It's impossible to say how many people died in the Franciscan Medical Center over the course of its more than a century of operation. Some people say that many of them never left.
Reports I've read say that the Franciscan is full of moving shadows and mysterious voices. Our guide through the building concurred. He described several brushes with the paranormal during his time there.
Working first shift as a guard meant our guy had to walk the entire building once at 6 A.M.--while it was still dark outside. On several occasions, while walking down a hallway, he would see something reflected in the window glass at the end of the hall--something behind him. More than once, mysterious sights and sounds have caused the guards to chase someone or something they never seem to find.
According to him, a certain room on one of the upper floors was the site of a nun's suicide years earlier and has been haunted ever since. We visited this room, and he pointed out one of the security cameras on an outside corner of the adjacent Dayton Heart Hospital, which he says captured an explosion of brilliant white light in this room. The guards were called up to make sure nothing was on fire, and found nothing out of place--no electrical shorts, no fire, nothing.
The Nun's Room
The guard also told us about a spot in the hospital which smells like perfume. When we came to the place we all smelled it too. The guard has taken celiing tiles out trying to find out what causes the smell, but so far nothing's turned up. He says the legend concerning that area is about a woman who worked at the hospital pharmacy whose boyfriend killed her because she wouldn't get him any more drugs.
The Perfume Spot
Finally, The guard says there is a tape circulating among the guards which shows the main lobby--the gigantic atrium of the main building, which stands where the original hospital was erected more than 120 years ago. The tape is said to show a wheelchair spinning in circles by itself.
The following was e-mailed to me by someone whose mother was a nurse at the Franciscan:
My mother has told me a few stories about the place. She told me that when she was first hired, she could hear someone crying at the doors to the pediatrics unit late at night but every time she went to check it out, the crying stopped. She said that the security guards informed her it was the ghost of a nun weeping for the lives of children who had died while in the ward. After that, she could continue to hear the crying but wasn't worried about it anymore. She had never heard your report about the perfume room but said that it doesn't surprise her that it's there. She's seen people standing outside the windows staring into a room only to vanish a second later. She's been in rooms where humidity and moisture fog up the windows for no reason and has had people breathing down on her when she was alone with a patient.
On our trip through the Franciscan nothing terribly out of the ordinary happened. We did smell the perfume in the spot the guard had told us about. And the elevators did act funny--especially at the basement level. But no major sightings. Still, an amazing place. My thanks once again to the nameless guard for showing us through.
