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...

Specializes in Med/Surg.

I work with several people that claim they can "see" things and have experiences with ghosts. I was taking care of a patient last weekend around 3am and heard the water turn on at the sink outside the patient's room. Now this particular room has its sink in a "staging" area that runs parallel to the patients room, we use this area for dressing for isolation patients. This particular pt wasn't in isolation so the door between the pt's room and staging area was open and you could easily see the communal exit for both rooms while standing in the patients room, although the view of the staging area is largely obstructed due to the configuration of the patients room. So about 3am I'm medicating this patient with an IVP med, standing on the far side of that patients bed when I hear the water turn on. The sink has an infrared sensor on it that you have to stick your hands down into the basin to get it to turn on. I really didn't think anything of it as the staging area also houses an additional trash can/linen hamper and figured someone had come in to empty them, so look up to see who it is, but dont see anyone. Finish giving my med and head out to wash my hands and no one is there. Still don't think much about it until a few nights later when I'm back with the same assignment talking with one of my co-workers who is telling me how paranormally active it has been the past few days. I ask what was going on and she told me there had been a man who followed her into a pts room and turned the faucet on. I asked which pt and of course its my patient. :uhoh3:

I keep trying to convince myself its a faulty sensor, but its a bit coincidental considering she knew nothing of my previous night.

CuriousK: Agree about 3am being the polar of Jesus' death. I'm not sure where I heard that though.

Specializes in Obs & gynae theatres.

I'm more inclined to believe in circadian rhythms than Jesus and 666 tbh.

Hello! I am not a nurse, but am fascinated by all the ghost stories on this site. My late husband was a Native American Traditional Healer who actually worked at a health clinic in Canada counseling Aboriginal clients. I was his assistant and worked with the clinic's wonderful and dedicated nursing staff.

You are correct in your observations about 3 am being somewhat of a "witching hour". My husband was taught by Native Elders (through the oral tradition of his people) that the Negative powers work mostly during the odd hours, particularly at night. Thus, you will find certain "negative" things happen at the odd hours of the night and sometimes the day. He used to wake at 1am, 3am and 5am -- like clockwork -- and said he could sometimes feel the negative energy in the air. At those times he would pray to the Creator for protection for himself and those he loved. Sometimes, he said that if you get that feeling that something dark or negative is around at these times, you can acknowledge it and ask it to leave without harming anyone. Native people often acknowledge such things by laying tobacco.

My late husband passed away in the ICU of a hospital surrounded by his family and caring nurses. One time, a couple of months before his death, he was in a regular ward of the hospital, in a shared room, awaiting the results of some tests. He had severe COPD and was on oxygen. Being a "medicine person" he was very sensitive to paranormal activity and was used to seeing "spirits." It was particularly hard for him to stay in a hospital because he said that there were a lot of spirits in hospitals and he could get little rest because he would see them and they would also come into his dreams.

At the time of the incident described here, I was 100 kilometers away at home (I would drive in to the city every day to visit him) asleep in my bed. Our 3 dogs were asleep in the same room with me. My two youngest dogs all of a sudden woke up and were very restless, whining and barking. I looked at the clock-- it was 3:07 am. I sensed something was not right and got up to calm them down and try to figure out what was going on. Then the phone rang. My heart skipped a beat, as call display showed it was the hospital. A nurse was calling me to tell me that an incident just occurred with my husband.

The staff found him almost passed out in the hallway of the hospital -- his oxygen tube was, of course, out of his nose. They got him back in his bed, and once he was revived enough he told the nurses that when he woke up his room was different -- it had file cabinets in it and there were people sitting at desks. He tried to get the attention of the nursing desk that was right outside his room door, but no one was there. So he got up from his bed and started looking for someone and eventually wandered down a hallway and ran out of oxygen.

The nurse on the phone was frightened by what he was saying, and got even more upset when I told her that I wasn't surprised at all by her call and that the dogs had woken me up to alert me that something was not right. The nurse assured me that they would assign someone to sit beside my husband the rest of the night.

The following day, I went early to see my husband. He told me that the nurse, an Aboriginal woman, was totally freaked out, especially when someone told her his background. Later that day, the hospital approved transferring my husband to our local hospital, saying they did not have the staff to be with him 24/7. All my husband would say about his experience was that he thought that his room in the hospital had been used as an office or something, and that the spirits of those people were still there, along with a number of patients who passed away in the room after it was converted to a hospital room.

