Florence in the Machine Pt. 2

We hear from Jane, the ICU nurse, again. This time, she’s battling paranormal forces… inside one of the hospital’s medication-dispensing machines. Part two of a two-part story.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Glynn Washington?

  Midsummer twilight, on the hill. The women dance while men stand still. And if you ask to join their throng, you won't be living very long. You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned. Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. And sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage for

• 0:45Glynn Washington?

  you, along with 24/7 claim support and great customer service. So when you think about it, that's like four great decisions that more than makes up for the TV debacle. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 1:06Glynn Washington?

  Do you like scary stories? Think you've heard it all? Well, you've never heard it like this. Radio Rental is a horror podcast featuring true scary stories told by real people.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  He's tapping, tap, tap, tap. He's tapping on the door. He wants us to open the door.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  And then the mirror light turns on, and then the mirror light turns on in the shape of a triangle. And I'd say it's probably about the length of a school bus, you know, right above my head.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  She had long, ratted hair. She was wearing a dress. Her ribs were showing, her fingers were long, she looked shriveled, partially decayed.

• 1:45Speaker 04

  I'm starting to freak out a little bit. I'm pleading with them to just please let me out. Dee's eyes started opening. They were pure white, and I lose it.

• 1:58Speaker 05

  Radio Rental returns October 23rd. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:10Glynn Washington?

  Now then, if you have not heard the previous Spooked episode about Jane, you're gonna want to go back and listen to that first. And if you have heard it, recall that Jane is a nurse. She's all about medicine and science and empirical fact. And yet, Maddie's powers and everything else she's seen on the job, angels at the window, Jane starts to wonder if everything is truly as it appears. We're returning to the ICU with Jane, where Jane is gonna need to suspend her disbelief to solve a big problem she's doing her rounds, putting up patients' medications in a machine called a Pyxis.

• 2:53Glynn Washington?

  And I'm gonna let Jane take it from here. Spooked.

• 3:22Speaker 06

  I went to the machine to pull medication out for one of my patients, and I noticed that when the list of names came up, there were 11 names instead of 10. So I just turned and called out, since it's an open unit, "Who here is taking care of Florence?" All the nurses, we looked at each other and everyone said that it wasn't them, that they didn't have a patient by that name.

• 3:53Speaker 06

  So I just assumed that the pharmacist had accidentally put an extra name in. It was a possibility, if she was a patient somewhere else, that her nurse would not be able to get her medication for her. So that was a big deal.

• 4:08Speaker 06

  I called down to the pharmacy and I said, "This is Jane, I'm in Open Heart ICU, "and I've got a problem with the pixis." He asked me what it was and I told him that "I've got 11 names here and we only have 10 patients. "So, obviously, she must be somewhere else." He says, "I'm looking at the master screen right now." He says, "You only have 10." I said, "Well, fine. "If you don't believe me, then just come on up "and take a look for yourself." So he did. So he came up and he looked at the machine "and he was bewildered." So he checked and touched on the name "and there were no meds listed under her name, "which made it even stranger "because there was medication listed

• 4:53Speaker 06

  "under every patient name."

• 4:56Speaker 06

  I spoke to our secretary Frankie. I asked Frankie if she could look in the computer "and see if she could find what room Florence was in, "what floor she was in. She put her name in, got nothing back, "and then she manually searched floor by floor, "looking at all the names and all the rooms, "trying to see if she could find her "and she couldn't find her anywhere."

• 5:28Speaker 06

  The next day after the manufacturer, the technician came and said he couldn't figure it out. Well, at that point, we relaxed a little bit "because we realized that it wasn't a case "of someone not being able to get their medication "because she wasn't obviously even in the hospital. And a few days later, it disappeared on its own.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  Over the next several months, in fact, Florence's name kept appearing and disappearing "in a seemingly random pattern. We stopped calling the pharmacist "because we realized there was nothing he could do "and he couldn't see her, so that was pointless. So we just ignored it "until one day, I noticed a pattern.

