The hospital is the place we go to when our lives are in danger and we want to live—and so it is a place of tragedy, triumph, and more than a few inexplicable events. From the horrors of the body to the spectres of the supernatural, here are some of the spookiest occurrences medical professionals have ever experienced.
#1 Secrets Revealed
I overheard an old lady whisper this to her old husband dying of kidney problems. "You are going to beat this, you got away with murder, this is nothing."
#2 Time for Recess!
On one floor of the hospital, there is a room where different patients often complain of hearing noisy children playing between 1-4 am. This room is on the far end of the unit away from the nurses' station and next to only one other room. The TV is always off at the time. My hospital does not have a pediatric section and visiting hours are over at 2100.
#3 It’s All About Attitude
Checked in on a patient before the end of my shift and she was in good spirits, had been joking with me the whole time. Her condition was tenuous (new trach) but she had been positive throughout. I asked how she was doing and she replied by singing "The old gray mare ain't what she used to be" and wished me a good night. I came in the next morning and she had coded and died overnight.
#4 Bacon Wrap
I had a diabetic foot patient a couple weeks ago who thought that wrapping his foot in raw bacon would help get rid of bacteria. He’d apparently been doing it awhile, ‘cause it cost him four toes.
#5 Logical Explanation
We had something happen a few years ago where people were hearing mysterious noises back at my hospital, so I've heard. They ended up finding homeless people living in the walls or ducts or something since the adjacent part of the hospital was under construction.
#6 Yes, Dear
Patient comes in coding. We are working on him and getting nothing, so we bring in his wife to say goodbye and she starts yelling at him at the top of her lungs. He comes back so we arrange transfer to a tertiary hospital and he codes again, so she comes back and yells at him again, at which point he comes back again.
Cut to later on, they are loading him into the helicopter to be transferred and he codes again, so they bring him back into our ER after working on him for a bit on the helipad, his wife yells at him again and once again he immediately comes back. Eventually, they decide to have his wife ride in the helicopter with him to make sure she can scare him back to life if he were to code again. The guy ended up living, received a heart transplant and is still alive to this day—all thanks to his wife scaring the life back into him.
#7 Just in the Nick of Time
This happened to a respiratory therapist that I used to work with. She was working at an old hospital and had finished her rounds on mother-baby. As she got in the elevator to leave, a red-haired nurse on the elevator said to her, "Go back. They need you." She didn't really think about it, she just hopped back off the elevator and returned. A baby had coded and they needed respiratory. Of course, she had no explanation for how that nurse knew what was going on or even who she was.
I don't believe in ghosts, really, but every time I tell this story, I get goosebumps. That same therapist would swear that she had seen a large cat on the roof of the nursing home we worked at. No one believed her. Months later, local news reported a bobcat was caught in the city limits near a creek that passed by the nursing home. Suddenly her story was totally plausible so part of me wants to believe this one is too.
#8 I’m Just a Lonely Blue Boy
So one of my professors in nursing school had a story about working in med surgery in the 90s and some woman kept asking the nurses to "stop letting that blue boy come in my room and bother me" and saying things like "he looks sick, and someone should be taking care of him." Now, since this is a page of ghost stories, I'm sure you've already guessed that there was no little boy.
But, a boy had died in the ER from some hypothermia issue earlier that week, and it was still on everyone's minds. It became a big deal by the end of the day. Nurses and other staff were coming from all over the hospital to try to talk with this woman or otherwise touch the story of the haunted ghost boy. Turns out it was too much digoxin and some doc caught it. Once they fixed her levels, no more zany, off-color hallucinations.
#9 Unfinished Business
Last year: my grandfather started desperately pleading for his life with his German captors from WWII. The doctor present was smart and said in German: "You are free, Herr Caticature. You are free." And then he died.
#10 Just the Same Old Routine
I work in intensive care at a small community hospital. We have a nine-bed unit that is completely closed off from the medical floor via two doorways. Two nights ago, we were all sitting at our station and charting when we all heard footsteps coming down the hall. It’s a completely open unit where you can see every room from everywhere.
No one was in the unit with us. CT is below us and they close at five (unless an emergency comes in) and we only have people on the second floor, the third is used as storage, so no one was above us. It happened two or three times.
Then last night cupboard doors kept opening and shutting in the two empty rooms. I finally asked my coworker what the heck was going on and she just told me that it usually happens after someone passes, especially if it was sudden. We had two codes last week that we lost and I guess everyone has had weird stuff happening for a couple days.
#11 What Lurks Behind Those Curtains
I was still being oriented to F/T nights. A resident rang and was upset, stating they were scared as something had gone past their curtain. We reassured the resident and went on our way. Then, not too long after, another resident on the same side of the hall said she had also seen something go past their curtain. Could have been something outside but it was creepy.
#12 Networking With the Patients
Not mine, but a fellow nurse that I know. We were talking about patients' hallucinations when he told me about this time he was walking past a patient's room, an elderly woman with dementia, and she was chatting up a storm with someone. He asked her who she was talking to, and the woman replied "that nice man in the black and white striped shirt." A while later he went into another patient with dementia’s room, and she asked where the man with the striped shirt had gone.
#13 Agonizing Request
DNR patient was on comfort care. Was on a high dose of morphine and hallucinating. She would alternate between grasping for things not there and trying to climb out of bed. She was too unsteady to walk so my job was to sit in the room and make sure she was safe. She tried to get up and I went to ask her what she needed. She grabbed my arm and pulled me down towards her face and said, very angrily, "kill me."
#14 This One Is Weigh Too Creepy
My friend is a PCA on a peds oncology unit. She told me this story. They had a teenage boy who had leukemia. He was in and out of the hospital for a year. He was a big boy, much bigger than any other kids on the unit (160 kg). He passed away in a room in the BMT hallway. A day or so later, they're admitting a kid to that room.
The scale turns on by itself and goes directly to the weight of the kid who had died. Totally freaky because it was definitely his weight, as he weighed so much more than anyone else on the floor. She said she has tons of ghost stories from her floor, but that's the only one she's told me so far.
#15 A Familiar Voice
Patient had been in CCU (where I worked at the time) for a long period of time (six months). We had finally been transferred to med/surg floor and he coded. We worked on him for 45 min to an hour and he had no pulse or heart rhythm the entire time. The docs had decided to call it. His family walks in the room, leans over him, rubs his chest lightly and says his name. He immediately regains a pulse and regains consciousness. How do you explain that one?
#16 Sounds Like Something out of a Movie
Before I was a nurse, I worked in Industrial Hygiene, mostly supervising asbestos removal projects. One of the projects was an old abandoned TB hospital in Spartanburg, SC. The entire front of the building had been fixed up cosmetically for the movie Sleeping with the Enemy so it looked somewhat modern. As soon as you stepped beyond the movie set portion of the hospital, things got really spooky immediately.
Most of the windows were either broken or painted over so there wasn't a lot of light. One of the first things you came to was a hallway with a hole in the floor to the basement. To get around it, you had to go through an X-ray room. All the original equipment seemed to be there: metal table, lead barrier with window, control panel.
The kitchen had trees growing through the windows that weren't painted. Old equipment was laying around throughout the place: bedpan washers, some broken wheelchairs, old bed frames, etc. It was a place you expected something ghostly to happen with the atmosphere and knowing about all the people that went there and died. There's nothing more spooky than an abandoned hospital of any kind, I think.
#17 Ring a Ling Ding
Lost a young lady after she coded unexpectedly one day. In the days following the emergency call, a bell would ring randomly from the room at night. Single room, no other patients in there, door was closed every time. The electricians came twice to "fix" the problem, both times finding nothing wrong but went in and changed the bells anyway. Still continued only at night, then eventually just stopped. I'm sure it was just coincidence but you never really know, do you? Definitely spooked everyone out on the ward!
#18 Cold Case
An interesting and creepy true story about a nursing student: Maura Murray had emailed her professors asking for a week off due to an undefined “family emergency” (which it turned out no one in her family was aware of). Her car was later found crashed. After that, witnesses from the scene reported that the woman who had been in the car had refused offers of help, claiming that she was already contacting roadside assistance.
