Hospital horror stories immediately conjure up the image of something going ghastly wrong in the ER. Those are hospital horror stories to be sure, but they’re not the only kind. It turns out hospital horror is a pretty diverse genre. Haunted hospitals rebuilt on the skeletons of an old TB ward. Patients who see things and talk to things that aren’t there. Or worse when the patients are a little horrifying themselves. Get ready to get spooked, as doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees over on Reddit have shared with us the spookiest things that have happened to them while at work.
1. Wandering Woman
I used to do home care for an elderly lady with learning disabilities. She had no eyes—they were removed due to a congenital condition. She was lovely but prone to wandering around her flat at night in total silence, which led to several horrifying situations where I left my room at two am only to encounter her standing silent in the hallway, turning her eyeless face towards me.
2. Work Through It
Confused patients can be really creepy too. Saying things like, "Please don't let them take me!" or "Who's that behind you," while only you and the patient are in the room. You get used to it though and even manage to comfort the patients after a while.
3. Cry Baby
The unit I work on used to be an old maternity unit. Not a lot of people know that, but we still have tons of patients report hearing crying babies.
4. Brute Strength
My mom used to work as a nurse in the cardiac ward of a major city hospital. She told me that if they couldn't properly seal an incision after open-heart surgery, they'd have to be vigilant and bandage the wound while cleaning it constantly. She told me she'd have to clean wounds while watching the heartbeat within their body.
She told me that one time she had to watch a doctor dig into a dude's chest cavity to remove an obstruction, all while the dude was conscious. I'm always amazed by how brute force medicine can be.
5. Good-Byes Are Hard
I worked in a nursing home as a nursing assistant. While I worked there seven residents called me into their rooms to tell me thank you, and good bye on different nights over the three 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 two, but seven?
6. The Dead Can Talk
I worked security through college at a local hospital. The only "creepy" thing I remember is when a dead man moaned at me. One of my duties was to help wheel patients who had expired down to the in-house morgue. Once, we were wheeling an 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—a newbie—that sometimes the air in the lungs doesn't come out until sometime later or is delayed for a bit.
7. Maybe it’s the Wind?
I walked past a lift late at night while the doors suddenly opened with no one around. It messed me up until I found out the lifts return to the ground floor when they haven't been used in a while.
8. Night Shift
I used to work in St Bart’s hospital in London, which in parts is over 1,000 years old. One of the buildings had two floors with massively high ceilings, and so the floors were taken out and rearranged to make into five 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.
Due to the new floors, only her head would be visible drifting down the ward.
9. Change of State
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.
10. Call a Priest
I'm a nurse in an emergency medical unit and when somebody comes in under section awaiting a mental health bed, if they have acute psychosis, 99% of the time they talk about Jesus, 666, and the devil as if they are actually possessed.
11. Call From Beyond
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 on my unit who had a son who visited her every day. She was on 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.
12. Angel of Death
This starts off very cheesy but it's all true. One dark and very stormy night at the hospital I was working with a new nursing assistant and training her on how things run around the hospital. Basically she needed to know how to help me, the nurse, and how I did things. Well, we start to walk down one hallway and we both become paralyzed in fear because we see a dark malevolent-looking figure at the end of the hall by the exit sign.
I completely take off running and she follows. We scream/talk about what we saw and she swears she saw a fog around the entity. In the end, we chalk it up to late-night shifts and too much coffee. Laughs ensue. Well, even though it's night time, no one sleeps in a hospital so we are paged to go in a room and continue our rounds.
We carefully look down the hallway and nothing is there. We do our work with a patient and as soon as we step out of the room, there is the scary shadow man at the end of the hall. We scream and take off running again. I call security and they come up and check everything. Of course, nothing is found. But then we hear an alarm start to go off in a room so we bolt in there.
It's the room at the end of the hall where the figure was. A doctor and another nurse had made it in there before us, and the patient had died. Now, this was a stroke patient who was paralyzed and could not walk. The weird part was that her window was open. So the nursing assistant and I start crying and explain what had been happening.
