The Ghost Will See You Now: Haunted Hospitals of the South

"Ghosts are not fiction," Randy Russell said in a recent interview. "Anyone who has spent a night outdoors in the South knows that." After years of interviewing people who have encountered ghosts and writing four books of Southern ghost stories, Russell now focuses his attention on some of the most common sites of hauntings across the South--hospitals. From ghosts of patients at long-closed and abandoned facilities to those who inhabit contemporary medical centers, from soldiers who died at makeshift battlefield hospitals to lobotomized inmates in insane asylums, expiring spirits refuse to pass to the other side in peace. Assisting those in pain is a life's calling for many nurses, doctors, and hospital staff, more than a few of whom also continue to occupy the location of their life's work. Organized as a state-by-state guide to known Southern hospital hauntings, The Ghost Will See You Now includes 40-plus ghost stories and lists of sightings at more than 160 haunted locations. In addition to the numerous hospital sightings, ghosts also haunt medical-care facilities as diverse as TB sanitariums, spas, dental clinics, treatment centers at historic forts, nursing homes, hospice centers, ambulances, hospital train cars, and an early-19th-century pharmacy in New Orleans.