49 Real Nurses Share The Terrifying Hospital Ghost Stories That Scared Them To Death
Spirits and the paranormal abound at hospitals so what happens when these shrines to science and medicine come up against things that are entirely unexplainable?
By Eric Redding
1. The Vanishing Girl
I was a new nurse at our hospital, and 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 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 nurses station further down the hall. She had big pigtails, was wearing a brown dress, white shoes, 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 shit 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.
2. Like The Dead Are Leaving The Hospital
I work in intensive care a small community hospital. We have a 9 bed unit that is completely closed off from the medical floor via two doorways. Two nights ago, we were all sitting at our the station, charting, when we all heard footsteps coming down the hall. Its 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 5 (unless and 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 WTF 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.
3. The Man With The Striped Shirt
Not mine, but a fellow nurse of mine. 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’s with dementia room, and that different patient asked where the man with the striped shirt had gone.
4. “Don’t Let Them Take Me!”
The best I have heard is from a nurse who said that one night she was floated to oncology at the hospital she used to work at. She was given a patient who was passing away and had been unconscious for several days. At one point during the night the nurse went into the room and the patient was at the top of the bed and looked at her and said, “don’t let them take me!” The nurse was freaked out and asked her who was going to take her and she said that black thing up there and pointed up in the air. This patient died within minutes.
5. An Unexplained Black Shape
One night I was caring for a dying male patient. He was scared and I spent quite some time with him, trying to calm and reassure him. Eventually he calmed and I left the bedside and went over to the nurses station which was about 15 feet away. As I sat down I glanced over to him and there was a black shape standing over the bed, looking down at the patient. I was terrified, and am sure it was something evil.
6. In Two Places At Once
I used to work in a state institute for developmentally disabled. We were temp relocated to another building for remodeling of our bldg. Anyways…I was working one night, 2nd shift. We had a locked pica unit. I saw one of the residents walking down the hall. Very distinct gait and very distinct yellow t-shirt w/ a happy face on it. I went into the ward to let staff know that they had an escapee. This was a serious situation because this particular resident, Larry, would ingest absolutely anything (from clothing to pens to belts to *ugh* a bird’s head)…literally anything. He was also very reluctant to go back to his home ward (hence why I didn’t bring him back myself…he needed two escorts). When we got back into the hall, less than 15 secs later, Larry was gone!! We searched the entire building! Outside, downstairs, all wards…he was NO WHERE to be found!!! This whole search lasted last than 10 mins because I had all extra staff looking for him.
I was just about to call the house supervisor to let her know that we “lost” someone when out from the bathroom walks Larry with one of the staff. He had been getting his bath in the bathroom for the last 30 mins or so. Kind of freaky! I absolutely, without a doubt, saw Larry in the hallway. I never would’ve short-staffed the wards like I did if I hadn’t seen him! Like I said, very distinctive gait, look, clothing. I took a lot of razzing that nite! They all thought that I was crazy. Anyways, come to find out the next day, after the story goes around that I am crazy…Larry had an identical twin brother who died in that building 10 yrs previously.
7. The “Grandchild”
We had a black girl, about 10 in ICU that was severely injured in a car accident. Lots of brain damage. She didn’t die there but was moved to another facility after weeks and weeks.
After that, I know of 3 older black males, in their 50’s, that, if they were even mildly sedated, would ask about the little black girl with the ribbon in her hair who was sitting at the foot of their beds.
One guy said, “she asked me how I was doing, and then got up and walked that way” while he was pointing towards the 2nd floor window. He paused, a wide-eyed look came over his face, and then he said, ‘But I guess she really couldn’t have left the room that way, huh?”
Personally, I think she was taking care of grandfatherly figures.
8. The ‘Dark’ Room
I worked in an ICU where a prisoner convicted of murder died in ICU 1 – and nobody would put a patient in that room after that cause the air was too heavy and the room was too spooky and ‘dark’. It was so bad that the hospital eventually closed down the room and knocked out a wall to make it a separate entrance into the unit because nurses would refuse to put patients in the room even if it was the last available bed. They’d triage out a patient before they’d trust putting a patient in that bed.