• 6:19Speaker 06

  Sally saw Florence's name appear in the Pyxis. And the next day, I lost one of my patients. The next day, Deborah lost one of her patients. And then the third day, Allison lost one of hers. We were having a bad time. Right after Allison's patient died, an hour later, I went back to get more medication and noticed that Florence was gone. And I thought to myself at that time, standing at the Pyxis and looking where her name had

• 6:59Speaker 06

  been, that it was unusual because normally she stayed longer than three days. I walked back over to my patient's bedside and spoke to the colleague that was taking care of the patient in the bed next to me and told him that I had noticed this pattern. He was very skeptical. But I said, you know, I think we need to pay attention to this the next time she comes and see what happens. The nursing supervisor had come down to do her routine checks.

• 7:39Speaker 06

  And I spoke to her and I was a little sheepish, actually, because we try to be more scientific than this and a little less superstitious. So I told the nursing supervisor, I'm wondering if there's some sort of a pattern and is there any way that you can help me to figure this out? Because if it's just our patients, then we're in serious trouble. If she's coming to take patients from all over the hospital, then it's not quite as nerve-wracking seeing her name.

• 8:20Speaker 06

  And the nursing supervisor, of course, laughed at me at first and told me I was crazy. But then she agreed and said, "All right, I'll help you." She said, "So if there's a death anywhere," she says, "I'll call you and let you know if, you know, when someone dies. And we'll, together, we'll look and we'll see if your theory pans out or not. And if her name really disappears after three deaths, or four deaths, or five, or none, or whatever, we'll, we'll take a look and see if that makes sense."

• 8:59Speaker 06

  Four days later, she called me and, and said, "Are you still interested in knowing if anyone has died?" I said, "Florence's name is still in the machine." I said, "I'm, I'm definitely interested in knowing if there's been any deaths." She said, "Well, we just had one up on, in the neurosurgical ICU, so I thought I'd let you know." Then the weekend went by, and then on Monday, the nursing supervisor called me again and told me, "I just thought you'd like to know, you were off over the weekend, but there was another death over the weekend." She said, "So that makes two so far."

• 9:40Speaker 06

  Five days later, she called me again and told me that there had been a code blue and the patient hadn't made it. And she said, "So that's three." She said, "Do you want to go look at your machine now and see if Florence is still there?" So I did. I went and looked, and her name had disappeared. I got goosebumps, thinking, "Okay, so that's twice now that we have had three deaths and then her name disappears."

• 10:14Speaker 06

  I was probably, I would say, maybe 75% convinced that this was not just a coincidence. There was another 25% of me that thought, you know, I have to be rational about this. Look, let's just wait and see if it happens again. And if it does happen again, then I'll be convinced completely that this is real and that this is actually happening.

• 10:48Speaker 06

  So three weeks had gone by. My colleague Nancy had gone to the Pyxis machine to pull out some medication for her patient. I heard her let out this little shriek, and she turned to me and said, Florence is back. I went up to the machine and looked, and sure enough, her name had come back. I went back to my patient, and Nancy followed me back to the end of the unit where my patient was, and told me that she was very nervous because her patient was very sick and dying,

• 11:32Speaker 06

  in fact, and she was doing everything she could to save her, and she was worried that Florence had come to take her. So I tried to reassure Nancy that I didn't get the feeling that she was there to harm anyone. I got the feeling that she was just there to collect them, to pick up the patients as they died. Because if not, why would she only have stayed for three days the first time with our first three deaths, and then waited two weeks with the second one? Why wouldn't, if she was causing it, wouldn't she have caused it faster?

• 12:23Speaker 06

  So three days after Nancy first saw Florence's name appear in the Pyxis, the patient that she had been taking care of passed away. And the nursing supervisor called me and she informed me that this man had come in, he had had a heart attack, massive heart attack, and they were unable to save him. And so he was our second death. I got a call from the nursing supervisor approximately two days later, and that was a death in the emergency room. It had been a, the patient had been in a car accident.

• 13:04Speaker 06

  I went straight to the machine and she was gone. You always have that sort of niggling feeling in the back of your head, thinking, well, maybe she is causing the deaths, even though realistically in your gut, you know that that's not true. I spoke to Frankie, our secretary, and I asked her if there was any way she could try to find out who Florence was and see if we could figure out this mystery together. And then she had an idea.