The doctor requested security play back the video of the hallway to make sure no one hurt the patient. In the video, we all could clearly see a dark shadow that never disappeared and yes, it did look like it was surrounded by fog. Right before the patient alarm went off, the shadow vanished. Now, everyone claims this was the angel of death.
I don't know what it was but I'm glad I don't work there anymore!!
13. Stalker
Had a patient record a video of me without my permission and post it on YouTube claiming that I was his new radio/web show cohost. When he is discharged from the hospital, he then proceeds to stalk me, waiting for me in the cafe and by leaving notes on the floor I worked on asking me to call the number he wrote on the paper so we can meet for the show.
Weeks pass and a fellow coworker saw him waiting for me in the cafe, so she reported him and security escorted him away and I had to file a report. Coworkers looked up the video on YouTube. Still there. Creepy comments from his "supporters" of his web show/radio series comment about me and how they "need to see more" of me.
14. Double-Check
I was a hospital aide for a year working in a unit that saw its fair share of Do Not Resuscitate orders and death. One night my shift was almost over, and a patient in the next unit passed. That unit only had one aide, so I went over to help her. She'd been there for years, so we get to work without really talking—cleaning the body, removing tubes, changing soiled linens.
When it came time to put the deceased into a body bag, she rolled the patient (a large man) towards me, with the intention of sliding the bag underneath his frame. However, she rolled him and a large groan escaped his lips, and we both jumped and nearly dropped him. It was just air or gas escaping his lungs, but it sounded exactly like a moan someone makes in their sleep.
We double-checked for a pulse, found none, and by now he was mottling on his underside—a color change when blood pools beneath the skin due to lack of flow from a heartbeat. He hadn't had vitals for a few hours, so we knew he was definitely dead. Still, it creeped me out and gave me the heebie-jeebies.
15. Watching You
The patient comes up to the unit from the Emergency Department. The ED nurse warns me this is a bad elder abuse case, and the local police are involved, as well as adult protective services. She was found on a mattress covered in urine and stool. The poor woman was horribly demented, and her arms and legs were contracted in the fetal position.
Her eyes were bloodshot and she was covered in wounds and open sores. Even though she couldn't move, those bloodshot eyes would follow me while I was in her room. She kept trying to talk, but her mouth was swollen and full of sores. She ended up dying shortly after we changed her code status. Her eyes were open and looking through the doorway when I walked in after the monitor showed cardiac arrest.
I will never forget her face and those eyes will stay with me forever.
16. Mirror Image
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 on 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 the mirror that faded like instantly. I knew it wasn't one of our shadows because there was a light directly above the sink & mirror. I never slept in that ward ever again.
17. Dying Out of Spite
While I was working the night shift at a hospital one time, we had a patient that was living with dementia and had some serious expressions. We had her in a chair at the nursing station and she was talking with my co-workers and I. We had called one of the residents to the ward so we could get a sleeping pill for this woman, and he was in the middle of writing the order when the woman looks at us and says "I really don't like this man."
So my co-worker asked, "Oh, why not?" She responded with, "I don't know, he just gives me the weird vibes. You know what I should do, I should die on him." She then lays back in the chair, closes her eyes and dies. We just through she was sleeping so we didn't check her until the resident was done writing the order and he went to check on her. He said she was dead and kind of laughed, stating, "Well, I guess she showed me."
18. Code White
I had a patient in the hospital that had stage four liver cancer, and as a result, wound up with hepatic encephalopathy and required an ostomy. This poor guy was as yellow as can be. He was super aggressive and paranoid. We called at least 15 code whites (the code for an aggressive patient) on him a week. Security got to know his room number and name by the end of his four-month stay.
On a day shift, he was being really happy and super nice with all the nurses and then suddenly he just lost his mind, like literally lost his mind. He barricaded the door with furniture from the room. It took six security guards to bust open the door, and restrain the patient. I come into the room with the large needle and inject it into the patient.
As I'm holding pressure on the site I look at the wall near the foot of the bed and spelled across it is "SCREW THE NU." I say it out loud and the patient yells: "SCREW THE NURSES, BUT I RAN OUT OF POOP!" He died a month later. The worst part is that the stool stained the paint, and no matter what we used to wash it, it didn't come out.