Specializes in LTC, CPR instructor, First aid instructor..
Hello! I am not a nurse, but am fascinated by all the ghost stories on this site. My late husband was a Native American Traditional Healer who actually worked at a health clinic in Canada counseling Aboriginal clients. I was his assistant and worked with the clinic's wonderful and dedicated nursing staff.

You are correct in your observations about 3 am being somewhat of a "witching hour". My husband was taught by Native Elders (through the oral tradition of his people) that the Negative powers work mostly during the odd hours, particularly at night. Thus, you will find certain "negative" things happen at the odd hours of the night and sometimes the day. He used to wake at 1am, 3am and 5am -- like clockwork -- and said he could sometimes feel the negative energy in the air. At those times he would pray to the Creator for protection for himself and those he loved. Sometimes, he said that if you get that feeling that something dark or negative is around at these times, you can acknowledge it and ask it to leave without harming anyone. Native people often acknowledge such things by laying tobacco.

My late husband passed away in the ICU of a hospital surrounded by his family and caring nurses. One time, a couple of months before his death, he was in a regular ward of the hospital, in a shared room, awaiting the results of some tests. He had severe COPD and was on oxygen. Being a "medicine person" he was very sensitive to paranormal activity and was used to seeing "spirits." It was particularly hard for him to stay in a hospital because he said that there were a lot of spirits in hospitals and he could get little rest because he would see them and they would also come into his dreams.

At the time of the incident described here, I was 100 kilometers away at home (I would drive in to the city every day to visit him) asleep in my bed. Our 3 dogs were asleep in the same room with me. My two youngest dogs all of a sudden woke up and were very restless, whining and barking. I looked at the clock-- it was 3:07 am. I sensed something was not right and got up to calm them down and try to figure out what was going on. Then the phone rang. My heart skipped a beat, as call display showed it was the hospital. A nurse was calling me to tell me that an incident just occurred with my husband.

The staff found him almost passed out in the hallway of the hospital -- his oxygen tube was, of course, out of his nose. They got him back in his bed, and once he was revived enough he told the nurses that when he woke up his room was different -- it had file cabinets in it and there were people sitting at desks. He tried to get the attention of the nursing desk that was right outside his room door, but no one was there. So he got up from his bed and started looking for someone and eventually wandered down a hallway and ran out of oxygen.

The nurse on the phone was frightened by what he was saying, and got even more upset when I told her that I wasn't surprised at all by her call and that the dogs had woken me up to alert me that something was not right. The nurse assured me that they would assign someone to sit beside my husband the rest of the night.

The following day, I went early to see my husband. He told me that the nurse, an Aboriginal woman, was totally freaked out, especially when someone told her his background. Later that day, the hospital approved transferring my husband to our local hospital, saying they did not have the staff to be with him 24/7. All my husband would say about his experience was that he thought that his room in the hospital had been used as an office or something, and that the spirits of those people were still there, along with a number of patients who passed away in the room after it was converted to a hospital room.

Your story was very interesting. thank you for writing it.
I don't think 3am has to do with half of 6 or 666. I had learned (from some respected, deeply spiritual and mature Catholic teachers) that the reason for the 3am activity and reputation as a "witching hour" is that it is a mockery of the 3pm hour of death of Christ. Satan imitates and in his own way tries to "undo" God's work by inverting or doing the opposite. So we hear of things like upside down crucifixes, black 'masses' and the 3am witching hour (opposite of 3pm). Makes sense to me.

This is true, or at least true from my studies of such subjects.

I am amazed at the number of posts in this thread. This is my third day reading, and I am not even to page 30 yet. I have always had a firm belief in ghosts/spirits, and have had several experiences myself. Right now I am just a student so have not had any nursing experiences.

Maybe some of these tales are exaggerated, and I would not be surprised if some are made up, but for those of you who disbelieve (seems you are a minority) because you have never "felt" anything yourself, that does not mean that some of these things are not true. Not everyone is open to the other worlds around us.