The police showed up to find no body or trace of her at the scene, and no one has seen or heard from her since. This was in 2004. People are quick to blame all of her actions on latent head injury symptoms, but there's still just too many odd things that happened for it to be completely explained in my mind.
#19 An Eerie Prediction
I'm an apprentice funeral director. We went to a nursing home on a removal and as we were walking down the hall one of the patients got antsy and opened the door to his room and saw us walking with the stretcher. "I'll see you next week boys." And guess who we had to pick up the next week.
#20 Totally Normal, Someone’s Just Touching Your Feet
I was looking after a patient who needed one on one care when I still worked at one of the public hospitals, who had vivid hallucinations of people crawling on the floor and touching the feet/legs of anyone not in bed. She went on to describe in great horror-story type detail the person she saw touching my feet, while I sat in a chair next to her for part of my shift.
It was actually made worse by the fact that she was a moderately good storyteller and the fact that I knew she was mentally ill/actually hallucinating and not just pulling my leg for something to pass the time...
#21 The Hiss of Death
I work in a cardiovascular surgical ICU. We have a lot of messed up people (both physically and mentally) that come through our unit. We had a stretch of nights where each corner room of our unit (it is a perfect square) reported seeing a cat walking around.
Not a friendly cat either, apparently. The thing was hissing at them. The accounts were so similar to each other we actually spent probably a half hour looking around for a cat and then had security/plan ops come look as well. No cat was ever seen or found. Two of those four patients coded the next day.
#22 Reconnecting With Old Friends
My father-in-law sat at his mother's bedside for days as she was dying. She was in and out of it and spent a lot of time in conversation with her parents and siblings—who were all long dead. One of the last intelligible things she said was, "leave the gate open, Rodney. I'm coming."
#23 Gimme a Hallelujah!
About two years ago, we treated patients during a fungal meningitis outbreak. Our acute care floor has a census of 20. During this, at least 10-15 were meningitis patients, age ranging from twenties to nineties. There are no shared rooms and all the patients were in isolation, no contact with one another. Many of them had the same hallucinations, children in the corners of their rooms and auditory hallucinations of religious music.
#24 Oh, I Didn’t See You There!
I did my clinical as a CNA in a memory care unit. I helped feed this woman. She never really moved. Never talked. It was like she was in a coma or something. I would wheel her into the dining room. I can hardly get any real food in her. I'm able to slide in some special ice cream. For days she doesn't move or have any response. So one day I'm feeding her and talking to myself pretty much. After about ten minutes she slowly turns her head and says "Oh hello", then she rotates her head back to her blank staring position. Super creepy!!
#25 Goodbye and Good Luck
I worked in a nursing home as an RNA. While I worked there, 7 residents called me into their rooms to tell me "thank you and goodbye" on different nights over the 3 years I was there. All of them died during the night after they told me. They all knew, I don't know how, but there is no other way to explain it. One would be a coincidence, maybe even 2, but 7?
#26 Anything Voo Can Doo I Can Doo Better
Night nurse for four years now at an old folk's home. Had a palliative who couldn't sleep because of incredibly vivid hallucinations. She would describe voodoo people around her room that would just stare at her waiting for her to die. I didn't take it seriously until the lady across the hall (who rarely ever spoke) starting seeing them in her room too. Legitimate shivers.
#27 Bully in the Corner
This might get buried and is not really nurse related other than the fact my grandmother's nurse told me. My great grandmother was 94 and just started suffering with dementia. She told the home nurses and me that there was a little boy in the corner of the living room who would taunt and tease my great grandmother while laughing at her telling her she was going to die.
Well at first it was a little disturbing and we all shrugged it off because of her dementia. But then everything got real when my best friend came over with his little boy who is about 3 or 4. The little guy pointed over to the same corner and yelled: "I'm going to beat you up!" When we asked him what that was about, he told us that he saw another little boy in the corner and he is not nice! We flipped out! I got shivers just typing this. Maybe Nana wasn't hallucinating.
#28 The Unexplainable
I work midnights in a long term care facility as a nurse’s assistant. I have two men under my care and both of them are unable to use their call lights. They have severe dementia and debilitating Parkinson's disease, but stillm, their lights are looped around their bed rail. One night their light came on and I went to answer it already confused and creeped out.
I turned it off and left the room. Before I could get two doors up the light came back on. I went in there and both lights were unplugged from the wall and thrown under their beds. I fished them out, plugged them back in and left. I've seen shadows standing over the dying and felt a tap on my shoulder while doing chest compressions so I knew that lady had passed. I'm not a believer but some of those things can't be explained.
#29 I’m Convinced It's the Kid From The Grudge
Private duty home health nurse here. I worked third shift in a patient's house. The patient lived in a very old house with their parents. I often saw flashes of light in the hallway between 2 am and 4 am. Sometimes I would see a figure move by the open door. Everyone else has seen it as well. The creepiest thing has to be when I heard the dad scream at about 2 pm.
Middle of the day. He was in bed with the windows covered so his room was dark. He claimed he felt someone sit on his bed. He assumed it was one of his kids, so he told the person to get out so he could sleep. The bed kept moving, so he sat up to see which kid it was. He said he saw a small pale kid with black hair and black eyes staring at him. He screamed and tried pushing the thing away, but his hands went through it. That's when he ran out of the room screaming. Pretty creepy.
#30 Death Rattle
Worked security through college at a local hospital. The only "creepy" thing I remember is when a dead man moaned. One of my duties was to help wheel in patients who had expired down to the in-house morgue. Once we were wheeling and older man from the E.R. down, and halfway down the hallway he let out this low moan. I started to panic, thinking that he was coming back to life, but the RN explained to me (newbie) that sometimes the air in the lungs doesn't come out until sometime later, or is delayed for a bit.
#31 Doesn’t Make Any Sense How She Survived
I was working as a helicopter retrieval doctor in Australia last year. Called at 2am to a car crash in the middle of nowhere. Patient was 150 kg (330lbs.) and 5-feet tall. So drunk you could smell the alcohol in her blood. Had been ejected from the front passenger seat of a car through the front windscreen. Wearing no seatbelt.
She had lain undiscovered for three hours on the side of the road. The temperature that night was 2 degrees centigrade. Her entire right scalp had been degloved. Blood pressure and oxygen saturation were unrecordable at all times on transfer due to shock, hypothermia, and body habitus. Carotid pulse only. GCS 3 (completely unconscious).
Due to her ENORMOUS obesity any movement of her head from the position she happened to land in obstructed her airway. If she had landed in any other position she would have had no way to breathe and died. Two hour flight from nearest trauma center. Unable to intubate her without drugs due to muscle tone. Scariest RSI of my life.
Gave her drugs to paralyze then intubate in the middle of a paddock, on ambulance stretcher, under lights, with patient placed in RAMP position. With best rewarming we could do in the helicopter core temperature was 29 centigrade on arrival in ER. We didn't carry blood on the helicopter at that time. Survived and discharged neurologically intact.
#32 Phantom Bell Rings and an Apparition Appears
Used to work in a personal care home. A couple of times, a day or so after a resident had passed, their call bell would go off in their room. No one was in the room when the call bell went off on any of the occasions. We had one resident die pretty traumatically—nurses had to perform CPR because he was a full code).
That night, the midnight staff said they saw him at the end of the hall just walking down like he always did. Then, the alarm on the door to the outside—it was a secured unit for Alzheimer's/dementia—went off. It was the door he always tried when he was looking to get out.
#33 You’re Being Watched
Worked at a hospital doing transport for a couple of years. The transport home base was in the basement of the hospital, where all the laundry is done and supplies are also sorted there. I hated working late nights after this incident. On this particular night, I was the only one in the basement when I heard whistling at the end of the hallway by the elevator.
I poked my head around the corner expecting to see my only coworker on duty that night, but there was absolutely no one there. I shrugged it off, I'm not easily spooked. Nights are slow, so I ate some snacks and hung out in the break room for a bit. Next thing I know, I hear a loud bang. I walked into the hallway and a bed is rolling down the hall bumping into the sides. At this point, I think that my coworker is pranking me.