So the next patient that went into the room simply sat in his bed and kept saying "Screw the nu?"
19. Neck Wound
I saw two patients die from bleeding trough their carotids, a major blood vessel in the neck. Both had a recent tracheostomy and an infection slowly "ate" the blood vessel lining until it burst open.
20. Death Watch
I didn't see this one, but heard about it multiple times. A suicidal patient managed to die by suicide by carefully observing the staff schedules, and did it right after the evening shift went home, so only the night staff was there. He used the TV power cord and put himself on his knees until he died. But that's not the worst part.
To make sure the staff would be delayed as much as possible, he spread feces ALL over the room, and especially around himself.
21. Treating a Criminal
Used to work on the burn unit and got a call saying we had to do the burn wound treatment on a guy who just doused his girlfriend in gasoline and lit her on fire. Dude was like 6'5" tall, 280 lbs., and covered in tattoos. He had three police guards to shackle him down flat to the bed while we helped heal someone that just basically murdered someone.
The burn unit was a great job and I often felt like I was helping people, but working there was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.
22. Death Moves With You
Not that I believe in it or anything, but some rooms seem to be attracting death. And this happens in most units I can think of. It can be sometimes explained as these rooms have more facilities to accommodate the "heaviest" cases—both figuratively and literally speaking. But for the other "normal" rooms, I can find no rational explanation.
This phenomenon seemed to be able to "move" also from a room to another. For example, a few patients died in room 10, then a patient is transferred from this room to room 20, and the phenomenon "follows" the patient. Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but after seeing it myself multiple times, I know something we don't understand is at work here.
I just can't find a better way to explain it.
23. Unexpected Guest
In a hospital I used to work in, there was a department where the employee break room was right next to the elevators. Often during the night shift, nurses would go in during their break to sleep. One night a nurse went to rest a bit but forgot to lock the door. The security guards then arrived, during their rounds to check, opened the door to see the nurse sleeping, and a homeless dude sleeping on the floor next to her.
They managed to get the guy out without waking the nurse but told her afterward. They eventually locked those elevators with a code during the night.
24. Seeing Nothing
I've had a few colleagues telling me that they saw, on multiple occasions, patients acting really creepy in ICU. Often those were hypoactive delirium patients—like the patients are really slow in most of what they do, or don't move at all. But they had their eyes wide open and fixed their gaze on whoever was in the room without blinking, sometimes grunting at them.
Some were even saying they looked like they were possessed. I believe that in one or two cases families brought priests for exorcisms. Not a joke, even doctors confirmed this. I don't remember if it “worked” though. I believe most of them eventually healed and were acting normally upon discharge.
25. Direct Eye Contact
This was from when I was a nursing assistant in a nursing home/sub-acute rehab. My first severe paranoid schizophrenic patient was actually only in for rehab after a hip replacement. He was very well behaved, and actually mild-mannered, but his eyes had nothing behind them. He was very independent but needed some help with dressing.
He had a huge flag in his care plan advising to make direct eye contact with him as much as possible during direct care. He had only mild auditory hallucination, but his paranoia was off the charts, and if he noticed you "looking at someone" anywhere else in the room he would fall into a panic. This entailed a lot of screaming and trying to hide from us.
It was very disturbing to see and honestly heartbreaking. He was horrified of what he thought we would do to him, or about who else was there.
26. Ghost Sighting
I work as an ICU nurse. A female in her mid-20s came in with some serious cardiac abnormalities and then went into respiratory distress. Never had any medical history at all. We had to put her on the ventilator, but she was on just enough sedation to keep her lucid. She could nod/shake her head yes & no appropriately to questions.
One night, the patient in the room next to hers died, and the other patient’s body was still in the room about to be taken to the morgue. The female patient's door was closed with curtains drawn, so she couldn't have seen what was going on next door. When I went in to check on her, she had a look of sheer panic on her face, trembling.
I asked her a series of questions to see if she was cold/hot/in pain/etc. and she denied all. I asked her if she saw something—she started to aggressively nod her head YES. She wasn't on any drugs that would make her hallucinate. I went on to get details on what this thing looked like. After playing 20 questions I got this: a man, pale white, left arm missing, heavy, bald, standing still, behind me.
