors that were taken off their hinges and propped up against the attic door!

That was, I believe, the last big encounter I had at that house. Eventually, his family moved back in for a short time and then sold the place altogether. To this day he won't 100% acknowledge what happened that day, or any of the encounters he and I shared at that place as he purposefully put it out of his mind. He was always a bit of a skeptic at first but more times than not things were left unexplainable and terrifying; so he doesn't like talking about it much. I, on the other hand, couldn't forget something like this! It stuck with me all these years and feels like it happened yesterday, as this house was THE MOST haunted house I ever spent time in!

I still have many more stories to go. As crazy as these encounters were, I've encountered SO much worse!