23 Doctors And Nurses Share The Paranormal Stories That Make Me Believe Every Hospital Is Haunted

"This, to me, is the scariest thing at work. They see something you don't."

By

samanthavaughan

Parking lot ghost

“A staff member was sitting out in her car during night shift when some woman who knocked on her window and quickly disappeared. The next day she was discussing this out loud with the oncoming shift when someone pulled out a picture from old files based on the description provided. Apparently, it was a match to a former patient that had passed away at least 10 years before that staff member was hired.” — 88th_coward

Sweet justice

“Did a rotation in a burn unit. There are tons of stories that go around, but I’ll share my favorite. A pimp lit one of his prostitutes on fire, and she immediately bear hugged him causing them to both suffer pretty severe injuries (unfortunately hers included an inhalation burn). They both were being treated in the same icu but on opposite ends.

Weeks later she ends up coding and passes away, and after about 30 minutes as things start to quiet down, the guy starts screaming from his room “get her out! Get the god damn bitch out of my room!”” — MyDogOper8sBetrThanU

Sometimes they aren’t really dead

“There is probably some medical explanation for this, but still the weirdest thing I’ve seen as a nurse so far. We had a very robust, confused old lady on our floor. Her room was in front of the nurse’s station so we could keep an eye on her, and had one of our nurses aids as a sitter too. She was always fighting, kicking, trying to get out of bed. Very restless and agitated, as some patients I’ve had before can get before death. One day we were called into the room as her heart rate was going down and she lay still with her eyes open. It was 30…20…then flat lined. We checked for a pulse and did not find any. She was a DNR so we did not attempt resuscitation. We close her eyes, prepare to get the body bag and call the family, the sitter remains in there to start getting the body ready. Less than 10 minuets later she calls us back in. The old lady is at it again, hitting, kicking, trying to get out of the bed. She came back to life! Honestly we found the situation hilarious, and I still have never seen any patient come back like that on their own. I think she made it out of the hospital too.” — cheeezus_crust

Little girl omen

“I’ve worked in a small family run nursing home for 6 years as a nurse aide . It was a orphanage before it became a nursing home , and unfortunately before being shut down the orphanage had a history of Severe abuse and neglect , unfortunately It’s not gossip the owner herself has told us . When residents get close to death they always see a little girl . One of my patients a very alert gentleman he knew all our names and was very alert and oriented . I was passing dinner trays and saw that He had his back turned and was talking and laughing in the corner I knocked and asked him who he was talking to & he chucked and said “ this little girl came into my room , she was scared “ he died 3 days later . About 6 months later had another patient screaming about a little girl grabbing his feet and she needed to leave him alone . He died that night . She’s come up over the years it’s always the same thing they see her and then they die . Other coworkers have had the same experience. It’s very unsettling.” — Pyper151

She had to explain to him that he died

“A ward I worked on once had a patient who was a psychic/medium as a patient. We had a bit of a laugh with her as she was on the ward for a while (she’d had a stroke which affected her mobility) and she would do ‘readings’ for the staff etc from time to time. I took it all as just a bit of fun until one evening when she pressed her nurse call buzzer and told us to go check on a patient in a side room as he was dead. We went to check and sure enough found that the gentleman had died. Later on we asked our psychic patient how she had known and she told us she had seen him coming out if his room obviously distressed. She realised he had died and had to explain to him what had happened and help him to pass over/go to the light….now I am not a believer but that gave me the creeps.” — smackmacks

Touched

“I was working at night and one of the patients died while I was in the room, we tried everything to revive this person but it didn’t work so after doing the papers and everything I went to another place in the hospital and I swear to god that this patient who I saw dead, touch my right arm. I think that I have never cried that much in my life.” — GalaGalaxy_

The haunted floor

“I worked in a pediatric hospital and had always heard that the fourth floor right outside our oncology unit was haunted. I worked three twelves normally but would pick up overtime and picked up a night shift. I was working in the NICU which happened to also be on the fourth floor but on the opposite side. The oncology unit had a staircase that was a short cut down to the cafeteria which was on the second floor. At about 3am I was ready to take a short break and wanted a cup of coffee from the cafeteria so I decided to take that staircase. I walked through the automatic double doors and saw a kid skipping down the hall. I called out to him as I was afraid a little kid had snuck out of a patient room. As soon as I called out to him he turned and in the blink of an eye totally vanished. A lot of other nurses and docs had seen the same little kid skipping in that same hallway. Of course I chalked it up to just exhaustion and didn’t really think about it much after that. But you are damn sure I didn’t use that hallway at night ever again.” — agf0605