I radio him and he says he's upstairs in the cafeteria. Ah, I still don't believe him and think I'll catch him in the act. I walk past the laundry room and the machines start. Pop my head in there expecting to find him but it's completely empty. Okay, starting to get a little nervous. I walk into the laundry room, and the machines completely stop.
I freeze, then run out and head towards the elevator when I hear whistling again. At this point, I know I am the only worker in the basement. As I am standing there waiting for the elevator, things start falling off of the shelves down the hall. Boxes of gloves, tissues, packages of tubes. I am literally standing there watching them fall off one by one at the opposite end of the hallway.
I kid you not, my entire body broke out in goosebumps, my hair stood on end and I had this strong gut feeling like I was being watched, I was not alone. As I'm getting into the elevator, I feel what feels like someone brushing my arm. Went upstairs and found my coworker in the cafeteria, freaked out to him. I got the heck out of there and transferred soon after that. The creepy thing to add to it is that I usually whistle mindlessly to myself at work, it was almost as if the spirit was mimicking me. Creepiest feeling ever.
#34 Hallucinating Religious Music Is One of My Greatest Fears
About 2 years ago we treated patients during a fungal meningitis outbreak. Our acute care floor has a census of 20. During this, at least 10 to 15 were meningitis patients, age ranging from people in their 20s to their 90s. There are no shared rooms and all the patients were in isolation, no contact with one another. Many of them had the same hallucinations of children in the corners of their rooms and auditory hallucinations of religious music.
#35 Nightly Visitor
I used to work in St Barts hospital in London, which in parts is over 1,000 years old. One of the buildings had 2 floors (with massively high ceilings), and so the floors were taken out and rearranged to make into 5 floors. The nurses working night shift would often tell us of the ghost of a night nurse who wandered silently doing her "rounds" at night—but due to the new floors, only her head would be visible drifting down the ward.
#36 Heaven Sounds Luxe as Heck
My father-in-law was in the hospital and his heart stopped. He was dead but they revived him. Then he kept talking about a heart surgery. Finally, my wife said, "Dad, you didn't have heart surgery." He said, "Yes I did. I remember the big diamond-encrusted scepter that was thrust into my heart to fix me." I don't know what it means, and he died a few days later so I can't get any more details.
#37 The Man in Black
Used to work in a skilled nursing facility. I was usually assigned to the Alzheimer's ward. One night I'm in the linen room stocking my cart, and I heard someone shuffle up behind me, then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and there was no one else in the room. The door was still shut too. Another lady started to complain that a man was coming into her room at night (again, Alzheimer's so I didn't think much of it).
So to reassure her, I told her I'd check on her throughout the night. She complained of this man every single night for two more weeks when I asked her to describe him to me. "He's real handsome, and wears a black suit. Oh. He's right behind you now, honey." That freaked me the heck out. Of course, there was no one behind me. She died the next night in her sleep.
#38 I Get Around
I was a new nurse at our hospital and had only been working there a couple of months. I had brought a patient of mine up to day surgery from the ER for an endoscopy and they called back down and asked me to bring her family up because she only spoke Italian (and not enough English) and they needed someone to consent for the procedure.
After dropping them off, I walked past the waiting room to head back down the hall to the elevators. I took the back way to get to the ER and the hallways are all deserted—it used to be the pediatric wing of the hospital, but that is all shut down for years and the rooms are just empty and full of broken equipment and beds and crap.
As I reached the old nurses' station at the T junction between the pediatric hallway in the hallway that goes to the elevators, I saw a little girl standing across from the nurse’s station further down the hall. She had big pigtails, was wearing a brown dress, white shoes, and holding a teddy bear. I thought perhaps she was a family member who had walked away from the day surgery waiting room.
I was concerned that she would go into one of the rooms and get hurt or lost, so I said, "Hey little girl, what are you doing? You don't need to be over there, you're going to get hurt..." and I walked around the nursing station to go grab her hand and bring her back. I kid you not, she VANISHED as I got about 15 feet away from her.
Every hair on my body stood up straight and I turned and ran like a bat out of hell down to the elevator. I pounded that button for what seemed like an eternity until the elevator got to the floor. As I got back to the ER I walked up to the nurses' desk, white as a sheet, and one of the older nurses looked at me and said, "Jesus Christ what's wrong with you?"
I remember babbling like an idiot as I tried to tell them what happened. After listening to me for a moment or two, the nurse said, "Oh you saw the little girl ghost...she's been around here for years..." and I remember saying "Well thanks for telling me about it before this...!" Apparently, the ghost has even been seen down in the ER, ducking in and out of patient rooms and peeking around curtains. My wife worked up on the 7th floor and she said that one time on nights a whole row of patient rooms started yelling about a little girl that was running around in the rooms. I guess she gets around.
#39 Her Last Hope
My first hospice case. She was on morphine and started mock smoking. She looked at me, took my hand and said "please" in the most pleading voice I've ever heard. I sat with her body until the coroner arrived. She had no friends or family. Only her lawyer showed up. I've only done one hospice case since.
#40 We All Scream for Ice Cream
LPN here, I work in long term care currently, a lot of palliative residents always claim to hallucinate either small dogs or children eating ice cream before they die. It's always facility specific too. In one facility I work at I have had about six or seven residents claim to see a little girl eating ice cream, then they die that night. I’m going to find that little brat, she is causing me so much paperwork.
#41 Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite
Nurse here. I worked night shift when a ward patient's relative came running to the nurses' station in a panic. "Nurse! Come quick!" she cried. "What happened?" "You have to see it for yourself!" I ran to the ward when this little old lady patient was crying and holding on to the bed for dear life. Her bed was shaking.
Now, you're probably thinking that the lady was the one causing all that shaking. But she was this frail, practically emaciated thing. She couldn't have even barely rattled the bed rails. The ward had only two other patients in it and their respective watchers. Everyone was huddled in a corner, shaking in fright. Apparently, that particular ward was seldom used, and the bed that old lady lay in was rarely occupied. People who have laid in it complained of nightmares where they hear screams and laughter of angry children. I guess some restless spirit called dibs on that particular bed.
#42 Maybe She’s in the Wrong Profession...
A coworker of mine is cursed. We work on the med/surg unit in my hospital and for the last 12 deaths on our floor she has been working, but she has NEVER been the nurse taking care of those patients. We're keeping a tally now. After death four it was funny. Now at death 12 it's scary. I personally never believed in that mumbo jumbo before this, but now every time she is on with me, I watch my patients like a hawk. Just in case.
#43 They Were Afraid of the Dark
I was pulling a guard shift in the CHS on FOB Speicher one night in Iraq. There hadn't been any action for the whole previous week so the staff was all racked out. I was walking the halls and everything was supposed to be off or on standby. I walked passed one room that they used for locals who were victims of trauma.
The lights were on so I toggled the switch down to turn them off. I started walking down the hall again and I saw the lights come back on out of the corner of my eye. This is when I went into alert mode. I cleared the corner and looked into the room. Nothing. I put the switch back in the down position again and went to call it up on the icom.
The radio was on the fritz. So I began walking back to the CQ desk to report it in person. The lights turned back on. At this point, I'm a little on edge. I can't radio in for help, there is nobody on this side of the compound that would hear me yell, and the light switch position keeps changing when the lights go back on. Keep in mind that I'm on a Forward Operating Base in a combat zone.
I don't know what I was expecting when I went to clear the corner and look into the room again, but I saw nothing but an empty room, a gurney, a heart monitor, and a crash cart. I couldn't tell you to this day why I said what I did, but I was worried that if I didn't, the lights would keep switching back on. I said: "If you're scared of the dark, I'll leave the light on for you."
I finished my shift and left the light on. I left a note with the desk that one of the surgeons had asked me to always leave that light on just in case they had an emergency come in. For the remainder of my shifts, that light always remained on.
#44 A Date With an Angel
I'm an RN, and while I was a student I was caring for a lady who had end-stage renal failure, had a DNAR, and was shutting down. We were having a little chat when she stopped, looked over my shoulder and said "Bill's here love, I've got to go," and swiftly stopped breathing. Read her old notes and Bill was her deceased husband.
