The Darkness Which Dwells in the Ambulance Bay

Years ago, just after leaving the Christian and Missionary Alliance I worked for an ambulance company, Med-Stat Ambulance.

I was hired in the fall of 1995 as a midnight dispatcher and my duties were to watch over the sleeping crew and take any emergency calls that might come in during the graveyard shift.

I met a lot of interesting people at Med-Stat, but the most interesting beings that I met there you could not see. You see the building was haunted by multiple entities.

I was told about the hauntings on my first week by a paramedic named Mary. She was a young woman who was a sensitive and had multiple experiences with the beings that resided in the second story bunkhouse.

One night she was sleeping on the top bunk by the large front window of the bunkroom. At about 3 in the morning she awoke to a strange sound. She thought it was one of the crew talking to her but the sound seemed like it was muffled and came from the direction of the window inches from her head. As she turned over to look out the glass, she froze in terror. There hovering over 30 feet above the ground was a green mist which covered a vaguely humanoid form. It writhed and twisted in the middle of the air as if trying to take a more solid form. All the while the whispering grew louder, “Mary…Mary….” The voice whispering sounded like that of an elderly woman. It seemed to glow in a pulsating fashion as it came into form. When the face began to take shape it looked vaguely to Mary as that of a rotting corpse.

Her scream woke the whole bunkhouse.

After the ensuing chaos many tried to calm her down but she was hysterical and spent the rest of the night sleepless and sitting in a well lit room without any windows. Many ridiculed her but she stuck to her story despite the disbelief surrounding her.

A few weeks later during another midnight shift it happened again. This time she seemed to sense it. It was afar off and came wafting over the tall grass of the front lawn illuminated by the light of the crescent moon. This time it did not call her, she just felt the presence. She woke up again at 3 in the morning and looked out the big glass window that faced Route 19 in Waterford, Pennsylvania. It looked like just a green puff of smoke as it glided toward the building. As it neared the window it once again began to take shape. The arms turned from vague blurry ether to thin bony white appendages as they reached out to caress some unknown form in the shadows. The entity did in fact seem to be that of a woman, but not decayed as she previously had thought, instead the withered form that was materializing before her was that of an aged and decrepit old lady who had been wasted away by disease or old age. It came closer to the window and Mary lay there just as afraid as the weeks before but there was another emotion that began to overpower the fear: compassion. In the withered face of the specter that she saw before her she saw all of the elderly patients that she had cared for who were at the last stages of life. She did not recognize the face, for even though fully formed it seemed to phase in and out of existence. But she embodied it with all the sadness and loss that she had seen in her years tending to the elderly with renal failure who withered and wasted away into nothingness. Then the voices came again, but this time they were not so frightening, a hollow voice that seemed to be familiar, “Mary….Mary…” finally she decided to reply. With a hesitant half stutter she talked to the visage that came from the mist, “Y..yes?” she croaked out.

The entity faded into the mist and the green ectoplasmic cloud was scattered in the wind.

Mary was sure that this was a former patient whom she had cared for, but she could not specifically place the face or the voice. There had been many women whom she had tended to who passed while in her care. And it was no longer frightening, instead it was reassuring. She felt as if one of them had come through from the other side to just say thank you and to encourage her in her tireless duty.

However the green lady was not the only spectral being that Mary had encountered in that ambulance hall many years ago.

While taking her turn cleaning the ambulances late one evening after a very late hospital run she had an encounter that made her refuse to ever go down in the bay alone again. They had transported a bleeder from an accident scene to a local hospital. The person did not make it and the back of the ambulance was full of blood. She had the unluck of the draw and had to wear her hazmat gear and give the ambulance a thorough cleaning. She used a hose and swaths of cloth to mop up the remaining blood. There was a large red tub in which she threw the soiled cloths. Even though flushed with water the cloths were crimson with human body fluids, and almost near the end of the cleaning the bucket looked as if it were full of meat rather than soiled towels.

Then the towels moved.

Mary was just about to throw in the last one and give the ambulance a dousing of bleach when she saw what looked to be something alive in the blood filled bucket. The towels swelled and moved up and down as if something was inside trying to get out.

That was when the arm came out.

It pulled itself out of the bloodied rags and covered in goo the hand grabbed for the side of the bucket. The arm and hand was mangled with tissue and bone protruding from various cuts and gashes. It flung itself around wildly and Mary screamed frantically and threw the bleach bottle at the gory appendage. The bucket was knocked over and the soaked towels sprayed all over the cement floor of the bay. Within minutes the crew who had accompanied Mary had run down the long flight of stairs from the bunk room above to find her cowering in a corner of the ambulance. She was hysterical and it took a few minutes for her to even begin to tell them what she had seen. They went over to investigate the bucket but all they found were the soaked towels that she had placed inside. No arm, no hand, no living tissue-just blood soaked rags. She was taken upstairs and another crew member took over the job of sanitizing the ambulance. He and others complained that this was just a stunt to get away with not doing her share of the work. But to many it was clear that Mary did indeed see something. A few weeks later after doing some research she found out that in the late 1980s there was a bad motorcycle accident on the site. In fact one of the other paramedics at the company had been on site. The poor victim had been literally torn apart and his arms were severed from his body. Marie was sure that what she saw was a remnant of the accident victim that had somehow been evoked by the presence of the blood. She never saw it again, but then again she never cleaned an ambulance alone again either.

When she told me these stories I must confess that I thought she was a little crazy. At that time I had not had any firsthand experience with ghostly apparitions, although I had experienced demonic presences. But late one night an incident happened to me that blew away all such disbelief.

It was a normal midnight shift and I had settled down to read when at about 2am I heard someone walk up the long flight of steps that opened up to the door of the dispatch room. It was hard to not notice the heavy steps and they were a familiar sound whenever the crews came back from a run. But nobody was out, so I turned to see who was making an unexpected visit so late in the morning. But as the steps came to the door, the door did not open. Neither did I hear the sound of someone walking back down the steps, so I rose from my chair to investigate.

I opened the door.

No one was there.

Now the sounds were unmistakable, and since the stairway acted as a magnifier of every little sound that was made in there, it was nigh impossible that someone could have made their way down the stairs without so much as a sound. So I put it down as just a figment of my overactive imagination.

However a few moments after this incident I went to the lavatory down the hall to relieve myself. I shut the door behind me and as I approached the toilet the hand of the door began to turn and rattle. It was unmistakably moving. I quickly opened the door and again, there was nobody there. The crew room was next door, but everyone was asleep. And if it was a practical joke (which we were prone to do to each other) nobody came forward to gloat about it. Everyone was truly asleep.

The door handle had turned on its own.

To me I knew immediately I had just experienced a haunting. But the weirdest thing about it that struck me was the normality of it all. I was not frightened, or even scared in the least. It was just downright odd.

Med Stat Ambulance has long gone out of business. But that two story building with the large first floor garage still stand off of route 19 in Waterford Pennsylvania. And I am certain that whoever occupies the residence now has been visited by some uninvited guests.

I pray their nights are peaceful.

Until next time,

Pastor Swope