This was the man who had just died next door. I spent the rest of the night consoling her.
27. Missing Patient
I work in dispatch in the basement of the hospital. I was working the night shift and I was alone. I had the door closed, and there is a key code needed to unlock the door. I am the only one in my corridor of the basement at this time. I heard over the intercom that there was a code yellow—missing patient—from the mental health floor.
I have no idea how he got out, but he was out there roaming the halls of the hospital. About 10 minutes later, the door handle starts shaking and someone is trying to get in. I stayed completely silent until it stopped, then got up and looked through the peephole. There was a man just sitting against the wall wearing a hospital gown.
I went back to my desk and called security, and I spoke as quietly as I could so he wouldn't hear and run away. Security came and I heard them take him away. He was yelling all sorts of stuff that didn't make sense and was clearly resisting them. A guard came in afterward and asked if I was okay and I told him I was fine thanks to the door lock.
Thank you, keypad.
28. Dark Figures
My mom works as a nurse in the ICU and she always says that the patients know when it is their time. They usually say, "nandito na sila," or "they are already here" in Filipino. They also usually ask for a glass of water and just flat line right before it was given to them. Most patients, days before they die, say that they can see a black figure in the corner of their room.
Scary stuff. My mom usually experiences not less than two deaths a week, whether it’s her patient or not. I can't imagine the stress she goes through, and I admire her strength for that.
29. Scream
On my way to the morgue with a colleague. Pushing a bed with a recently deceased man. My first time going down there, so I was a little bit creeped out, but it was with a kind of cute colleague, so I kept my cool. We leave the body in the cold storage room, she goes out while I handle the paperwork and I shortly follow and reach to close the door behind me.
After that follows one of the most terrifying screeches I have ever heard from the room behind me. I lose my cool, jump about two meters in the air and let out a loud screech. Turns out the door screeches when closing, but not when opening. My colleague was laughing her butt off.
30. Threatening Old Lady
Little off, but I worked as a kitchen aide in a nursing home. Got plenty of interaction with the residents. I was cleaning one of the dining rooms, there was still one woman present. One of the nursing assistants came into the dining room and asked if the resident was ready to go. Mind you, this woman has been here for over six months.
Always incredibly nice nothing short of a gem. The resident grabs the nursing assistant by her collar and says, with the biggest smile, "I will slit your throat," and just gently pushes her away. The endearing smile and look of pure joy never left her face. She was quickly moved to the dementia unit.
31. Shadow Figures
Extremely anxious teenage girl with recurrent sleep paralysis. She reported waking up in the middle of the night, unable to move, and being aware of several shadowy figures in her room, clustered around her bed and staring at her. This had been going on for a few weeks, and just prior to her being referred to us, she had started seeing the shadow-people when she was awake, always watching her from somewhere in her peripheral vision.
32. No Escape
There was this five-year-old girl who I was doing a neurodevelopmental assessment on. During the appointment, she began telling me a story about how she had been playing in the woods; she got lost and the "shining people" had found her and hidden her in the place under the hill. Her parents had gone looking for her, and the shining people had made a doll out of sticks and leaves which they gave to her parents, and made them think was her.
There was something incredibly creepy about the way that she told the story, particularly when I –playing along to see where this was going—asked her how she escaped. She looked me straight in the eyes, for the only time in the entire appointment, and said: "I didn't."
33. Scary Room
We have a room on my floor that is known by staff to jokingly be haunted. I have had numerous patients in that room see things come from the ceiling and materialize in the room with them, sometimes our staff attributes these to the hallucinations, but I was talking with a guy who was totally with it and he saw the same stuff.
To add further credit to this, a staff member's father was staying in that room and my coworker joked, "Dad, you got the haunted room.” Not 10 minutes later, the picture on the wall lifted off the backing wire and fell to the floor. My personal experience in there is that the pulse oxygen monitor and EKG start reading when no one is hooked up in room. The room always gives me goosebumps.
34. Check Under the Chair
A lady in the dementia ward told me the lady under my chair didn't have any arms.