#45 Awww He Came Back for His Wife
For the last 4 years, I've worked summers and weekends at a nursing home in my hometown. Two years ago, we had a married couple in their 90s (He was 95, she was 96). I always found them adorable. They spent their entire days together, and it was clear to me from the first day I met them just how much they cared for and depended on one another.
She always waited for him at the table so they could have breakfast together, and made sure the staff made his coffee the way he liked it. They slept in separate rooms because he was suffering from (relatively mild) dementia and would occasionally get up during the night, confused, which disturbed her sleep. Yet they would always end the day sitting in her room, drinking tea and talking before we helped him to his room to go to sleep.
A few months after celebrating their iron anniversary (70 years!), the husband died. It wasn't really unexpected, as he had been sick for a few weeks, and the nurses knew he wouldn't recover. Two weeks later, his wife got weaker and mostly stayed in her bed. Now, she was not demented at all. At times, she seemed brighter than me—she kicked my butt at crosswords—which is why something that happened while she was on her deathbed creeped me out.
I was in her room helping her adjust her blankets, near the end of my shift, around 10 pm. She had been sleeping before I came in to check on her, so the room was dark. She had complained about being cold, so I closed and locked the window. As usual, we were making small talk, when suddenly, she went silent, looked towards the door and said "John?" (her husband's name). "John, is that you? No, John, wait."
Then the door to her room slammed shut at tremendous force. I honestly do not believe in ghosts or anything similar. I'm not a very spiritual person. Yet that terrified the crap out of me. I had just closed her window, and all doors in the nursing home automatically closes and locks at 8 pm. There's no way it was the wind.
I only worked with four other people that night, all of whom were in the staff room at the time. All other patients who might be able to walk around on their own were sleeping. There was literally no one nearby. She barely seemed to notice, not even jumping from the loud noise the door made and told me "It's ok, you can leave now. Good night!" She died two days later, in her sleep.
I barely ever tell anyone about this, ‘cause I never thought anyone would believe me. And because to this day, I don't understand what happened, and it creeps me out.
#46 A Light in the Dark
I work at a nursing home. I'm not actively involved in the direct care of the residents, but I still interact with them on a daily basis. There was one woman in my unit who had a son who visited her every day. She was in hospice, so he wanted to be around as much as possible for his mom. She passed away during one of the rare times he wasn't in the building.
We called him to let him know, and he got in his car immediately to come be there when the funeral home came. The aides had finished preparing her body to be taken out, and we were all just waiting on the son to get there to call the funeral home. Her room was empty. The moment he rounded the corner to the hallway her room was in, her call light went on. The nurse on duty and I looked at it, then at each other, as if confirming that we both saw it. As soon as he went into the room, it went off again. That's the strangest experience I've had so far.
#47 That’s One to Add to the Nightmares
Psychiatric RN here...I worked in an acute care adult unit, but was sent to work with the kids one evening shift. It was after 10 pm, all patients were in their rooms and in bed. I heard a child screaming and a psych tech trying to calm him. I ran to the room, the 7-year-old boy was hysterical. He was crying, sweating, and shaking. He said he saw "something."
After he settled down, he told me that he saw a white man with gray hair in a hospital gown in his room. While we discussed what he saw, the child froze in fear, tears rolling down his face … he said "Ms. Whoawhoawhoathere be still. Oh my God he's right behind you." We decided to address "the man" and tell him that the little boy was scared…the boy said the man turned around and left after that.
The only thing anyone in the unit would have heard was the boy screaming at the beginning … all other discussion was in his room and quiet. Not even 3 minutes later, a 17-year-old male at the end of the hall started screaming. I ran to his room … he was standing on his bed trying to get away from a white man in a hospital gown.
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#48 The Nurse Healeth and the Nurse Killeth
Never anything paranormal, but I had an older patient who kept every piece of paper from every hospital stay. His heart was in bad shape so I was desperately looking for anything to help our cardiologists out with. I finally found his records from when he had heart surgery. It was in Perris, CA in the 1980s. I was just reading a book about nurses who became serial killers, when sure enough I see records with the name Robert Diaz. I was the nurse for a man whose former nurse was a serial killer.
#49 Maybe Let’s Brick That Room off
We have a cursed room on my floor. Two of the most traumatic deaths I witnessed happened in this particular room. A patient arrived to us stable but unresponsive. Out of nowhere, wakes up in the middle of the night, walks to the bathroom, locks the door, and hangs himself with his belt.
Had a patient suddenly and unexpectedly bleed to death when a tumor caused an artery in his neck to burst. It looked like a crime scene. Wasn't a DNR, so we had to do compressions for a good 30 minutes in that bloodbath. Sad too. It was a man who had been on the unit for a couple of months. We all really liked him.
Also had a patient go crazy in there. She started throwing stool from her colostomy at the nurses and smearing it around her room. She was a middle-aged woman and did not have any evidence of trauma to her brain and no psychiatric history, or other chemical imbalances.
#50 Radical Cure
I had a pregnant woman whose ultrasound showed the baby had Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. It means the baby has half a heart, and it’s 100% fatal without surgery. She stopped seeing her obstetrician so she could have the baby in the forest and bathe it in breast milk to cure him.
#51 The Telltale Signs
I work a stroke/telemetry floor on the bought shift. Most of our patients are elderly. Apparently, there are two things that patients see before they pass away. Some will say that two men are walking in their rooms and telling them to get ready to leave. The patient will call and tell us that these men are big and abrasive in their demeanor.
They are either terrified or annoyed when they see the two men. The other thing they will see is a little boy who will go into their rooms and try to wake them up. The boy is usually loud and runs around their rooms. The patients will call and ask who's letting children just run around late at night. Several nights later, or even that same shift, we're coding or cleaning the patient for the funeral home to pick up.
#52 He Made a New Friend
I work on a pediatric bone marrow transplant unit, and sadly we have a lot of kids that pass. Our kids stay here for longer periods of time (usually 1-6 months inpatient) so we have to rotate them to different rooms to make sure everything is clean. One particular 3-year-old boy doesn't have family come to visit.
He never really communicates with staff and would only occasionally chatter to himself. We moved him to a room where a little girl had recently passed and we started noticing him talking to different places in the room and staring/nodding when alone. Then he started saying new English words though he hadn't had an increase in visitors.
My coworkers are convinced he's talking to the little girl that died there, and though I'm a pretty skeptical person, I still get the creeps when I walk by and see him talking to himself.
#53 With the Snap of a Finger
My friend went hiking with his family and he fell a few feet off a cliff they were climbing and he hit the back of his head on a rock. They called an ambulance and when they finally arrived at the hospital he was pronounced dead. He had no heartbeat or any brain waves. They were already unplugging everything and moving on with all the paperwork when he suddenly woke up the nurse screamed "he's awake!" and then chaos ensued all over again.
He was dead for about 7 minutes and he says the entire time he was laying down fully conscious in a really dark room (he calls it a room but doesn't really know). He said he couldn't tell how long it was but that suddenly he heard a sound like if someone snapped their fingers next to his ear and then he woke up in the hospital.
#54 Too Much to Hand-le
My town has two really old hospitals. One no longer functions as overnight, and the stories are unsettling. No one cleans the old ER alone, because all the lights and call bells go off. On other floors, there's a kid with his ball, a lady in a white dress, etc. A coworker was cleaning an entire floor utterly solo (the norm) and bounced between rooms because the cleaning solution stays wet for a few minutes. Upon returning to a freshly wiped bed, handprints were clearly visible.
#55 Listen to the Faucets
My mother trained as a nurse at the old Westminster Teaching Hospital in London in the 1950s. On one of her first night shifts, she was doing rounds in the children's ward. Everything was fine, all the kids were asleep, but in one of the rooms, she found the sink faucet running, which was a bit weird, because it had been fine when she'd been by a few minutes before.
She figured that one of the kids had got up and been thirsty or something, turned it off and carried on with the rounds. When her shift was over she checked out with the Matron, who asked if she had anything to report. She said there was nothing, except that someone had left a faucet on in one of the rooms. The Matron looked horrified and gasped out "oh no!"
She then explained that the ward was haunted by a ghost which washed its hands - leaving the faucet running - whenever a child was going to die. My mother laughed this off, pointed out that none of the kids in the ward were seriously ill and went home.
