What's Your Best Nursing Ghost Story?

What Members Are Saying (AI-Generated Summary)

Members are sharing personal experiences and stories related to ghosts, spirits, and paranormal occurrences in healthcare settings. Some members discuss encounters with deceased loved ones or unexplained phenomena, while others share their interest in ghost stories and movies like "Doctor Sleep" and "The Shining." There is a mix of skepticism, curiosity, and belief in the supernatural among the forum participants.

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...

Maisy

Have you ever been able to stop something from happening?

As for the door. Why do you think it slams??

:typing

Specializes in ER/EHR Trainer.
Maisy

Have you ever been able to stop something from happening?

As for the door. Why do you think it slams??

:typing

I've thought about that alot...I think we all have "feelings" we just ignore....if I'd ignored the feeling about my daughter, she may not be here!

If there was one thing I could've stopped or had that heads up....I would have been with my dad during his last few minutes on earth. I really miss him, he was my buddy. :sniff: If I could have stopped his passing, I would have in a second!

As for the door, haven't got a clue....someone wants to be acknowledged?

who knows maybe nurses are more sensitive....don't you all get that sixth sense when looking at a patient? Can't quite put a finger on it, but just know something isn't right. The difference between stopping an event and picking up after an event is very subtle. I don't know about you guys-I'd rather prevent that clean up!

Maisy

Bumpppppppp

I'd get more than chills. I'd have a priest at my house. I'd be a basket case.

:chuckle:lol: I'd feel the same way!!!

Specializes in LTC, CPR instructor, First aid instructor..
I have several stories that have happened to me and my family.

My great-grandmother was a nurse from Ireland....she also believed that your relatives came to get you when you passed. Right before she died she talked about speaking to her dead children and first husband who died during the Flu 1917. My grandmother(her daughter thought it was nonsense)-she died that night (at home) with a smile on her face. My mother was 10yo and remembered her appearing beautiful and like she saw heaven!

Years later, my grandfather was very depressed and committed suicide-my mother awoke at that exact time shaking and screaming-she said "she felt like death had grabbed her"-my father confirmed it....not something mom wanted to talk about.

When my unbelieving grandmother passed away-she was being treated for kidney stones. My mother had gone home to care for me ( I was a toddler), when she returned she told my mother that she had just missed her father, and grandmother. My father said my mother walked out of the room and went hysterical! Why? Because my mother was a big believer in the supernatural and believed my great-grandmother, especially when she experienced my grandfather's death. My grandmother died that night of uremic poisoning, she was only 59!

When my daughter was two I was cutting the grass-my daughter was safe in her crib napping(or so I thought), I got a bad feeling and heard my name. I stopped cutting the grass went in the house and found my baby hanging from the blind cords-VERY SCARY! I almost disregarded that feeling. She was turning blue and I have no doubt she would have died.

A few years later I was going with my dad and 5 year old to his last soccer game of the year...of course, I wasn't ready, wasn't dressed yet. I kept looking at my dad, and I kept asking him if he was okay. It was weird....I've read books where an author foreshadowed a death, something like " a shadow crossed over his face..." I swear that is exactly what happened. My mother got alarmed and said "why do you keep asking him that?" I really didn't know..it was weird. Crying as I write this, I never saw him alive again. Daddy died of an anuerism-they said he was walking and laughing and that was it! 59yo too and healthy as a horse-it was a family joke that we'd have to hit him over the head with a shovel, he was never sick!

Like her dad, my mom went into a depression...was out two years after my dad's death with the kids....had that bad feeling again, mom had OD'd....got her to the hospital in time. Hate this feeling.

Have had other feelings, weird ideas and thoughts about people..sometimes I don't want to know-and sometimes I believe I shut it off.

Most recently, FIL passed in hospice after brief illness. Even that was weird, DH had checked on dad 30 minutes before I was leaving, but had a bad feeling....found him aspirating on vomit. HATE THESE FEELINGS!

Anyway, the day before he went to hospice he was talking to family, and a friend from his youth that he had kept in touch with-while we sat around watching him. Told us he talked to George, George was coming. Dad did not talk much in hospice, but said George was coming. The day he died we called George's home, we were told that George had passed away 1 year prior on the same day. Coincidence? Maybe George came.

I don't doubt that ghosts, visions, lost souls, evil presences and whatever else you want to call it exists. It stands to the reason that are bodies if controlled by electrical impulses are energy. Energy never dies, so when our body expires-it has to go somewhere.

I have truly enjoyed this thread...keep them coming.

Maisy

PS don't want any feeling anytime soon, mine aren't usually good!

