This semester, I was fortunate enough to get a new job to help me with my future career. Now working at the UW Nutritional Sciences building, I help create their semester newsletters, post on their social media accounts, design flyers and presentations and more. Although mostly online because of COVID-19, once a week I go into the building for one of my responsibilities, but after learning about its past, it always makes me a little nervous.
My boss explained to me that the UW Nutritional Sciences building used to be a children’s hospital. The building was remodeled in 1982 for the Nutritional Sciences department, but you can still tell that it was a hospital from the layout: the extra long elevators for stretchers, the long hallways with offices that used to be patient rooms and nurseries and the tunnels that connect to other buildings and more.
There is nothing wrong with this building at all. It is actually a beautiful old building with a lot of charm. But being a horror film fanatic, my mind tends to wander to dark places, since there are a lot of horror films that relate to both the topics of hospitals and children.
Every Tuesday morning, I go to the Nutritional Sciences building to inspect rooms and the eye wash stations, since a lot of professors do not come to their offices because of the pandemic. The three other floors are nice and smooth-running for me, but I always dread the last part of inspecting the basement. At 9:00AM, there are not many faculty workers there and the basement is always dark and spooky. That is when my mind starts wandering.
There are a lot of old professor’s rooms that still have not yet been cleaned out. You can tell from the dusty lab coats hung up, the big, boxy first edition of the Apple Mac Computer, the cassettes and the very old paperwork that is piled on the desk. The combination of the old rooms, the creepy noises the basement makes and the animal lab being in the basement always gets to me, but I always end up finishing the job.
Overall, this is a super awesome job and it has given me lots of opportunities. The charming, old Nutritional Sciences building does have a very interesting history too, but sometimes may get a little spooky.