Terrace is no stranger to paranormal activity. With Halloween around the corner, one Terrace resident shared spooky stories she experienced while working at the Terraceview Lodge, a long-term care facility for seniors.
Kendra Rae, a health care aide, began working in the facility in 2015 when she was 22.
She was told that people occasionally see things but didn't think anything of it. A few years passed and she still hadn't seen or heard anything abnormal.
Then Rae started working night shifts.
Disappearing elder
One night, she was working in the locked dementia unit in 2018. Her coworkers had gone on break, so she was the only worker in the unit.
"I had just done my night check so I knew everyone was in bed," she said. "I sat in the living room to read my book and I heard what I thought was a resident out of bed."
"It was the sound of shuffling feet down the hall. I waited and didn’t hear them come past me, so I checked on my residents again and no one was awake and wandering."
She shared that it was not out of the ordinary for residents to be awake and wandering the halls at night sometimes.
"I sat back down and continued to read and I heard the shuffling of feet again but this time closer and they walked behind me toward the kitchen. I got up from my seat and went to follow the sound but found the kitchen area empty."
"By this time I was getting a little freaked out," said Rae.
"Instead of going back to the living room area, I went into the nursing station. I went back to my book but I couldn’t concentrate," she said. "I heard the foot shuffling again but this time I thought I seen someone at the corner of my eye walking into the kitchen — a little elder in a night gown."
"I thought it was a resident wandering so I just sat a minute, waiting for them to come back down the hall. A few minutes passed and they didn’t come back down, so I got up to go check to make sure they were okay and found an empty kitchen."
Rae shared that the kitchen is at the end of a short hallway with locked doors ot the back hallways."
"There no way they could disappear," she said. "No way."
Trapped resident
In 2019, a resident told her about a man trapped in his room, unable to walk. It was in the old part of the building that used to be the army hospital. The more he spoke about this man, the more it reminded her of a former resident.
"They described a former resident to a T," she said.
The current resident said they could not sleep because a man was supposedly stuck in a chair in the room.
He was trapped because he only had one leg. Rae shared that it was amputated for health reasons and that she worked with this resident before he passed.
"They had never met that we were aware of and there was no picture of the person anywhere either," she said. "The fact that they were able to describe what the person looked like was very creepy."
Goodbye from beyond the realm
During a hot summer night in 2019, Rae was working a night shift upstairs at the Nass unit.
"I had a fan in front of the door blowing in cool air. It was plugged in all night working with no issue," she said. "At one point in the night, it started turning on and off this happened for about 30-60mins and I eventually gave up and tried plugged it in a different outlet and it was fine I went about my shift.
Then between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., her coworker came to check on her.
"My partner that was working on the other side of the unit came over to see if I was doing okay. She let me know a resident had passed in the night on the other side of the unit. She told me the time and I told her about the fan."
Rae shared that this resident was one of the first she ever took care of.
"We both think this resident was telling me she had passed," she said. "It made me laugh, I think she was joking with me one last time."
