Haunted Hospitals in North Dakotas

It seems that almost every hospital has a story of a haunting. It may be because, at least before antibiotics, hospitals were places of dying as often as places of healing. Many of the hospital hauntings I've discovered are hauntings by nuns, which is hardly surprising, given how many hospitals were started by religious organizations. Here are two stories from North Dakota.

St. Alexius Hospital in Bismarck was the first hospital to open in Dakota Territory, before North Dakota's statehood. It was opened by a group of Benedictine Sisters from the convent in St. Joseph, Minnesota. They came to Bismarck intending to open a girl's school, but when they arrived they felt that the medical needs of the community outweighed the needs for a private school for girls. Their Abbot purchased a four-story hotel building in Bismarck's business section in 1878, and $30,000 and several months later, a 15-bed hospital opened, named St. Alexius.

As the population of Bismarck grew, St. Alexius outgrew the original building, and a new building was constructed on the corner of 9^th street and Rosser Avenue in 1915. In 1892, even before the move, the hospital was managed by Sister Boniface. Sister Boniface was born Mary Ann Timmins, but the people of Bismarck will always remember her as Sister Boniface. She devoted her life to the hospital, overseeing the growth of the building, the new physicians, and of course the nuns who provided nursing care. She died in 1937, but before her death the hospital had treated some famous or important people, including Theodore Roosevelt, one of the sons of Sitting Bull, and Woodrow Wilson. Sister Boniface's focus, though, was never on the rich and famous, but always on the poor and needy of Bismarck and surrounding areas.

These days, the nuns of St. Alexius no longer wear the full habit of Sister Boniface's day. They dress modestly and neatly, and are recognizable as nuns, but their garments have changed with the times. Still, patients in the hospital, especially those near the oldest part of the facility, often are visited late at night by a nun in full habit, who glides into their rooms silently, looks at them and smiles gently, then leaves without saying a word. Many of these patients notice a painting in the lobby when they've recovered and are discharged, and recognize the nun who checked on them at night: Sister Boniface. It seems that she still watches over those seeking care at St. Alexius. (There are staff who claim to have seen her as well, but they spoke of her only on condition of anonymity!)

Dickinson's St. Joseph's Hospital was founded by a different order, the Sisters of the Holy Cross, in 1912. Dickinson had been growing steadily since the railroad reached it, but the nearest medical care was 100 miles away in Bismarck. Seeing the need, the Sisters built and staffed the hospital. The mother house of the Sisters of the Holy Cross is in Switzerland, and most of the Sisters who worked at St. Joseph's were Swiss.

The Sisters uncomplainingly did every job that was needed in the hospital. Of course they did nursing care, but they also did laundry, cooking, cleaning - all the other chores that a hospital requires. Most of the early patients were what you'd expect in a largely rural ranching area: childbirth, farm machinery accidents, vehicle accidents, and illnesses like pneumonia and tuberculosis (although TB patients, once diagnosed, were usually sent to San Haven Sanitorium in northern North Dakota). The Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918-1919 hit the area hard, and the nurses turned no one away, and worked hard to save as many patients as they could. Fortunately none of the sisters fell victim to the influenza themselves.

But in February of 1926, six nursing Sisters fell extremely ill with an illness that the hospital had never seen before. The doctors did their best, but within a week, five of the Sisters died. The sixth Sister survived, but never fully regained her health. Sisters Ambrosina Haegele, Anaclete Huwiler, Fedele Donati, Deocara Sicwart, and Secunda Hackl were buried side by side in St. Patrick's Cemetery in Dickinson. Sister Hildebrandis Flury lived for 8 more years, and every day, regardless of the weather, visited the graves of the five who had preceded her in death. On February 10^th, 1934, almost exactly 8 years to the day of the first deaths, Sister Hiledbrandis died of pneumonia, and was buried next to the Sisters whose graves she had visited so many times. The cause of death of the first five nuns was finally determined to be a rare type of encephalitis, called Encephalitis lethargica. At the time, there was only one case of this extremely contagious illness on record, and the physicians were surprised that none of the patients at St. Joe's were infected, but the loss of the devoted Sisters, followed by the loss of Sister Hildebrandis, was devastating to the hospital staff.

These days there are two apparent haunted sites. One is at the hospital itself, where a nun in full habit is seen walking into six rooms - the rooms that the 6 Sisters were staying when they died. Other strange events include call buttons (that didn't exist in the days of the deceased Sisters) going off in unoccupied rooms late at night; and an elevator that goes down to the morgue during the night, when no one is there - and the morgue floor can only be accessed by the elevator with a key. Security tapes often show the doors opening, according to a member of the security staff who asked to remain anonymous. Often the tape just shows snow right before the elevator arrives in its nocturnal visits. Apparently unrelated, but considered by many to be a result of the Spanish Flu epidemic, the sounds of children playing and cutlery rattling are often heard, even in daylight hours, in the corridors under the oldest part of the hospital, now primarily used as a clinic and office area.

The other haunting occurs in St. Patrick's Cemetery. A nun in full habit is often seen at twilight, bending over the graves of the first five Sisters who died of encephalitis in 1926. It's believed to be the spirit of Sister Hildebrandis, visiting the graves of her fallen Sisters. This type of haunting is called a residual haunting; no intelligent entity is involved. Instead, an action from the past, often related to trauma or strong emotion, is repeated over and over, like a film clip that keeps replaying.

These are only two of the many haunted hospitals across the state of North Dakota. Do you have a haunted hospital in your town?

(Source: Orser, L. L. Spooky Creepy North Dakota. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing: 2010)