Hello kiddies, welcome to a special, extra-spooky Halloween edition of the Bone Guys!!
*(Pops out of coffin)
We’ve been dying to see you. Muhahahaha! Cough, cough.
We felt it’d be direly appropriate to explore the subject of haunted dentists offices this time around. Because much like any other historic office building or small space with an available lease in a corner spot of a strip mall, dentist offices can be prime places for the paranormal, too.
So now we’ll recall a few infamous cases when the patients were not quite ready to leave the examination room, if you know what we mean. And if you don’t, we mean ghosts.
And along the way, we’ll do our best to make a more spooky-ooky Dad puns. Just to show off our Halloween... wait for it... SPIRIT!
Muhahahahaaaaa!!
Spencer, MA. — The gray two-story clapboard house still sits today. Though it has had many lives and at least one murder over its 155 years, today its warren of rooms is filled with dental chairs and teeth-cleaning equipment. And though you may experience horror in the examination chair (and possibly juuuust a little pressure), it’s what happens at night that is truly chilling. That’s when the sound of children playing in the halls may echo in the hallway. Doors will open and slam at will. And sobs of misery peal from the basement. The haunting’s history goes back to 1873, when a local doctor attempted to vaccinate the town’s citizenry for smallpox. He injected them with a live virus instead, infecting them with the deadly disease. A local abode was officially decreed a “pox house,” where hundreds of infected would live out their final painful days and later moved by horse and buggy to what many believe is this same house in Spencer where today people get their molars drilled by Dr. James Ostromecky. One thing is known, a woman did back over her husband several times at the contemporary house. Is her murdered husband the ghost that plays havoc with the electricity equipment and hovers over staff today? Or is one of the many tragic souls who lost their lives to smallpox in a wholly different pandemic? Come on a ghost hunt inside the haunted dentist office right here.
Neutraubling, West Germany — It’s 1981. You’ve come for a routine cleaning, nonchalantly reclining in the dentist’s chair when an angry, croaking voice oozes out of the sink and shatters the tranquility. It’s known as “The Chopper” and it pleads, heckles, professes its love for a girl named “Claudia,” and makes fun of your appearance using language most foul, rattling you to the bone.
“Shut your mouth!”
“Release me!”
Reports of the voice’s cruelty, profanity, and sudden appearance are made for nearly a year, with patients hearing it emerge from electrical outlets, plugholes, and even the toilet. Ultimately, a lengthy analysis by police and media finds “The Chopper” to be the work of 17-year-old prankster and (not very good) dental assistant Claudia Judenmann with help from Dr. Kurt Bachseitz and his wife, Margot.
The younger assailant was inventing the ghost and its voice all along using her own trachea, recordings, office acoustics, ventriloquism, and a tube to alter her voice, offering some comic relief to everyone bored at work.
The doctor and his wife end up admitting themselves to a mental institution after the hoax/crime was discovered, while Claudia disappears, though supposedly her tricks inspire at least one German pop song.
Hampton, VA. — At 1420 King Street, an office is apparently haunted by a dentist said to have killed himself in the 1970’s. Inexplicable drill sounds and the dead man’s presence are reported by employees of the next tenant—also a dentist. A hired psychic later claims to speak with the deceased, who clarifies for his mother that he died from an overdose of nitrous oxide, not suicide.
Huntington, West VA. — Dr. William Grimes’ dental office is located in a beautiful old home from 1909. He’s worked there since purchasing the house in 1973. But there’s someone else he worked along who was there a great deal longer.
Grimes first met Lavina, or “Livy,” when preparing his office. After an electric charge grazed his back and the lights all went out in his stairwell, he took a look behind him only to find a ghostly young girl staring at him. After several more sightings through the years, with Livy appearing at varying ages, Grimes contacted a paranormal society to unlock the history of the house and its ghostly resident.
Livy ran away from her abusive father in Ohio alongside her mother and sister, moving into the house in the 1920’s, only to have her evil father find them, break in, and kill everybody. An investigation by ghost hunters announced the presence of up to fifteen ghosts in the house, leading to a cleansing that Dr. Grimes says has rid the house of all uncanny activity. He later released a book on his experience called Journey on a Stairwell, and one commenter on this story claims she lived in the house in the 1950’s and considered Lavina her playmate.
East Bend, North Carolina — Michael Renengar, an author whose books center on ghostly local legends, says his interest in the subject was first provoked when he rode his bike by a neighboring building at age 12. Looking through a window on the upper floor, he gave a nonchalant wave to Rosebud Garrett, who ran her dentist practice in the office upstairs. He quickly balked when he realized the only problem with that was the woman having died the year before when he was 11.
And just in case you didn’t get enough of stories involving ghouls and dentists, we just happened to find this piece of zombie apocalypse fan-fiction, written by one Dr. Andrew Tanchyk, DMD, of Amboy, New Jersey.
Not bad, Tanchyk, not bad.
Remember, kiddies, if you’re ever going to up and abandon your dental practice, make sure to leave a lot of creepy artificial teeth lying around like this. Just so some guys find it later and turn it into a spooky blog post or video or something.
Happy Halloween!
Now it’s probably time to get those drills warmed up for all the post-October 31st cavities that await you.