Strange Town

(intense music) -

Mark

On this episode of Strange Town, we travel to Yoakum, Texas, claims of a mysterious blue nun, dark figures, permeate these walls. It just, it bothers me to this day that I actually saw that, 'cause I physically saw that and I'm going, how did that happen? -

Mark

We investigate the old Yoakum Community Hospital. My name is Mark Morrow. And my name is Billy Driver. -

Mark

We are here to seek out claims from ordinary people. (heart beats) Who come in contact with the unknown. Real stories, -

Billy

Real evidence. -

Mark

Welcome to our world. (eerie music) And welcome to Strange Town. (dramatic music) (heart beats) In 1922, the city of Yoakum built a community hospital from land and cash donated by the late John Huth. Unexpectedly, the hospital fell into decline during the midst of the great depression and became a huge financial nightmare for the people of Yoakum.

And today, the original hospital building sits abandoned. (creepy music) (heavy breathing) -

Mark

Yoakum, Texas is located just a few hours east of San Antonio and nestled in between the Lavaca and Dewitt county line. In 1824 this region of land was governed by the United Mexican States, known as the Coahuila y Tejas Republic. In 1835, the Mexican government granted a league of land to John May which was used for gathering cattle. Following the Civil War, beef was in big demand to the northern states.

The state of Texas herded thousands of wild longhorn cattle up the Chisholm trail to northern cattle markets. This area was beneficial to the old trail drives and the longhorns were referred to as Texas gold but the town of Yoakum did not grow until the construction of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway in 1887. Railroad shops were located in Yoakum in 1888 and hundreds of people from surrounding towns found employment at it's large round house. The town's infrastructure was laid out and named after Benjamin F.

Yoakum, the railway's general manager. A store was built, a post office erected and the town was incorporated in May 13, of 1889. By 1896, Yoakum had a cotton mill, three cotton gins, a compress, several churches, a bank, an ice factory, specialty and general stores, a school system with 700 pupils and a population of 3000. By 1914, the number of residence had reached 7,500.

(bell rings) 1922 saw the birth of Huth Memorial Hospital, a 13 bed facility, opening on Hubbard Street, the hospital was owned and operated by the city of Yoakum. During the great depression, the hospital was no longer able to support itself and became a detriment to the city. It was during this time that the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament of Victoria, would take over management of the facility. They started in auxiliary, where 200 members paid one dollar dues annually, the money was used to buy oxygen equipment, instruments and various hospital supplies.

The nuns would visit the hospital, two or three times a week to help make sponges, cotton balls, and any other supplies the hospital needed. The hospital grew in stature and reputation. New funding saw an expansion, the facility would soon change it's name to the Yoakum Community Hospital. Everything seemed to be going fine, but in the 1980's the hospital was struck with more financial hardship due to a major change in medicare which the hospital was heavily reliant upon for business.

It was around this time that the Sister's of the Sacrament would step down and soon be replaced by Sister's of Charity of the Incarnate Word of San Antonio. Who would eventually, make major upgrades to the hospital. Even though the building had been modernized, no machine could save the life of a nurse who was gunned down by her jilted lover right here in this room. (heavy breathing) (gun fires) -

Mark

In the early 1990's a young nurse was working in the Intensive Care Unit, during her shift, she receives an unexpected visit from her distraught husband. In a rage, he argued with her in the waiting room, of the second floor, pulled out a gun, and shot her several times before running out of the hospital. Doctors and nurses rushed her to the ICU but the gun shots were fatal. (machine beeps) The man responsible was sentenced to 99 years but hung himself in the Lavaca county jail shortly after his trial.

In 1997, the hospital moved to a new state of the art facility only miles away. Abandoning this location and as the building sits unused for the past 20 years, memories of the former hospital still remain. But there are other memories, that will haunt this location forever. -

Mark

We meet up with Robie, managing partner from the Old Yoakum Hospital Group. My name is Robie Lowery, I'm a founding member of the old Yoakum Hospital Group for the Yoakum Hospital here in Yoakum, Texas. I came across it in about 2011, I was with a paranormal group in Victoria and we were looking for places to go and we came in and that very first night that we were here we caught some pretty interesting stuff so it sparked our interest and so we just kept coming back, we've been coming back about once, twice a month ever since. Well this is the only way in and out.

-

Mark

He leads us to the chapel on the first floor. This is where Father Kram held his mass with the nuns, you know, every day and especially on Sundays this is where it happened. He was he world's only quadriplegic priest and so this, we came in, he lived here in the hospital. He didn't pass away here in the hospital.

