Florence in the Machine Pt. 2

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.

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 going to need to suspend her disbelief to solve a big problem.

She's doing her rounds, looking up patients' medications and a machine called a Pixis.

And I'm going to let Jane take it from here.

Spooked.

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.

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.

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 under every patient name.

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.

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.

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 when he couldn't see her, so that was pointless.

So we just ignored it until one day

I noticed a pattern.

Sally saw Florence's name appear in the Pixis.

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 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 Pixis and looking where her name had 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 and I spoke to her and I was a little sheepish actually because

when

we try to 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.

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 take a look and see if that makes sense.

Four days later,

she called me 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 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.

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.

disappears.

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.

So three weeks had gone by.

My colleague, Nancy, had gone to the Pixis 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 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 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?

So three days after Nancy first saw Florence's name appear in the Pixis,

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 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 patient had been in a car accident.

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.

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 on the operating room table She called me.

She said, Jane, come here.

She says, I found Florence.

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 PIXIS.

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.

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, say hold on to your patients ladies Florence has come back

we had 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

it would make it 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.

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 she I

did lose patience while her name was in the pixis

and it felt

it 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

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.

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 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.

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 blonde 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 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 potluck.

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.

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, well Florence on your way into the afterlife

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 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

and we told all of them we said you know if you go in uh 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

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 well talk to the mannequin who was representing Florence I would say

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

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,

and her name was in the Pixis at that time.

I didn't think the party would work simply because her name had come in about two weeks earlier, and we had 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 Pixis,

and there were several of my colleagues with me.

I logged into the Pixas and looked at our names and she was gone.

Her name had disappeared out of our Pixis

without a third person dying.

And for months after that day,

Every time someone went and logged into the Pixis, 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.

I ended up working there in that hospital for eight more years,

and in eight years, she never came back.

Thank you, Jane, for sharing your stories with the spoot.

And thank you for showing Florence the light.

The original score for that story was by Renzo Gorio.

It was produced by Annie Nguyen.

Remember, the story is never over.

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 spook gear head on over to snapjudgment.org slash shop get yourself the spook t-shirt and tell the world you know about the shadowland

And if you like your storytelling in the bright light of day, subscribe to the amazing Snapjudgment podcast because it might just change your life.

This book 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, Mark It's all chatty.

Ann Assessment are Chief Spooksters Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsome, Leon Morimoto, Renzo Borio, Taylor DeCot, Marissa Dodge, Aaliyah Yates, Zoe Fergnal, Greta Weber, Doug Stewart, Jacob Winnick, Son of Khan, Tiffany DeLiza, Ann Ford, Fernando Hernandez, and Flo Wiley.

The spooked theme song is by Pat Lucidi Miller.

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 BC, 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.