What's Your Best Nursing Ghost Story?

Nursing is a profession that often involves long lonely night shifts in eerie hospital wards. It's a perfect breeding ground for ghost stories. These stories often involve sightings of apparitions, strange noises, and unexplained events that are said to have taken place in hospitals, hospices, and other healthcare settings. Some of these stories are believed to be based on true events, while others are purely fictional. Regardless, they continue to captivate and intrigue both nurses and non-nurses alike - providing a spooky glimpse into the world of healthcare after dark.

I know you have seen and heard freaky things. Share your nursing ghost stories...

Specializes in MDS/PPS.

Ok, I have a couple...

During clinicals at Nursing school over the last summer, we went to a older hospital that had been converted to a Rehab unit after a hurricane...It is a 3 story facility, but only the top floor is used.

The elevator would stop on the 2nd floor everytime, which was being used only for storage, and being inquisitive I asked the staff and found out that supposedly the 2nd floor is haunted by an old ghost doctor who worked and died on the unit...

I just HAD to investigate! I grabbed a classmate and upon stepping onto the vacant, darkened unit, a callbell was on.....we walked in and turned it off.

What we weren't told is that 2nd floor was the old OR floor. It was pretty creepy walking through the old surgical suites.

Well, once we had made an entire trip around the unit we came back to the nurses' station, which was adjacent to the elevator....as we rounded the corner to face the elevators, the doors to the elevator FLEW open and all the call bells went off, as if to say, "Get out!" :eek:

Also, at the SNF I work in (11-7)I have seen a dark figure floating across the floor when walking into a room, only to disappear under a door....

yes, I know that some persons don't believe in ghost that they are just the work of the devil. I too believe that. However, we need to bear in mind that until the Lord comes, the devil will really lure us and deceive us for he is the GREAT deceiver in earth and so ghost are real. . . because satan the deceiver is real.

I have many--after working LTC many years. One that comes to mind is: one morning after report and hearing of this dying resident, who rested quitely "except when the monster was chasing her." and need a personal alarm, as tried to climb out of bed then.-- I checked her first and took in her am meds. She ask: "Do I have to go with that mean man?" I told her No, that she could go with someone nice. Went on to visit about her serious illness and I ask if there was anyone she wanted to come sit with her or a minister called. She replied in the negative. No family and not religious. I ask if she wanted me to say a prayer with her. That was affirmative and we said the Lord's Prayer together. On finishing she stated, "He's gone!" She died the next day and never from the time of the prayer, was she trying to escape the bad man or monster. (She could definitely see him. I couldn't)

Ok you are all gonna say that I'm cruel as hell on this one and yea I guess I was. We had this one LPN that was scared of her own shadow but was constantly trying to scare us. The nursing home I worked in on 11-7 I was the nursing supervisor. (I still work there but now Restorative nurse) This home is infamous for being haunted even though it was a new building compared to the old home that a lot of the residents came from. (It had been the county poor house, infirmary, lunatic assylum etc since 1845) Well apparently they brought a few of their "old friends" with them when they came cause believe me there is wierd stuff happening there all the time.

Anyway, as the supervisor you had to go to the basement and check all the doors and make sure they were locked twice a night. Well it was Halloween time and they had an old casket down there for the haunted house they put on for the residents and families. Well I told one of the other nurses about it and she insisted we go down to see it. (I could already see the cogs turning lol) So I took her down and we pulled it down the hall so that it was right in front of the elevator. We got one of the aides to comes down and lay in the coffin and I went up and told this nurse that I had to go to the basement for supplies. (she should have known something was up cause I was the only one that would ever go down there alone). Well it was harder than hell to keep a straight face all the way. When the elevator doors opened, the aide pushed the lid of the coffin open and slowly sat up. I thought that nurse was going to go throught the back of the elevator and they could hear her scream clear upstairs. LOL. Needless to say she never tried to scare anyone else again. But me on the other hand, I'm bad it's just not so easy to do it when I work day shift now. HEHEHE

Hugs

Rosie:rotfl: :coollook:

Pepper The Cat said:
Here's mine.