9. Nurse Betty
I was working in the NICU when we had a threat of a tornado. Some Nurses got pulled to go to a sister hospital in town to assist in the disaster plan. When all was over one of the nurses returned with this story: She was assisting the nurses in giving some meds before pulling all into the hallways. Every pt she went to said they already had their meds from that nice nurse in the white uniform and hat. She realized after she left that its been awhile since a nurse has worn a hat. That story revealed the urban legend of Nurse Betty. Story goes she had an affair with a married MD, became pregnant then agreed to allow him to perform an abortion on her on the 2nd floor OR room.She died and he went to jail. She never left the hospital and was seen frequently. The local newspaper would do an article of her every year around halloween on her sightings. The hospital has since been replaced with college dorms. Hmmmm i wonder if any students have seen her?
10. Rocking Mary
The story of “Rocking Mary.” We closed room 12 in our MICU because just about every patient that has been there since Mary died complaints of seeing a woman in wearing a white habit rocking back and forth by their bedside. Apparently this nun never makes eye contact…just stares outside the window which happens to be on the patient left side over their head. This window overlooks the hospital cemetery where nuns that have died where buried. Mary was a nun that died of a car accident outside the hospital back in the 50’s. She was only about 30 years old and all patient describes her as a young woman. We all thought that it was the “sun-down syndrome.” Anyways, since then room 12 became our storage room where no one goes in by themselves unless it is absolutely critical.
11. The Lingering Spirit
We had a patient, chronic CHFer, always on the call button, hated being on fluid restrictions. you know the type: the nurses have to take turns during the shift answering the call button so the primary can actually do other work.
And this was a frequent flier cause he was very chronic, very borderline, and the hospital was the only place he wouldn’t fluid overload.
I work 7p-7a. He died about 8pm. Oh the look on his face, like, “how could you let me die!” – Like it was our fault.
Anyway, family came and gone by 9pm, funeral home gone at 930pm.
About 10pm, the call button starts going off. I was there – call button going off every 5 minutes.
One of the nurses was a very spiritual girl. At about 2am, after like 4 HOURS OF THIS, nurse Mary snaps, ‘Enough!’
She walks down to the room, and, practically screams into the empty room, “Mr X, you have died. You can’t be in here bothering us anymore. Move along. In the name of Jesus, I’m exorcising you from this plane of existence. Go to the light and be happy!”
And I kid you not, the call button stopped going off then and there.
12. The Lonely Ghost
Not a spooky story but a lonely ghost.
One of the rooms, if it was being used regularly, fine. no problems. But, since it was a room at the end of the hall, it was used for ‘storage’ lots of times.
If a couple of weeks went by and there were no patients/activity in the room, the call light would start going off, 4-5 times a shift. But, if you went into the room and turned on the TV, the call light wouldn’t go off anymore.
So, needless to say, when the room was being used for storage, the tv was always on w/ the volume down low.
13. The Old Nun
Like most very old hospitals, at one time our hospital was run by nuns. One particular unit had been converted into a sleep study lab area for outpatients tests. One shift in the middle of the night I was watching the video monitor and five patients simultaneously began removing their monitoring equipment. I went into the first room to ask what was going on and the patient said that old nurse with the cap told her the study was over and that she could leave. All the patients reported the same story.
14. It Was Identical
I work on a coronary care unit with mostly post-heart attack patients. My charge nurse told us this story, not sure if she’s just messing with us, but she sounded serious. So our unit was empty, we consolidated our last couple patients onto the ICU because we had low pt. census. My charge nurse was over in CCU at the nurses station doing something on the computer. All of our rooms were empty. She heard a bedside monitor alarming, so she went into the room where the noise was coming from, and there was an EKG strip coming out of the bedside printer (which we never use) and it was a long continuing strip of clear VTach. She said she had just coded someone there the week before who had been in VT. Creepy. As. Fuck.
TL;DR: Ghost in pt room printed her last VTach rhythm strip out of her bedside monitor one week post death.
15. There Are Places In The Hospital That People Refuse To Go Alone
I do inter-facility transfers as an EMT so get to see all the skilled facilities and hospitals in the state.
Two places give me the hair raising just bad negative juju creeps: an abandoned “school of the feeble minded” and the state’s prison mental health facility that use to be a huge tuberculosis ward when there were massive outbreaks back in the day.
A third creepy place is the old birthing hospital that got turned into a long term care facility. The top floor is mostly padlocked off. Jokingly, I asked a nurse on the elevator if the building was haunted and she matter of factly said yes. Little kids shapes on the top floor and residents report older women in dresses. She said there were areas of the building she refused to go without another person.
16. Never Open That 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.
17. They Die Within 72 Hours Of Seeing Her
I work in a LTC facility, and within lies the legend of the little girl…many people have seen her; few have survived to tell about it…quite a few residents have asked me “who’s that little girl?” and pointed to her…coincidentally, these people would be dead within 72 hours of seeing her.