35. Never Alone
I was an x-ray tech for years. At one point, I worked the night shift and I worked alone. One night I had to x-ray a homeless man who had hurt his shoulder or something. Anyway, I had rolled him into the room and parked him against the door opposite where the control panel was. I got some film and was walking back into the room towards the man and he looked at me and said, "It's like watching an aquarium. You're surrounded."
He went on to say I was surrounded by people and animals and that I was also "being watched by" people from some native tribe I had never heard of, and told me I should feel honored since they didn't follow just anyone. It was like five am and this freaked me the heck out. For the only time in my life, I actually had that cold icy feeling going down my spine.
I know he was probably suffering from some mental issue but isn't that just the type of person who does this? Weirdly, a year or so later when I was visiting San Francisco, I had a fortune teller stop me on the street and ask to do my reading. She said the same thing, that I was "surrounded."
36. No Resting in Peace
My mother used to work housekeeping at a nursing home. She would often take my sister and I to go visit some of her coworkers or the old folks. I was maybe five or six and my sister was seven or eight. This nursing home was always incredibly dark inside, despite having huge skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows in every wing.
Even from a young age I knew this was a place of death, from the decrepit frail bodies gathered around the wood-paneled television showing Lawrence Welk reruns, to the black enamel "tree of life" they hung on the wall in the lobby, where every little bronze leaf was engraved with the name of a patient who died there, and the overwhelming smell of urine and sickness.
Regardless, my mother is an extremely upbeat and chipper person, and she absolutely loves old people. Even now in her 60s, she doesn't consider herself an "old person," and she loves to volunteer with the elderly. So in spite of the aura of decay coming from her workplace, she thought it was a wonderful place to show off her children.
So we'd visit her along with my dad on her lunch hour during her weekend shifts, and also were forced to go to Mass with her on Sundays, as it was a Catholic facility. Afterward, we'd mill around on her break before she went back to work. Anyway, one day she took us down one of the wings of the facility to greet one of her coworkers.
The two of them chatted, my sister hanging with my mother while I just amused myself by wandering. Everything was completely normal, except for the woman in the room next to us. I didn't look in the room, but I could hear a woman shouting, "I'M IN PAIN," over and over again, her voice echoing like the wail of a cat mixed with the voicebox of a doll who needed its batteries changed.
I asked my mother, "Shouldn't we do something about her?" My mother replied with something like, "No, she does that all the time, like 24 hours a day." So that was the day I learned that oftentimes, stroke or dementia patients can have verbal perseveration, or the repetition of certain words or phrases, due to their condition.
Cut to about ten years later. I'm working dietary at the sister facility to this nursing home; an independent and assisted living facility. Our two facilities were connected by a wing so staff could travel between the two, as well as patients if they were able. When I worked there I made the trip many times to the other facility's kitchen.
It just so happens this was the same wing where the shouting woman used to live, but I didn't remember at the time. I walked through the wing and heard a distant, "I'M IN PAIN" repeat a few times before it trailed off. The facility has a policy that all patients must keep their doors open, so I poked my head into a room where I thought the sound was coming from, but it was empty, no patients currently living in it at the time.
Beds were made, no decorations on the wall, nothing. Confused, I walked out and met immediately with a nurse. I said, "Oh hey, [nurse's name]. I thought I heard someone shouting on this wing while I was walking to the kitchen." "You did," she replied. She pointed to the lights next to the door and the call light was on.
I didn't trip it or anything; I wasn't even near it while I was in the room. She explained, "Occasionally people will hear a woman shout—" "I'm in pain," I said. "Exactly. And the call light will go off so we have to go in and reset it. Happens every couple weeks."
37. Silence Isn’t Golden
I used to be a nursing assistant working swing and graveyard shifts in nursing homes. One of my creepier experiences was when I had a lady in my hall that was actively dying. I found that a lot of time when the dementia folks are in the process of actively dying, they babble. It's weird at first, but you get used to it.
This lady didn't babble. She was completely silent and still and it creeped me the heck out. Other than that, I went along with my usual system of checking on her every half hour to make sure she was clean and somewhat comfortable. On my last check of her before leaving for the night, I had just cleaned her up and I had my back turned as I was emptying up her garage when a hand reached out and grabbed my wrist.
