The Ward of Renovated Memories

The date was November 14th, 2019. I was scheduled for a cesarean with a tubal ligation, my second child. But a sudden respiratory infection turned into pneumonia, and the surgery had to be postponed. I was given antibiotics and an inhaler, and I was told to come back in two days to try again.

That night, I lay in my own bed, coughing and wheezing, but my mind was elsewhere. I remembered the ordeal of my first daughter’s birth, two years earlier. I had been assigned to the newly renovated wing of the county hospital, a place with a long history of death and suffering. The hospital had been built in 1902, and the new wing was an amalgamation of old and new, with crumbling brick walls hidden behind fresh drywall and new linoleum floors.

My room was at the end of the corridor, number 217. It was a spacious private room, with a panoramic window overlooking the parking lot. The first night, around 2 AM, I was awakened by a sound like heavy furniture being dragged across a wooden floor. I sat up, heart pounding, but the room was dark and silent. The next morning, I noticed scratches on the vinyl floor, as if something heavy had been pulled from the corner to the door.

On the second night, the baby crib, which was empty because my daughter was in the nursery, moved on its own. It rolled from the wall to the center of the room, then back again, as if someone was rocking a baby to sleep. I watched in paralyzed fear, my hand frozen over the nurse call button. When it finally stopped, I felt a cold presence in the room, and a whisper, ‘She’s not ready,’ seemed to come from the empty crib.

On the third night, I was sitting in the chair by the window, trying to calm my nerves with a magazine. The bathroom door, which I had left ajar, slowly creaked open. The lights flickered, and a shadow fell across the wall. In the mirror, I saw a figure—a woman in a white shroud, her face twisted in pain. She raised a hand as if to motion to me, and then she faded. The room grew cold, and I felt a sense of dread I cannot describe.

I called my husband, telling him I wanted to go home, but he could only offer soothing words. The nurse came in and dismissed my fears, saying the hospital had a long history but nothing was wrong. She refused to change my room. I was stranded there for another night.

That final night, the events escalated. The dragging sound started again, this time accompanied by the clatter of metal and the cries of a baby echoing down the hallway. The door swung open to reveal an empty corridor. As I stepped closer, the cries grew louder, and I saw at the other end of the hall a gurney being pushed by a shadowy orderly, its wheels squeaking. On the gurney lay a woman, covered in a sheet, but as they passed under a flickering light, I saw her face—my own. She was dead.

I woke up the next morning, drenched in sweat, convinced that the ordeal was over once I left. But now, two years later, I’m returning to that same hospital, to that same wing, because the new wing is now the only maternity suite. I’ve heard that several patients reported similar experiences, and some even saw the ghost of a nurse who died in the 1918 flu pandemic, still making her rounds, tending to the sick and the dead.

As I sit in the pre-op room, the antiseptic smell burning my nostrils, I can’t shake the feeling that the room is waiting for me. The walls seem to breathe, and I see a small crack in the plaster, shaped like a woman’s face. My doctor assures me that everything will be fine, that the surgery is routine. But I know that the past is not a closed curtain. It is a patient waiting to be reopened.

Tomorrow, when they wheel me into the operating theater, I will not be alone. The ghost of that woman, the one who died in childbirth in this very spot, will be there. She wants what I have, and she will do anything to take it.