Turns out, about 10 years ago, there was a fatal car accident in front of our LTC…the victim? A little girl, about 10 years old.
18. “Maggie”
A couple, retired military captain and his wife, Margaret, sold their house to move to Florida. It so happens that they sold their house to the State – the state was going to use it as a resident home for mentally disabled teens.
After the closing, but before they moved, Margaret died in the house. The Captain had to move cause the house was already sold.
Do you know where I’m going with this??
Residents always referred to ‘old lady’ that they always saw. Nursing staff just referred to her as ‘Maggie’.
Now, late at night, when the residents were asleep, if the staff put the TV on more adult programming, like ‘Red Shoe Diaries’, etc., the TV would turn off, and when turned back on, would come on on a different channel.
There was this one nurse, it was like the house was out to get her. She’d swear that ‘the carpet tripped me’. When cupboards opened, knives would fall out aimed at her. Turns out this nurse was eventually fired for abusing and stealing from the residents.
Maggie takes care of her ‘children’.
19. She Died But Then Came Back
I work as a CNA in long term care. We had one resident “Betty” who was totally independent, all ADL’s were done on her own and she did fine on her own, never had an incident. The only time she wanted help was showers and then she only wanted you around to make sure she didn’t slip and fall. Betty came down with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. When she came back she was too weak to do things on her own but too stubborn to ask for help. The last thing the CNA told her before going to bed was “If you want to get up, hit your call light. I’ll come help you.” Of course she didn’t, got rid of the bed alarm, climbed out of bed and fell. Betty died from the fall. No one was moved into bed C (Betty’s bed) afterward.
The following week the call light for the room went off at night. Thinking it was the resident in bed B, I walked down to the room to see what she wanted. I walked into the room only to see the call light for bed B and A off, the call light for bed C (Betty’s unoccupied bed) was on. My eyes filled up with tears, I backed out of the room and made someone else turn the call light off.
20. The Inspector
We have a gentleman that we call the inspector. He appears at the end of the long hall (our wings are L shaped). He carries a clipboard in his hand. When he shows up a resident usually dies within the next couple days. We’ve also had residents ring and tell us that there was a man standing next to their roommate’s bed and that we should tell him to leave (no men on nights). The roommate usually dies soon after. And then there’s the children. Several lucid residents have reported children in the halls at night-There’s a children’s home behind us where children have been abused in the past.
21. She Said “Rex” And Then I Saw Him
I was working a night shift job as an aide caring for a lady with terminal cancer on hospice at home as I have for years. She was starting to slip and I woke her family, two girls and DH. We were all sitting around, she was pretty quiet and peaceful. All of a sudden she looked toward the door and said “Rex, Rex you’re here for me. Im ready and they won’t let me go” I saw a shadowy figure come into the room and felt the creepiest evil spirit……..I’m not normally spooked but I was so glad when it was time for me to go home. I turned to watch this spirit and the family was looking at me like “what are you looking at?” The lady died later that day.
A few months later her daughter had been sick (just not well, not terminal) and they called my agency to see if I would come and stay with him at night for a few days until he was a little stronger. I stayed two nights. All kinds of weird paranormal stuff in that house. Voices in rooms that were empty, sound of people moving around when everyone was asleep, etc. I decided I didn’t care how sick he was or how much that family liked me, I was NOT doing another shift there.
22. Willy
A couple of stories from the unit. In bed 3 there was a homeless pt “Willy” who, thanks to modern medicine, was kept alive for I believe around 3 months (no family to stop care). Willy eventually died but PTs who are in bed 3 will talk about their friend Willy who brought them a blanket or stopped by to talk. Bed 3 is at the end of the unit and has an ante room before you go in. You can’t see directly in Bed 3 unless you’re in the ante room or looking at the room on the monitor. One night with no pt in Bed 3 the monitor flips to the room and a body was seen laying over the side of the bed (over the side rails)…kind of floating…the room was checked and no one was there.
Another night a nurse who has worked in the unit a few years saw someone sitting in a chair behind the door in Bed 3 with their legs crossed. She wondered since we have limited visiting hours how a family member got in the room. She went in the room and no one was there. Needless to say she was freaked out.
There was also another pt who was a young woman in her 20s who contracted necrotizing facilitis (flesh eating disease) from one of her kids who had strep. She was in the unit a while and eventually died. One of the nurses coming on to the next shift wanted to know why the PT was standing on the backside of the unit with her twin daughters holding their hands (wondering how she made such a miraculous recovery) she was informed the PT had died earlier that day.
