The True Story of
The Ghost of Nurse Betty
Most ghost stories that get sensationalized are about vengeful or malevolent spirits but not all ghosts are scary monsters. In fact, there are a number of local spectres who are loitering as guardian spirits in Denton, Texas. One is the ghost of Nurse Betty from the old Homer Flow Memorial Hospital.
Many a Dentonite claim their honest-to-Betsy local bonafides by having been born in the old Flow Memorial Hospital, founded with a 1949 post-mortem donation by Homer Flow who is himself buried in the IOOF Cemetery. My son was born in 1985 at Flow the year before it went bankrupt.
Developers have since turned its lot into student housing on Scripture Hill, but stories of a ghostly nurse had already been haunting the hospital grounds for decades.
As early as the 1950s, night staff, security guards, and even patients had inexplicable encounters with a woman dressed in a nurse’s white gown and cap. Many told of a dedicated young nurse at the Flow Hospital, pregnant from a tryst with a married doctor, who had died in the elevator after collapsing from a stillborn birth, yet her spirit still lingered as a caretaker. A new mother groggily saw a nurse in “a vintage uniform” close a window and then blanket her newborn in the middle of a chilly night, but was later told by the night nurse on duty that there was no one else on the floor.
Even after the hospital closed, one shaken student co-ed claimed that a woman “dressed in a nurse costume” had spooked away a potential attacker during her walk home in the wee hours after the campus bars had closed. Most accounts of Nurse Betty are similarly benevolent or benign, even if often unnerving.