The veil is thin

“Back when I was a paramedic in Oakland I was taking care of an elderly gentleman in the back of my ambulance he looked up into the upper corner of the ambulance and said it’s okay Lulu I’ll be with you soon. His daughter was with him and told me that Lulu was his wife who died 20 years earlier. A few minutes later he went into cardiac arrest and passed on.” — HenryRN

Little girl ghost

“There is a little girl who haunts the burn unit of a large Military Medical treatment facility in the US. She has been seen by both staff and patients. Haunts may not be the correct term, but she has been witnessed by several.” — Jcc7089

Pastoral care knows what’s up

“We’ve actually had a room sprinkled with holy water several times by our pastoral care due to the amount of deaths we’ve had in the same room.” — BigJRitch

They linger

“I worked as a Medtech at an assisted living facility. One day a resident (I’ll call her Margaret) suddenly passed away and her family left all her belongings in the room that night including her pendant to call the staff for help. The next night Margaret’s neighbor called the staff because someone was talking in the room next door and keeping them awake. We brushed the resident off knowing that Margaret’s room was empty. About an hour later Margaret’s pendant started going off from her empty apartment. I was the only one willing to go turn it off so I walked into the room and it was FREEZING COLD in the middle of summer (the air conditioning was off.) Suddenly the bathroom door slammed as I was turning off the pendant light. I locked the door and ran back to the nurses station. We forced one of the older male staff members to go check out the entire room and he claims the door was still locked when he got down there and no one was in there.” — KaylaC-J

The ghosts wear gowns

“One of the rooms we have is obviously having something of a haunting. A man in a gown gestured one of the techs to come in, she went in and he was gone. One week earlier a female pt was asking to get a different room, because a man wouldn’t leave her room. We just thought it was some sort of delirium. Multiple others have seen him too.” — SavageAmallya

They mess with the lights

“I‘m a Labor and Delivery/Nursery nurse, mostly it’s call lights alarming from rooms that are completely empty. Sometimes it would coincide with apx the time of death on another unit, or be the anniversary of a fetal demise. However my creepiest… we have a button to push after a delivery to play a lullaby over the PA system announcing a birth through the hospital. One night no one was even in the same room as the button and the lullaby started playing. It did that twice then we unplugged the entire thing. It still went off once more that night, and again a few days later despite being entirely disconnected. That was a few years ago and no one ever heard it do that before or since.” — DrunkOnSushi

Malevolence

“This was an odd experience. I’m a nurse in the PACU and was on call during a big ass snow storm. I didn’t want to drive home and risk getting called back in, so I stayed at the hospital that night on our little couch in our break room. I dozed in and out throughout the night, but I got caught in some state between wakefulness and sleep and I fucking swear to God I felt this malevolent being in the room with me at one point. It was super dark and I just felt…anger from it. Like this unbridled hatred and rage. It was so heavy it was palpable. It almost felt like it was jealous I was alive? Anyway, it came down on top of me and pretty much collapsed through me and I just heard it cry in seething anger. Then, it was gone and I was fully awake. I’ve had sleep paralysis from time to time, but this felt different. And I have NEVER felt such hatred from anything I’ve come across in my life, real or conjured. The cliche part here is this happened around 3 am.” — lucidzealot

“Hey”

“This is probably going to get buried. When I was a nursing student up on an ICU floor I was hanging antibiotics in my patient’s room when I heard an audible “Hey”. I turn around and there is no one else in the room. Mind you, my patient was intubated and sedated so there’s no possible way it was them. It was a woman’s voice as well so I thought it was my preceptor. I go back out to the nurses station and I asked my preceptor if that was her in the room trying to catch my attention. She told me no and and I’ve never seen someone’s eyes get so big. Apparently the room I was in has had the most paranormal sitings and activity out of all the rooms on the unit. Sitings as in shadows sitting in the corner of the room, voices being heard and curtains being flung violently across the railings. No one ever told me about this room prior to my preceptorship so it just added to everyone’s beliefs it was haunted af.” — HELLAclogged

Bloody ghost

“This story is more about my mom she’s a nurse. She was walking through her nursing home and acting like it was a normal day. But it wasn’t, people were looking at her really weirdly. After a couple hours someone asked her what happened to her child? She asked what they were talking about. They said that everyone has been seeing a bloody boy walking beside her all day. Then she looked behind her and no one was there. Then all day after that people kept asking what happened to her child. When she got home she looked up every incident at her nursing home. She found something about a murder but I don’t remember the whole story.” — Marshmallow88888

Hannah

“We had a little boy come by ambulance and was a toddler. His parents had put him to bed and he was with a cold. Nothing serious but developed tragically into more and he started coming in and out of conciousness. We had to do a rapid intubation and he ended up passing away a few days later. Before Mom & Dad made it to hospital he kept talking about his baby sister Hannah. Not soon after we had to life saving measures. I was distraught because I had a son similar in age and a daughter named Hannah.