23. The First Patient To Die
The very small step down unit I worked in was having night time staffing issues, I agreed to rotate to nights to help them out.
It was a 4 bed, newly renovated unit. It was around 3am, and I was watching the monitors, listening to the patient’s snore. The pencil drawer slid open, I didn’t think much of it since the hospital was on a very busy avenue and I thought it was caused by the vibrations from the traffic on the busy road below. After sliding the drawer back several times, I decided if the drawer felt it needed to be open so be it
Several minutes later I heard a noise in the room, the patient’s bathroom door opening and the sound of someone pushing an IV pole. Since I did not have clear view of the bathroom, I just thought one of the staff members from the main floor had dashed in to wash their hands. I looked up from my monitor viewing to see a patient we recently had in the unit. It was Mrs. G, an older woman who came in with atypical chest pain, became septic due to a gallbladder issue.
She evidently had expired in the unit. Although the hospital itself had been on this site for years, the unit was newly renovated, right down to tearing down walls and putting up new ones. I heard the patient’s bathroom door open and again I heard the rattling of the IV pole and shuffling feet. I looked up and saw Mrs. G. standing there in the middle of the floor, one hand pushing the IV pole, the other hand on top of the pump on the pole. She stopped walking, turned and waved, nodded her head, said everything was going to be okay, took a few steps, and disappeared.
It was quite a site to see. Shortly after that “vision” one of the nurses from the floor came in to see if I needed anything. I told her no I was ok. And asked her if she had ever seen a ghost in the hospital. She looked at me, gasped and asked “no, why” and I explained to her what had just happened. She said she would never step foot in that room again.
Mrs. G was the first patient to die in that unit. She was well liked by all the staff and my feeling was that she was watching over us. The day shift came in, and I told them my story. They weren’t surprised.
Through the years working at various hospitals, worked as a Nurse Extern my senior year in nursing school and heard older nurses telling their stories about ghosts, I thought they were just burnt out. HA!! Yes there are ghosts in care facilities. If they are not seen their presence is felt. They leave an energy behind.
24. “The Scene Was A Bloodbath”
I was working my regular 7-7 night shift in a bone marrow transplant unit with one other nurse. We had 5 patients, and it was about 3:30 am. My coworker had just come out of room 4 and I startled her as she came around the corner. She had been emptying a urinal when the bathroom door had closed on her, which of course freaked her out, and she spilled urine on herself but I digress.
She proceeded to tell me that there was a young gentleman who had been in that room who had died a rather gruesome death…evidently this man was slated to go home, but one night (around 4) the nurses heard a thump…the sound of someone falling…they rushed in the room, and this man was in the bathroom, central line out, and blood everywhere. They coded him, but he died right there in the bathroom. No one is sure why he pulled his line, or what had happened, but evidently the scene was a bloodbath. Horrible, horrible…now here comes the scary part.
A few weeks later, a sweet little old lady is in that room and asks the nurse if someone had died in there. The nurse explained that this is a hospital, and it was likely that someone could have died. Well, the lady says, “I think a young guy died in here.” The nurse asks why, the lady responds “cuz he’s talking to me.” Aghhh!! Ok, I’m not making this up….this lady has a central line, triple lumen. The nurse goes in there later and there is blood everywhere. One of her lines is cut. Not pulled out, but cut. There are no scissors in the room. The lady says “he did it.”
25. The Nurse In The White Uniform
I am a South African Nurse who is currently living and working in California. The weirdest thing happened to me one night when I was working Night Shift back in SA. I had a patient whom I thought was playing with his IV causing me no end of headaches – as we have all experienced. I eventually confronted him after having to open the clamp for what seemed like the hundredth time that night. He got really irate with me and said he had done no such thing but blamed it on a young nurse in a white dress whom he said had fiddled repeatedly with it. I was confused because we wear specific uniforms in South Africa and they were not white at this specific hospital. Needless to say I was really irritated and I think we both ended the conversation feeling exasperated.
I didn’t think about his story about the young nurse for several weeks until one night I was dealing with a totally different room and a totally different patient. The call light rang and when I went to answer it the patient said he had a problem with one of my staff. Curious, I asked what. He said a young nurse in a white uniform was standing quietly in the doorway of the dark bathroom staring at him and it was freaking him out. At this my hair stood on end but I reassured him that he must have been dreaming and checked the bathroom just to be sure. There was nothing there but I will never forget it.
