La Planchada

La Planchada, Ironed Lady, is a well known ghost legend in Mexico. In the 1930’s, a nurse by the name of Eulalia worked at the Juarez hospital in Mexico. Her uniform was always very clean and crisp, and perfectly ironed. She was very good at her job and her patients felt lucky to be under her care. But things started to change when a young, handsome doctor joined the hospital’s staff. Eulalia and the doctor started seeing each other socially, and it wasn’t long before she fell in love with him and the two were engaged.

Shortly after the engagement, the doctor left to attend a medical seminar. To her shock and surprise, the doctor did not return the following week. Another week passed and still no sign of the doctor returning. Eulalia became increasingly worried and felt sure something bad must have happened to him. But several weeks later, the hospital received word from the doctor. It seemed he had met a woman in the town that hosted the seminar and the two had married.

Eulalia was heart-broken and fell into a state of deep depression. Her work began to suffer and she started to neglect the patients that were under her care. As a result, one of her patients died. Realising her terrible error, Eulalia became ill. She did not have the fight in her to survive and died shortly after in the very hospital she worked in.

Strange things started to occur shortly after her death. Patients, nurses, and even doctors started seeing a nurse in the emergency room area. Some stories state that she appears to glow and floats instead of walks through the hospital corridors. Others state she appears to walk normally, but no footsteps are ever heard. Staff at the hospital decided to call the apparition ‘La Planchada’ because she always appears wearing a clean, white, perfectly pressed uniform. The reports from the patients are the most intriguing. This ghostly nurse will appear at night on the ward she died in, and looks after the patients that appear to be neglected. In the morning these patients are well enough to be moved to less intensive care rooms. When asked how they are feeling, they reply, “a nurse came in and healed me.”

People believe Eulalia returns as a spirit because of a sense of guilt. It seems she is forever doomed to pay for her mistakes in life. There are several versions of this story. In one version, it states that the nurse was a cruel woman who treated her patients badly, so when she died, her punishment was to take care of patients for eternity. In another version, Eulalia was never engaged to the doctor, this version states he rejects her advances and marries the woman he was already engaged to. She then takes her disappointment and anger out on the patients, resulting in several of them dying.