Post-Life Care: Did the NHS really hire an exorcist to rid a hospice of evil?
Whether they’re working in a hospital, GP office, hospice, or a dentist, it is basically impossible to freak out medical staff.
Which makes sense when you think about it. A cursory glance at a show like The Pitt or ER shows just how horrible things can get in a medical setting, and, as realistic as they claim to be, those can’t help but be sanitised versions of everything that goes on in them. The real world is a whole lot grottier and hopeless than anywhere that Noah Wyle or George Clooney would find themselves, and your average medical professional knows this intimately.
However, they are human. They may be capable of superhuman feats of courage, intelligence and dexterity under the kind of pressure that no one should ever have to feel, but that’s the incredible thing about what they do. Humans are capable of doing those feats. Humans in all our messy, superstitious, overly emotional majesty. The kind of people who can do incredible things by day and still believe in the most absurd stuff by night.
Stuff like the presence of a ghost in their workspace. The irony of it all is that if something like that were worked into a storyline on a medical drama, the vast majority of people would scoff at it. Reasoning that no one with their head screwed on as much as your average medical professional would entertain a possibility like this for more than a second. Well, truth is often stranger than fiction and as a hospice in Norwich showed in 2023, people are more susceptible to this than you think.
To the point where the staff took the drastic measures of hiring an exorcist to help out.
Why did medical staff hire an exorcist?
The Priscilla Bacon Lodge is a hospice near Colman Hospital in Norwich. Now, as we all know, hospices are specifically built for end-of-life care, so it stands to reason that if ghosts exist, a place where people literally go to die would be a hotbed of paranormal activity. What made this place stand out, though, was not the reappearance of recently departed patients roaming the halls, but instead a young girl in a red dress.
Now, as a hospice, Colman Lodge hosts adults at the end of their lives. Children do frequent the place, but only as visitors. However, as if this story couldn’t be ripped more from a The Conjuring movie, if we look back into the history of the building, we can find that the site has seemingly always been a medical building. However, in the 1970s, it was called the Jenny Lind Children’s Hospital. Everything clicked into place, and suddenly, the staff became convinced that they were being visited by a patient from five decades ago.
Thus, the hospital immediately contacted the Diocese of Norwich in a set of emails that have since been published in The Telegraph. These emails were specifically seeking advice “from the deliverance team” as the paranormal events occurring at the hospice were “really upsetting staff”. A sign of just how terrified these people were, if you ever needed one, I think. These were staff who, every single day, saw people pass away in the most horrific circumstances. Who spent their day jobs making people comfortable and helping grieving families. One of the more intense and affecting jobs you could ever have.
Yet whatever was going on with this spirit in the red dress? That was what they couldn’t handle.