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 Plastics. General Surgery. ITU. Oncology.

My hospital is an old one. Opened in 1902 as a TB hospital and still has its original buildings. This is a tale told by a young doctor and I cannot vouch for the veracity.

As I said the building is old (and very pretty) the doctors have an on-call room right in the heart of the oldest part of the hospital.

In the early hours of the morning the doctor on-call heard a gentle tapping at her door. She called out "Yes?" but got no reply. The tapping came again and she got up to open the door.

Nothing. Empty corridor. She dismissed it. Only a few minutes later her bleep went off Cardiac arrest. As she hurried down the stairs she saw a nurse in an old-fashioned uniform turn into the ward where the arrest was.

The doctor swears blind she saw the nurse. Imagination? Who knows?

Specializes in PACU, OR.

Last Saturday we had a spooky incident, and I was totally gobsmacked about it!.

Ours is a pretty new facility, just over a year old. Although there have been several deaths on the wards, there have been none in theater, no staff members have passed away, with the sole exception of one nurse who worked in surgical and never worked a day in theater.

I was busy with a patient in PACU and the nurse assisting me suddenly said, "Who's that woman? She just walked into the store room!" So I told her to go and look, and ask what she wanted. There was no-one there....

Whoever or whatever she was, she was small, plump, dark-complexioned and wearing scrubs, and there was no-one on duty who fitted that description!

Apparently this was not the first time strange apparitions have been seen either. One of the cleaners was walking towards the door into CSSD when a woman came through the doorway; being a perfect gentleman, he stood back, half bowed and said, "Come through, lady." He was wearing one of the gowns we put on when we leave the theater complex. This suddenly billowed up as though in a wind, and when he looked up, the woman was gone.

Old hospitals are always haunted-they have seen so much death and strong emotions it would be impossible for them not to be, but I would have thought it was a bit too soon for the ghosts to start appearing in a new one.

I'm now doing some research to find out the history of the site...

Specializes in critical care, home health.
That's a really cool story but I have a question: How can you tell one brand of fabric softener sheet from another? Don't they all look pretty similar (and none have the brand name on them)?

In those days, my mom always used the a kind of fabric softener sheet that was a thick, bluish-green sponge. All the dryer sheets I've found now are thin, papery, and white (and like you say, one brand looks just like another). My mom was really ****** when she couldn't find the thick green sponge ones anymore. They were quite distinctive. They may be available somewhere else, but not in our area.

Specializes in L&D; GI; Fam Med; Home H; Case mgmt.
In those days, my mom always used the a kind of fabric softener sheet that was a thick, bluish-green sponge. All the dryer sheets I've found now are thin, papery, and white (and like you say, one brand looks just like another). My mom was really ****** when she couldn't find the thick green sponge ones anymore. They were quite distinctive. They may be available somewhere else, but not in our area.

Actually, I do think I remember those. Very cool!

First I want to convey that all of the stories previously posted have been unbelievable and truly awesome to read.

My stories do not take place in a hospital but..............

When I was a little girl my bedroom was always very cold no matter what the thermostat for the house was set at. Our house was a new construction, in other words our family was the first to inhabit our home. I recall so clearly as I was growing up that I always felt as though I was not alone. So much so that I began talking to the whatever it was. At times I would feel something brush by my arm, but of course there was nothing/no one there. I never told a soul. I just dealt with it. Well now to fast forward to many many years later my best friend had some friends over her house to hang out. One of the guests claimed to be psychic and said she would do complimentary readings for everyone. Well, when I sat down and did the card thing she required she looked me in the eyes and said, "You must stop speaking to the spirits in your bedroom" I freaked out. I was embarassed and crying and Scared. Like I said, I had never told anyone, including my best friend. The psychic said that they were not necessarily bad spirits but that I should not encourage. SHe advised me to go home and rebuke the spirits from my room or something like that. I did do what she advised. Not long after that I moved out of my parents house and got my own place 2500 miles away. LOL

Next story............I was about 9 years old and was attending my Uncles wake. While sitting there staring at him, I totally saw him get up out of the casket. I screamed. Of course everyone said it was my imagination but I know differently, especially after reading all these awesome posts.