Another instance, there was a patient who was terminally ill with liver cancer in a private room. I was working days but the night shift people said they hated going into the room because something would blow on the back of their necks and shadows would move where shadows shouldn’t be. The man was a Christian, as was his wife, and his wife said she saw this black presence descend above him and his breathing would become labored. She asked myself and a friend to pray for her which we gladly did being Christians ourselves. We anointed and blessed the room and prayed with the family and asked the Lord to seal the room. From that time on the room was filled with peace and love and the man breathed so much more easier. People had no more problems with going in there. This gentle little man eventually passed away, but it was in a place of peace and love.
26. Voodoo People
Night nurse for 4 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. The Hissing Cat
I work in a cardiovascular surgical ICU. We have a lot of fucked up people (both physically and mentally) that come through our unit.
We had a stretch of nights were 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.
28. Common Spirits
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 night.
Several nights or even that same shift we’re coding or cleaning the patient for the funeral home to pick up.
29. Hand Prints
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 min. Upon returning to a freshly wiped bed, hand prints were clearly visible.
30. “Please, Don’t Let Me Go Back There!”
Not my personal story, but when my mom worked as an E.R. 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.
31. “Those Things Can’t Be Explained”
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 still 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.
32. “I’ll Leave The Light On For You”
I was pulling a guard shift in the CHS on FOB Speicher on 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 (safety off, at low-ready). 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 intercom. 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 had always remained on.
33. “I Got The Fuck Out Of There”
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 bullshitting 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 shit you not, my entire body broke out in goosebumps, my hair stood on end and I had this strong gut feeling 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 fuck 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. She Yelled At Him And He Came Back
First story: Patient had been in CCU (where I work 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 and the docs had decided to call it and his family walk in the room leans over him and rubs his chest lightly and says his name and immediately regains a pulse and regains consciousness.
Second Story: Patient comes in coding and we are working on him and we are getting nothing, so we bring in his wife to say goodbye and she starts yelling at him at the top of her lungs and he comes back so we arrange transfer to a tertiary hospital and he codes again so she comes back and yells at him again and comes back again, cut to they are loading him into the helicopter and he codes again, so they bring him back into our ER after working on him for a bit on the helipad and his wife yells at him again and once again he immediately comes back. Eventually they decide to have his wife ride in helicopter with him to make sure she can scare him back to life if he were to code again. The guy ended up living and received at heart transplant and is still alive to this day all thanks to his wife scaring the life back into him.
35. The Old Psych Hospital
I worked overnight security in one of the largest, best, and oldest hospitals in the US. My fellow security officers and I all have stories about one building in particular, but the one that I’ll tell is the one that happened to me.
The Backstory: This hospital was built in the late 1800’s and it was the original psychiatric building for this hospital. Now, being the late 1800’s, not much was truly known about psychiatric disorders. On top of that, this hospital was known for its medical research. With both of those facts combined, you can infer that some terrible shit was done to these misunderstood psych patients in this building. A couple years before I started working security there, this building had been converted into offices after the newly built part of the hospital dedicated a section for an updated psych ward.
My story: My rounds for that night happened to include said building. At night this building was empty, due to recently being converted into offices and the drones who worked there wanting to leave promptly at 1700,if not earlier. In some of their haste, they left their office doors unlocked, which is a big no no due to medical information being located in their offices. It was our duty to go to each floor, and make sure every door was locked, and if it wasn’t, to secure it ourselves.
I did my initial sweep of the building to make sure it was clear (nobody in the building), and proceeded to do my door checks. The hallways were pretty narrow, so I could check both sides of the hallway’s doors at once. At the end of this hallway there was two sets of doors you had to go through to reach the final office, which was a dead end. Everything was secure. Awesome. Time for the next floor.
I exited the two sets of doors from the dead end office and stood absolution frozen from what I saw.
Every door ajar. Set perfectly so their own weight wouldn’t cause them to shut again. And one wheelchair, at the end of said hallway, facing towards the steps.
I had heard other security officers outright reject that set of rounds due to strange stuff happening there, but I laughed it off until that night happened. Never took those rounds again.
Second story: The old children’s ICU is currently under construction to be turned into medical labs, so we have to patrol the area. Once again to make sure the area is secure, or to report if the contractor / foreman stayed to plan for the next day.
When patrolling this area, several security officers have reported seeing a single white male child around the age of 5-7 with short brown hair (think 90’s bowl cut). I personally dismissed this (this was before the psych ward incident) as a tall tale told with the intent to scare me because I was new at the time.