I turned around to see this tiny old lady sitting straight up on the bed, staring at me, with a death grip on my wrist. She didn't say a word and just laid back down and went to sleep.
38. Haunted Hospital
So I'm not a doctor, but my dad is, and I sometimes go with him to different hospitals that he works at. There's one in particular that stands out, though. This hospital used to basically be a death camp for people that got tuberculosis—they'd send them there for "fresh air" to heal them and they'd die because there wasn't any real cure.
Very many people died this way in the hospital, and the building, in general, is old and creepy looking. When he sees patients, I hang out with the nurses/PAs, and they often tell me ghost stories. Because of working there, a lot of the staff has gotten into things like Ouija boards, recorders, ghost tours, etc. too, so that's also cool, and I've heard some of their recordings and such.
Until last year, there was an old elevator that was known for sometimes stopping you on either the second or fourth floor before taking you where you actually wanted to go. This wouldn't be a big deal normally, but this hospital is strangely laid out. It's a four-story building, but only the first and third floors are in operation.
The fourth and second floors look like a typical abandoned hospital, complete with broken wheelchairs, outdated medical equipment, and no working lights. My dad has gotten stuck on the abandoned floors several times in the past, and people have claimed to have bad experiences there. Patients who would report seeing the same people in their rooms.
One incident involved several patients complaining about a little boy and little girl coming to their rooms at nighttime. There were several patients refusing to stay in their room again after the first night. People hearing screams and children's laughter. A horror movie was filmed at the hospital on the third floor, and the staff kept noticing noises that were messing up the filming coming from upstairs.
They went downstairs and asked the staff to tell the nurses on the fourth floor to quiet down. No one has worked on the fourth floor in a very long time.
39. Empty Halls
I’m a nursing assistant in a nursing home. I swear I heard a walker going down the hallway for a full few minutes. Hallways were empty, no doors opened or closed, and we did rounds 15 minutes after hearing that and every single person was in bed.
40. Cassandra of Troy
There was an old woman who was in her 70s when I first saw her in 1985. She had chronic schizophrenic by all criteria. The consultant who trained my consultant was a resident in psychiatry when she was admitted the first time—in 1943, that is. I found it rather strange that my consultant would never, ever prescribe her any medication, instead would treat her as a guest visitor whenever she dropped in to have a chat with her friend.
My consultant was due to retire and during one of his last days, I summoned the courage to ask him about the old woman. He said, "She fulfills every requirement that warrants the diagnosis, yet my consultant never ever attempted to admit her or treat her, nor did I. You must never as well." The answer was unexpected. He must have read my complete shock.
He took out an old worn-out file from his cabinet and asked me to read. Pages were yellow and the ink was fading but the dates and notes were legible. 1943. His consultant had broken the rule. Secured a patients file and kept with him. Then he handed that file AND the patient to his student who was incidentally my consultant.
As I read it, I knew the reason. She had, back in 1943, while in a mental asylum, predicted demise of Nazis, usage of nuclear bombs and half of Europe falling under communists, freedom for colonies in Asia and Africa. The notes said that she had "systematized delusions and auditory hallucinations that she held to be true and voice of God".
I never saw her after my consultant went into retirement. However, if ever there are a few enigmas that I encountered, she is the biggest of them all.
41. Practical Joke
I studied recreational therapy in college and we had to shadow many different hospitals. One of the ones we had to shadow was an old state psychiatric facility, which is rumored to be haunted. Since it was so far, they offered to let us stay in the dorms they have for their interns. My friend and I were the last to get there out of all our class.
The campus was huge, so when we arrived, we got out where we thought we were supposed to go. As we approached the building, we heard a god awful scream. I screamed. Followed by maniacal laughter. I thought it was our professor/fellow classmates playing a joke on us. We finally found where they were, and we told them that they got us good.
They told us it wasn't them. I was terrified to sleep there that night.
42. Eaten Alive
This was maybe more disturbing than creepy, but...I get called into work late one night. I am a registered nurse working in surgery, and late-night calls are always a roll of the dice as to what you might get. The hospital operator calling had very little detail as to what we were coming in for, just the surgeon and patient name.