When she came in for her shift the next evening she discovered that a previously perfectly fine child in that room had had a sudden seizure and died only a few hours after she'd found the open faucet.
#56 Thinking 0f You
Patient had passed away during my shift. The patient was well known and liked on the ward. At handover that evening, I mentioned the patient had passed away. At that moment the door to the handover room (which I had closed) suddenly opened and shut just as I mentioned she had passed away. She was totally saying goodbye.
Later that month, on nights we were chatting about said patient at the nurses station, a card which was pinned on a notice board weirdly fell just as we started talking about her. Went to pick it up. It was a card from the patient’s family saying thanks for caring their parent. I thought it was quite nice.
#57 A Shocking Change of Heart
This is sad, but also creepy, and I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it. Had a 20-year-old kid, gang member, who was dying of primary liver cancer. Super unusual, aggressive, and terminal. He was angry at the universe. His family was there to comfort him, but he literally spat in their faces. Every ounce of energy he had left was angry and mean and ugly.
His mom would beg him to lighten up and accept Jesus into his heart. He would swing at her and tell her to screw herself. The family remained beside, in hopes he would chill out at the end. His last day, hours, moments, he was angry. The family called me into the room, and told me they thought he was going (he wasn't responding, Cheyne-Stokes breaths, eyes glossy and skin cold, the end was imminent).
His lovely mother, in her dearest attempt, whispered to him to go towards the light, to her Jesus. With his dying breath, he opened his eyes, looked at her and said: "Screw your Jesus!!!" A second or two later, he slowly turned his head to the to the left, and got the most horrific look on his face as if he was looking at something we couldn't see, and horrified, like in a bad movie, his face contorted. But the worst was yet to come.
Then he screamed with his last breath, eyes wide, "OH NOOOOOOO!!!!" then made a guttural noise and promptly fell back into the bed and died. Every family member was shaking and too frightened to speak, and I left the room and took two days off. I don't care if I never find out what he saw.
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#58 Heebie Jeebies
I worked hospital security for a while. There was one floor in the main bed towers where you could just feel something watching you, and you'd get this intense sense of dread. During the night and day, the same feeling. Later, I found out that floor had the most people die in the entire hospital. I like to think Im a very logical person, but I could feel some sort of dark energy on that floor.
#59 Sure, Let’s Provoke the Spirit
CNA here, have been working the night shift at hospitals for 7 years now and I have quite a few stories. Came into work one night and Jen, one of the nurses, told me and my other coworker Jay the creepiest thing happened a few hours earlier. A patient had passed in one of the rooms abruptly. The room was cleaned and was quickly occupied by another patient who had coded, was pronounced dead, but was resuscitated.
Soon after being admitted to his room he complained to the nurse, "I can't be in here. This man won't stop looking at me. He's really worried about his dog. His dog doesn't know that he's dead." She had assumed he was just seeing things and said, "Oh yeah? What does he look like?" He described the deceased patient perfectly.
I could see the chills running down her spine as she was telling us the story. Turns out the man did have a dog as well. The new admit was moved to another room. Jay said, "I don't believe in ghosts. Those aren't real. I wanna see it. Tonight I'm gonna provoke it so it can show itself." 3 am rolls around and all 3 of us are at the nursing station.
Jay starts playing YouTube videos of various puppy sounds. Soon after two lift team guys come up, we forget what we're doing and start another conversation. Suddenly, we all hear it, except for Jay. A dog bark. In the same room. Loudly, clear as ever. The lift team guys say, "Does someone have a dog in here?" Jen and I simultaneously lose it.
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#60 Looks Like He’s Going Back There...
Not my personal story, but when my mom worked as an ER nurse, a guy came in from a car accident and was losing blood. In the midst of resuscitation, the man jolts awake and screams "Don't let me go back there! Please, please, please don't let me go back!" A few seconds later they lost him.
#61 Dead Eyes
I got the opportunity to shadow nurses and surgeons for two of my class periods in high school. I never really experienced being in the ICU before. What was creepy for me was seeing how many unconscious people were fighting for their lives. I followed a nurse to a major heart attack patient. This guy was put under an induced coma, but his eyes stayed open.
The nurse had me help put gel over his eyes. It's been three years, and I still have his "dead" gaze stuck in my head. I also had to help reposition the guy, and it was like trying to move an extremely stiff mannequin. Seeing a human in a not-so-human state is extremely uncomfortable and creepy.
#62 Silent Shrieking
I am an RN and have had my share of odd happenings. One of the creepiest took place on the night shift at a hospital in Texas. I was caring for a man who was dying from liver failure. He was fairly young and his mother and girlfriend had been staying at his bedside for days. He was nearing death and had been unresponsive for days.
Late one night, I realized he was going to die shortly and woke his mom and girlfriend so they could say their goodbyes. His girlfriend sat next to his bed to hold his hand. Suddenly the man, who had been completely unresponsive for days, sits upright in bed with the most terrified expression I have ever seen.
His eyes were huge and terror-filled, his mouth was curled into what I can only describe as silent shrieking, and he was staring up at a ceiling corner. His girlfriend, of course, was thrilled, thinking that he was suddenly ok. She puts her hands on his head and tries to turn his head towards her so he could see her.
She's telling him she loves him and to look at her but he just continues to have the most bone-chilling look of pure fear on his face. When she manages to turn his head, his eyes continue to focus on the same spot on the ceiling. So there she is, holding his face towards her, shrieking at him to look and her, but he won't take his eyes off the same spot on the ceiling in the corner. And then he just simply fell back and died. It was awful.
#63 To Thine Own Self Be True
I work as an EMT, and the one I have that best fits the question is an elderly male who had fallen and hit his head a few hours before they called for an ambulance. The guy was screwed. All of the signs of a traumatic brain injury. All of his responses to our questions to this point were nonsensical.
We were about four minutes from the hospital when we tried talking to him again, and he seemed to come as clear as day and open his eyes and stare at us to say "I'm dead." My partner tries to say "oh, don't say that" and he stares more intensely at us to reiterate and say "no, I mean it, I'm dead." He died an hour later.
#64 The Handprint That Haunts Dreams
I used to work as a CNA in an Assisted Living Facility. First year working with a patient privately and there were no issues, nothing weird happened at all. Then I get asked to work overnights and at first it's still all good. I try to nap throughout the night as much as I can, but a couple months in I keep waking up in the middle of my naps.
Like being startled into wakefulness. Then I start to wake up to what feels like someone whispering my name in my ear. Okay, creepy, but maybe it's a dream. Then a week later I wake up to something just completely neutral, like not exactly male or female, just a voice violently shouting my name, like it echoed across the room when I was fully awakened.
Maybe it's still a dream? I don't know, folks. I try my best to rationalize. Right after this, my patient starts seeing things, of course. Talking to people that aren't there, accusing me of drugging her, seeing strange men in the window and people hiding in her closets. I suspect she has a UTI, but apparently, she actually had pneumonia and was hospitalized for a few days.
The worst thing, though, after all this happened? Every day at 5:45 PM my patient scoots on down to the dining hall for dinner and I get an hour's break. So one day in mid-January last year I wanted to take a shower because I did a lot of cleaning that day and just felt a bit grimy. I take a long, steamy shower that fogs up all the windows.
Exit the bathroom, dressed and dried and for some reason, the first thing my eyes get drawn to is the window near my patient's bed. There's a handprint in the upper right corner, clearly outlined. Not only had the door to the suite been locked, but my patient is incredibly short and immobile without her scooter (due to paralysis caused by polio).
Not to mention she has five fingers, handprint only had four... Unadulterated, absolute anxiety sets in when you are faced with the physical truth, and that handprint will forever haunt my memory. Taunting the logical, cynical side of me. I'm not a religious woman, but I'd have prayed the rosary at that moment if I could find the right beads...
My patient moved and no longer sees people in her windows and closets. Turns out she doesn't have dementia either, after all. And I no longer get that terrifying, hair-raising feeling that something malicious is following me home from work at night...
#65 Sneak Preview (For Some of Us)
A few years before my dad passed away, he was stabbed three times by muggers and died three times on the operating table. Up until the day that he offed himself, he maintained that when he briefly lost life, he was crawling through a wall to hell, and was able to glance in and see hell.
