Nursing Home Ghost Stories: Winchester Manor and the White Lady

Not the actual nursing home. Picture found on internet.

 Winchester Manor was like every long term care facility I'd ever worked in. 

Despite it having once been a large Victorian home at the turn of the century, it still had the same sterile smell, and institutional feel of about a dozen other nursing facilities in the area. The lower addition was constructed after the city had taken over the property sometimes in the 1980's. It consisted of a small nurses station, two shower rooms, and eight residents rooms.

A wheel Chair ramp led from the new addition to the upper level that was part of the original house. This area was where the two small dining areas were located, the kitchen, living room, two more bathrooms, and four more residents rooms. There were two rooms located on the first floor and two more located upstairs. There was also a door that led down to the basement where all of the frozen foods were stored, safely locked up, and off limits to the residents.

When I was first hired at Winchester Manor, I was in awe of the building. The outside was grand and very welcoming. Fresh, soft yellow paint had been recently applied. A beautiful white fence wrapped around the front and sides of the building with a gate that led into the back through a small patio that was decorated with beautiful flowers of every color. The entire structure had a warm, inviting vibe to it, and I was thrilled when told that I would soon be added to the staff. I had wanted to work there ever since I had first seen the place when driving past it with my mother one day. I was already working at another facility at the time and didn't want to leave but when I had moved that summer it made sense to apply at Winchester since it was closer to my new home.

The inside had a real homey feel to it, at least the part that was the original house. It seemed more like a group home than an actual nursing home until you stepped into the lower half. But it was a nursing home and although it wasn't as large or housed as many residents as places I'd worked previously, it was still run by the city and had strict rules of conduct for the staff and procedures that were state wide requirements for any long term care facility. We were required to wear uniforms, limited jewelry, and we had to maintain a somewhat professional appearance.

Proper hygiene was required by all staff and residents. We had two house keepers that worked Monday through Friday, but no laundry staff, and aside from the cooks we had no dietary aides. The nurses aides were required to fill in these positions as well as do house keeping on the weekends. Usually it wasn't a problem though. We never had all the beds filled at any given time and the residents that lived in the older part of the home needed only limited assistance. The more severe residents, the bed ridden ones, and hospice patients, were kept in the new addition.  We usually ran three aides and two nurses on day shift, along with one cook, and an activities aide. Therapy aides came in from an outside agency a couple days a week, and the nurse aides did their own showers. On third shift we had two aides and one nurse.

Because we were so small we typically only ran two shifts. The six am to six pm shift, and the six pm till six am shift. I worked the latter. Usually when I came in dinner was over and the residents were getting ready for bed. At eight pm they got a snack and by nine usually everyone was in bed. There were only a few residents that we actually had to get up or change during the night so the rest of the time we would work on laundry, passing ice water (we passed it twice on a 12 hour shift), and cleaning. This was, of course, between answering call lights.

One of our cleaning assignments (and one that I absolutely hated) was cleaning wheel chairs. It wasn't the cleaning that I hated so much, but where we had to clean them. The easiest way to clean the chairs was to take them into one of the shower rooms in the old part of the house, wheel them directly into the shower and hose them down.  It wasn't a hard job, but I hated to do it mostly because I hated that shower room.

I couldn't really put my finger on why I hated it so much. The few times I'd actually used it I was with a resident and I just had the odd feeling like I was being watched. I'd keep looking over my shoulder, thinking I was going to see someone staring back at me but of course, there was no one there. I was never so happy to leave a room as I was when I left that shower room.

I'd been working there maybe a month and looked on the chore chart and saw that it was again time to clean the wheelchairs. Normally when we cleaned the chairs there were always two of us, one washing them, the other drying them just outside the shower room door. When we were done we'd store them in an empty bedroom adjacent from the dreaded shower room. On this particular night though one of our hospice patients was critical and so we had to do vitals every fifteen minutes and assist the nurse with changing his dressings and other things.

The aide that worked with me that night did her best to help me with the chairs but she kept getting called away which left me in the older part of the building, in that shower room, cleaning the chairs on my own. I absolutely hated it. I would wash a chair as quickly as I could, sometimes cutting corners just to get done sooner. I'd shove it out the door and grab another one quickly as I rushed through the job. I was nearly done, at least with the washing, when I got the same eerie feeling of being watched.

It was different this time though. It felt somehow more malevolent. The shower room itself seemed

Close to what the actual room looked like

darker. The lights over head flickered and I prayed to what ever God was listening that they didn't go out. The shower room was small. One walk in shower that I was using. One toilet and a bathtub that hadn't been used in God knew how long. The area where the tub was located was crowded with un-used wheelchairs, walkers, and bedside commodes. The toilet was free of clutter but save for a privacy curtain, was pretty much out in the open. I don't know why, but I couldn't seem to take my eyes away from that old bathtub. Every fiber of my being was telling me to stay as far from it as humanly possible, but my brain was telling me to keep an eye on it. I tried to ignore both my brain and the feeling of dread that was building up in me and just finish my work, praying that my co-worker returned soon. I shut off the shower head, hung it back on the wall then shoved the chair out of the shower and into the middle of the room. That's when I looked up and my heart leapt into my throat.