I get there and the doctor had booked an amputation to remove part of the foot on a diabetic patient, which is not unusual. When I go to talk to the patient, it turns out that due to his diabetic neuropathy, and therefore lack of sensation in his feet, he had a sore on his toes that had gone untreated—again, not unusual.
Well, in this case, he had awoken to crunching noises in the middle of the night...he wakes up and turns on the light to find that underneath the covers, his beloved chihuahua had eaten all 4 of his smaller toes and was working on the great toe. The wound was a pretty ghastly site, and the site of those tiny teeth marks is something I'll never forget.
43. Dancing Shadows
I had started on my night shift, and a patient turned to me and stated that he was going to die tonight and that I couldn't let the shadow people take him. He ended up dying that night with the light on, and you could see shadows dancing around his bed, when no-one else could walk in that bay.
44. Strange Visitor
Had a patient who needed to be tubed and taken up to ITU in the end, but a couple of hours before that he had a delirious phase, and kept saying that his wife was watching him, and that there was something different about her, that she wasn't the same and that he just wanted her to go away and that he was going to visit her when he could get out of bed.
At the time she was in the same hospital a floor below him for a different reason. It turns out she had died about two days before that, whilst he was in surgery.
45. See You Again
I nursed a patient who had come back from surgery with a very distinct leg ulcer—they had tried to wash it out and do a skin graft but it was too necrotic and they were going to take his leg off the next day. He was very confused overnight, but the next morning his wife came in and he was a lot more with it. He told everyone that he just wanted to die and that he didn't want any more treatment.
He said that he wanted to die at 4:30 that afternoon because he could then finally relax. We later found out that that was the time he used to get in from work and relax in front of the television. He died at 4:33, that afternoon. Cue me crying with his family. A couple of days later, I had to go down to the bowels of the hospital to collect some equipment from the gastro ward.
That’s when I saw that patient with the leg ulcer walking around. He turned to me and smiled before walking through a locked door.
46. Keep Your Eyes Closed
First time I saw a dead body, no one told me that when you close a person's eyes, they don't stay shut like in the movies. They can spring back open. Cue me, washing this person’s chest after having closed their eyes, only to turn around to see him staring at me because his eyes have re-opened. I screamed like a little girl, and everyone came rushing in.
47. House Call
I got called out overnight to a patient's house, when we arrived we found a paramedic crew there because the patient was vomiting fresh blood. They ended up leaving because he was dying, and there was a Do Not Resuscitate order in place, so they legally couldn't do anything. We stayed and washed him, and comforted his brother.
We watched him as he died, vomiting more blood, and losing control of his bowels constantly. All in all, it took him about an hour and a half to die from liver cancer due to alcoholism, and it was a very uncomfortable and undignified death. But as no-one had informed his brother about funeral arrangements and body pick up, he had no-one to call to collect his dead brother.
We had to leave a grieving brother with his last relative's lifeless body in the next room until a funeral parlor opened three hours later to sort it out.
48. Burning Up
I used to work patient transport. I got a call to take a body from ICU to the morgue. Nothing crazy. I got to the ICU and because it was shift change, a large group of nurses was circled around the nursing station. There were two doctors there as well. I went up to the group to say I was ready. That was when I felt an incredible wave of dread.
I saw that they were all super creeped out, both the nurses and doctors alike. One doctor asked, "What was the temperature?" "101.5," replied a nurse. "When did he expire?" "Over three hours ago. The family requested additional time." Bodies are usually only allowed to stay two hours on the floor before going to the morgue.
The whole group, with me trailing, walked to the patient’s bedside. The doctor placed his hand on the patient’s stomach. The immediate shock that came across his face was terrifying. The patient was burning up. After three hours, they should be cold. He said there was no medical explanation. He is an esteemed ICU doctor with years of experience, so I trusted him.
I took that body down and while in the elevator, I thought of zombies. I have never been so scared. But while waiting, I knew that I had to touch his stomach or else I would never forgive myself. I had to be a tangential part of this medical anomaly. Through a pair of gloves, a body bag, and two sheets, I touched his stomach and felt the radiating heat.
