My Strange New Mexico

The Alien Ghost

Posted on Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 10:09PM by Mike Smith in Roswell Edition Column | 1 Comment

Ghost stories in New Mexico can sometimes be a dime a dozen.  Whether it be tales of little girls that suddenly appear in the window of a deserted building only to disappear moments later, the wailing woman La Llorona calling for her dead children at night by a lonely river, or haunted hotels in Santa Fe, once you’ve heard one you’ve probably heard them all.

However, there is likely no place that can match the colorful cast of ghostly characters that inhabits the New Mexico Rehabilitation Center (NMRC) south of Roswell located at the former site of the Roswell Army Airfield (RAAF).

There is Old Scratch, a TB patient whom can still be heard scratching on the door of Room 002.  There is the bombardier who appears from time to time in Room 209 to offer words of encouragement to the patients.  There’s also the cigarette smoking man who lights up occasionally in Room 204, a blonde nurse who likes to tell people what to do, and the sounds of crying babies that come from where the old maternity ward used to be.

And then there’s the “little man,” which some researchers such as Jim Marrs have since dubbed the “alien ghost.”

It is no coincidence that the NMRC is located on the old airbase.  The building used for the Rehab Center is in fact the old military hospital from back when the RAAF changed to Walker Air Force Base in the early 1950s.  The hospital was not, contrary to popular belief, the place where the alien bodies from the crash were supposedly taken.  That hospital was torn down and replaced by the building that is now the NMRC, although the new hospital was built right next to where the older building had been torn down, and since then many strange things have happened there…

Ghosts, most skeptical researchers will tell you, can be quickly dismissed as mere tricks of the eyes or one’s own overactive imagination.  While that may be true in the case of a single individual seeing something inexplicable, what about the staff of an entire building?  Ask any one of the night workers at the NMRC and they will tell you of the unexplainable things they have seen or heard at the rehab center over the years.

David Rocha, who has worked at the NMRC for more than 25 years, recalls one Christmas when all of the other employees had been sent home and only he and a handful of others stayed behind for maintenance and security.  All through the night elevators mysteriously opened and closed, doors would occasionally be heard slamming shut, and strange footsteps that were not those of the other men on duty could be heard.  “It was pretty spooky,” said Rocha. “Even though this wasn’t the hospital where they brought the aliens…that was next door…you still have the sense that something happened around here.”

Speaking of aliens, the most extraordinary sighting of something strange at the NMRC happened to Josephine Morones who saw the “little man” back in July of 1997.  While stepping out of the staff kitchen one night Morones was struck with a strange feeling.  Turning to look down the hall she saw a bizarre sight: a small humanoid figure that bore some similarities to a Roswell alien.

“My thing was very weird.  The hands weren’t like fingers, they were like mittens.  All I could see was the thumb.  The skin, or whatever it had on, was like silk tape.  We have [silk tape here] and it looked to me like someone wrapped up in that silk tape,” said Morones of the figure.  When asked whether or not she thought it looked like an alien she said, “It had the egg/pear shaped head; you know how people talk about the slanted eyes and all of this?  This one had round eyes.  That’s what really got me.  It didn’t have a nose; as far as a mouth it had a little bitty mouth.  At first I thought somebody was playing a trick on me.  I really did.  I couldn’t explain the feeling.”

Also strange was the fact that the figure cast no reflection in the glass cabinet it was standing in front of at the end of the hall.  “I kept looking at it and I didn’t panic because I’ve known about this place for a long time…but I looked at the glass expecting to see a reflection and what got me was there was no reflection.  I kept looking at it and it suddenly just faded out and then I was able to move.” said Morones of the incident.

Morones would see the figure again several nights later.  “I was walking out of the kitchen and I got that feeling again and that time I knew what it was.  With that in mind I was able to turn around and look and it was just standing there again.”

This time Morones was able to call for a coworker to come and look at it too but by the time she finished calling him the figure had disappeared, and has not been seen since.

In summing up her strange encounter Morones said, “The first time it freaked me out and I was really afraid.  I had heard all these stories and stuff but I never really believed them.  I didn’t feed into stuff like that.  I didn’t believe in all the stuff that was going on this building.”

Although the “Alien Ghost,” as some now like to call it, is the most famous ghost to have ever been seen at the NMRC it is certainly not the most frequent one.  The most frequently seen figure there appears to be an air force officer wearing an old leather bombardier helmet.  He is most often seen in Rooms 208 and 209 by patients.

Sylvia Scherff, a night nurse, recalls one evening when a patient in room 209 said a man was trying to get her guardrail down so that she could get out of bed and use the restroom.  The only thing was that there were no male staff workers at the rehab center that night.  The woman believed the man left to get help.  Moments later Scherff came in and the woman assumed that the man, who never spoke, had gone to get Scherff to help her out of bed.

Another patient once asked Scherff and another nurse if they had a pilot around the NMRC that went around “offering words of encouragement” to the patients.  Other patients also described a figure that gave them comforting words. “People have described a certain person coming into their room telling them everything will be alright.” said Scherff.

The workers have since tried to pinpoint whether all the people who see the pilot have a similar illness or ailment but so far see no correlation.

“We had several patients describe the same type of person.  It’s not coincidental because we’re talking about patients that had been here two to three years apart from each other and they see the same type of thing.” said NMRC worker Jerry Lopez to sum up the sightings of the pilot figure.

Some of the ghosts can sometimes be a nuisance though.  “Another time in another room that’s in another corner [patients] would call and say, ‘You need to ask this man to get out of this room because he’s in here smoking and we’re on oxygen,’” said Scherff.

The patient in the room claimed the man walked in, sat on the edge of the bed, and lit up a cigarette.  This was said to have happened several times.

Scherff also recalls another nurse one night telling her of how she ran across a short blonde woman in the building who was telling her that she wasn’t doing her job the right way.  The woman abruptly and mysteriously disappeared leading some to speculate that perhaps she had once been a nurse there.  It is also said that a woman in high heels can be heard getting out of the elevator and walking across the hall to a water fountain on some nights.

Another story goes that years ago one of the male workers went to take a nap during his break in a room down the hall. Later on one of the nurses thought she saw the same man up and walking around but in different clothes.  Eventually the real man came back from his break only to find the other nurses confused as to why he would not answer them earlier and why he had been wearing different clothes.  Their conclusion was that it must have been another ghost.

These are but a few of the strange things that occasionally happen at the Roswell Rehab building and there are many more night workers not quoted here that can certainly tell you the same thing.  A film crew also captured some “anomalous footage” of something at the NMRC one night.  The footage has never seen a large audience though due to the fact that it was filmed for inclusion in the currently shelved Discovery Channel series X-Ops of which Jim Marrs was involved in.

While the NMRC building certainly has a long and interesting history, new plans are currently underway to possibly move to a new building that has yet to be built.  But what will happen to the old building and its ghosts?

When asked what he thinks will happen if the NMRC moves into a new home one day David Rocha says, “There’s no telling what they’re going to do with this building.  I’m sure there’ll be more stories said if they leave it open with whoever has it next.”