Investigating The Old Agnews Hospital - A True Ghost Story

Unsuspecting commuters and distant travelers pass by a neglected old Lafayette Street landmark, not realizing that within its massive exterior dwells something from the other side of reality...something that makes one's skin tingle and envelopes one's body creating labored breathing and sweaty pores.

Just the sight of this immense structure during daylight will evoke a feeling of apprehension and viewing this structure after sundown will evoke a much stronger apprehension. The whole area looks dilapidated and in disarray. The paint is peeling and flaking off its walls, windows are boarded up, withered vegetation clings to rough edges around the structure as if in a death grip.We were introduced to the property's caretaker. He and his wife speak of mysterious happenings in and around this old structure after sundown. The caretaker points to the bushes outside this old convalescent hospital, stating that they will react strangely as people pass by. The wife is in fear for her baby, and because of this she says she keeps a loaded gun near her at all times.No one has spent the night inside this old structure since it closed down almost five years ago.We decided to investigate this old convalescent home and attempt to determine if there really was anything going on that would cause such fear in people.We arrived at the old hospital a little after 6 p.m. and met with a handful of workers who were taking some of the fixtures out. The building was destined to be demolished in about two weeks. The workers continued working until 8 p.m.

During the time that they are still there, we wandered throughout the dusty hallways and climbed up and down the creaky stairs to get a feel for where everything was and became familiar with the floor plan. When the sun went down, there would be no lights and someone could trip over something or worse, get lost in the maze of rooms there are in this building. Even in daylight, this building has an unusual way of making you feel on edge. It is almost too much for me as I walk slowly past the open doorways to the rooms in the convalescent hospital.I tried to imagine what it must have been like when old people walked these halls or were taken to the various areas of the hospital. We walked into a bathroom and I noticed that the tubs are now caked with dirt and dust from years of neglect. Dirty stains encircle the tubs and toilets and the mirrors are fogged.We all feel pretty safe with our flashlights and equipment and the workers not too far away. Sounds of drills and saws fill the air but soon they ceased. The workers left and we were alone in this building.Slowly we made our way back to the front of the building and took a look up the stairs one last time before the workers were all gone for good.

The workers leave and wish us luck. Someone tells us that no one has ever been able to stay in this building for a few hours let alone overnight. We tell them we were here to investigate and why. Why is it that no one can stay here? We wanted to find out why things were happening in this building. We might not get another chance.

We decided to start on the first floor and work our way up to the third floor. We decided to stay together. Even though we had walkie-talkies and everyone was buddied with another, we decided it would be safer to be together. We were unsure about the stability of the floors or the building.The sun had gone down but faint light filtered through the windows. The rooms were getting dimmer and dimmer until it got totally dark. Although there were streetlights and the safety of the street was not far away, I felt very apprehensive at that point.

We started to make our way through the first floor. There were boxes and barrels and construction equipment all over the floor and we had to watch our step as we made our way through room after room. If not for our footsteps on the floor and an occasional clicking of cameras or changing of tapes, the whole building would have been deathly quiet. We reached the end of the first floor. We had taken a lot of readings and a lot of pictures for documentation. By my watch it was 10 p.m. We started to make our way to the second floor. We began to settle in to our tasks and joked a bit. In the middle of a joke, someone said to no one in particular - do you hear that? We stopped in our tracks about halfway up the stairs. Suddenly, arms go up and recorders are turned on. We wait breathlessly. There it is again. It is faint, but audible. So faint though, I don't think our recorders can pick it up. A lady is calling someone. The voice, small, yet quiet...young sounding. "Come here". Pause. "Come here". Four out of five in our group heard it. It was coming from above us. Don't know where. Don't know from whom. We had not yet reached the landing of the second floor. A member of our group stopped suddenly. He was feeling a tingling moving slowly up his legs. We stopped and waited to see what would happen. Suddenly, there were clicking sounds. The type of clicking sounds that happen when someone would "flick their Bic". They happened in no regular pattern...3, 4, 5, 6 times. They stopped and then another voice...faint, strained -- "nurse". Pause. "Nurse". An old man calling out, his voice strained as though he could barely talk. We all were standing still, motionless. Our eyes were all fixed on the landing in the darkness ahead of us. These sounds were coming from up there, apparently from outside a room or in the darkened hallway. They had an echo quality to them.Then they were gone. As soon as the sounds came, they were gone and then dead silence. We were definitely aware of everything going on around us. Our senses were extremely heightened. We waited for what seemed like hours. It was probably only about 15 minutes. We all decided to go on. We got to the second story landing and looked to the left down the long hall...nothing - and to the right and there is nothing. Nothing moving, nobody breathing and darkness for as far as the eyes could see. We heard sounds, which we attributed to the building.
We opted for the left side first. We walked halfway down the hall and heard a few noises, we all stopped dead in our tracks. It was nothing. The creaks and groans of an old building. We walked all the way to the end without anything further happening.We just started to make our way down the right side of the hallway. This floor had to have about 28 rooms on this floor, 14 to the left and 14 to the right. All the rooms were various sizes from small patient rooms to larger, perhaps office-type rooms. Some had bathrooms, some didn't. As we approached what was maybe the third room on this right side of the hallway, one investigator went into a room and immediately came back out and told us of a cold spot. We had two more people go in with him and the rest stayed in the hall. In this area, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, the girl next to me told me she was getting really cold and then we looked across the hall to see and hear the remnants of a door slam shut. The people in the room came out quickly and asked what that was. We told them the door behind us just slammed shut. They said it was really cold in that room and that they felt like they were being watched. We switched places with them and indeed the room was cold, very cold. We all took readings and pictures and video. After a few more minutes of waiting we decided that since there was nothing further in the hall or in that room we would continue on. We completed that floor and ascended to the third floor. There was nothing up there. It was as quiet as the first floor. There was just a bunch of old rooms with boxes and papers and dirt all around. We decided to make our way down to the first floor.As we passed through the second floor, two people decided to detour into the cold room we were in earlier and discovered it was no longer cold. The door that had slammed shut earlier was now open again. As we descended the second floor, one person told us to stop and we did. You could tell she was straining to hear something, even turning her head toward whatever she was listening to. The rest of us didn't hear anything. She said she couldn't make out what it was but she heard a faint voice.We all went home that night knowing that this was the last time we would be able to go through this old convalescent hospital because in two weeks the building would be gone for good. They were going to put up a Sun Microsystems campus on that very spot. We wondered what would become of the people left behind...the old man calling out for his nurse, the woman calling out for someone to 'come here' and the other things that were happening on that floor. We checked and double-checked our readings, pictures and video from that evening. We did catch pictures of orbs and although we feel we did catch EVP from one room that night, it is very, very difficult to hear. Our thoughts still wander to that night and wonder if those people are now wandering the halls of Sun Microsystems. We felt that this was one of those places that we would have loved to go into again and to research it differently. We feel very lucky to have had that opportunity and one day we will contact Sun Microsystems and see what is happening on the second floor these days.