Not long ago I saw a tv show on ghosts, I think it was called "My Ghost Story" or something along those lines. One segment was about a hospice in California, a place that has since gone out of business and been torn down. There was a big storage closet there that all of the employees felt was somehow not right, they were nervous, uncomfortable, etc going into this closet. A patient had a friend with a video camera, and one night the friend decided to set the camera up inside the closet before he went out to dinner....afterwards, he came back, and they all gathered around the patients bed (the guy who filmed it, the patients, some nurses) to watch the video he had taken. A face, blurry and indistinct, but definitely the form of a human face, sort of skull like, appeared out of the dark and came right up to the camera, as if it was trying to figure out what the camera was....one of the eeriest, most chilling things I have ever seen! I will try to see if I can find this segment of this show on Youtube or somewhere online, and come back here with the link.

As for me, please all you good spirits out there be with me and help me to get thru my last semester!!

Since everyone and their sister has a camera phone, many that can, in fact, record videos, please take some pics and videos of the death angel and get an interview with him or her if you can. That would be so great.

Don't know why, but that really made me giggle.....:lol2:

I've had a patient's granddaughter get a bright light over the bed of her dying grandmother after grandma said she'd been seeing angels......pretty interesting picture.

Same here----I get so scared I can't get to sleep---I keep hearing "noises--" but I come right back to the computer and start reading again.....

I've never seen any ghosts, or spirits, but I've had some uneasy feelings in 3 separate, old places-----one was the old Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island; one was the nursing home wing of Long Beach V.A. Hospital, and one was the cadaver lab in one of the old, (vintage WWII) buildings at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital.

We used to have our classes in the classrooms adjacent to the cadaver lab, and we had to go up there at night to study. I always, always felt as if I was being "watched" when I was there alone. It wasn't a peaceful feeling, either--it was really, really creepy. Part of our duties in those days ('70s) was sprinkling those cadavers down with formalin once a week. I always half expected to look up one night and see one of them walking zombie like down the hall toward me, like the zombies in "Night of the Living Dead." There were only 2 girls and 5 guys in our class, and I always tried to get one of the guys to study with me at night--they felt the same sense of creepiness, but somehow it just felt safer with one there.

One last kind of creepy thing---my mom and I weren't particularly close, but I don't think we had any "issues." She died of anoxic encephalopathy after being comatose for several days after having an M.I. when she was just 47. I have had, since she died in 1981, scary, scary dreams about her---in the dreams, she is a zombie, coming at me with long, ugly fingernails, and she has fangs.

Now, when I was about 9 or 10, I remember my mom telling me to clean the bathroom (my Saturday chore) one Saturday morning, and I was arguing with her that I wanted to go play with my friends. She called me an "ingrate." I told her there was no such word. Next thing I know, she had grabbed me from behind by my ponytail, spun me around, and, as she did it, raked her long, pointed fingernails (fashionable in the early '60s) across my face. I think it was purely an accident; she just wanted to spin me around and show me the word "ingrate" in the dictionary. LOL, I had 5 bloody fingernail scratches on my face for days--but, in those days, that wasn't unusual. I can remember kids coming to school with a palm print across their faces after being slapped for "smarting off" to THEIR moms.

My husband tells me I must obviously have unresolved "issues" with my mom, but I really don't---in fact, that incident never bothered me. My mom had a horrific childhood (her earliest memory was coming home from kindergarten and finding HER mom dead; kneeling on the floor; head in a gas oven, a la Sylvia Plath) and she and her brother and sisters were all sent to different orphanages because their father was a long distance trucker and apparently couldn't or didn't want to take care of them anymore. So, I just figured she had her own inner demons----she was never intentionally abusive to any of us, and no one ever would have considered that "child abuse" in the '60s, anyway--in fact, I figured it served me right for "smarting off" to her.

Whoah, now I really AM scared to go to bed!

wow, what awful dreams to have. Not uncommon though. one of my aunts dreams about her father, my grandfather, who died in the 60's of cancer...she sees him coming after her, eyes bulging out, wearing a long black dress, and on a motorcycle....crazy, huh? And she got along great with him. Go figure.

Specializes in Med/Surg, DSU, Ortho, Onc, Psych.
This is true, or at least true from my studies of such subjects.

I am amazed at the number of posts in this thread. This is my third day reading, and I am not even to page 30 yet. I have always had a firm belief in ghosts/spirits, and have had several experiences myself. Right now I am just a student so have not had any nursing experiences.