I got that buildings patrol one night, and a foreman who stayed late called security and asked for a security officer to come up ‘because a kid locked himself in a room, and I don’t want him to get hurt with all the open wires in there.’ Or something to that effect.
I unlocked the door for him. Looked in what could only be a 10 x 8 room for about 10 min. No kid. Called it in as a false alarm, and finished my patrol.
Third Story: Had a special detail (aka babysitting) a violent psych patient, along with another security officer. He woke up in the middle of the night, recognized the other officer, and said hello.
He sees me and immediately starts screaming at me not to hurt him. Now, I’m a rather large gentleman (at 6’2 and 250 lbs), but I try not to make myself too intimidating around psych patients as to not escalate the situation.
Well, he keeps screaming for me not to hurt him, and he says if I promise not to, he would make something good happen for me. I promise, he calms down, goes back to sleep, and I forget about it.
Next day I got a permanent set of rounds and a pretty good promotion. Easily a coincidence, but interesting nonetheless.
Fourth Story: Fellow security officer had rounds in the aforementioned psych building. Heard a call on the radio, in what could only be described as dry throat terror voice, for one officer for back up. I was close so I responded to his call letting him know I was on the way.
When I got there he had his head between his knees, and was silently crying with a shattered chandelier a couple feet next to him.
Now, before I had experienced the abnormal happenings in this building, I would have written off his testimony off as idiocy. But he claimed that something held him in that spot as the chandelier started swinging wildly until it started to fall. When it started to fall he was ‘let go’ and allowed to move, and scrambled out of the way before it hit him.
Got him up, calmed him down, and took him back to the supervisor. She yelled to one of our other supervisors ‘almost lost another one in [insert building name here]!’ The other supervisor laughed and said ‘Why do you think we send the new guys! Haha, you know I don’t even like going over there!’
That guy is my roommate and hates when I bring up that experience.
36. The “Sweet” Old Lady
I had cared for an elderly woman with no family who came to us when her husband died. She didn’t speak often but when she did it was usually just words that made no sense together. I felt so bad for her because ever since she had arrived so many of the residents in her area that she seemed to enjoy spending time with had passed in such a short timespan. She put up a picture of each of them next to her pictures of her husband and several others who were probably family to remember them. I had ad always felt sorry for her and showed her extra attention and we became close. It just seemed so unfair that she had such luck and kept losing people that she cared about. One day she looked at me and said plain as day “sweetie, I think I’m done now” and handed me a picture. It was a picture of me and I smiled because it touched my heart that I was that important to her. She passed nearly a week later and I cried for days, it hit me really hard. She knew it was the end for her and she said goodbye as best she could.
A little less than 2 years later I was talking with a colleague and she came up in conversation. My colleague referred to her as “that crazy bitch” which seemed very out of character for her and it shocked and offended me deeply. I expressed this to her, not so nicely and she looked at me with this shocked look and said “oh dear, do you not know?” and then explained something to me that I hadn’t known. As it turned out, it came out sometime after she had passed that she had killed her husband by poisoning him and that there was an investigation because it appeared that she had a ritual of befriending someone, obtaining a picture of them, and hiding the picture until she could kill them (usually by poisoning) and then displaying the picture as a sort of trophy. It was suspected that this may have been the reason for the spike in mortality rate during her stay and the considerable number of photos in her “collection”. The last I heard, the old “family” photos weren’t any relation to her and the police were trying to ID the individuals and compare them to several cold cases.
37. The Man In The Hospital Gown
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 10pm, 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.
38. A Skinwalker?
I have a couple stories, one from my mother and one from me. My mother’s is probably the most creepiest and has always stuck with me. Especially with all the paranormal stuff she has seen.
My mom worked night shift at the hospital in Arizona, in a town by the border, and go figure. Old mining town. Well anyways, she’s working her night shift going room to room when an old lady who walked the halls due to insomnia told her some weird goatman kept trying to get in through the doors. My mom didn’t think anything of it, but she is Catholic and had those moments of silently praying to herself.
After a few moments, there was a shriek, she couldn’t explain it, but that it was a horrible shriek that made your blood turn to ice. She than went to the nurses station to ask if anyone else heard that, in which they did. Come to realize that shriek was heard all around the hospital. Freaking everyone out, especially paranormal religious ladies and men. A few of them go to look out the Windows and see hoof marks by the doors and windows, and the marks had no trail towards or away from the building.