Thanks for the opportunity to share!!!

Karen

Florida RN

i actually have a few stories, they dont have to do with nursing but i would like to share :)

when i was 20 i realized that i was little more sensitive to the deceased than others. my mom and her sisters are as well.

my grandmother died when i was 16. not long after she died i woke up in the middle of the night to someone whispering my name. i said "what?" and i kept hearing it. it sounded like my grandma so i opened my bedroom door because thats where i heard it from. when i turned on the light i saw my dog staring at me. she looked as if she had seen a ghost and ran up the stairs. to this day i sware it was my grandmother trying to tell me something. but i dont know what it was.

another story happened all within a week. i lost a friend in a car accident almost 2 yrs ago. around the one yr anniversary i kept seeing something out of the corner of my eye. like a shadow. i thought it was just my eyelashes and didnt think much of it. one day i was letting my dogs out when i saw something again out of the corner of my eye. i looked real quick and it looked like a hooded figure running along my house and then dissappeared. i dont know if it was my friend brian but he did die 1/4 mile away from my house. i still get chills when i think about. 2 days later i got in my car on my way to school. go to back up and as i look in my rear view mirror i see the shadow again and then it goes out the window. now i am convinced that this is an evil spirit coming to kill me on my way to school. nothing happened that day but it still freaked me out. i dont see the shadows anymore.

my mom is also convinced that my grandmother breaks our appliances. she will see her in a dream and then within the next week an appliance will break. they didnt have the best relationship...

How in the world did he hit them twice?

that is EXACTLY what i was thinking!

I'm not going to look through 180 pages to see if this was previously posted. But, this is supposedly a nurse testing a camera in an empty hospital room.

Look closely in the mirror, then sleep well tonight.

hospital_ghost103107a.jpg

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....

:eek::eek: verrrry scary!

That picture two posts up is freaky as heck!

One night, one womans light kept going off. Everytime I would go to the room, she would be asleep- and she wasn't capable of pushing the light anyway, it was still coiled up neatly on the wall. I would reset it, and it would go off again about a 1/2 hour later. Freaky!

Specializes in L&D; GI; Fam Med; Home H; Case mgmt.
I'm not going to look through 180 pages to see if this was previously posted. But, this is supposedly a nurse testing a camera in an empty hospital room.

Look closely in the mirror, then sleep well tonight.

hospital_ghost103107a.jpg

Probably a Photoshop picture, but still cool.

Just curious why the OR floor would have call bells?

haha, didnt even catch that one!

and i have a story. not that serious. i work in a doctors office. built in 2001. everytime i walk torwards "E1" it sounds like someone is quickly walking back into the room. this happens almost everytime i go near it. in the daytime too! i dont get any creepy feelings when i go in. just when u walk by. it might not be anything but it sometimes freaks me out.

Specializes in L&D; GI; Fam Med; Home H; Case mgmt.

This is a major digression but it just happened yesterday after I'd been reading some of these so I thought I'd share it.

I was putting clothes from the washer into the dryer, then as I turned to leave the laundry area I saw my golden retriever standing by the back door. I had already started walking the other direction so I just kept going that way and walked around the couch to the back door to let him out. He wasn't there. I figured he had walked back around the way I had come (around the sectional) so I called out for him to come back. I heard him jump up from my bedroom down the hall (where he usually lies during the day) and run into the laundry area. There is no way he could have been at the back door when I thought he was. He has tags that jingle when he moves and I hadn't heard anything at all until he jumped up and ran to where I was. I wasn't a bit creeped out - it just confirmed to me that our minds can sometimes see things that aren't really there. Not sure why, but it happens.

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