#68 The Quiet Ones Are Always the Ones You Need to Watch out For...
Acute GI bleed, patient was in her 90s. She had been on our floor for about three days with no improvement. I help one of the aides take care of her because she will not respond to any verbal commands and never moved. No moans, no eye-opening, only breathing. Regardless, I like to talk to my patients and let them know who I am before I do anything, introduce myself, and tell them a bit about me.
I tell her my name, I mention my two golden retrievers at home. I assisted my coworker with giving her a bath and Q2 turns and then would leave, never seeing a response from her. The next day I come in and she is my patient. To my surprise, she is fully alert and talking. Just out of curiosity, I ask her if she knew who I was. "Yes dear, you are [insert my name]. You're planning to go to medical school and have two golden retrievers at home, Levi and Leo."
I'm shocked that she heard and remembered so much, but then she continues: "I saw my mother yesterday.... She wants me to tell you that you really need to get that weight off of you." Just then the signal to the TV drops and the room is filled with a blaring loud static noise before switching back to the channel that was on before. I know it was likely coincidence but it was enough to worry me regardless.
#69 Nope, Not Today
My friend's daughter fell off a chair and banged her head on the floor. They took her to the hospital to check for a concussion. Once they were in the room, she kept crying. The nurse was in there trying to talk to her. She was just freshly 2 years old, and sometimes needed a bit of a translator from what she says and what words she's trying to say.
Anyways, the nurse was asking her about if she was in pain, etc., and my friend was translating her responses. Finally, perfectly clearly, she said that she wasn't hurt, she was scared. The nurse asked why she was scared, and the girl responded that she was scared because the little boy in the corner was scared. The nurse looked at both of them and just left.
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#70 Ghost Relatives Are Totally Normal
When my grandma was in assisted living for a short time one of the nurses told me this story. They had a lady who had mental issues. She would get up, make a mess, talk loudly, and normally hated being in bed. One day, the nurse walked in to find a guy in his 40s or so sitting there while she slept during the day. She addressed him and he said something like, "I'm just making sure she makes it ok."
The nurse goes about her business. Lady dies that night. She has no family so they clean her room. First nurse was looking through a photo album and found a picture of the guy with the lady. The second nurse sees the picture and mentions "oh that was her father, he brought her here before he died of cancer X years ago." Dunno what to say, but that is what she told us.
#71 She Wanted a Proper Last Meal
ER nurse. Had an old lady come in by ambulance, near death. She was a DNR, so we weren't going to do much for her. She didn't have any family that we could find. The hospital was full, so we had to keep her in the ER for the night. Again, she was near death. When you've seen enough people die, there's no mistaking it, and she was almost there.
Barely responsive; pale, cool, breaths were really irregular. Heart rate was up and down, too. We just turned the lights down and kept an eye on her monitor, basically waiting for her to die. About an hour later, she's standing at the door of her room. She'd gotten up and put on all her clothes. We were all like, what?
One of the nurses went to check on her, and she said she was hungry. Not knowing really what to make of things, we got her a chair and a bedside table, went to the cafeteria and got her a tray of food. Lady sat there, ate all her food, talked with the staff a little. After about an hour, she told her nurse that she was tired and wanted to lie back down. We helped her back into bed, and within 30 minutes she was dead. Not exactly paranormal, but in 22 years in busy, wild, inner-city ERs, it's the weirdest thing I've seen.
#72 Better Watch Your Back
I remember a story from years ago about a guy who was on the brink of death and saw shadow creatures attack him, trying to tear him to pieces. Not in a lake of fire, though. He was an atheist, and the experience made him a theist (though not a Born-again Christian, IIRC).
#73 Tales From the Eye Doctor
As an eye doctor, I’ve seen a lot and could write a book about all the weird ways people neglect their eyes, but three stories in particular stick out. I had a patient tell me they clean their contact lens with MILK because it “gets the acid off them.” I had a patient with a 6-year-old translating for them. They basically couldn’t elaborate on the problem except to say that their eye hurts.
Another patient came in with her hand covering her eye. I asked to see the problem. Her eye looked like a shriveled up grape. The optic nerve was holding onto a shriveled up decayed eye loosely hanging in the orbit. She wanted glasses to fix it. I also had a guy recently come in because “wife made me.” He had tried to use tweezers to remove a piece of metal from his cornea. Didn’t look pretty. I removed the remaining metal rust with a needle and spinning burr tip brush. He needed antibiotics. I told him not to do that again.
#74 Like the Plot of a Really Twisted HBO Series
When I was an intern, we had a 22-year-old man with persistent abdominal pain. His symptoms were unexplained as all studies turned up negative. His mother was constantly at his bedside and detailed her son’s medical history, which included multiple hospital stays with no definitive diagnosis. I noticed that he would frequently take ill after meals, which his mother brought from outside the hospital.
It eventually became clear that he was a victim of Munchausen by proxy. His mother was purposely making him ill. I had a patient with Munchausen's when I was in medical school (she was injecting her own feces into her IV), so I was particularly tuned in. Both cases were very sad.
#75 Leaving on a High Note
I'm a nurse and was previously working at an assisted living community on the dementia/Alzheimer's unit. My very favorite patient had been declining pretty steadily so I was checking on him very frequently. We would have long chats and joke around with each other, but in the last two weeks of his life, he stopped talking completely and didn't really acknowledge conversation directed at him at all.
I finished my medication rounds for the evening and went to see him before I left. I told him I was leaving for the night and that I'd see him the following day, and he looked me in the eyes and smiled SO genuinely and said, "You look like an angel." I thought it was so sweet because he had not seemed lucid in weeks. He died the next morning. It really messed with me.
#76 Bigger Isn’t Always Better
An ER physician told me this one: a 16-year-old boy presented to the ER with extremely swollen and discolored genitals. Apparently, he has been using his mom's insulin needles to draw blood out of his arm and inject it into his own genitals. He thought that adding blood would help increase his size. His penis was terribly infected and he was hospitalized for a week or so.
#77 Great, Hellhounds Are Real
Not in-house medicine but a former paramedic who plays EMT on weekends now. I have a decent one and this is a throw away so people don't think I'm insane. I always thought if I were to experience something weird at work it'd be in any one of the ambulances I've used on account of all of the souls that passed through. My partner and I that night weren't that lucky.
I used to work in the city and our company covered surrounding towns. Only a few hundred thousand people with suburbs and beyond that woods and a river valley. Nothing special. We had to respond to the fringe of our coverage area in another town one night and after almost getting there we wound up being canceled by first responders en-route. It was 4:30 AM on a Wednesday in autumn.
The ride back to civilization is only a 20-minute trip but it's a long, straight road with dim street lights and thick forest on both sides. I was riding in the passenger seat with my face in the laptop writing our canceled tag mentally preparing to go home after a long night and my partner asked "Do you see that?" and began to slow down.
The cab was illuminated by the lappie so I shut it and looked up, squinted a little, and there I saw it only one hundred feet or so in front of us. A dog. A large dog. A large dog that's silver/gray with straight ass ears with little tufts atop of them walking away from us ever so slowly. Darn thing had to be four feet at the shoulders.
My partner slows to a crawl thinking it's hurt and maybe it has a tag or collar. Surely such a magnificent beast has an owner. As we slowed to a crawl some stuff happened that I will never unsee or ever forget and it's the day I started believing that not all things are what they seem.
The idle of the ambulance isn't its usual roar, we're creeping at about 8 km/h (5 mp/h) and gaining, I was on the passenger side and it was on my side of the road, the plan was for him to put flashers on and me to whistle or hoot to see if our new friend was acclimated to humans and needed help or if he was street tough and to let him on his way. We closed the 100-foot gap to around 25-30 feet.
As we closed our distance and right at that 10-yard mark or so my partner and I simultaneously got a sense of dread. I was suddenly very aware of how much trouble I was in and my blood turned cold. The dog stood up. My view of this was from behind and the bastard’s shoulders would put Vince Wilfork's to shame.
It was a massive animal. My partner stopped the truck, the beast cocked its head to the side ever so slightly to the left revealing a single yellow eye shine, then turned to my side (right side) of the woods and bolted. It was over as soon as it started. The thing that has always bothered me though is that little head tilt.
