Twenty-two years of grievance letters from ‘A Former Resident Who Remains Concerned’ — and management has been responding to them

The suggestion box at Shady Pines Care Facility, 4400 Isle of Hope Road, Savannah, Georgia, is a laminated pine box mounted at wheelchair height near the second-floor nurse’s station. It has been there since 1999. Since 2003, someone — or something — has been using it to file formal complaints about the temperature in Room 214, the quality of the Thursday bingo prizes, and what the letters describe, consistently, as ‘a persistent and disrespectful attitude among overnight nursing staff toward the residents of this institution, living and otherwise.’ That last phrase appears in fourteen of the twenty-two recovered letters. I read it standing in the hallway outside Room 214 at approximately nine in the morning on a Tuesday, holding a photocopy, and I will tell you the air in that corridor was noticeably colder than the air six feet in any other direction.

The letters came to light during an internal compliance audit triggered by a licensing review in March of this year. The auditor, a woman named Brenda Castillo who works for the Georgia Department of Community Health and who I spoke with for forty-five minutes in a Denny’s parking lot, told me she flagged the letters on day two of the review and spent the remaining three days trying to determine whether they constituted a records violation. ‘My job is to look for paperwork anomalies,’ she said. ‘This was an anomaly. I documented it. What it is, exactly, is above my pay grade.’ She would not elaborate. She did accept a Dragon Ice I had in the truck. I consider that a sign of good character.

Community Notice

The handwriting doesn’t match any current resident, any former staff member we’ve identified, or any resident in our records going back to 1991. It also doesn’t smudge. I don’t know what that means. I’m not saying it means anything.

— Brenda Castillo, Compliance Auditor, Georgia Department of Community Health

Twenty-Two Years of Documented Grievances, Zero Postage Stamps

The letters are postmarked — this is the detail that keeps me up, and I sleep in The Evidence Vehicle approximately one hundred and fifty nights a year, so my baseline for ‘things that keep me up’ is already high. Every letter carries a postmark from the Savannah central mail processing facility dated within forty-eight hours of its apparent deposit in the suggestion box. No envelope shows evidence of having passed through external mail. Postal inspector Leonard Waverly, who I reached by phone and who asked me not to call him at home again, confirmed that the postmarks are legitimate USPS impressions and that there is no mechanism by which a letter could acquire a valid postmark without entering the mail stream. He then told me the call was being recorded. I told him mine was too. We agreed to disagree on what that meant.

I spoke with twenty-five current and former staff members over three days on site. The consensus breaks into two camps with a hard line between them. Camp one: there is a rational explanation nobody has found yet. Camp two, which I will quote directly from a night-shift nurse named Darlene Okonkwo who has worked the second floor for eleven years: ‘Honey, we know who it is. Everybody knows who it is. We just don’t say it out loud because then we have to think about what that means for all the paperwork.’ What that means, for the record, is that the facility has been receiving, logging, and in some cases formally responding to communications from what multiple staff members privately acknowledge is a Ghost — specifically believed to be a former resident named Mr. Augustin Prewitt, who died in Room 214 in February of 2003 and who was, by all surviving accounts, a man who felt strongly about institutional accountability.

He filed three complaints with the ombudsman’s office when he was alive. Three. In fourteen months. So this is — this is consistent. This is very on-brand for Mr. Prewitt.

— Darlene Okonkwo, Night Shift Nurse, Shady Pines Care Facility (11 years)

That last point in the factbox is the one I keep coming back to on the drive home — when I take it, which won’t be for a few more days because I have an outstanding question for the facility administrator that she hasn’t answered yet and it’s on the list in my notebook and it stays on the list until I get an answer. The Thursday bingo prizes were upgraded. The facility changed policy in response to a complaint from a man who died in 2003. I do not know whether to call this a ghost story or an administrative success. I am going to call it both. I am going to call it both very loudly, which is apparently how I call everything, and I am going to follow this until someone gives me a straight answer or asks me to leave the premises, whichever comes second.