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...

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:

LOL!!!! PRICELESS! I love it. :::making mental note, gotta do something like that someday:::

:uhoh21: That is actually pretty sad. I don't find the humor in that. And I like to think I have a good sense of humor.

:rolleyes: oh! you ought to read the whole story to get the joke. Yeah, I agree, its quite sad. . . but the joke is on the caregiver. . . she was literally sleeping beside a dead body for several hours before she got to know that the patient is dead.!:rolleyes:

:rolleyes: oh! you ought to read the whole story to get the joke. Yeah, I agree, its quite sad. . . but the joke is on the caregiver. . . she was literally sleeping beside a dead body for several hours before she got to know that the patient is dead.!:rolleyes:

I read the entire story and I understood she had been lying beside a dead body for hours. But when the Poster was laughing that the caregiver was in the corner shaking...........I didn't find that funny. And believe me, I have a good sense of humor. But don't find humor in someone else's sadness.

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.

Ok, it's my turn. I've been reading this thread for several days now and am finally to the (current) end. I am a home nurse. Most of my clients are ventilator patients. I have been warned by one family that the house was haunted but nothing ever happened while I was there. The only nursing related ghostly experience I can relay actually happened nearly 17 years ago and I was not the nurse. I'm not even sure she was a nurse, she may have been an aide. So if when you read this story, you recognize it as yours, please let me know. It happened in a hospital in northern Kentucky in April of 1989. Here is the short version:

Postpartum - the room of a young mother and her newborn son - late afternoon. The nurse knocked and opened the door. She could not see the bassinet from the entryway, but could clearly hear the woman talking to the child so she walked into the room. As she got to the corner of the entry, the young mother popped her head out of the bathroom and just about startled the nurse into a heart attack. The nurse appologised and explained that she heard her talking to her child and didn't realize she was in the shower. The mother went on to explain that she was not the one talking to the baby, she thought it was the nurse and was just stepping out of the shower to see who was there. They talked about it for a minute or two and verified that neither one had said a single word until they were face to face and it was definitely another woman who's voice they both heard talking to the baby, who was asleep in the bassinet. The two agreed that the little one had just had a ghostly visitor.

That is all I know of that nurse's experience on the event, so if that was you, let me know.

The rest of the story is just this:

That exact incident was actually the THIRD time I had heard the voice while I was in the shower, but every time I shut off the water and went into the room the voice stopped. So on the third time, I thought I would leave the water running and surprise whomever was talking to my kid. That poor nurse! :eek: She jumped about a foot when I darted around that corner. Well, all of the commotion must have scared the visitor off because after the nurse left I was able to finish my shower and nothing else happened in the hospital.

THEN: The second day we were home from the hospital, I was in the kitchen doing some dishes while the baby slept in his bassinet in the living room. We were alone in the house, and after a while I realized I could hear someone talking to him again, just like in the hospital. So I turned the water off and went into the room only to find my little angel still sleeping, and no voices. Well, on the third time I decided that I needed to leave the water running in order to approach without interrupting. I stood just shy of the doorway and listened to her talking to my son. It was really strange. I could hear her very clearly but couldn't understand anything she was saying (like listening to a grown-up talking in a Peanuts cartoon). I had already decided that it was probably my husband's mother, who died when he was only 10, as all of my relatives were still alive. So after a minute or so I called out her name to get her attention. It worked! :eek: SHE ANSWERED ME! She said "What?".

But that was all. And I never heard her again. :sniff:

liz

p.s. Did anyone else make the running water connection? I thought that was really strange too. A water spirit? Isn't that a sprite?

i agree with you.

I read the entire story and I understood she had been lying beside a dead body for hours. But when the Poster was laughing that the caregiver was in the corner shaking...........I didn't find that funny. And believe me, I have a good sense of humor. But don't find humor in someone else's sadness.

I was saying that I don't find humor in this either.

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.

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.

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.

Oh man, this story made my eyes water! I hate when that happens!:wink2:

+ Join the Discussion