I got the sense of dread before he stood up, it was almost telekinetic if that makes any sense. I just got this feeling like "I know you mean well, move on, and I was never here." Then it vanished. I've seen may canines stand on their hind legs. I've never seen a Hellhound sprint with precision over a guardrail and brush that dicked with my head other than that night.
After a lot of research I came upon the Legend of the Michigan Dogman and the Beast of Bray Road. The only problem is I live in southern New England and we're not known for our Bigfoot sightings or wacky crypto-zoological stories. I don't know what I believe in and it's certainly not werewolves. But I totally saw something that really, really, really looked like a werewolf just that one time.
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#78 Knocking on Heaven’s Door
In the morgue at my hospital, I would always hear knocking coming from inside the freezer. It really creeped me out, especially when the pathologist looked up, grabbed me by the shoulders, stared me straight in the eye and said "You hear that? You never open that door when they're knocking. Never." It turned out to be some loose pipes, he thought it was hilarious. I didn't sleep that night.
#79 Gangrene Is No Joke
This is a story from my mom, who was a nurse in the ER for 20 years. She helped care for a patient that had massive gangrene that began as diabetic ulcers. They went untreated and she had already gone through a double amputation at the mid-thigh, but the gangrene continued to spread, leading to her ER visit. My mom distinctly described seeing this woman’s stump of a femur moving amidst a mass of rotting tissue, its end wiggling like a trapped pencil when they changed her bandages.
One nurse had the task of standing in the corner with a bottle of air freshener. My mom said the smell was something straight out of hell. Unfortunately, this woman’s gangrene spread to her abdomen and there was no saving her. Now I realize why my mom, after being diagnosed with diabetes herself years later, was so darn protective of her feet!
#80 Let the Doctor See You Now
I was a unit secretary and nurse aide on a radiation oncology unit in the early 2000s. We had a patient show up through the ER who was admitted for emergency radiation treatment. She had a fungating mass in her mouth that had consumed half her head. When the doctor tried to examine her and open her mouth, her remaining teeth fell out into his hand.
It had eaten through the bones of her face, invaded her eye socket, everything. Doc said it was the worst case of mouth cancer he'd seen. According to her husband, she had a small lesion on her hard palate (the top of her mouth). Upon receiving the diagnosis of an early stage squamous cell carcinoma, she decided to treat with essential oils and things like frankincense, because chemo was poison. Her husband said he had tried to reason with her, but she was adamant about the “natural” treatment. She died in agony shortly after.
#81 Disaster, Come on Down!
This is actually pretty funny. I was doing nursing clinicals at a small hospital that used the same type of telemetry throughout the entire building. Occasionally patients would be put on some other equipment if they had specific needs. The standard telemetry would not make any sounds in a patient’s room, but some of the other options that were used did.
So this one morning I am walking down the hall and I hear "Beep, beep, beep, beep" going super fast (like 160 BPM) coming from a patient’s room. A moment later I heard it start to slow down "beep... beep... beep... ... ...beep," and then it just stopped. I ran into the room expecting to call a code when I saw the patient watching The Price is Right with the volume cranked up. Turns out someone had just spun that freaking wheel.
#82 Umm, That’s Not Concerning at All
While I was still a student nurse, I was working in a VERY old hospital. They were renovating one of the wards, so the staff were advised they can sleep in that ward in the completed rooms until it was opened up again. One night, I was sleeping in one of the rooms with a fellow nurse when suddenly I hear a scream from the bathroom.
I fly out of bed to find my co-nurse huddled in the corner farthest from the mirror. I kid you not, in the reflection of the mirror was a SUPER faint, almost shadow-like, figure in that faded almost instantly. I knew it wasn't one of our shadows because there was a light directly above the sink and mirror. I never slept in that ward ever again.
#83 Bedside Specter
I posted this a while back while I was still a lab assistant, as a nurse I have never had a scarier experience. I had worked in a hospital for almost 7 years then and I've seen the life leave people's bodies and felt a presence/connection with people but I've only had one experience that truly terrified me. I used to work nights.
Thinking about a large dark hospital full of quiet sleeping people is kinda creepy but I never felt that way. My job is to wake people up and draw their blood, I know I'm super popular at the hospital. There has always been a wing of the hospital that makes me uneasy. I'm an amazingly upbeat person, I love my job and the patients.
But the minute I walk on to that wing I'm uneasy and something makes me look over my shoulder and want to leave. So one morning around 3 am I go on to this wing to stick a patient, feeling queasy, I walk into the patient’s room, not knocking because it's so late. The lights are all off and I see someone standing in the far corner away from me, I'm immediately taken aback but quickly think it's a nurse hanging blood or something.
I look at the figure and ask "do you need me to come back" no response. It turns towards the corner and just stands there with its back to me. My whole body is on edge and I have never felt so scared in my life, I knew without a doubt it wasn't a nurse, I back out of the room and walked towards the nurse’s station.
I just lean against a wall trying to catch my breath, a nurse asks if I'm going to be sick. I had to go back into the patient’s room and draw her blood, this time I turned on the lights before I even stepped in. Of course, no one was there except for the sleeping old lady, I quickly drew her blood trying to ignore the sinking feeling that I had. I hate that wing and that room will forever give me the tingles when I have to go in it, it's been years but I won't forget it.
#84 Who’s the Idiot?
Picture a middle-aged man, but his index finger is five times the size of the rest of his fingers. It smells, it’s leaking pus, there’s necrotic tissue. Basically, one huge infected cancerous finger. He was a firm believer in not taking any sort of medication; including antibiotics or chemo. He died a few weeks later, but he did manage to tell us we were all idiots before he passed away.
#85 Meeting All the Stereotypes
I’ve had a few friends who have been in crazy accidents and have slipped into comas as a result. One said it was the most peaceful experience ever. They had something similar to the "white light" phenomenon where they were "floating" above their body, seeing a bright light etc. Almost the stereotypical experience of "dying."
The other had a completely different experience that shook me a little. He said he saw demons and creatures and all sorts of crazy stuff. He even said he felt pain and sorrow. He said it was the most horrific thing he’s ever experienced. Both of my friends aren't religious, were both in comas and on heavy meds (not sure of what exactly).
#86 Flea Treatment
I got this from my friend, who is a doctor on the children's ward in a rural hospital. These parents bring in their child, whose hair is infested with lice. The lice were visible to the naked eye and could be seen crawling on the child's clothing. While the medical staff examined the kid in order to determine a course of action, they discovered the child was covered in a white powder and smelled heavily of chemicals.
They asked the parents what the substances and the smells emanating from the child were. The parents said, quite matter of factly, it was Sevin powder (a garden insecticide) and flea and tick spray they used on their dogs on the family's farm. Needless to say, social workers were notified about this case.
#87 Monster Hospital
Growing up, my father used to tell me of an experience he had while having open heart surgery. The doctors had to stop his heart for about 20 or 30 minutes while they inserted a mechanical valve into his heart. At the time, he was in his early 20s and was involved in a lot of bad activity that he says he is ashamed of now.
Anyway, while my dad was "dead" he said he was in a very dark place and as he wandered around, he started running into very scary people who were deformed and screaming at him. He ran for his life into a corner and hid. And just before the people got to him, he looked up and saw his deceased grandmother reach her hand down and grab him.
The next thing my dad remembered, he was back in the hospital. He's convinced he was temporarily in hell. I don't know if this was just a dream state or something but I've never seen my dad so convinced in his life. It was enough for him to turn his life around and turn to religion and more importantly, to come back to his family that he had left behind.
#88 Cup of Broken Water
I work in the ER. We had a very pregnant patient come in needing stitches in her nether regions. Turns out she was a realtor and didn’t want her water to break while she was showing a house, so she put a glass cup in her pants to catch the water. Instead of using a pad or an adult diaper, she went for a GLASS CUP. She sat down while showing a house and sure enough, it broke and cut her up pretty bad.
#89 Samara, Is That You?