My story was pretty creepy. I too became a cna, and worked a locked down dementia and Alzheimer unit at night. I’ve had creepy moments. But this one will always stick with me.
I was finishing up my binders when a light goes off out of the hall, so I took it, punched my code in and went out since the other cna was busy with someone else. I go in, ask if everything is ok. Sleepily my little lady tells me there’s a darn women who keeps knocking on her window wanting to come in, and that she really wants to go back to sleep. She insists I go and let her in, and I’m thinking to myself, Ohhh No, this sounds all too familiar… I reassure her, peek out the window, nothing. Maybe she was dreaming, and really tired and mistook it as her room mate.
After that incident I head back into my unit. Sit, eat a snack, chat with my head nurse, talk with my usual insomniacs, mind you it’s around 3ish am now. Light goes off, and in my unit. Also, this unit has no outbound lines at all. I head down to her hall, and ask if all is ok. My lady says she can’t sleep, someone keeps banging on her window and she is scared. I pretty much about crapped myself at this point. I again reassure my lady thinking, what just happened. I tell my nurse and she laughs and said, this has been happening for years. Great.
39. The Dog
CNA here, have been working 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 in 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 her 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 shit ourselves.
40. The Lady In Pink
When I worked in a nursing home there was an elevator between the levels as well as stairs at the far end. It was shaped like a u with the nurses station on one tip of the u and the residents spread out around the unit so hypothetically you could see all the exits and stop any confused residents. I was studying to be an RN at the time so I always did night shift. Here’s the thing though. The elevator would randomly one a night go from the top floor to the bottom, and then about an hour later come back up to the floor you were on.
I didn’t think anything of it thinking it was a quirk of the system or something. That was until the night I saw her, the “lady in pink”.
I was in the nurse’s station studying and looked up to see what looked like a resident who had sundowners in pink walking without her walker to the elevator from her room on the other end of the unit. So me being a good nurse I ran to stop her falling or falling down the stairs. But here’s the thing. I get there and she’s not there. So I check her room and the sides of her bed are up and she is unconscious.
Then as I’m walking back I notice the call button is lit up. The elevator opens, the door closes and the elevator moves with no one in it.
I tell my coworkers the next morning (just me on nightshift) and they tell me it’s the lady in pink. Tell me they had this huge Samoan guy who worked there 2 weeks doing nights until he saw the lady in pink then he quit. So me being the big, strong, masculine figure I was, I did the only logical thing. I quit and got a job as security in a high security psych facility. I prefer my danger visible thank you very much.
41. The Tall Cowboy
My mom used to be a RN at a hospital in a small western town. This hospital was connected to a senior living home and at night, the RN over-watched both sides of the building (hospital and living home). She was usually the overnight RN and would have either one or two CNAs working as well. She has experienced this apparition about 6 or 7 times during her 10 year stint there and everyone has referred to the apparition as “The Man in Black”. Each experience was identical except for the location in the building.
Frequently throughout the night, she would have to do her rounds (checking vitals, etc.) and would have to walk around a corner from the nurses’ station/ER towards the (6) beds in the hospital and towards the senior home. She would see the apparition either right after rounding the corner or right after walking out of a room and walking to the next. Outside of the next room, she would see the same apparition. The apparition was of a person in a black, old (old west type) suit with worn black cowboy boots and worn black cowboy hat to match. The creepiest thing about this man (assuming) is that his face was not very distinct. She would describe it as though a man’s face was drawn with charcoal and slightly smeared making it slightly blurred. He was about 6’5″ and would tower over her 5’5″. But when ever she would see him (whether its 10 feet or 3 feet away), he would stand there looking at her and then turn and walk into the room he was outside of. When she would walk into that room, there would not be any other person in there or anything out of place. The first few times scared her to a panic but she slowly just went on without letting it freak her out. But with this man came some extra attention to the patient.
The kicker was that, in about 90% of all the experiences seen by other RNs as well, the patient’s health would deteriorate in the next few days and the patient most often passed away shortly after. So, whenever the over night RN saw “The Man in Black”, extra precautions would be taken with that patient. Another weird thing about the apparition is that it is always seen by just the RN. Not a single CNA has personally seen the apparition. My mom always said that he knew who would be able to help the most at the time. I, on the other hand, took it as the completely opposite. I always thought that it was almost to mock the RNs because he would let them know that something was going to happen but they could not do anything about it. Even though I am not an RN to see him, it still creeps me out every time I walk down the halls and she points out where she has seen him.
