Shaky Leg Mary

When I was in college, I worked for a local hospital, one of the largest in the North Georgia area outside of Atlanta.

I won't name drop because they probably don't want to be mentioned, but this hospital was huge. I'd worked clerical jobs in a few other hospitals, and you could have easily fit three of my previous facilities in this place. That being said, it was a mismatched monstrosity of old and new. The new Medical Promenade might have been a modern architectural marvel, but areas like the ER and the admin hallway still looked much as they had in nineteen seventy-two. It's a place at war with itself, constantly changing but also continually staying the same.

That's probably why there are so many ghost stories connected to the place.

Working at the front ER desk, I came in for a lot of rumors, especially since I worked the night shift. Security has an office in the ER since it's where the biggest trainwrecks usually happen. This meant that Carl, the night watchman, would usually wander over to hang out and watch Youtube videos when I'm not checking people in. David, the late shift maintenance guy, and Mark, the eleven to seven switchboard operator, are also pretty likely to come hang out if the night is slow and they're on break. Between the three of them, I've heard all the good stories from after hours. Some of them were kind of funny, like the nurse's Carl walked in on screwing during a security check or the handsome Er surgeon, Dr. Logan, who cried to Mark for three hours while he was stuck in an elevator that had stopped working.

These stories were fun, but they inevitably led to stories about the hospital's haunted areas and the weird occurrences they sometimes witnessed. Some of them were clearly bullshit, Like David telling me that his ladder had disappeared from the fourth-floor stairwell and appeared on the roof, but some of them were too weird to be pure fabrication. Certain areas of the hospital were definitely more active than others. Place's like the South Promenade, where a girl had jumped to her death from the fourth-floor railing. David claims to this day that he watched a shadowy figure drop to the tiles a few times, and the look on his face makes me believe he probably wasn't lying.

Then there's the matter of Marks phantom phone calls every night. Mark claims that he gets at least four phone calls from the courtesy phone on the third floor every night between midnight and four am. The caller never says anything, but Mark was sure he could hear a little whisper under all the static. One night, he had recorded the noises on his cell phone to let a friend listen to its whose into paranormal stuff. When his friend had processed it through a computer program, the caller had said "Jackie" and "Baby" and "Love" but the rest had been gibberish. It happened at the same wee hours of the morning every day, and Mark had even sent Carl up to the phone on a few occasions to check for people playing jokes on him. Carl had reported that the phone wasn't even plugged in, yet the phone calls still came.

Then, of course, there was Shaky Leg Mary.

Many members of hospital staff had seen the entity known as Shaky Leg Mary. She has been seen in the ambulance bay, in the ER, in the pass-through hallway where she was wheeled into surgery, but most often, she was seen wandering the OR hallways after hours. She had been a homeless woman that had been run over in front of Mary of Mercy one night long before I was hired. Her skull had been crushed, her lungs mostly collapsed, and her left leg was a tangled mess of bones and flesh. They had rushed her to the ER as quickly as they could, but she had died on the table as they tried to operate on her.

She had made frequent appearances after that.

So when Carl came staggering up an hour ago, looking starey and pale, I knew he had seen something.

I figured he'd had another situation with a combative patient, but it turned out to be a little worse than that.

"I just saw her," he whispered like he was afraid to say it out loud.

I looked up from my Youtube video and clicked pause after one look at him, "Saw who?" I asked

"Mary," he said, "Shaky Leg Mary. I saw her in the surgical hallway."

I told him to tell me the story, and he shakily obliged.

Carl had been doing his rounds, as he usually did, when he saw her. He had come through the surgical center, checking doors and making sure everything was secured. It was three am, and he was making his way briskly about his appointed route so he could stop by the cafeteria and get a cup of coffee before heading upstairs to continue. All he had to do was cut through the surgical OR hallway, check the operating room doors, and he'd come out next to the cafeteria.

He had opened the door, and that's when he had seen her.

She had been standing in the hallways, her back to Carl, and he had pulled out his flashlight to shine it at her. He was just about to yell at her, tell her this was a restricted area when he had finally noticed her leg. It was twisted up like a bent signpost, and he watched as it flexed weirdly beneath her. Her hair was dark and oozed with something pink and viscous. Carl swore he could hear her breathing raggedly, her air hitching in oddly as her deflated lungs tried to pump it, and the bulb popped when he dropped his flashlight.

The sound made her turn, and her squashed face looked like a ruined Jack-o-lantern as the bulbous eyes stared blindly in his direction.

"She was as far from me as that water fountain," he said, pointing to a fountain that was about thirty feet away, "but that leg didn't stop her from coming after me."

Carl said she hunkered, going to all fours like a dog, and charged him grotesquely. Carl backpedaled, trying to run, but had tripped over his feet and fallen onto his rump at the least opportune time. She was gasping and closing in on him, jaws opening weirdly in a mouth that was mostly broken when Carl thought to close the door between the two of them. He kicked out shakily and slammed the heavy door shut just as she was about to jump on him. She hit it like a cannonball and then screamed like an angry wild cat.

As he sprawled there, panting, in the lighted hallway, he heard her slamming into the door six or seven times before he found his feet and ran to somewhere he knew there would be people.

That's what had brought him to me.

Carl later got David to agree to go with him to make sure it hadn't been some homeless person who had wandered in and was trashing the place. The two of them turned all the lights on and explored every OR room and storage closet but didn't find anything but surgical equipment and cobwebs. She had disappeared as quickly as she had arrived, but they did bring me to that door to show me one thing she had left behind before I left for the night.

David showed me a heavy indent on the OR side of the door that had left a deep mark in the metal there.

"The doors a little bent too." he added, "I'm sure I'll have to fix the track on it before the week is out."

Though, he was emphatic about the fact that he wouldn't fix it after dark.

Carl never went into the OR hallway again after hours, and the legend of Shaky Leg Mary continued to grow.