The Shadow Child of Emerson Hospital

[00:00:00] Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Today's story speaks of the experience of a nurse, just as she thinks she has seen it all. It changes. My name is Edwin and here is a scary story. I woke up after I felt the cold pen right on my forehead. I had

[00:00:25] woken up for the fourth or fifth time and I knew that the desk would be as comfortable as I imagined it to be. We didn't have many patients that night. We had the regulars and two other women who had checked in earlier that day for

[00:00:38] monitoring after their procedures. The place was cold, just like it had been at every other hospital I had worked in before coming into this one. That specific part of the station where all the computers were so warm. There was no way

[00:00:54] I was the only one who would sneak in a nap there every once in a while. Plus the patient rooms were all equipped with sensors for when the patients fell aka when they hit the floor. Sound sensors, temperature and of course vitals. If

[00:01:09] anything happened, if anyone moved even to go to the bathroom, I would know. But it was so slow. I was not aware that I would miss the fast-paced environment of the other places until I got to Emerson Hospital where nothing ever happened.

[00:01:25] Working with the elderly was different. They have a different idea on life and are willing to tell you what's on their mind most of the time if you only ask them. Some are bitter but most are sweet and kind and only want someone to talk

[00:01:41] to. We had a volunteer program actually, one where children of all ages would come in and talk to the patients for two hours from 4 to 6 in the afternoon before we started serving dinner. It really hit me one evening when one of

[00:01:57] the kids asked about a patient who had passed away over the weekend. All of the nurses and staff were used to dealing with family members whenever something like that happened but never a child went by themselves to the hospital

[00:02:09] spent time with, well, their friends. After sorting out how to give the news I had to figure out how to deal with the crying child. Fortunately Jill, one of the other nurses, helped out with that while I got back to the paperwork I was already

[00:02:26] behind in. Whenever a patient died it was sad, of course, but it was also routine work. About once every couple of months we would have to go through something like that and we could never guess who would be next. It was such a surreal

[00:02:42] feeling knowing that you were the one to give the person their last meal and somewhere in the back of your mind you already had your suspicion it would be their last. So you tended to their requests for a larger spoon or patiently

[00:02:58] waited for their food to cool down along with them but for a bit I wanted to go back to that. The slowness of the nights with the beeps coming from the other rooms and the phones on the quietest volumes, deliveries at 4 in the morning,

[00:03:15] the distant sounds of the street from the window. We were not allowed to use headphones while on duty so we would hear everything around the hospital wing floor. I say that I wanted to go back to it because for a while things were

[00:03:30] strange. When I think about that autumn season with sudden winds and scattered rains I still remember what the place smelled like. Asphalt. For those times a heating system had already activated and the vents would bring in the smell of

[00:03:45] warm air coming from somewhere outside. Margaret Montgomery was a patient we had for a long time or Emmy for short who brought along some of the more vivid memories of the time. Emmy was being tested for issues and likely Alzheimer's.

[00:04:05] The doctors had requested that she be kept alert with activities throughout the day and was eased out of a certain type of medication later to be put on some other one. Emmy had lots of stories of her life, you know, I had never met

[00:04:20] anyone who had grown up in a small farm until I met her. She got out of her small town and managed to get through school while working before getting married. Three children all grown up and successful. She had many stories about

[00:04:35] them. Some of her other stories were about other things. Stuff that either she was making up or was remembering again from some hidden spot in her brain. Stories of the warnings that would come from her dad in the farm. Bizarre stories

[00:04:55] of ghost friends and creatures that would roam the fields and come up close to her window. I, just like the other nurses, learned to listen to her and not make her feel bad while we changed the topic. She managed to understand that

[00:05:10] some of those things would scare us. I mean, at most two of us were on duty at night alone in a dark floor. I had gotten there to start my shift a bit earlier than usual at around nine at night when Emmy was still awake with her reading

[00:05:27] light when she saw me come in and called me over to her room. I told her that I would be right there. I just had to sign in and do a couple of things. But about

[00:05:36] ten minutes after that, I was there and standing right next to her as she started with the sentence that sent chills down my back. Honey, I don't mean to scare you, she said. But there's someone in this room right

[00:05:51] now and unlike what you're expecting to hear, I know that there was someone there. I turned around slowly, the shadow of the reading light covering half of the room by this point. The back corner where the chair was by another small

[00:06:10] table with a room for a couple of magazines. Standing right by the chair, by the curtain, was a small figure. Dark, completely dark and with no distinguishable features. Immediately I reached over to the light switch by the

[00:06:28] doorframe and flicked it on. I didn't even get to turn around before Emmy was telling me that the child had left. I asked her who it had been and with a gust of fear that I hadn't noticed in her voice when I first stepped in, she

[00:06:46] started breathing deeply saying that it had been a child asking her to come and play with him. Honey, I think it's my time to go, she said. The sudden sadness in her voice. I walked over and reached for the box of tissues by the side of her

[00:07:04] bed. She asked that I dial the number of one of her sons and as soon as I did, I held up the phone up to her ear and we both waited for the call to connect. When

[00:07:14] I heard someone answer on the other end, I just stepped out of the room. I myself could not explain what had just happened but I had to tell someone so I rushed over to Jill who was just coming through the door to start her shift with me. I

[00:07:28] told her, still not believing what I was about to say, that someone, a child, had been in the room with Emmy. That I had seen him. I don't even know why I bothered though. Jill simply looked at me and smiled saying that it was not even