I used to work as an STNA in a nursing home. Worked third shift throughout university. During the night, we turned half the lights off so it was darker for the evening and didn't get a lot of light in the residents' rooms. We had one resident who was younger (70s) and was mostly in for mental reasons. She had long, dark hair and was very thin.
I was sitting at the nurse's station at the top of the hall and heard a call light go off. I stood up, looked down the dark hall, and on all fours, straight out of The Ring, this resident was crawling up the hall toward me. The other STNA had forgotten to put the bed rail up and the resident was VERY good at climbing out of bed. Needless to say, I needed some new britches and my heart was racing a mile a minute.
#90 Hallucinations in the Hospital
A 9-year-old girl came in once. Her parents had been finding her dolls hanging around the house with belts or strings tied around their necks. She went into a rage and held a knife to her own throat. They brought her to the hospital, and during her psych evaluation she said she heard voices in her head telling her she was stupid and telling her to kill herself. She said she didn't want to but she had to listen to the voices. I couldn't sleep for weeks...
#91 Not Fazed by Basal Cell Carcinoma
This lady came in and literally half of her face had been basically eaten up by basal cell carcinoma. One of her eyes was completely missing. According to her, it had been this way for years. And here’s the kicker, that's not even the problem she came into the hospital for! She had come in for an umbilical hernia as big as a basketball that had been there for months, and she'd started vomiting over the past week so she finally went to the emergency department.
#92 The Lady in the Pink Cardigan
My mother in law is a nurse in palliative care. One night shift there was a disturbance in one of the rooms. One of the little old ladies was sitting on the edge of her bed trying to dress herself, when asked what the matter was she replied "the lady in the pink cardigan is telling me I have to get up and go now." As the night progressed, patients in other rooms started doing similar things.
They all described the same lady, and said she was telling them to 'get up and go.' Another patient said that she didn't want to go with the lady because she wasn't ready to go anywhere yet. Another patient said the lady was pulling and tugging at them to get up. After a couple hours into this shift, a lady a few rooms down from where it all started passed away. Amongst her belongings was a picture of her with a lady wearing a pink cardigan.
#93 It’s a Good Thing Someone Was Paying Attention
I was in a car accident when I was seven and I shattered my skull, broke my left shoulder, and had cerebral hemorrhaging. I came in and out of consciousness a few times afterward while being transported to the hospital and I specifically remember waking up in the helicopter and looking out at all of the buildings. Then things got weird.
The buildings started to change color and transformed into strange shapes. I was tripping HARD. I saw very bright lights and everything felt extremely peaceful and I didn't question one moment of it. I'm not completely sure if my body was going through the theorized "DMT dump" or if this was some other effect caused by brain damage, but if the amazing doctor that I owe my life to had not suspected hemorrhaging (from my mildly droopy smile that my own parents didn't catch) I would have died that night.
I only stayed in the hospital for a week after surgery and the only remaining damage from this incident is a pretty rad "headband" scar from ear to ear and 3 plates in my head. 10 years later I was out eating with my father (who was also in the accident) and he spotted the EMS workers that responded to the accident and I got to thank them. Greatest moment ever.
#94 Evil! Evil! Evil!
I work at a nursing home and went in to feed a dementia patient her supper. So we were eating and were about halfway through the meal when she became fiercely agitated. Now, this resident has a lot of social anxiety and she does normally get upset, so I didn't think much of it at first, just spoke to her softly and tried to calm her down so she could finish the meal.
I got her settled down enough so she would go back to eating and I was about to put something in her mouth when all of a sudden she sat straight up in bed. She stretched out one pale white arm and pointed with her bony fingers at the corner of the room and started moaning and saying, "evil evil evil," over and over again, and telling someone in the corner to get out and then looking at me with terror in her eyes.
Now I know people with dementia often think things that aren't true and she is a very confused resident, but regardless, I got chills and had to keep myself from running out of the room. I finished her meal as quickly as she would let me and then had the other nurses take care of her for the rest of the night.....
#95 Mysterious Visitors
I had a cousin that had cancer and died when he was a little kid. He once asked his mother why all these people visited and she said: "Because your cousins, aunts, and uncles love you very much and want you to get better" and he answered, "I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about the ones that visit me at night."
#96 Lifesaver
I work as an ER nurse and had a patient with a little dizziness, a little nausea and a swollen abdomen. She was fairly bright, able to talk, and nothing seemed too horrific. But she was turning a grim gray color and breathing quickly. Our average wait time today was two hours. I could have put her back in the queue and moved on.
But I had a little dark feeling that there was something sinister happening here. So I called our most senior doctor out of a consultation and asked him to see her. Right now. Ever heard of your abdominal aorta? Enormous blood vessel that can pouch out, suddenly rupture, and make you bleed internally to death in minutes?
It’s called a burst AAA (abdominal aortic aneurysm). You’ve heard of it now. That’s what she had. I’ve never seen one before. But now I have. Within five minutes, she was barely responding. Within ten, her blood pressure had dropped to a barely sustainable level. Within twenty minutes, I was pouring blood into her and eight people were around the bed.
Within an hour, she was on an operating table clinging to life. But because I raised the alarm, and because my team worked their butts off, that woman is still, somehow, alive. Feels good, man.
#97 Say What Now?
My grandfather on his deathbed said "they have no eyes." Still gives me chills.
#98 Hello From the Other Side
When I was a student, I got called in to a stroke patient. She had coded and they were doing CPR. They worked for 45 minutes, but she died. They cleaned her up, and called on the family to say goodbye. By the time the family was on their way, she had been both brain dead and without a pulse for more than 45 minutes.
Blood had filled her brain, and she was completely grey and started to smell. Suddenly, she sat up and called for her family. The nurses rushed to get monitors and equipment back on her. Started working on her again, she stabilized, said goodbye to her family, and promptly died a second time.
#99 Near Death Experience
My aunt died in the hospital several years ago. She was clinically dead for a few minutes. In that time she says she floated above the operating table and saw them trying to revive her. She says she felt a pull on her and flew out through the very top of the room. She remembered very clearly floating above the light fixture on the ceiling and then there being darkness.
Suddenly she found herself floating above the ground several inches just above a field of dirt. In front of her was a very large chasm, deep, very dark, she couldn't see the bottom of it from where she was. On the other side of the chasm was a beautiful field. Green grass, flowers, trees and sunlight. On her side of the chasm it was overcast and very little light, no vegetation, just brown dirt.
She felt the same force that pulled her out through the ceiling of the hospital start pulling her across the chasm. As she started floating over the chasm these hands reached out of the blackness and started pulling at her, almost like ripping the flesh from her legs and feet. She says it was the worst feeling of pain and cold she had ever experienced and it horrified her.
After what seemed like forever she reached the other side of the chasm and the hands went away. The feeling of pain and terror was replaced with a feeling of happiness and contentment and warmth. Several family members that had been dead for some time were there and they seemed to be beckoning her over. She was going to the field when she heard the doctor say something.
It sounded like it echoed very loudly from the other side of the chasm. Suddenly that force pulled her across the chasm again only this time much faster than she had been pulled over the first time. Again the hands came and again the cold. The hands ripped at her and she felt the pain she had felt before. Finally she came to the dirt side of the chasm again.
Then blackness. Then she was on the ceiling of her room in the hospital again and she saw her body spasm violently and her arm smacked the doctor's arm, breaking his watch. Her spirit was pulled back into her body again and she heard him say something like "She's back" and then blackness again.
Several hours later she woke up and she was PISSED OFF, at first. Then she realized she was alive and she thanked the doctor and apologized for breaking his watch. He was surprised because when she did that she was technically dead. I don't know what she saw but she was very descriptive of what she thinks she saw. This was very long ago and she's now on the other side of that chasm due to lung cancer.
#100 That's No Scratch
I'm a nurse, but I was working in the ER when a guy came in for a scratch on his neck and "feeling drowsy." We start the usual workups and this dude's blood pressure TANKED. We scrambled, but he was dead within ten minutes of walking through the door. Turns out the "scratch" was an exit wound of a .22 caliber rifle round.
The guy didn't even know he'd been shot. When the coroner's report came back, we found that he'd been shot in the leg and the bullet tracked through his torso shredding everything in between. There was really nothing we could've done, but that was a serious "what the heck just happened" moment.
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