Pensacola Hospital (tour stop 8)
8. Pensacola Hospital (aka Old Sacred Heart Hospital) was a state-of-the-art facility when it opened in 1915. On the night of January 30, 1931, 19 year-old Gretchen Gregory coasted Henry Moore's roadster coupe up to the hospital’s front entrance. She knocked on the front door. Yes, Gretchen had to knock on the door of the hospital. It was, after all, 11:30 or 11:45 p.m.. The night supervisor, a Nurse Dumas, answered the door and managed to coerce Gretchen into returning to the car and driving around to the ambulance entrance.
Having only driven a car once, or maybe twice, in her life and only to church and only with the assistance of her brother, Gretchen stalled the car before she reached the ambulance entrance. From the stalled vehicle, hospital personnel carried the body of Henry Moore into the hospital. Here’s Nurse Dumas’ account: “And my idea was to get the man out of the car and get him up there and get a doctor to him as quick as I could. And I had his head and I saw he was a young boy and I was thinking how badly his mother and father would feel.” The doctor would confirm what the night supervisor already knew: Henry Moore was dead. By the time the police arrived to the hospital they had a murder investigation on their hands.