Do You Believe in Ghosts?

                In writing this blog I decided to check out a reported haunting I wrote about in Haunted Long Beach 2—the Long Beach Navy Hospital, now the location of the Towne Center shopping center.    Hospitals seem a logical place to go looking for ghosts.  According to the first law of thermodynamics energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It just changes shape. After death the energy that ran the human body is transformed, it must continue on in some form.  What better place to look for that energy conversion than a place where many deaths occur, such as a hospital, especially one built over Long Beach’s Native American village of Puvungna. Puvungna, which many of you know, was a sacred site to our indigenous people.  It was a place of powerful energy…energy so powerful that many believed that all life in the world emerged from a nearby sacred spring.

                 I wanted to find out if residual energy from the hospital and/or Puvunga still remains.  Were “ghostly” things still happening?

                Few realize that the original 89.7 acre Navy Hospital was located where the VA hospital is today.  In 1941 Uncle Sam began looking for locations to build permanent government hospital facilities.  Long Beach, with the Navy nearby on Terminal Island and the new Naval Reserve Air Station in Los Alamitos just a few miles away, seemed a perfect spot.  Construction on the $3 million institution began in October 1941, but was delayed by a mysterious fire which burned through the wooden forms used in pouring concrete for the walls.  Despite this setback the hospital was commissioned on December 15, 1942.

               The Long Beach Navy Hospital on Seventh Street was short lived.  Following World War II the Navy began cutting expenses.  It seemed the Navy hospital itself was about to die, scheduled to close in June 1950.  However, Long Beach City Health Officer, Dr. Irving D. Litwack, wasn’t about to see it happen without a fight.  Litwack traveled to Washington to speak before a Congressional subcommittee overseeing military cutbacks telling them that closing the Long Beach Navy Hospital would create “an acute public health emergency” in the Long Beach area.  The committee agreed to a compromise.  The Van Nuys unit for veterans would move to Long Beach and take over the Long Beach Navy Hospital.

                On June 1, 1950, 1200 patients, nearly half of them non-ambulatory and paraplegic cases, were transferred from the Birmingham VA hospital in Van Nuys to the newly acquired Long Beach VA hospital.  In a brief ceremony in front of the administration building, the Navy struck its colors and ended its occupancy and the Veterans Administration took over.

                The Long Beach Navy Hospital was reborn in a new location, in a new facility, a decade later.  In April 1962, in the midst of the Vietnam War, the United States House of Representatives voted $9.1 million to open another facility in Long Beach. The new hospital at 7500 East Carson Street was commissioned on February 1, 1967.  It became well known for its alcoholic recovery unit which hosted former First Lady Betty Ford, Billy Carter and Senator Herman Talmadge.  It closed its doors permanently on March 25, 1994, the hospital torn down and the Towne Center retail center erected on the site.

                In writing Haunted Long Beach 2 I came across many reports of paranormal happenings at the Carson Boulevard Navy Hospital.   In one instance a heavy metal and glass door which shielded the isolation room in the intensive care unit on the fourth floor would close by itself, usually between 2 and 3:30 a.m., or if it was already closed it would rattle and open slightly.  When this happened some claimed to have felt the presence of someone going in and out of the room.

                I decided to interview employees at businesses currently in the Towne Center, agreeing to keep their names and company names confidential. Many were afraid of “getting into trouble” if they spoke openly.  Two employees in the same store told me they had a heavy door which they liked to prop open, but it would inexplicably close itself…very similar to the door in the Navy Hospital’s intensive care unit!  Employees in other establishments told of items mysteriously falling off shelves, and hearing “heavy breathing” when they were the only ones around.   So it does appear as if “odd” things still occur on the site.  A residual haunting seems the most logical explanation…if you believe in such things!

                Another business, in Signal Hill, that wishes to remain anonymous, has employees that claim to hear a young girl crying and letting out loud sighs. Some have seen shadows late at night when no one else is there. Some have heard banging on walls and other noises when they thought they were alone. Computers suddenly turn off and on.

                In investigating the location I found it was first the site of an Air Force hospital, but from 1947-1983 the land was occupied by the Long Beach General Hospital and became a hospital for the homeless, indigent, alcoholics, people in permanent comas, etc. It wasn’t actually an asylum, just a hospital where anyone without money could go, or they would be sent there.  Could residual energy from former patients still remain?

                If you have any stories of your own you would like to share I would love to hear from you.  Contact me through my web site.