49. Security Rounds
I worked the IT helpdesk in a hospital for three years, which meant working a late shift one week out of every six. The first time I ever did this, most people went home between 5–6 and it was dead quiet by 7. Later in the evening, I started hearing doors and windows opening and closing in the building's other wings. This went on until I left at 1 AM.
Windows opening then immediately closing, doors opening at both ends of a long hallway simultaneously. It just went on and on all night. I commented to my manager the next day that the security guards took an awfully long time to do their rounds of the building and check all the windows were locked. It went on for hours, by my watch.
He gave me a funny look and told me that there was no security in our building after hours. I'd been the only living soul in there. It's worth noting that the building had originally been a nuns' dormitory, and when they moved out it was converted into a morgue before getting its final makeover and becoming an office block.
The same thing happened every time I pulled a late shift. I heard these noises all night but never saw anything disturbing, so I decided in the end that it simply wasn't a problem. However, leaving the building meant turning all the lights off then walking 30 meters in the dark to the main door. I hated that part of going home.
50. Creepy Crawlies
I used to work as a nursing assistant in a nursing home. Worked third shift throughout university. During the night we turned off half the lights so it was darker for the evening, and there wasn’t a lot of light in the residents' rooms. We had one resident who was younger, in her 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 assistant 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.
51. Sugar and Spice and Everything Terrifying
A nine-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...
52. Long Goodbye
I worked for a rural hospital and we had a patient that came in with a heart attack. We worked on her fruitlessly for 30–40 minutes. The doctor declared her dead and invited the family in. Her body laid in front of the grieving family for almost another half hour. Her family members begged her to come back and say goodbye, and she promptly obliged.
She sat up hugged one of them and said goodbye. The entire staff rushed in and ran a full code for the second time. She was pulseless and cold when we started the first time, and worse when we ran the second. She never made it. But she was back to say goodbye. It was one of the most unsettling things I ever saw there.
53. Bad Dreams
Fourth-year nursing student here. My story is more sad than creepy. I was sitting for a 28-year-old woman going through alcohol withdrawal. It was day three, the worst day. Sitting is when you sit at the patient bedside because the patient is a danger to themselves/others. She was in full restraints, with her hands and feet bound to the bed.
She couldn't physically hurt me, but she kept calling me racial slurs and spitting all over the room. After a while, she started hallucinating. She thought she was in the car and I was sitting in the front seat, her two kids in the back. She talked about her kids for a while and then, started screaming and telling me to take the wheel.
This scene went on for about 10 minutes of her explaining in vivid detail the car crash that had happened, and how she had killed her son. When the story was over, she kept crying and apologizing to me and asking me to pick up her son’s dead body and give it to her. She was given IV sedatives but when those wore off she had the same hallucination again.
It replayed about seven to eight times over the duration of my 12-hour shift. It was extremely unsettling because after hearing the story a few times, I could tell that this was something that actually happened and that she was replaying the horrifying memory in her head over and over and over again in her delirious state.
The poor woman must have suffered so much. I'm glad she finally checked into a rehab program to detox, but it's sad to think of the long journey she has in front of her.
54. Second Meeting
I was a fresh intern in a massive university hospital. As with a lot of hospitals in the UK, half of it is space-aged while the other half hasn't had a lick of paint since the 70s. A lot of the old section of the hospital has been out of use for years but late at night interns would navigate these closed wards and corridors for shortcuts when under pressure.
My cardiac arrest bleep—in the US, this is called this a code—went off at about three am. I was on the ground floor of the old section of the hospital and the call was to the far end of the top floor of the same section. I ran up five flights of stairs to bring me to the right floor but the wrong side. I had to pass through a massive abandoned ward that was completely pitch black to get to the ward I wanted.
I sprinted down a long dark corridor, huffing and puffing. I nearly smashed into an elderly lady. She grabbed my arm, I'll never forget how ice-cold her grip was. She asked me, "How do I get out?" I pointed towards where I had just come from and told her to get into the elevators. I then continued my sprint to the patient.
I was the first doctor to make it to the bedside. A nurse was performing CPR and another was drawing up adrenaline. I went to the top of the bed to manage the airway. I looked down. It was the same old lady I met in the corridor.
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