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 Med/Surg.

wow.. that gave me chills.. thank God he did not enter that building and harm someone else..

The one with the elevator and the "person" screaming for help is so creepy......................................................

Ghosts seem to love elevators for some reason. At one of the local hospitals that is no longer being used it had some elevators that would run on their own.

I work in Out Patient Surgery, we take call on the weekend and give IV antibiotics, or drain Denver Drains etc. to Pt's needing this done over the weekend. We are in the unit by ourselves except for the patient. I was standing in the medication room between Out Pt and PACU and out of the corner of my eye saw a tall, lanky, shadow walking through PACU. I immediately looked both ways in the long PACU room and didn't see anyone there. When I worked Monday (the next day) I teased my PACU co-workers about their room being haunted, one of the PACU nurses gave her own story. She and two other staff members were sitting at the nurses station in the oldest part of our hospital, they all three heard someone screaming for help, the three staff members ran toward the scream and couldn't find anyone in the whole area.

You all have to keep this post going! I have the most boring summer job and reading these make the days go much, much faster!! I'm only a student with no clinical experience so I don't have anything to contribute but if I ever do, I will share it here!

I was taking care of a 2 patient assignment in the ICU. I had the same 2 patients on back to back night shifts. Their rooms were in the same pod, but opposite ends of the pod.

Patient A was A&O x 4, never had any signs of confusion.

Sadly, Patient B coded and passed away at the beginning of my 2nd shift.

After fininishing up with the code, I walked into A's room and he was waking up from a nap. He said "It's the weirdest thing. I keep seeing a ghost swirling around the room."

I was freaked out and I wanted to ask him if she looked like my other patient, but all he could tell me was she was a "black ghost." As in shadowy, not racially.

He never had any other hallucinations, just that one right after she passed.

I am not a nurse yet. Still doing my prerequisites. My grandpa was in the hospital because he missed a couple of days dialysis. He ended up being admitted because his potassium was high. So he was in CVICU. When we would visit he would tell us about people laying in bed with him, others being in the room with him, and shadows coming from the tv. He told me it was the scariest room he ever been in. At the time we chalked it up for him hallucinating, but now after reading 24 pages of this post that it was probably patients that died in his room in the past.

Specializes in Gerontology.

We were talking about ghosts at work recently. A bunch of us work in offices that are renovated from an older nursing unit. One person worked as a nurse on the unit before it became offices. So we were asking her about ghosts that may still be around.

she told us about a break room that was named after a nurse that died in a traffic accident on her way into work. Apparently a lot of nurses had creepy feelings while taking breaks at night in that room. Nothing really bad happened, just uneasy feelings and a sense of not being alone.

Not a nursing story, but still weird. When I was a child, even a teen, I would visit my grandmother, and all sorts of things would happen. The light would go on and off when you could clearly hear the switch moving( it was one of the old ones from 40's that you had to push pretty hard to move). Her house had an attic that gave me chills. I always felt presence, and never wanted to stay in the house alone. There were times when it sounded like someone is moving around in the next room. Weird noises coming from the attic. Sometimes dishes would fall and break. My grandmother denied all of these occurrences.

I have another story that happened to my grandmother(fathers side) when she was a child. Her mother passed away before she was old enough to remember her. Her father married another woman that wanted the children out of her life. So the dad bought a very cheap wooden house and let his four children live there alone. Three boys aging 17,15,13 and my grandmother 5. The boys would go out to work during the day and leave grandmother home alone. She told me that evil lived in this house. Whenever the boys would leave something would throw the furniture around, start fires and do damage. My grandmother spent her days outside waiting for her brothers, or if it was too cold, she'd close her eyes tight and not open them for hours. She said that something was dragging her by the foot to the floor. No physical damage ever was done to her, but I think knowing that something that's not supposed to be there is touching you is damaging enough. Then, it started to get worse. My grandmother complained to her brothers, but they were too tired to pay attention to her. One day, when the winter passes and she could wait outside, she was playing when she heard a loud voice calling her, she said it was her brother. When she turned around, she saw a black hairy thing in the window of a house starting at her with an evil smirk. The brothers became victims of this thing soon after. An old woman told them that the house is possessed by evil and that they should leave because no good would come to them. They decided to burn the house and burry ashes in different places so that the evil would not become whole again.

I believe that this story is true because all four siblings recited it to me when I was an adult with a terror in their eyes.

Again, not a ghost story, but one night after I was done for the shift. A lady from one of the rooms( not my pt) called me into the room. I went it thinking she needed something. She told me that my daughter is adorable. I couldn't believe it, I never spoke of my child so there was no way that she'd known. When I asked her how she knew, she just gave me a smile and a half wink. Another nurse told me she practices voodoo. Spooky.

Specializes in Cardiac, ER, Pediatrics, Corrections.

I worked in a LTC facility as a dietary aide in high school. The place I worked at was an old orphanage and next to it was an orphan cemetery. Residents would often complain of children running around the dining room or in their rooms. Even my great-grandma who was with it talked about children talking to her in her room. One woman said she would watch children run in and out of her closet at night. THESE WERE THE "WITH IT" RESIDENTS! You always felt like someone was watching you and always saw things out of the corner of your eye.I was once cleaning up the dining room where there was a piano. The piano is up on a stage so I would have seen if someone approached it. I heard a few keys play on the piano. Turned around, nobody there.

Specializes in LTC Rehab Med/Surg.

I was a new hire at an old hospital. I was still on orientation, and knew nothing about the stories about ghosts. I was waiting at the elevator with several other nurses, to go down to lunch. I smelled roses. Rose is my favorite scent and I'd recognize it anywhere, no matter how faint. We were in the hallway and there were no flowers in sight. It wasn't perfume.

I said something like, "Do you smell roses?"

The other nurses looked at me funny and told me the story about the ghostly nun who wondered the halls of 3rd floor. Seen sometimes and accompanied by the smell of flowers. I think they thought I'd heard the stories, and was just having some fun. Honestly I didn't know anything about a rose scented ghost nun until they told me that day.

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