I was working the Night shift in a very small hospital. The RNA (this was years ago, before they became RPNs) and I had just finished our 1:00 rounds and were doing our paperwork at the Nsg Station. We heard a loud scream that cut off short. We looked at each other and ran to the room where we heard the scream come from. A patient we had just turned, repostioned, etc was dead. She wasn't expected to die and was quite medically stable. She was a DNR so we did nothing, but that scream creeped us out for the rest of the shift.

All I can think of is that she didn't like who came for her!

Well, just remembered a similar experience, when we found out that during our change of shifts rounds that an old lady patient just passed out without letting us know and what is more funny is that her caregiver who is with her does not even know that the patient is already dead and she was sleeping BESIDE the patient (the two of them are lying side-by-side in one bed). When we woke her up and asked her what time the patient passed away, she gave us an angry look, but when we informed her that the patient is already dead when we entered the room, she suddenly jumped out of bed and was actually shaking in one corner of the room.

When I was an LPN and supervising a nursing home on the 3-11 shift (early 1980's), late at night, (the first time I saw it)...I was sitting at the nurse's station which could view down three long halls. I happened to look up and down one of the halls and saw this tall figure, dressed in a long black flowing hooded robe...no sound from the tiled floor it made. It appeared and just seemed to glide down the hall..and entered the room of a hospice patient. I turned to one of the nursing assitants who had worked there for many years...Bobbie just looked at me and said..."Yes, I saw it." That was very un-nerving. I asked her "...what was that?" She replied..."that was death, we better go down there and check on the resident." Trembling, and heat pounding, Bobbie and I walked down the hall...into the resident's room...the resident indeed had just passed away. There was a distinct odor in the room...(difficult to describe), but throughout my 34 years of nursing, I have smelled it several times before, during and after a resident or patient has expired...the odor of "death." I kid you not. After that incident...I saw the figure three more times, and always just prior to a death. I have worked nights in facilities when the locked front doors would open with the alarm sounding and doors closed on there own...also associated with an event of death.

Since I received my RN, BSN, I have experienced paitent's words, fear, explanations of what they have visualized prior to their deaths...seeing and speaking to loved ones passed on before them, those who have described angels who have come to guide them from this earthly world. Now a nursing instructor...I teach clinical on a step down ICU unit where we have patient's who are prescribed comfort cares, and those who's code status is changed to DNR or referred to Hospice. The night and day nurse's often talk about two rooms on the unit where the call lights come on throughout the shifts... The engineers have checked the systems, the hardware, electrical and have found nothing wrong. IT appears as these two rooms are rooms where patient's have commonly expired from. Coincidence? Who knows... I only know that I don't ever want to be a patient in either of those two rooms.

My Dad used to tell a story that was unnerving for him. He and my Mom had just had a verbal "thing" of sorts. My Mom was an active alcoholic, my Dad was a recovering alcoholic. My Mom had been drinking then she'd pass out. Wake up, drink some more, and pass out. This went on for years before she died.

One day she woke up and was drinking and that is when the verbal fight began. She stormed off to the bedroom and my Dad was in the kitchen and quite angry. He looked up and she had returned but she was wearing a long white gown. He took a double take and realized she was not actually human. It was my Mom yet it wasn't.

She looked behind her where my Mom was, then looked at my Dad. She looked behind her to my Mom again and looked at my Dad again. My Dad described the look on her face as very sad. She slowing shook her head back and forth.

My Dad asked her who she was, she never spoke. My Dad started to approach her and she disappeared. 'Course, first thing he did was to go check on my Mom. She was sitting there happily drinking away oblivious to what had just happened.

He never did understand what that was all about, he could only guess and thought it was my Mom's soul or a guardian angel or some such thing.

My scariest is probably a long time ago when I was a cna. I was taking care of this lady and she started screaming "they are behind you" She really believed there was something behind me. She did die later that night. A more pleasant story was when a lady was dying and she kept saying "look at those beatiful white horses" she too died shortly afterwards.