So we don't really know if his spirit is still here. This community really loved Father Kram, he was very well respected in his community and he was an avid HAM radio operator. Everybody just loved him. They would have wheel chair races with him, up and down the hallway.

The nurses just were tickled to death with him. He was just a great man. And so that's why we feel that there's nothing negative in this hospital, that's the way we feel. -

Mark

He begins to tell us about a shadow figure, captured by a previous investigation team. They were standing, right here. They were filming like this, and they go back and forth and then they swing around, and then they, right about similar to where he's at but he was facing that way. So you're, you know, so then they go back and they pan on it and they go slow motion, let you see it and then they go back and then they freeze on it.

You sit there and go, that's a person, there's a shadow even on the floor. (eerie music) This is the actual emergency room right here. Lots of EVP's in this room. Screaming, moaning, and cold spots.

Here in the emergency department, I guess, we had come down here and was investigating this area and we had gone into this room, I believe this was the surgery room. We hadn't had really any experiences in there until we started, we came out and we started hearing children laughing and playing and sounded like they were upstairs so one of the other investigators went to check it out, he went further down the hallway and, I was kind of standing like right about here, and was just kind of listening, as I was standing here listening, I felt like a child would come up and try to get your attention I felt three taps, on my wrist, then I kind of, brushed it off for a second and then it happened again, three little taps on my wrist, and I'm like, okay, something's going on so I just stood there and waited and it happened a third time. Three little taps on my wrist. We don't really know why there's children ghosts here, we've had psychics in here saying there's a boy and a girl running around here.

And we, and there's, there's captured EVP's of a little girl going, "Hi". But that's, that's, that's, rather odd. I don't know why child spirit would be in this building. (buzzes) -

Mark

Robie takes us to the second floor. Come up here to this doorway right here. -

Mark

And describes the nurses final moments. His wife was working in this area right here, called her, they said something to each other, he called her, came over here, they were right here, and they started arguing, over who knows what, and then he pulled a gun out and shot her. When she collapsed, everybody came out and they brought her over here. Into ICU, somewhere in this room she passed, I don't know which area exactly.

But in this room. That's the one actual murder in this hospital, tragic as it is, you know. That doorway right there, we've had two groups claim they saw a full body apparition of a nurse in scrubs, blonde hair, pony tail, and everything. We've never captured that, we've never seen it.

How much time as we've been in this hospital, we've never seen it, but two, two people claim to have seen it standing right there in that doorway where that chair is. But there, we do have pictures of I don't even know what to call it, plasma? You know, right about right here, you know, it's strange, it's a purple, you know, it's just odd. We were here with the Klinge brothers one time, they were filming for a Japanese TV show and they were standing right down here and what's odd is, I got another video of a shadow person that crosses right here.

-

Mark

We meet up with Coy McCollum who captured video evidence of a spirit in the second floor stairwell. So I'm coming down and I'm by myself and I have my camera, it's a night vision camera, so I'm coming around and I'm panning I'm looking around and I get about right here, and I just pan into the stairwell right here, the exit door, and I look and, right here on the corner of the stairs, you can see something, it looked like legs, it looked like a small figure and you can see it and the actual video, it startled me and so I grabbed my camera and I start going in and I get about right there and as soon as I put it up and I stop, you can hear footsteps run up the stairs. (beeps) That looked like somebody just went up the stairs. Hello?

Hello? Nobody's there, nothing. (buzzing) Up here on the third floor, now right here is where I had my most, I don't know how to say, I still can't believe what I saw here. I was here one day giving a tour to a group, that was gonna come and investigate the place and we were all standing down there in the hallway and I turned around and I looked right here in this hallway and I saw two legs, just walk across.

No torso, no feet, just two legs, this is the area of the blue nun. The only way I captured it was with my eyes. I have no proof and it just bothers me to this day that I actually saw that, because I physically saw that. And I'm going how did that happen?

(ominous music) Paranormal investigator Coy once caught some pretty good evidence, he caught what appeared to be an apparition of a man or a young boy, running up the stairs behind me. Will this DVR camera catch the same apparition? And finally, this DVR's on the third floor this is where Robie's seen a blue nun. Will this DVR camera capture the blue nun?

-

Mark

We begin our night of investigation in the chapel. You'll notice that, we're wearing masks. The air quality in this building is very very poor. And just spending the day that we've been in here setting up, we're kind of, our throats and our lungs are starting to feel it.

So throughout the investigation we're gonna be wearing these air filtration masks and up on three where there's a serious mold problem, we're gonna move to heavy duty respirators. So in my hand I've got a Mel Meter. This basically detects electro magnetic energy in the air which ghosts are thought to produce. One things we like to do is do a sweep of the room and see if there's already any energy in the air.

