The Ghost of Clara Barton by Angela L Burke

In the early 1990’s I worked as a Charge Nurse at a Nursing Home in Michigan which was named after the famous nurse, Clara Barton. I was working the 11 pm to 7 am shift and it was usually pretty quiet..

Around 3 am on this particular Friday night, I was getting ready to lock up some medication that had been brought in by the pharmacy. The medication cart was parked just outside the nurses station, in front of a long hallway, which was my unit. It was a large unit with approximately 65 beds. I was the only nurse on duty for my unit but, I had several Nurse Assistants working with me that night.

The lights in the hallway were dimmed each night to help facilitate sleep but, there were generator type lights on in the corridor and it was lit enough that you could see anyone who was walking in the hallway.

As I was locking up my medication cart, I happened to look up and at the end of the hallway, I saw a black figure, which was like the outline of a woman.It darted across the hallway from one doorway to the other. It was so creepy looking that I got chills up my spine. I knew that the room on the left was empty..we used it to store wheelchairs and shower chairs in.

I walked to the end of the hallway and as I got near the end, one of the nurse assistants came out of a room to drop some dirty linen in the laundry barrel and I asked her if she had seen anyone down this end of the hall..she said no and I asked her if she would walk with me to the end and see if anyone had entered the last room on the left as I had thought I had seen a woman go into the room..

She said “ok” and we went to the last room on the left..the door was closed and I pushed it open and reached inside to flip on the light..As I did the room was freezing cold..so cold in fact that we could both see our breath.. I checked the windows ..they were closed and locked..I checked the bathroom there was no one there..I checked the thermostat on the wall and it said that it was 72 degrees in the room ..but there was no way it was that warm…we could find no explanation for what I had seen or why it was so cold…we searched the unit for wandering patients or anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there and there was no one who wasn’t where they were suppose to be.