I have worked LTC with hospice etc for a very very long time. (God I'm getting old) Anytime you get a resident/patient talking to a dead relative with great deal of pleasure on their faces or say look at the pretties you can bet probably 99% of the time that person will die within probably 24-72 hrs. People tell me I'm nuts but believe me I've seen it way too many time. We also have a resident who is very demented and chants etc. Well when she gets extremely loud and hangs around outside a certain person's room, you can almost bet that person won't be there long.

Rosie:kiss

I've worked in LTC for a long time, most of those years on 11-7 shift. I don't have any good, scary ghost stories, just some creepy experiences. There is one unit in our facility that is notorious for "shadow" sightings. Many people, including myself, have seen figures in our peripheral vision. It's usually when we are in the nurse's station charting. You see someone walk by, but when you look up, no one is there. This has happened to many different people on numerous occasions. We joke about it, and often ask new people if they have met the "ghost" on that unit. We also have residents who complain from time to time about children coming into their rooms and making noise in the halls in the middle of the night. One morning, we had 5 or 6 different residents in different rooms ask if "that little boy" was still there. There have also been times when a resident will refer to "the girl behind you", but when you turn to look, there is no one there. We also have had episodes of call lights in empty rooms coming on, doors slamming shut, and just a general uneasy feeling in certain rooms. It probably doesn't help that many of us have learned to do many tasks without turning on the bright lights (as to not disturb sleeping residents) and things are always scarier by the light of night lights.

I also have a couple of stories that have a definite creep factor, but are also comforting in a way. The first one involves my mother-in-law, who was in ICU and dying. She had been unresponsive for some time. Shortly before her hospitalization, she had been talking a lot about her childhood, which had been very hard. When she about 6 or 7 years old, she was walking with her mother when her mother got hit by a bus and died in front of her. After that, her father became abusive to her and her sisters in the worst way. Anyway, here she was, lying in a hospital bed, at death's door. All of a sudden, she opened her eyes and was fixated on the ceiling. She smiled, held up her arms (like a child does when they want to be picked up), closed her eyes again, and died. We like to think that it was her mother, coming to get her.

Another time was on my wedding day. My brother had been killed just seven months before in a car accident (he was 19). Anyway, my mother said as she was driving to the church, she was thinking about how she wished that my brother could be there. All of a sudden, the smell of roses filled the car. She said it was so strong, that it was almost overpowering. Then as quickly as it had come, the smell was gone. Maybe he was there, after all.

I know this thread has been going on for a long time, but please keep them coming. I love this kind of thing.

Well....it's not a nursing story, but it happened to a nurse so does that count?:coollook:

A friend of mine has a three year old son. A neighbor of theirs was dying of cancer, and my friend was going in to the home daily to help out as a neighbor, not as a nurse. Anyway, one morning at 9:00 she called the neighbor's husband to ask if he needed anything from the store as she and her son were on their way. He named a couple of things, and she and her son went to the store. It took about an hour, and at 10:00 she and her son drove up to the neighbor's house. The woman was in a coma and was expected to die at any time. My friend was kind of leery of taking her son in to the home because of the woman being in a coma, but she decided to anyway. She explained to him that the woman was not sleeping, she was in a coma and she wouldn't wake up and was very likely to die soon. He cut her off and said "Mama, she's already dead." She said, not yet, honey but soon. He said again very emphatically "Mama, she is dead." He was not upset about it, he was just stating a fact. She and her son walked up to the door and rang the bell. The hospice nurse answered the door and told them that the woman had passed away at 9:30 that morning. My friend and her son returned to the car, and she asked him "How did you know she was dead?" He said simply "Tony told me." My friend did not know anyone named Tony, either in the family or as a friend. She asked him to describe Tony. Her son said that Tony was a child who was about one year old and he was in the same house as the woman who died. The problem with that is that there had been no children in the house at all besides my friend's son, at least no LIVE children......

Specializes in Telemetry/Cardiac/Neuro.
I've also enjoyed reading these stories. I don't have a ghost story, but I do have a "dream" story.

I am currently a nurse at an independent birth center. At the time of this story, there were three nurses that took turns taking call, and three docs/mws who took turns with call. Meaning that a patient could end up with any combination of nurse and doc/mw at their birth.

