Booth Memorial Hospital (Former)

Residents of this Covington condo wake to a 1930s nurse checking their forehead. A Covington PD report documents the morgue freezer and severed power.

Two or three residents of the Governors Point condos on East Second Street in Covington have told the same story. They wake up in the night because something is pressing on their forehead, the way a nurse checks for fever. When they open their eyes, there's a woman in a 1930s nursing uniform standing beside the bed. She looks at them and says, "Everything is going to be okay, honey. Just go back to sleep." Then she's gone.

The condos sit inside what used to be the William Booth Memorial Hospital. Before that, the site held one of Covington's grandest mansions: a Gothic Revival castle built in 1869 by Amos Shinkle, the Ohio River barge magnate who helped finance the Roebling Suspension Bridge. Shinkle died in 1892. His family donated the mansion to the Salvation Army in 1914. After renovations and a $500,000 fund drive, the old castle was torn down and replaced in 1925 by a colonial-style hospital named for William Booth, the Salvation Army's founder. The hospital specialized in maternity care and handled a huge volume of births and adoptions, particularly for unwed mothers after World War II. By 1958 it had 150 beds and 17 bassinets.

It stayed open through hard history. A shutdown from 1932 to 1937 during the Depression. The 1937 Ohio River flood hit the day after it reopened, destroyed the boiler, and the hospital still took in 100 flood refugees. Urban flight eventually broke it. A replacement opened in Florence in 1979, and the Second Street building went vacant. That's when the Covington Police Department filed what a responding officer called the only ghost story in the department with its own official report.

Developers hired Wackenhut guards to watch the empty building overnight. The guards started calling dispatch almost immediately, reporting the sound of children running around upstairs. Nobody ever saw the kids. They were only ever heard. One winter night around 2 a.m., a neighbor called because the guard on shift was crying in the parking lot, locked in his car with the window cracked an inch, refusing to go back inside. A replacement guard was sent. Within the hour, the new guard called police and asked the officer to come sit with him and see whether he could hear the running upstairs too.

While the officer and his sergeant swept the basement, they realized they'd stopped outside the old morgue door. Inside was a chest freezer. When they opened it, a shelf collapsed. Underneath it was a body, accidentally left behind when the hospital closed. The replacement guard saw it, passed out, cracked his head on the concrete, and had to be transported to St. Elizabeth for treatment. When the coroner arrived to collect the forgotten remains, he noticed something the guards hadn't: the main electrical feed to the building had been severed, cut clean in half. No power was running to any of it. The freezer was still cold. The elevator had been working when the guards used it earlier in the evening.

The building is now a sought-after address in the Licking Riverside Historic District, 323 East Second Street. Chris Code, who runs River City Tours' Ghosts of Covington walk, collected the nurse-at-the-bedside accounts. Whatever she is, whatever the kids upstairs were, none of them seem to have followed the hospital to Florence. They stayed where the work was done.