This is exactly why I love to watch the TV show, "Ghost Whisperer." That show is about things the actual woman who was on the Oprah Winfrey show a while back told about. She was then asked if she sees a lot of them, and she said she did, but she had to block them out and focus on just one or two at a time.
Specializes in Geriatrics, Alzheimers, Special Needs.

I worked in an alzheimer unit that was supposedly haunted. Now me being a fan of Ghost Hunters wasn't bothered by this so called rumor. I still enjoyed working there, but I was a day shifter.

One month while covering the overnight shift for a co-worker, I expereinced two haunting experiences. I was only a temporary fill in, so I wasn't alone either night, and had my own witness.

The first night I was getting trained and oriented to the overnight shift and what happened when and where. My co-worker and I sat down for some coffee in the dining room around 1am, after we had gotten the wanderers back to sleep.

While she was telling me about the usual nightly procedure, we heard a door slam. Knowing that we had opened and propped each door open for the night, we went to check and see who was up. The door that had slammed was to the room of one of our bedridden residents, who wasn't even capable of sitting up on her own, and she was fast asleep. Not really worried about what happened, I opened the door and pushed the doorstop under the door and made sure that it was secure before I headed back to the dining room with my co-worker.

In a matter of minutes after sitting down, there was another door slam. I didn't know why, but I was certain it was the same door, so this time both of us went down to the room, to not only find the door slammed shut, but locked. We were able to find the key and open the door, finding the patient still fast asleep. Together we both propped the door open and made sure that it was securely propped.

Durring the morning shift change, while doing rounds and checking on patients, we found the same door shut and locked. The door was still propped open and the patient was doing fine at the last check, less than 30 minutes before, and neither of us had heard it shut again. Once we unlocked and opened the door, we found that the patient had passed away.

The second happened the week after. We had just finished checks on the patients rooms, finding all residents safely asleep, and had started on the reports and charting for that night. Everything was calm and quiet and so far uneventful. All of a sudden we hear a loud crash, as if someone had fallen. My co-worker took the west hall and I took the east, and we carefully checked every patient to see who had fallen out of bed. Neither of us found anything out of the ordinary. The same crashing sound happened again before our shift was up.

Now I went back to my day shift, and none of the day shifters believed us about what had happened, but every single night shifter congratulated me on my first experiences, and followed with their own stories. Too many to fit in one post.

Specializes in Med surg, Critical Care, LTC.

3 weeks ago I was on call over the weekend. We had been working 20 hours straight, and I was exhausted. I had my last patient in recovery and then "hopefully" was going to be able to go home and get some rest. So I was very vested in keeping up with the VS, urine output, PCA, incisional assessments, pain, etc... so I would be ready to take the patient to the floor in exactly 1 hour - the minimum time they had to spend in PACU.

Things were going well, the OR nurses had finished cleaning up and said goodbye, anesthesia and the surgeon were long gone, just me and my patient we left.

I was doing my care plan when I heard a noise in the holding area, which is right across from PACU and where I was sitting. It was dark, but there are, for lack of a better word for them, night lights throughout the area, so it's not totally dark.

At first I ignored the noise, it sounded as if someone had moved a chair. I chalked it up to fatigue and kept working. A few minutes later, I heard the same noise, so I looked up, and there was a chair, the stationary kind, not on wheels, sitting in the middle of the floor, facing me. I know this chair wasn't there before, as I had been walking through the area for 20 hours between cases to use the bathroom.

The patient was resting comfortably, and I noted that I had 10 min left before I could take her downstairs. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck and my arms. I couldn't leave her, so I tried to ignore the chair, but felt like it was staring at me.

Maybe another three minutes went by, and I kept glancing at the chair, every minute or two, when it just moved an inch or two backwards. I SAW IT - I WAS LOOKING RIGHT AT IT, NO PERSON MOVED IT!! I basically got up and called the floor saying I was on my way down with the patient. A few minutes early, too bad.

As we were leaving the OR doors, I heard a "BANG", and I just knew the chair had fallen over.

After bringing the patient back from the floor, I look and sure enough, that's exactly what happened. I was either to overtired to care, or my fear mechanism had shorted out, but I walked over to the chair, righted it, and push it back over too the side where it belonged. I looked around and saw nothing, heard nothing.

I cleaned up PACU, all the time waiting for something to happen, but nothing else did. I've been there three years, and nothing else like this has happed before.

I'm NOT looking forward to being there alone again after hours.

I don't dare tell anyone I work with about this, I'm afraid they'll think I'm nuts.

I would have passed the whole thing off as fatigue, except, when I came up from taking the patient to the floor, I physically MOVED the chair to it's right spot, so I kNEW I didn't imagine it.