Across from me, standing next to that old tub was a woman in white, with long black hair and dark, red rimmed eyes, and she was staring right at me!

Not actual photo of the woman but close

The actual woman I saw that night looked a lot freakier than the one in the image to the left. I could see her eyes, they were glaring at me, staring into my soul and the look in those eyes turned my blood to ice. I could sense so much anger coming off this spirit, she gave me literal chills. She looked old too, much older than the picture I'd found online. I wish that I could have taken a picture of her but at the time I didn't have a camera and there were no smart phones then. All I knew was that I was looking at something other worldly and it didn't like the fact that I was in that shower room.  I grabbed the wheel chair and pushed it out into the other room, pulling the shower room door tightly closed behind me. I didn't even stick around to dry the chairs I'd already cleaned, I ran down to the newer section where I knew the nurse and the other aide were. When I'd found them I was out of breath and visibly shaken. I explained to both of them what I had seen and why I refused to go back up and finish the chairs alone. Neither of them said much, they didn't even scold me or say that I was being silly. In fact, they seemed more inclined to brush the incident off and not speak of it. I was adamant though about not going back up front alone and neither seemed to argue with me about it.

As morning came upon us and the day shift staff began to come in I found myself in the kitchen talking to Linda, one of the two cooks we had on staff. She was an older woman, probably in her 50's and she'd been working at Winchester for years, before the new addition had even been built. She'd started off as an aide there, back when aides had no real schooling and could be grandfathered in. She was a young wife with a new born and a husband who was over seas. She needed the work and since the home was within walking distance, it was the perfect place for her. She worked there along side her mother-in-law who later became a resident there until her death.

Linda loved to tell stories about her youth. She was always a bright, and jovial woman. I found her extremely easy to talk to and so anytime I had a question or just wanted a chat I would go to her. When I asked her if she'd ever seen or heard anything strange in the home she was more than forthcoming. She had some stories to tell and she was more than happy to share them but when I specifically asked about the dark haired woman in the shower room her expression became somewhat dour. She looked around to make sure we were alone then whispered, "We're not supposed to talk about her."

It was then that I learned that I wasn't the only one who'd seen this apparition. Practically everyone who was employed at Winchester had seen her, as well as some of the residents. No one really knew who she was. She had never been a patient there but apparently she'd been a resident ghost since the place opened as a nursing home, possible before that. Some thought perhaps she was a member of the original family who'd owned the home, and was angry that we were now in her house. Another rumor was that she was the spirit of an Indian woman who'd died on the property.

Who ever she was, she wasn't friendly and had been known at times to do some rather not so nice things to the staff.  She mostly stayed in that shower room but had been known to show up in other areas of the building, always in the old parts though, never in the newer addition. The upstairs had been converted into a offices, aside from the two residents rooms, and even the offices weren't off limits to this specter. For some reason though she only seemed to appear at night. Either she didn't like the attention from a fuller staff or she liked to scare the bejesus out of people in the dark. I don't know which. All I did know was that my happy ass wasn't about to go in that shower room alone again, if ever. I could handle a little ghost here or there, but I was certain that one wanted to kill me.

I eventually fell into the same routine as the rest of the staff. We all knew she was there but we didn't talk about her. Talking about her seemed to make her more real and the sightings more frequent. That was the only time I'd ever seen her, thank God, but I'd always felt her presence around in that same, icy cold stare from invisible eyes watching you as you went about your nightly duties. I'd get the chills, I'd look over my shoulder quite a bit, but there was always no one there. No one that I could see anyway.

In early 2000 the nursing home was shut down and the remaining residents were placed in other facilities. The house still stands now, nineteen years later, empty and sad looking.  I drive past it every so often and remember my first day walking through those beautiful doors, then I think of the white woman (as she was often called) and wonder, is she still there, still watching? Perhaps still walking the halls of the long since abandoned house warning all who venture too close not to enter.

 (Note: All Images in this post are ones that I found online and NOT original images from the nursing home. It's been closed down for many years now and is in very poor shape and not accessible to the public. If I do go past it and am able to get a picture of the outside I will post it here at a later time. Also, the images here are not my property and I am not claiming them as mine. They were used merely to give an example of what things looked like at the time. If you see an image that belongs to you please contact me and I will give you credit for it. Thanks for reading my post and feel free to comment.)