by Ken Springer
The Accidental Ghostbuster
“Critical thinking requires us to use our imagination, seeing things from perspectives other than our own and envisioning the likely consequences of our position.”
~ Bell Hooks
In the fall of 1985, I traveled down the Stewart-Cassiar Highway from Alaska to the Lower 48 with my friend Mark Reed.
We had recently hiked the Chilkoot Trail, aka the Klondike Gold Rush Trail, from Skagway, Alaska, into the Yukon. Mark and I were going to visit a friend in Seattle, and the Stewart-Cassiar Highway passes through British Columbia before entering the state of Washington.
On the late afternoon of our third day of travel, we pulled into Sasquatch Provincial Park, a park with a thought-provoking name. We both chuckled as we set about preparing a camp for the evening.
Having been sitting in the small Toyota truck all day, I decided to get the blood flowing by running a loop trail around Hicks Lake. As I began my run, of which I grossly underestimated the distance, I was still smugly chuckling about the park’s name. Do Canadians really believe in these creatures?
I staunchly denied the existence of cryptids like Bigfoot, Chupacabra, and the Loch Ness Monster. So, with little daylight left, I slipped into my running shoes and set out on what promised to be a spectacular run along a crystal clear lake that mirrored the snow-capped mountains looming above the dense forest of massive red cedars.
As daylight gave way to the gloom that presages absolute darkness, I realized that even though I profess to require solid evidence as a requirement to belief, I started to feel the hairs on my neck stand up with each unidentified sound issuing from the darkening forest, calls, screeches, and snapping branches.
My ordinarily calm demeanor quickly replaced rationality with a sense of foreboding that increased proportionally to the waning light in the forest.
I began conversing with myself in the way we humans do when grappling with cognitive dissonance: “Hey, who am I to say Bigfoot doesn’t exist? They named an entire provincial park after a legendary creature with enormous feet, right? Why would they name it Sasquatch if there were none in the immediate area?”
I imagined Mark informing my wife that a sasquatch had snatched me. I even imagined a newspaper headline in Vancouver stating, “Another Yank Missing in Sasquatch Provincial Park: Has Bigfoot Claimed Another Clueless Tourist from the Lower 48?”
To some degree, my avowed cynicism about the existence of creatures like bigfoot was shaken; my out-of-hand disbelief had faltered momentarily. The brain’s fear center had overtaken my cherished critical thinking, a product of the prefrontal cortex.
Given the right circumstances, our amygdala, the brain’s fear center, stimulates the fight-or-flight response. Since I would stand no chance whatsoever against a sasquatch in a fight, I chose flight and stepped up my pace.
When I finally arrived back at our camp unmolested but spooked, I stood before the campfire sipping a steaming black coffee spiked with Yukon Jack. Before long, my skepticism was returning, but not as rock-solid as before starting the run.
My avowed cynicism about the existence of creatures like bigfoot was shaken to some degree; my out-of-hand disbelief had faltered. I ran faster because I wasn’t sure there was nothing to fear in that dense forest of red cedar.
Many of us have had the faith in our firmly held beliefs tested occasionally.
“We heard ghosts in one of the rooms in the hospital’s basement; we could hear the moanful sobbing of women.” Temporary worker, October, 2002.
If you were, like me, a fan of the TV series X Files, you might recognize the series tagline: “The Truth is Out There.” As quirky as the show was, it was tremendously popular for 11 seasons.
Gillian Anderson’s Scully and David Duchovny’s Mulder had what some call “chemistry. “Scully, a physician, played the quintessential skeptic to Mulder’s mantra, “I want to believe.” The two FBI agents were assigned cases that ventured into the supernatural, extraterrestrials, and even monsters. They continuously operated in a deep-state government conspiracy atmosphere where things weren’t always what they seemed.
Now, what does this TV series have to do with me, you ask? When I retired from government work in 1999, I went to work for a large staffing company based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Most of my job involved investigating workplace deaths and injuries and inspecting job sites before placing temporary workers. My bread and butter was ensuring that workers performed their jobs in a safe environment with proper training and personal protective equipment.
I enjoyed the work, but it was somewhat repetitious – that is, until a bright October day in 2002. My boss, the company’s corporate attorney, called asking if I could do a job that, as she said, was “a bit unusual.” She even called it an “X-Files” case involving ghosts moaning and sobbing. She now had my full and undivided attention.
Most people with even a modicum of curiosity love a mystery. I am one of those fortunate people who loves mysteries, particularly those that cross the boundary into the ineffable.
However, seeking the truth requires accepting that the source of any apparent disembodied voices may be mundane. Something that appears as a phenomenon defying immediate explanation sometimes goes into the supernatural bucket without thoroughly investigating with an open mind. That path may lead to false beliefs, and we don’t want to be hoodwinked, do we?
When my boss called to request an investigation of unexplained voices in the lower levels of one of Columbus, Ohio’s, oldest hospitals, I had just returned home for the day and was nursing a glass of wine.
She explained that six of our temporary workers were assigned to remove old hospital beds and equipment from the subterranean level of one of the original hospital wings that was destined for demolition.