I got called in one night to the labor of a woman who had five children, all boys, and the last pregnancy an "ooops." She wanted a girl (even though we all figured she was having a boy, since her previous 5 had been), so as a joke, we put pink sheets on the bed. When she and her husband arrived at the birth center, we said, "Look, D., pink sheets for your little girl!" and her dh looked at us very strangely and said, "Did she tell you about her dream?" And then she got upset with him and said "No, no, don't say anything, I haven't told anyone but you, if I tell, it will spoil it; it won't come true!"

So fast forward three hours, when her baby makes an entrance. It's a girl! We hand her up to mama and are drying her off, and I say, "Wow, I think that's your smallest baby yet! She can't be over 6 pounds!"

And she says, "She is, too, she is 6# 4oz and her name is Amelie. Last night I dreamed all about this, that I would have the baby tonight, that you and N (the mw) would be on call, that you would put pink sheets on the bed for my baby, and that it would be a girl. When she came out, in my dream, she looked up at me and said, my name is Amelie. And I said, no it isn't, I don't like that name. And then she said to me, I don't care, that is my name, you have to name me that!"

The mw and I just looked at each other and had goosebumps. Later I weighed her; she was 6# 2oz. I said something to the mw that "Well, she was two ounces off!" and the mw said, "No she wasn't, the baby peed right before you weighed her!"

Okay, it gets even better. One and a half years later D walks into the clinic, unannounced, no appointment, and asks me if I have time to listen to see if I can hear heart tones. I said, "I didn't even know you were pregnant!" She says, "I'm still nursing, but Amelie keeps coming up to me and pointing to my tummy and saying baby. You probably think I'm crazy!" I said, "D, I was at Amelie's birth, I have never seen anything like that. If I hear heart tones, I wouldn't be surprised." Sure enough, I could get heart tones. I looked over at Amelie and said, "Are you going to have a little sister or brother?" And that kid, all 1 1/2 years of age, said, "Baby - Me!" I looked at D and she said, "She's saying, the baby is a girl like her."

We did an US this time for unsure dates; sure enough, that baby is a girl.

I have never experienced anything like that. It wasn't scary or creepy, and I don't get an odd feel from Amelie; but there is no doubt something special about that little girl.

I've never posted before, but I had to respond to this one. Not a ghost or dream story, but still.....

After two heart breaking miscarriages, I finally gave birth to my second son in '95. My grandmother, who I was very close to, was in a nursing home & was very aware that she was now a great-great-great grandmother (meaning she had 3 great-grandchildren). Exactly one week after my son was born, completely out of the blue & before I could get to the nursing home for her to see him, I got the call that she had passed. Fast forward a couple months. Every time I changed my son on his changing table, he would laugh & coo at someone/thing just over my left shoulder that no one else saw. I'm convinced that it was Grandma, having a little fun with her great-grandson.

When this child was 2, I got pregnant again, & my son simply wouldn't put up with anyone saying that the baby was a boy. He'd point to my belly & insist that the baby was a 'sister', although the baby always turned away from the u/s so we had no idea if it was a boy or a girl. Well sure enough, the baby was indeed a little sister.

I have some nursing ghost stories, but I'll save those for another time.

I heard this story from a friend of mine, who is also a fellow nursing student but from another university. One night, while they were on a night shift, a 9-year-old female child unfortunately died in the Pedia Ward. My friend was the one assigned to perform post-mortem care to the said patient. So there he was, cleaning the patient's body and all. He placed a red bracelet in the patient's right hand, as it was the policy of the hospital to place a red tag on the right hand of all patients who are pronounced dead. After performing his tasks, he was on his way to the elevator when suddenly, the little girl came running after him! Terrified, he quickly pushed the close button so that the elevator would close right away and bring him to safety down to the lower floor.

While inside the elevator, an old woman in hospital gown asked him why he closed the elevator door right away when a child wanted to board in. Still overwhelmed with fear, he explained to the old lady "That was the child that I just performed post-mortem care a while ago. She is already dead. Did you saw the red tag on her right arm? That is the mark for all dead patients here in this hospital..." The old woman raised her right arm and replied... "Similar to this?"

My friend was found unconcious inside the elevator a few moments later. He never stepped inside the said hospital again. Ever.

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