I have not lived at Fort Bliss long. A year before, I had married an army officer and moved away from Ohio, where I was born and reared.
My new husband had just left for a 5 month rotation to Saudi Arabia, and I was alone in the strange town. Fort Bliss stands in the harsh desert of West Texas, a few miles from the Mexican border. Here, Pancho Villa met General Blackjack Pershing. Buffalo Soldiers trained in the still standing barracks. The US Cavalry, with its beautiful and proud horses, would parade the grounds. I was learning the local history.
Fortunately, I. A few acquaintances, other historians like myself. Through some of these people, I had managed to chase down some ghost legends about Fort Bliss. I even wrote an article for the Fort Bliss Monitor in 1998 about a particular building, and the article was popular. I had taken a photo of the building and something unexplainable appeared in 1 of the windows. Several professional photographers have not been able to explain it.
t was Halloween 1999, when four people accompanied me to building four on Fort Bliss, to set up a video camera and tape recorders to investigate the endless tales surrounding the building. The legends were certainly compelling and we hoped for success, whatever that would be.
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Building Four was built in 1914 as an isolation ward for sick and dying soldiers.
One hospital and a small morgue stood nearby, as they still do today. Tuberculosis was common, and the influenza pandemic of 1918 would soon claim thousands of lives in the area. Building four was used as an overflow for the little morgue when the latter was full. Certainly many people died here, and one cannot imagine the horror of being brought to the death house. Knowing you would probably never come out alive. Soldiers may have awakened to find the bed next to theirs empty, and their comrade in the basement, dead.
Getting the keys was no problem. Jim LITZAU from the Real Property department. Thought I was a bit nuts to spend the night there, but he gave me the keys anyway. I assured him that we would not be drinking and that we would be careful on the rickety stairs. He had already told me why the building stood empty, No one wanted to work in it. The former employees demanded to be moved somewhere else due to sounds of footsteps, disembodied voices, and even an occasional ghost sighting. Stories have circulated since the building was last occupied in about 1996. Radios would turn on by themselves, without being plugged in. Toilets flushed on their own, and a doctor in an old Calvary uniform had been seen in the basement. A girl in a bright bright blue flapper style dress was seen by at least four people, standing outside of the building, apparently waiting for someone.
I arrived at the building early, but was not about to unlock it and go in alone. Even in the daytime it looked sad and foreboding. It’s numbered sign was hanging Askew, vines were starting to creep around the door frame, and a few upper windows had been broken by pigeons.
Soon Edward and his cousin arrived, and another Sergeant and his wife showed up a little later. The five of us set up shop in the front room where the odd object in my photograph was. We placed his camera in the basement and mine on the second floor. A tape recorder with external microphone hung on the stairwell. We made small talk for about an hour and a half and then it started.
We smiled as we heard faint footsteps above our heads, we all had had some experience with this sort of thing before, and none of us thought that anything really horrifying would happen.
As we sifted through leftover Halloween candy and whispered to each other, something made us freeze in our seats. Directly on the other side of the wall of the room that we were in was a stairway leading to the second floor. We heard heavy footsteps making their way down the stairs. The soldier with us was standing in the doorway, and he, like the rest of us, literally froze. The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs and then stopped. Finally, the soldier’s wife yelled. Get the camera! We grabbed our cameras and dashed out of the room, and were immediately at the foot of the stairs. Nothing was there, Nothing turned out on our photographs, But Edward had an EMF detector with him and the needle maxed out, with the machine giving off a high pitched squeal. Something was there…
Tense. We decided that this would be a good time to go outside for a smoke break. We were outside for a good 30 minutes or so. We went back in to change tapes in the video cameras and I heard Edward ranting in the basement. We went to see what was up, and he was mad because his camera had recorded nothing. That camera had been rigged through a small TV set and plugged into the wall so we would not have to worry constantly about batteries running down. The camera kept shutting itself off. Consequently, we could never get any footage of the basement. The air became thick as mud at about 9:30 PM and we forced ourselves to gather up the equipment at 10:00 PM. We decided that we really didn’t want to stay the entire night after all.
I didn’t watch the tapes for a week, since I really didn’t think there would be anything on them. I finally sat down to do so, and after a few minutes I had to turn it off.
Something was going on. The heavy footsteps were not heard, but a metallic banging sound was. Voices could be heard when the volume was turned up and something actually thumped the microphone on the camera. Other noises were heard as well. We had written notes on where we were at various times, and these sounds weren’t us. Visual interference runs through the tapes, coinciding with the noises. The camera even shakes at times.
This would not be my last experience with building 4. I had my first hands on account of former employees who swear they would never go into that building again. Even my husband had a weird experience that frightened him. In February of 2000,, he went for a late night bicycle ride. He came home drenched, sweating and scared. He told me that he had turned around in the large parking lot area near Building 4 and glanced up in time to see a doctor, in Calvary boots, white lab coat, and Stetson hat, walking by the building. He did not stop peddling until he made it home.
I myself was driving by building for one night on my way home and I saw a car parked nearby. I went over to investigate, and found a couple of military policemen wandering into the basement. The basement door was unlocked for some reason. Once I told them that I was the one who had written the article that drew them to the building, all was well. We had only just stepped foot into the basement, when I heard a door bell ring. One man turned to me and asked if I had heard it. The other man had heard it as well. I took them upstairs to show them the antique, and long ago disconnected, doorbell. They turned white as well.
In May 2000, I took some more people into building four. Again, We had a camera, but this time it was an infrared, Night vision, Digital video camera. Seven of us stood in total darkness. The electricity had since been turned off due to lights going on and off by themselves all the time, and watched in fear and disbelief as orbs of light floated up and down the 2nd floor hallway. The lights were only seen when we looked into our camera’s viewer. They could not be seen with the so called naked eye. We did not stay very long
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I have been into building 4 since that night. Unfortunately, ghost hunting became a rage when my articles were published, and now the poor, Old building is boarded up completely, due to break ins.
Other buildings on Fort Bliss have a haunted story here and there, but this is the most haunted place that I have been into in a very long time.
By Heidi Crabtree.