• 13:47Speaker 06

  She looked in our death book. Our death book was a huge, thick book that we used to handwrite every death that occurred in our ICU. Frankie had looked in the death book already to see if she could find Florence's name, and she hadn't found her. But then she had an idea. In the back of the death book, there was recorded deaths that occurred in the operating room. Deaths of patients that were slated to come to us, who were having open heart surgery and were supposed to come to us, but who never made it to us because they had died

• 14:31Speaker 06

  on the operating room table. She called me, she said, Jane, come here. She says, I found Florence.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  I said, "You've got to be kidding me." She said, "No, no, look, come. I found her. I found her in the death book." And we looked in the back of the book where the OR nurses were the ones who write the name in our book. And she said, "Look, here she is. Florence's name was in our death book, and she had died during open-heart surgery two weeks before the first time that she had appeared in our Pyxis. She had never made it into our unit. She was supposed to come to our ICU, and since she had died on the operating room table, she had never made it, and maybe she wanted to come to us for some reason."

• 15:25Speaker 06

  Both of us informed all the other nurses in the ICU. And after that, Florence's name continued to appear. No matter who saw her name appear, that person would always announce it to all of us, and they would say, "Hold on to your patients, ladies. Florence has come back."

• 15:45Speaker 06

  We had patients die all the time, and in hospitals, people die all the time. And you get used to the fact that that's going to happen. The problem with having Florence's name appear is that it would make you more acutely aware of the fact that someone is going to die, and it's going to happen probably within the next couple of weeks. And even though, as I said, it would have happened with her or without her, just her presence, just seeing that name, would automatically cause me anxiety. I felt compelled to speak to her.

• 16:26Speaker 06

  I felt compelled to say, "You know, Florence, I know what you're coming here for, but I really, really need you to leave my patients alone. Go off to somewhere else and take whoever you need, but you need to leave mine alone." Although during that time, of course, I did lose patience while her name was in the Pyxis, and it felt... It kind of felt a bit like a failure, like I had given my patient to Florence, since at that point, not only myself, but all of us believed that she was taking them.

• 17:07Speaker 06

  I had almost gotten used to her coming and going. But when, it was Frankie in fact, our secretary, who informed me, said, Jane, do you realize that in, I think it was two weeks or three weeks, she said, it's going to be the anniversary of Florence's death. Actually, she was the one who suggested that we use that opportunity, that maybe on that day, she would be more open to suggestion, to leave. And that was when all of us got together and started discussing ways that we could maybe get her to move on. There were a lot of suggestions at that point.

• 17:48Speaker 06

  Seance was suggested, exorcism, even bringing in a Ouija board to see if we could talk to her. I'm not sure who was the one who came up with this brilliant suggestion, but it was decided that the reason Florence had come into the unit in the first place, and the reason she was staying and haunting the place, was simply because we had never gotten a chance to welcome her in as a patient. Since she had died on the operating room table, it was determined that all she wanted

• 18:29Speaker 06

  was to be welcomed somehow into the ICU, which she would have been if she had survived. We all agreed that that was probably the reason that she was haunting us. It was discussed and decided that the only way to welcome her to the unit, which would hopefully allow her to move on and leave us, was to throw her a party.

• 19:02Speaker 06

  I called it the "Go Towards the Light" party. I got a mannequin, a CPR mannequin, from the education department, and brought it down into our ICU break room, which was just off to the side of the unit. Put the mannequin in a hospital gown, sat her at the head of the table in a chair. She had blond hair and these blue eyes that would open and close. We had stickers that we would give to our visitors. You know, a sticker on it that says, "Hello, my name is," and then you fill out the name. And so I took that and I wrote, "Hello, my name is Florence," on it,

• 19:47Speaker 06

  and stuck the sticker on the hospital gown that I had put on her. And that evening, everyone who worked there brought food. We had a big totluck. It was Georgia, it was the South, so there was lots of food. We had ham and collard greens and cornbread. Oh, and black-eyed peas. I baked a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and brought it in for her. So I took an orange food coloring pen and I wrote, "Good luck on your trip, Florence."

