La Planchada of Mexico City’s Hospital Juarez

Beginning in the 1930s, many doctors at Mexico City’s Hospital Juarez began reporting a mysterious improvement in the condition of some of their patients. When asked about these miraculous recoveries the patients all claimed to have been visited in the night by a nurse in an immaculately ironed but quite old fashioned uniform. They claimed that she merely sat with the for several hours speaking to them until they fell asleep and when they awoke the next morning they felt much better. The hospital administration, local government and the press all went to great lengths to try to discover the identity of this mysterious nurse, but all their efforts led to nothing. Still the nurse was reported from cured patients who could not tell what she had done to heal them.

She became known as La Planchada, ‘The Ironed Lady’, because of her neatly ironed uniform, and she has continued to be reported down the decades to the present day. A great deal of legend and speculation has grown surrounding her. Most say she wears a very old 1920s or 30s style nurses uniform. Some have claimed to have taken her for a living nurse and only later realized her footsteps made no sound. Yet others have said she seems to be surrounded by a faint other wordly blueish glow and exudes an aura of peace and calm.

In one version of the story she is claimed to be a nurse who was distraught at having accidentally caused the death of one of her patients and who came back after her own death to atone for this by saving as many people as she could. In another she is an angel who comes to earth in the form of a nurse to heal the city’s sick.

Whatever the truth to the identity of La Planchada patients at Hospital Juarez still claim to be cured by the mysterious and peaceful ghost.

By Adriana Aguirre-Santos