Fast forward. Approximately two years later, family comes in with sick infant. They remembered me (I did once I recalled their story) and I was their provider again. Their daughter’s name was Hanna. It startled me and I recalled with clarity the boy speaking of his sister, whom I assumed was alive and at home. Nope, she wasn’t even conceived yet.” — rkelrn

A dark figure

“My aunt is a nurse and told me some stories, but this one stuck with me.

There was an old lady who insisted on being strapped down at night in her bed. She told my aunt that there was a dark figure that was trying to grab her and take her out of the room, where she would die. My aunt and other nurses oblige and for the next few nights she would check on her and it would look as though someone was trying to pull her from the bed randomly while she slept. My aunt is then off and whoever is this ladies nurse does not strap her down at night. Nurses found the old lady dead, laying on the floor by the door, her hand stretched out past the door and into the hallway.” — circle_stone

“The Woman”

“I used to work in a nursing home as both a CNA and an LPN, and while nothing too crazy happened there were definitely things that happened out of the ordinary.

I remember one time after someone had died I was cleaning up her body and the door to the room swung wide open even though it had been firmly latched nobody was there. It gave me the creeps

There were instances of furniture being moved, lights turning on and off by themselves, and toilets randomly flushing by themselves as well. I also remember I had one resident one night who asked me to make sure I closed the door to the closet that was at the end of her bed- and she told me that when it was open “that woman” kept going in and out of it all night and it kept her awake.” — eternalrefuge86

Death predictions

“I’m an ICU nurse. A patient’s son rang the hospital at 11pm on a Saturday night saying he was sure his dad was dying. His dad had had a severe stroke and was doing okay, recovery would be difficult but he wasn’t expected to die and was pretty stable at the time. I was looking after him and he was a lot of work because he would try to get up but couldn’t walk so he’d fallen a lot. The son really wanted to come in, even though it’s way past visiting hours, but y’know I’ll bend the rules in a good cause. I figured what the heck it’s his Saturday night, come on in and sit with your dad. Patient died about 2 minutes before the son walked in the door. It was like a switch was turned off, he just died. The last thing he said to me was “am I bothering anyone?”. I told him of course not, even though he had some very frustrating behaviour because of the stroke. The son just started crying and screaming “I knew it!”. How the heck he knew, we were all a bit freaked out.” — penguintummy

She wanted her ring

“When I worked at the funeral home I was told a story about an elderly lady that had died. The husband said he wanted her to be buried with her ring as she never took it off. My coworker was in the morgue and was washing the body. She removed the ring to mark it down on the paperwork. As soon as she did, a styrofoam head they used for wigs went flying across the room. She just said out loud, “alright, alright. I’ll put your ring back on.” No more disturbances.” — Wackydetective

They see someone I don’t

“I’m a nurse. I’ve witnessed quite a lot with alzheimer people. They often develop their own scenarios in their own head, often accompanied by vivid hallucinations.

Once during nightshift, I heard a woman scream in fear. Checking on her, she managed to climb into her wheelchair in pure panic, wanting to flee her bedroom. Asking what was wrong, she thought the building was on fire.

Now what’s important to mention here is, people often make claims that people are “just crazy” or “dreaming badly” or something. But this is not the case. People with hallucinations have been found to “actually” see, hear, smell, etc. something, when their hallucinations occur, as the same locations in the brain are stimulated as if they would get real impulses.

That woman “actually” saw fire. She “actually” smelled fire. She didn’t just make that up “to be crazy”. It’s what her brain told her was happening. And she was in real panic for her life.

And the same applies to when those people see someone else in their room. When they want me to guide someone out of the bedroom who isn’t actually there, seemingly standing right behind me. And it makes no sense to discuss with them that no one’s there.

To them, someone IS there. And you better do your best effort of improvising to guide that someone, even if it’s no one, outside. Play along, and they’ll be fine.

This, to me, is the scariest thing at work. They see something you don’t.” — KingOfAnarchy