Most rooms should read zero, there shouldn't be any thing. So if this device registers a spike, it'll be a good indicator that something has appeared there with us that wasn't originally there. -

Mark

Whoa, I got a, I got a spike real quick. Right here. It went away. What was it?

And I got tingles right when it happened. Point one. Not a lot but, something. Something in a building with no electricity.

And this being a hospital, and everybody, knew everyone and everybody was friendly, you know, think of us like, the people you once knew. Don't think of us any differently. I swear I just saw two eyes over there. Over there?

You saw two eyes? -

Billy

Like two glowing, like white eyes. Human height? Yeah, like where, you see where that mark is on that wall? -

Mark

Uh-Huh. -

Billy

Just like that height. -

Mark

We thought where Billy saw the eyes was a closet but when he decided to place a Rem-Pod inside, we soon discovered it was the priest's changing room. A Rem-Pod emits it's own magnetic field and once it's disrupted an alarm will sound and lights will go off. If you're in your changing room right now, can you light up one of those lights on the sink, to just let us know that you're here? We notice a peculiar black object peak through on the bottom left of the frame.

On the sink, to just let us know that you're here? As the camera continues to record, we also notice these two faint lines, strangely moving, just around the corner. Our mysterious black object is simply a cockroach making his presence known. With no activity from the Rem-Pod, we decided to move on.

What we have going on in the former x-ray room is we've set up a laser grid. It's a laser that's shown hundreds of dots throughout the room and we've set up a DSLR to take a picture every two seconds and what we're looking for is to see if there's any differences in the dots. If there's a shadow figure, or a mist, it'll obstruct the dots. -

Billy

Also I, we placed a flashlight on the edge of this table. We're just gonna invite, if there are any spirits down here to just go ahead and turn that flashlight on. And hopefully these dots can get some sort of an outline of their physique. -

Mark

We make our way to the second floor, where the nurse was tragically murdered, while placing our camera into position, we notice an orb appear on the top of the screen. Orbs are translucent balls of light, which many believe are one of the forms that spirits can take. Is this the nurses orb forming behind us? Although our Ovilus was silent, we did capture a voice on our camera's microphone.

It appears to be a man's voice, followed by a flashing orb in front of Billy. Is this the man who killed his wife, speaking to us from beyond the grave? We set up for another EVP session on the third floor where the blue nun has been seen. Going off of information provided by a previous investigator we target a particular priest.

Whoever we were speaking to, seemed interested to know more about us. That was kind of creepy. Oh that behind you? And you weren't touching it?

-

Mark

Geez. As we review our DVR camera, located behind us down the hallway, we notice an orb pass behind Billy at the exact moment that he is startled. Judging from the height of this orb, could this be one of the child spirits running behind Billy? (radio static) Oh!

Huh? Yeah. It does. -

Billy

Like more static-y? Dude I totally I know what you mean, I can feel it. -

Mark

Yeah look. -

Billy

Yeah look at both at the same time. -

Mark

Something's going on. -

Billy

Something's passing through these hallways. -

Mark

And now it's kind of going away. -

Billy

And what the hell was that dude? -

Mark

No. -

Billy

Sounded like a, hopefully it was a, it went ch, ch. At the same time. -

Mark

And now it's kind of going away. -

Billy

Now what the hell was that? Did you heat that? That was a, intense static feeling dude. -

Mark

It was. -

Billy

Like it literally felt like it was just passing like through us, like just going. Like moving. -

Mark

It was very busy. Very busy, very intense. -

Billy

Kind of like it had a, I don't want to say cornered but it kind of like had us, -

Mark

Surrounded? -

Billy

Surrounded at one point. Yeah it felt that way. Once we went to that corridor. -

Billy

Yeah. Kind of like when we were standing there it was just all around us. I don't know what to think about that. We left the camera recording down the third floor hallway where we had felt the static charge.

A ball of light, morphs into an elongated string like anomaly as it floats to the area where we were just standing. Could this be the orb of the rarely seen blue nun? At the end of the night, we revisit our laser grid and notice a significant change in a group of dots. If you look at image two, you will see five dots disappear.

As we superimpose what the image is over looking, you can see that the dots vanish over the counter top. This anomaly is also occurring exactly where earlier in the night, Billy had left the flashlight to be manipulated. Whatever it may be, this hospital seems to be active on every floor, each floor holding it's own set of stories and experiences. But what we noticed is that the spirits here seem interested in the living just as much as we are with the dead.

Until next time, happy haunting.