University Hospital Waterford – known locally as Ardkeen – sits on a gently sloping site on the eastern edge of Waterford city, and carries within its walls a history considerably older and more complicated than its modern name suggests.

In 1947, Waterford County Council acquired Ardkeen House and fifty acres of surrounding land. What rose in its place was Ardkeen Sanatorium, a purpose-built tuberculosis hospital designed by the architectural firm Nolan and Quinlan and officially opened on 21st June 1952 by the Minister for Health, Dr. Séamus Ryan. The buildings were laid out in a fan shape on a southern-facing slope, each ward unit fitted with open verandas so that patients could benefit from direct sunlight – the standard thinking of the sanatorium era, when fresh air and rest were among the few tools available to those treating TB. Thousands of patients passed through Ardkeen during the years when tuberculosis was still cutting through Irish communities at a devastating rate. With the arrival of effective drug treatments and the subsequent decline of the disease, the sanatorium was repurposed as a general hospital in 1958, and has expanded steadily in the decades since.

It is perhaps unsurprising that a site with this depth of history – decades of illness, suffering, and death accumulated long before the hospital took its current form – should carry stories of a different kind.

Hospital porters have long reported the figure of a nun moving through the grounds at night. She follows no particular route and causes no disturbance – she is simply there, and then she is not. Whether she belongs to an earlier era of the site’s life, when religious orders played a central role in Irish healthcare, is unknown.

A second account comes from the main lifts. A mother and daughter entered together, and as the doors closed the daughter noticed a man standing with them – dressed in pyjamas and a dressing gown, the universal uniform of the hospital patient. When the man moved directly into the path of the mother, the daughter called out to her. The mother turned, puzzled. She had felt nothing and seen no one. The lift, as far as she was concerned, had been empty except for the two of them.

The most detailed account involves a patient recovering from surgery in a private ward. A clamp had been placed during the procedure and was due to be checked overnight before removal the following day. The patient was drifting towards sleep when she felt the bedclothes drawn back and hands checking the site. A short time later, the same thing happened again. She opened her eyes this time, and there was a nurse standing over her – apologetic, professional, reassuring. The patient mentioned that the check had already been done a few minutes earlier. The nurse paused. She had only just arrived. She had not been in the room before.

Other patients have woken during the night to a different and more unsettling sensation – the feeling of a weight pressing down on them, as though someone were seated on their chest.