42. “Pointing Right Over My Shoulder”
Every night before the next shift comes in, I check on all my patients, make sure their briefs are clean, refill water pitchers, etc. This is usually right after sunset. Three different patients in three different rooms have told me they’re frightened of the tall, thin man standing in the corner, pointing right over my shoulder.
It’s really unsettling.
43. The Lonely Boy’s 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 just 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 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.
44. The Lost Visitor
I work in a level 1 trauma center receiving for 11 counties (implying a fair amount of carnage routinely). One morning between 3 and 4am I was alone in the bay (we have 4 trauma bays and 2 resus rooms in a rectangle surrounding a nursing station) catching up on documentation. I became aware of a man walking from behind me on my right, outside the nursing station and into one of the trauma rooms. Except I hadn’t heard any doors open (big noisy motion activated doors). He looked at me over his shoulder as he walked through the room doors, but didn’t answer when I called out, “Hello?”
I walked around (losing site of the bay door as I rounded a big column) to make sure it wasn’t a lost visitor and there was no one there. There’s no way out other than the door, and it was out of my sight line for maybe a second max.
I later related the story and heebie-jeebies I felt while I was looking for the strange dude to another nurse. She said she’d had an identical experience that same week. People bring it up from time to time, same story. Guy walks into the room, and then is gone by the time you go look for him. We’ve decided to just leave him alone. I hope he finds what he’s looking for though.
45. I Was No Longer Sure They Were Just Hallucinations
I was working a night shift, looking after one patient who needed supervision due to his hallucinations.
This patient had a routine where he would like to go out for a cigarette every hour, I took him out on a wheelchair for a cigarette which seemed to increase his hallucinations. I had been taking this patient out multiple times during the night. At around midnight I took him outside, for his last cigarette before going to sleep.
Once we were outside, he asked me if I could see a small ginger boy trying to get out of the locked cafe in front of us. I said no as I did with all of his hallucinations, this seemed to help reduce the length of time they appeared for.
He then informed me he could see a man and a dog running towards us, this is the dead of night with no around in the hospital, there was no man or dog. However when the automatic doors 50m behind us opened with no one in sight, I was no longer sure if they were just hallucinations. I moved us back to the ward very quickly after that.
46. The Hand-Washing Spirit
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.
47. “I See Ghosts On The Regular”
Just a volunteer at a local place where people go to die, and I see ghosts on the regular. I’m generally there at night, and ghosts make the doors open or close or stick together, I’ve offered to help someone and started walking only to turn around and see that there was nobody there in the first place. There’s a particularly nice ghost who wears a plaid shirt, he moves flower pots away from the edges of the countertops. All in all it’s a very freaky experience but most of them are nice, just lost.
48. It Just Kept Knocking
Hospital I used to work at had a geriatric unit. One night I floated to help out, and was told that all patients placed in a certain room at the end of the hall would have the same “hallucinations” of a tall man in a suit, and another of a baby in a baby carriage sitting outside the room.
On my unit, a general med/surg unit, a patient had passed in a room the previous evening and was now empty. The call light for that room kept going off ALL NIGHT, even after unplugging it from the wall until finally we went in the room and said “Can I help you?”
My unit was shaped like a plus sign (+), with the nurse station at the center. One of the wings was blocked off by double doors because it had been redone as a GI clinic where you would go to get a colonoscopy done and such. On that same med/surg unit on night shift, we heard a loud knocking coming from those double doors as if someone were locked out and trying to get to the nurse’s station. One of my coworkers walked over and saw nobody on the other side of that door, all the lights were turned off. It kept happening, BANG BANG BANG. We even called the security guard up to investigate because we were so spooked, but there was nobody there.
Sometimes I’d have to go through the empty GI clinic as a quick way to get to another elevator or area of the hospital, and occasionally I would walk into strong “clouds” of perfume in the empty vacant hallway, which nobody would have walked through for some time. Spooked me every time it happened.
That hospital has been around since the 30s, and after working there I am a firm believer in ghosts/the supernatural.
49. Basically, The Hospital Was Completely Haunted
LTC nursing is a great place to see weird shit.
There was the church lady “prophetess” who routinely let girls know they were pregnant and asked me about people in my life.
There was the room that would go pitch black occasionally, couldn’t see any light for a minute or two.
There was the room that had three consecutive residents screaming about the murderer killing children.
There was the patient that kept telling us to help “that old man” and described the prior patient perfectly. He died weeks before she was admitted.
There’s the squeak of shoes all night in the Alzheimer’s unit, the random screams, the chairs rocking on their own.
I could go on and on.