I've got goose bumps just wrighting about it, and I LIVE in a haunted house. I can deal with a fleeting aparation, or noises, but seeing inanimate objects move, that's too much for me!!

Specializes in Geriatrics.

I love this thread and have some great stories I'll add later. Funny thing, as I'm reading this, one of my interior doors keeps "bumping" and there is no way a wind could be hitting it and there is no one near it either!!!

I was reading this before I went to bed last night and thought I was not scared....I woke up in the middle of the night and was looking out my bedroom door saying what??? All I rememeber was someone telling me to come to the middle?? I really thought someone was in my house, must have been a nightmare from all these creepy stories, no more reading them before bed!!

Specializes in Geriatrics.

This is kind of long-

I have several stories- Most involving my neice Macy Nicole, who died of SIDS at 15 weeks.

About 1 1/2 months before Macy died, my sister told me that sometimes at 2-3 am, she would wake up and hear Macy "talking" and laughing in the dark. She asked me if maybe our Grandmother was there with her. (They lived in my grandmother's old house) After Macy died, my sister felt that maybe it was someone preparing Macy.

The night she died, my 2 yr old nephew, Jason was there and witnessed the resuscitaion attempts, and later told my Mom, that "one night a big, beautiful angel lady came and put wings on Macy Cole's back and they flewed away"

At the funeral, a lady came up to my sister and asked if she was the mother and my sister said yes. the lady proceeded to tell her the story of her grandaughter who also died of SIDS and the stories were identical. She went on to say " I just want you to know that these babies have a special purpose and Macy has fulfilled hers" No one else saw this woman and there were no unknown names on the book.

My sister and I went to a grief support group and the facilitator told a story of a little 7-8 yr old girl, who was a special needs child. She was to have a dance recital in May of this year and was very excited. it was all she talked about. Sadly, she passed away in April, but her Mother went to the recital in her memory, and afterwards, someone took a picture of her mom and the dance teacher and in the background is this little red haired girl in a dance costume, but you can see through her legs!!! She showed us a picture of the little girl before her death, and it was clear that it was her! She got to go to her recital after all.

There are several more, but I'll leave them for later.

Specializes in PICU, CCU, Psych.

I have been reading this thread for the past couple of days. Tonight, a patient died on my ICU unit rather unexpectedly. About 1 minute after she was pronounced by myself and another RN, the "service alarm" on her bed started going off. I unplugged the bed and plugged it back in (usually fixes the problem), but the bed kept alarming. I tried silencing it, but it started up again. The other RN and I were kind of freaking out, so I said, "Have you opened the window yet?" The other RN opened the window and I silenced the bed one last time. The alarm never came back on again.

My mom is an RN at a Shriner's hospital where they have a well-known resident ghost named Charlie. They think he must have been a Shriner, because he is such a prankster. One day my mom had to go to the attic of the hospital, which doubles as a storage room, to get a couple of wheelchair for routine maintenance. She knew that it would probably take an hour to get them together because the nurses at her hospital are always mixing and matching pieces from different wheelchairs, but for maintenance all the numbered pieces have to match. When she was getting off the elevator to the attic she could hear the door leading to the main storage area opening and closing by itself, which scared her a little. She yelled out, "Charlie, you're not helping!!" When she got to the attic, both of the wheelchairs she was looking for were side by side, put together correctly. She yelled out, "Thank you!" and got the heck outta there!

I have been reading this thread for the past couple of days. Tonight, a patient died on my ICU unit rather unexpectedly. About 1 minute after she was pronounced by myself and another RN, the "service alarm" on her bed started going off. I unplugged the bed and plugged it back in (usually fixes the problem), but the bed kept alarming. I tried silencing it, but it started up again. The other RN and I were kind of freaking out, so I said, "Have you opened the window yet?" The other RN opened the window and I silenced the bed one last time. The alarm never came back on again.

My mom is an RN at a Shriner's hospital where they have a well-known resident ghost named Charlie. They think he must have been a Shriner, because he is such a prankster. One day my mom had to go to the attic of the hospital, which doubles as a storage room, to get a couple of wheelchair for routine maintenance. She knew that it would probably take an hour to get them together because the nurses at her hospital are always mixing and matching pieces from different wheelchairs, but for maintenance all the numbered pieces have to match. When she was getting off the elevator to the attic she could hear the door leading to the main storage area opening and closing by itself, which scared her a little. She yelled out, "Charlie, you're not helping!!" When she got to the attic, both of the wheelchairs she was looking for were side by side, put together correctly. She yelled out, "Thank you!" and got the heck outta there!

apparently he was helping.

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