Maybe some of these tales are exaggerated, and I would not be surprised if some are made up, but for those of you who disbelieve (seems you are a minority) because you have never "felt" anything yourself, that does not mean that some of these things are not true. Not everyone is open to the other worlds around us.

Not long ago I saw a tv show on ghosts, I think it was called "My Ghost Story" or something along those lines. One segment was about a hospice in California, a place that has since gone out of business and been torn down. There was a big storage closet there that all of the employees felt was somehow not right, they were nervous, uncomfortable, etc going into this closet. A patient had a friend with a video camera, and one night the friend decided to set the camera up inside the closet before he went out to dinner....afterwards, he came back, and they all gathered around the patients bed (the guy who filmed it, the patients, some nurses) to watch the video he had taken. A face, blurry and indistinct, but definitely the form of a human face, sort of skull like, appeared out of the dark and came right up to the camera, as if it was trying to figure out what the camera was....one of the eeriest, most chilling things I have ever seen! I will try to see if I can find this segment of this show on Youtube or somewhere online, and come back here with the link.

As for me, please all you good spirits out there be with me and help me to get thru my last semester!!

Yes please see if you can find this on Youtube - I would be most interested to see it. You will be OK in your last semester - just believe in yourself and find a good study routine and be focused on what you are doing. Good luck.

carol, can't seem to find it on you tube, and so far all I have found online is just a description of that particular episode, titled as "Granada Hills Community Hospice Closet Ghost"....but I will keep looking!

Specializes in Med/Surg, DSU, Ortho, Onc, Psych.
carol, can't seem to find it on you tube, and so far all I have found online is just a description of that particular episode, titled as "Granada Hills Community Hospice Closet Ghost"....but I will keep looking!

Thanks for taking the time to look. I know some good sites I can maybe find it on, and there are also other good ghost videos on Youtube but if you do find it, just post it on here :) I love all that stuff - it scares me but I always have to go back and watch it, usually just before bedtime! :eek:

Specializes in Med/Surg, DSU, Ortho, Onc, Psych.

I just thought of another ghost story...

My gf, who was then a nursing student, moved to the city we were all studying at and the university gave her shared accommodation. Well I used to go visit her, or pick up nurses who shared with her when we were due on shift as they didn't have cars then. The old house they stayed in had converted rooms and shared bathrooms, and was quite huge. We found out much later on that someone said it used to be the site of the old cemetery when the town was first founded.

Well I wouldn't have believed what happened unless I saw it with my own eyes. We used to sit and watch TV, play cards or whatever and the doors would swing open on their own - creaking as well, which could be explained by the wind or an unevenly placed door. Well I didn't think too much about it. We were all in the lounge at the time. Before I knew it, the door swung back ON IT'S OWN as if someone had pushed it with their hand. There was no-one else in that part of the house at the time, and this used to happen with multiple doors at the same time.

We also used to hear strange sounds like footsteps in the other part of the house when we knew no-one was there. My gf also told me she had a long conversation with her gf who was in one of the bathrooms (she hadn't seen her that morning, just heard her) and when she went into the bathroom, no-one was there. Her gf had been out at the time.

The huge house was always morbidly cold, even when all the heaters were on. My gf used to hear laughing at night and saw shapes and cold rushing winds going past her, or at the other end of the house when she was there alone. She used to go out when everyone was away on semester break, come back and all her things would be moved around or her bedding messed up when she'd made it before she went out. The TV used to be on when she got home after being out when she'd turned it off (which can be explained by planes going overhead). After a while, I refused to go there because the atmosphere was just too evil and creepy; I can't explain it, it was just a horrid feeling of dread.

We also found out that the site used to be the old sanitorium as well - the disabled kids school wasn't far from this house, but the house used to hold the mentally insane apparently. It doesn't stand there anymore and is now demolished as it was getting too old and unsafe.

My gf also used to study at a big old private school in WA (can't remember the name). She told me it was a huge old building, with a spiraling staircase. Well one day the girls were all running up these stairs and everyone had stopped talking, and was staring at something. My gf looked around and lo and behold, there was a ghost in the shape of a schoolgirl floating up the spiral staircase. I think she said a girl had thrown herself off the stairs years before. She used to use the shared bathrooms and see faces smiling at her in the mirrors behind her, and when she turned, they were gone. She also said it was abnormally cold even in summer.

It's all just too creepy for words....now I'm scared!!!

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