piasharn | The Haunted Elevator (Reply)

At the hospital that I work at, I often refer to the eighth floor as the "haunted floor". This goes back to when I first started, and I was going up there (the Medical Imaging department is on the third floor, by the way) to do a portable x-ray with one of the students.

There are three elevators for general use, and another for employees only. We rarely use the latter since it is slow and seems to stop on random floors for no apparent reason. However, on this particular day, we got there in time to get on and go up to the eighth floor.

Shortly after we had gotten off, we heard a woman yelling something at us. Confused, we turned around. There was only one other person in the vicinity - a man, who was looking around in a bewildered fashion much as we were. Since the aforementioned student commented that that elevator was wont to stop at the eighth floor, I've started calling it the "haunted floor" as a result.

But I may have been mistaken.

It doesn't surprise me that a hospital would be haunted. After all, a lot of people die in them, although this is not often the result of the staff. (People are often dying when they are admitted, after all.) While I've never seen anything overtly supernatural, I've heard stories from other techs in every hospital I've been at. Especially from the ones who work on second or third shifts.

I had to work second shift earlier this week. Nothing was going on in the department, so when a portable order came in, the lead tech on duty came with me. Seeing that the staff-only elevator was already on the third floor, we nabbed it. "I guess we'll take the haunted elevator," she remarked as we got in.

"The 'haunted elevator?'" I inquired.

She informed me that whenever a patient died, it was this elevator that was always used to transport the body down. As a result, she always felt disturbed using it. I started to wonder if perhaps it wasn't a particular floor that was haunted, but this elevator. It made sense: it seemed to have a mind of its own, and would stop on floors even if no one had requested it to go to that floor.

I don't really know.

I'm not sure if I believe in ghosts. Perhaps I just want to believe in them, because it means that there is something beyond this life. Perhaps it's just that I have an over-active imagination.

But there's something weird about that elevator.