Their shift started at 11 p.m. when there was less foot and vehicle traffic in the area. The temps’ job was simple and straightforward: They were to carry all the hospital items from the basement to a truck parked on Grant Avenue, a one-way street that is very busy during daylight hours.
The temps’ first shift in the hospital was the previous evening. By morning, the six workers had left before the shift ended. According to our human resource director, the six claimed that the hospital’s basement was haunted and that they were too scared to return. The hospital was a good client, and we didn’t want to lose their business.
My next step was to call the hospital’s facilities manager, a young man named Dan. We arranged to meet at his office at 11 p.m. that evening. Usually, I would have been reluctant to take on a job in the middle of the night, but I remember being so excited about the prospects of this case that I showed up 30 minutes early and raring to go.
Before descending to the lower level of the old hospital wing, Dan and I discussed the reluctant temporary workers of the previous evening. He explained that the six temp workers, consisting of four men and two women, all reported hearing quite clearly wailing and moaning of what can only be described as disembodied voices; there was no one else in the room.
Dan made a point of the fact that his full-time employees, who were showing the temp workers what was expected of them, were also filling the temps’ heads with tales about primitive abortions carried out in the basement back in the early years of the 20th century.
Following our brief discussion, we headed to the subterranean level in an old creaky service elevator. We saw a long, unadorned concrete hallway with rooms on both sides when the doors opened.
We began checking all the rooms, which were carbon copies of each other. Paint on the walls and ceiling was peeling off in raggedy scrolls. The rooms contained old beds, mattresses, carts and rusty medical equipment.
The smell of decades-old urine permeated the old mattresses, and water dripped from the ceiling onto the concrete floor, creating soda-straw stalactites hanging precariously from the ceiling. The place was spooky, even if ghosts weren’t in the equation.
We finally came to a room on the right that looked much like the others. But as Dan and I examined outdated medical equipment stacked in a corner, we heard faint voices seemingly coming from nowhere. It was impossible to understand what the voices were saying, as they sounded garbled and raised and fell in volume.
After staring at each other in amazement for a long second, Dan asked, “I take it you’re hearing the voices, too?”
“Indeed, I guess those sounds could be mistaken for ghostly moaning,” I replied. “They are certainly female voices.”
At that moment, I reached up and touched one of the soda-straw stalactites hanging from the ceiling. It instantly crumbled into a small pile of calcium carbonate shards. Dan said, “Hey, there is a small hole where the fractured stalactite was. I wonder how far into the ceiling it goes?”
I remembered seeing a coat rack with metal hangers in one of the rooms we explored earlier. Returning to the room where we heard the voices, I cut the hook off the hanger with my multi-tool and used the pliers to straighten the wire.
Dan was taller than me, so I handed it to him, and he pushed the wire into the hole. We were both surprised that it went a good foot or more before breaking free of the concrete.
Dan pushed it up another foot with no resistance and asked me to hold it in place while he went back to his office to get some duct tape, saying, “I’ve got an idea; I’ll be right back.”
While waiting for Dan’s return, I could hear the voices. I realized they were intermittent and seemed to vary in volume. I imagined the workers, already fueled by the tales from the hospital employees, getting freaked out hearing these mournful sounds with no one else in the room.
Dan soon burst through the door with duct tape and a roll of architectural drawings for this hospital wing. After securing the hanger wire to the ceiling, he spread out the basement floor plan on a metal table.
Dan studied the architectural drawing for the basement for a while. When he looked up at me and patted the far wall, he exclaimed, “That’s strange; according to the original blueprint, this section of the room does not align with the exterior wall, extending at least a couple of feet toward Grant Avenue.
I suggested we go outside the building and look for the hanger. “I’ll grab a couple of flashlights and meet you just outside the first-floor entrance, Dan replied.”
We paced the distance from the entrance to the approximate location of the “haunted” room. A row of hedges separated the building from the sidewalk bordering Grant Avenue. We got down on our hands and knees, peering into the thick bushes, searching for the coat hanger.
After a few minutes of looking, Dan shouted, “Eureka! “He had found the hanger just a few inches from the sidewalk, meaning our room was right under our feet.
We were discussing our next step in the investigation when a group of student nurses having a lively conversation passed by. Dan and I looked at each other, thinking the same thing: could nurses walking from their dormitory to the hospital be the voices heard by the temps?
Dan asked the women if they would stand there and continue their conversation for a few minutes if it wouldn’t make them late for their shift. They eagerly agreed but asked why. I told them that as soon as we got back, we would let them know why we made the request.
As soon as we entered the room, we knew without a doubt that the voices of purported ghosts were the direct effect of young nurses gabbing while enroute to their night shift and the way that the porous concrete muffled and distorted their voices. It would also be easy to see how the vocalizations sound spooky enough to conjure up the dead as the culprits.
Dan and I went topside to explain our request to the nurses. They all started laughing and making jokes about working in a haunted hospital. As they walked away from us, the women suddenly turned around and in unison sang the theme from Ghostbusters.
“Oh well, who you gonna call?”
Ken Springer
ken1949bongo@gmail.com