• 20:26Speaker 06

  Frankie, the secretary, she printed out a banner for her that we hung over Florence the mannequin's head that said, "Bon voyage." And we wish you well, Florence, on your way into the afterlife.

• 20:46Speaker 06

  Word got around the entire hospital that the open-heart ICU nurses were throwing a going-away party for a ghost. So everyone had to come and see. We had nurses on their lunch breaks running down to our ICU because they just wanted to see it themselves. I mean, are they really throwing a party for a ghost? And sure enough, we were. We had surgeons come through. We had young doctors come in and steal our food.

• 21:17Speaker 06

  And we told all of them, we said, you know, if you go in, please say a nice word to Florence and ask her to leave nicely. Because we figured that the, you know, the more people, the better, encouraging her to move on. And they did. They, everyone, everyone got into it and began letting her know that, that it was, it was her time. It was time for her to go.

• 21:44Speaker 06

  One by one, we came in and we said our goodbyes to her. So when it was my turn to go in and talk to Florence, or talk to the mannequin who was representing Florence, I would say.

• 22:00Speaker 06

  And I felt like she was there, like she was present somewhere, somehow, listening, listening to what we were saying. I spoke to her and told her, Florence,

• 22:17Speaker 06

  you need to go on to wherever you need to go. I'm sure you have family waiting for you. I'm sure you have other people there that you need to join up with. And you don't need to stay with us anymore. We're okay. The, the dead will go on without you. They did before you came and they'll continue after you leave. So your job is done here. You need to move on. You need to go towards the light. And you need to go and fulfill your destiny somewhere else. And it's not here anymore.

• 23:07Speaker 06

  And her name was in the Pyxis at that time. I didn't think the party would work. Simply because her name had come in about two weeks earlier. And we'd only had two deaths in the hospital. We hadn't had a third yet. So at the end of the party, all of us had said our goodbyes. It was five minutes after midnight. And I went to the Pyxis. And there were several of my colleagues with me. I logged into the Pyxis and looked at our names. And she was gone.

• 23:47Speaker 06

  Her name had disappeared out of our Pyxis without a third person dying. And for months after that day, every time someone went and logged into the Pyxis, I know what happened to me. I would like hold my breath every time I went in to see if she was back and look for her name. And when I had been off for a few days, I would come back in. And that was my first question when I came in. Did Florence come back while I was off? And the answer was always no. She hadn't come back. And she never came back again.

• 24:28Speaker 06

  I ended up working there in that hospital for eight more years. And in eight years, she never came back.

• 24:50Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Jane, for sharing your stories with the Spooked. And thank you for showing Florence the light. The original score for that story was by Renzo Goryeo. It was produced by Annie Nguyen.

• 25:23Glynn Washington?

  Remember, the story is never over.

• 25:27Glynn Washington?

  And you've heard from Jane, but if you have a personal story that spooked you, where you touched a force, a power, a being that was not supposed to be there, where you had a relationship with the mystery, send us your story. Spooked at snapjudgment.org. There is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener. Spooked at snapjudgment.org. And the best way to rock spooked was in spooked gear. Head on over to snapjudgment.org/shop, get yourself a spook t-shirt, and tell the world you know about the Shadowlands. And if you like your storytelling in the bright light of day, subscribe to the amazing

• 26:09Glynn Washington?

  Snap Judgment Podcast because it might just change your life. Spook was brought to us by the team that will not speak to the other side unless it is spoken to. Except, of course, for Mark Ristich. Markets are chatty. Anna Sussman are chief spooksters Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Renzo Goriol, Taylor Decot, Marissa Dodge, Aliyah Yates, Zoe Fergno, Greta Weber, Doug Stewart, Jacob Winnick, Sana Khan, Tiffany DeLiza, Anne Ford, Fernando Hernandez, and Flo Wiley. The spook theme song is by Pat Lassiti Miller.

• 26:51Glynn Washington?

  My name is Ben Washington, and if you take a copy of the oldest magical text that is still accessible to us, the Book of Enoch, estimated to have been written around 300 B.C., rediscovered nestled within the Dead Sea Scrolls, translated from Aramaic, you can discover specific instructions for warding your home from demons. First and foremost, let's read directly from the book itself. It says simply, "Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, turn out the lights."