[00:07:45] that late to just grab a coffee and to grab her one too. But Jill had already had her set of stories around that place. She was older and had met many more patients than I had. She had been able to spot patterns of death and who was

[00:08:03] gonna go. Of patients saying that their dead family members had visited them to accompany them to the other side. And just like that, the patient would have passed away the following day. Late one night with one of the other nurses, she

[00:08:17] had heard her name being called through one of the vacant rooms in the voice of a patient. One who had already passed away. These things were normal to her. I guess normal to us to some degree. But nothing that we had experienced would come close

[00:08:33] to preparing us for the shadow child of Emerson Hospital. Part 2 of Shadow Child is coming up right after this. Stay with me. For two nights, Emmy would scream at random times at night, claiming to have seen the figure of a child in the corner

[00:09:03] of her room, asking her to go play with him. Soon, word spread of the shadow child around the hospital and it really took off after one of the other patients called the nurses station to come and get, and this is how he said it.

[00:09:18] This annoying kid out of here. Within two days, Mr. Sandoval was dead. This mainly spread more rumors with the nurses since we didn't share the stories with the rest of the patients for obvious reasons, but it was still such a bizarre coincidence.

[00:09:36] We have strict safety procedures for who can access the floor with a security guard on the bottom floor and a special key and access code to enter the floor itself, something a child wouldn't be able to do even if they tried. Cameras

[00:09:51] line the hallways and the staircases and they would not point to anything strange happening. But the sensors eventually did. It was late September by this time and Jill had been assigned to come in a little after midnight with me and another

[00:10:07] on-call nurse on duty when one of the sensors went off. Someone had either fallen off the bed or had walked around the room in order to use the bathroom or something. The thing was, the room where it was coming from was completely empty.

[00:10:24] Now, these patients are known to wander around sometimes, so it was not exactly a crazy idea that someone might have wandered into room 328. The lights were off. I could see the room and its window from my desk. Still, I walked over to the

[00:10:42] room, more curious and afraid, and was about to open the door when I saw it. Through the window, the dim lights from the outside that were lighting up the room went completely dark, as if someone was blocking the small window itself. I

[00:10:58] grabbed the doorknob and twisted it, pushed that door open and then waited. The lights from the hallway were already on and I could see that no one else was in there. Still, I reached in, flicked on the light and stepped back into the

[00:11:16] hallway. Silence. I walked in to shut off the sensor system. I turned off the lights and shut the door behind me. Emmy, all this time, had been getting worse. But the patterns continued with her stories of bizarre encounters back when she was

[00:11:33] growing up and the memories of the other side, as she used to call it. And all around the hospital, mainly with the regulars and long-term patients, you would hear stories of the shadow child who would roam the hospital wing at night.

[00:11:51] The supervisor was called in at some point to come in and check with security. The cameras would have caught any movement around the hallways of the hospital if there had been anything going on. But as expected, every minute of the tapes were

[00:12:06] reviewed and it showed nothing out of the ordinary. I had gotten there at around nine at night once again and upon checking the logs I happened to see Emmy's name, Margaret Montgomery, missing from the list of

[00:12:20] patients. I felt my heart drop to my stomach when I picked up the phone to check on the logs from earlier that day. Unfortunately, Emmy had passed away. The whole night I spent thinking of our conversations and the way she managed to

[00:12:39] keep it together for such a long time. Switching up the meals for her so she would get what she wanted. Listening to the same stories over and over again. But I also noticed that one of the nurses from earlier that day was still on the

[00:12:54] floor and apparently had not checked out. When I saw her coming out of one of the patients rooms, she quickly came over to introduce herself to me. Kim was her name. She had started that same week. She called me by my name and said that she

[00:13:12] wanted to talk to me. I could tell she was nervous from how fast she spoke to me. She had been in the room with Emmy, she said, when she passed away and she needed to talk to me in case I could help her understand what had just

[00:13:26] happened. That she had heard about my experience in Emmy's room. She had come in right before dinner time while the kids from the program were still there and one of them had been in the room with Emmy keeping her company. Emmy started to

[00:13:42] have trouble breathing at that moment and Kim was quick to call one of the other nurses to come into the room. While Kim was trying to stabilize Emmy, she let the other nurse know about the kid and instructed her to get him out of

[00:13:54] the room for a few minutes while they helped Emmy. The other nurse gave Kim a confused look and rushed out to get a different kit that she needed. Kim could see the child in the chair looking peacefully down at the bedside table

[00:14:09] smiling to himself. Desperate, Kim ignored him and adjusted Emmy on her side while she set off the code to set up a machine to help her breathe. She could hear behind her the kid talking to himself but she ignored

[00:14:24] him. She looked at Emmy's eyes become still and relaxed. In anger, Kim turned around and asked the kid to leave but instead he turned to look at her right in the eyes. The look she described as something she had never experienced

[00:14:44] before and then she watched his lips move. He said, now she's gonna play with me. When she turned to Emmy and then back to the chair on the corner of the room the child was gone. Nobody around Emerson Hospital ever saw the shadow child again.

[00:15:10] Be sure to check out our other shows on Scary FM or go ad-free by trying out Scary Plus. You can find out more on scaryplus.com or right on the Apple Podcast Player although it will work on any app including Spotify. Thank you very

[00:15:36] much for listening to my stories. See you soon.