No amount of medical school prepares a person for the bizarre, unnerving experience of working at a hospital. Even if a person gets a doctorate, there are still so many unexplained events that haunt them for decades after. These spine-chilling stories have no rational explanation for why they happened. But each story left a deep, unnerving impact on it's unfortunate victim. This eerie content has been edited for clarity.
Everything Was A Gruesome Lie
“I had cared for an elderly woman with no family, who came to us when her husband died. She didn’t often speak, but when she did, it was usually just words that made no sense together. I felt so bad for her because ever since she had arrived, so many of the residents in her area that she seemed to enjoy spending time with had passed in a short time span. She put up a picture of each of them next to her pictures of her husband and several others, who were probably family, to remember them. I had always felt sorry for her and showed her extra attention, so we became close. It just seemed so unfair that she had such luck and kept losing people that she cared about.
One day she looked at me and said plain as day, ‘Sweetie, I think I’m done now,’ and handed me a picture. It was a picture of me and I smiled, because it touched my heart that I was that important to her. She passed nearly a week later and I cried for days, it hit me really hard. She knew it was the end for her and she said goodbye as best she could.
A little less than 2 years later I was talking with a colleague and she came up in conversation. My colleague referred to her as ‘that crazy witch’, which seemed very out of character for her, and it shocked and offended me deeply. I expressed this to her, not so nicely, and she looked at me with this shocked look and said, ‘Oh dear, do you not know?’ and then explained something to me that I hadn’t known.
As it turned out, it came out sometime after she had passed that she had killed her husband by poisoning him, and that there was an investigation because it appeared that she had a ritual of befriending someone, obtaining a picture of them, and hiding the picture until she could kill them (usually by poisoning). Then displaying the picture as a sort of trophy. It was suspected that this may have been the reason for the spike in mortality rate during her stay and the considerable number of photos in her ‘collection’. The last I heard, the old ‘family’ photos weren’t any relation to her and the police were trying to ID the individuals and compare them to several cold cases.”
He Was Never A Doctor
“When I used to be in x-ray school, we had a separate building off campus that we would go for all our lab courses. This building used to be a cancer center, but the old building turned into a small clinic, and they only used the first two floors of the eight that were there. We were allowed to use the old operating room for whatever educational purposes we needed (labs, practical tests, etc.). If you have been in an operating room, you’d know they’re usually pretty compact with equipment, but since this one had been abandoned for years, it was just as creepy as it was empty. That set the mood.
Come to find out a couple of months before graduation, some overnight custodian discovered a homeless man that had been living on the sixth floor for several months. He kept his face shaved, and whenever he needed something from wherever in the building, he’d wear scrubs that he found in the building and hide in plain sight as a doctor. No idea how he got away with it for so long. The custodian caught him popping popcorn in the cafeteria in the middle of the night.
Of course curiosity got the best of us students and we took a trip up there once we heard the news. It was just creepy. It was unsettling because you could tell by the setup that someone had been living there. Chairs in certain rotations and tables in weird spots. Knowing this guy had only been a handful of floors above us the entire time just gives you that weird feeling of being watched all the time, even after he was gone. I’ve got to give it to the guy though, it wasn’t a bad gig for him.
I’m perfectly ok with not ever having to go back there.”
The Purple Man
“I worked for a short time as an EMT who spent most of my time with transfers. I had a regular who was an older woman that I took to a dialysis center across town frequently. One day she was being moved and I was in the back with her. She looked under the weather, so I asked what was wrong and she said a man in purple had been visiting her. I asked if he was a relative or a technician, and she shook her head. She said the man would sit next to her during dialysis and stroke her hair. Thinking this was strange, I asked the center techs about such a person, and no one had seen or remembered such a person. Visitors weren’t really a thing at this center anyway, so I assumed the patient imagined it.
Well one day, we’re actually heading to pick her up, and on the way into the parking lot, I see through the window something that chills my heart to think about.
It sent shivers up my spine at the time too, like I immediately recognized it. I saw a man in purple scrubs standing in one of the big windows watching us drive in, and when we pulled out of sight to go to the pickup door, we walked in to a bunch of techs rushing to my transfer patient. The woman had just suffered a heart attack, and we were unable to revive her even at the hospital she was rushed to.
None of the techs in that place wore purple scrubs.”
Nothing Could Stop George
“For the last 4 years, I’ve worked summers and weekends at a nursing home in my home town. Two years ago, we had a married couple in their 90s (He was 95, she was 96). I always found them adorable. They spent their entire days together, and it was clear to me from the first day I met them just how much they cared for and depended on one another (she always waited for him at the table so they could have breakfast together, and she made sure the staff made his coffee the way he liked it). They slept in separate rooms because he was suffering from (relatively mild) dementia and would occasionally get up during the night, confused, which disturbed her sleep. Yet they would always end the day sitting in her room, drinking tea and talking before we helped him to his room to go to sleep.
A few months after celebrating their 70-year anniversary, the husband died. It wasn’t really unexpected, as he had been sick for a few weeks, and the nurses knew he wouldn’t recover. Two weeks later, his wife got weaker, and she mostly stayed in her bed. Now, she was not demented at all. At times, she seemed brighter than me, which is why something that happened while she was on her deathbed really creeped me out.
I was in her room helping her adjust her blankets, near the end of my shift (around 10 pm). She had been sleeping before I came in to check on her, so the room was dark. She had complained about being cold, so I closed and locked the window. As usual, we were making small talk, when suddenly, she went silent, looked towards the door and said ‘John?’ (her husband’s name).
‘John, is that you? No, John, wait.’
Then the door to her room slammed shut at tremendous force. I had just closed her window, and all doors in the nursing home automatically closes and locks at 8 pm. There’s no way it was the wind. I only worked with four other people that night, all of whom were in the staff room at the time. All other patients who might be able to walk around on their own were sleeping. There was literally no one nearby.
She barely seemed to notice, not even jumping from the loud noise the door made, and told me, ‘It’s ok, you can leave now. Good night!’
She died two days later, in her sleep. I barely ever tell anyone about this, because I never thought anyone would believe me. And because to this day, I don’t understand what happened, and it creeps me out.”
Banging On Death’s Door
“We had an old lady come in by ambulance, near death. She was a DNR, so we weren’t going to do much for her. She didn’t have any family that we could find. The hospital was full, so we had to keep her in the ER for the night. Again, she was near death. When you’ve seen enough people die, there’s no mistaking it, and she was almost there. Barely responsive, pale, cool, and her breaths were really irregular. Heart rate was up and down too. We just turned the lights down and kept an eye on her monitor, basically waiting for her to die.
About an hour later, she’s standing at the door of her room. She’d gotten up and put on all her clothes. We were all completely astonished. One of the nurses went to check on her, and she said she was hungry. Not knowing really what to make of things, we got her a chair, a bedside table, and went to the cafeteria and got her a tray of food.
This lady sat there, ate all her food, talked with the staff a little. After about an hour, she told her nurse that she was tired and wanted to lie back down. We helped her back into bed, and within 30 minutes she was dead. Not exactly paranormal, but in 22 years in busy inner city ERs, it’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen. I think it was remarkable in that she was SO close to arresting before she rallied. Either way, it’s the one thing that’s always stuck with me.”
“He’s Right Behind You”
“I used to work in a skilled nursing facility. I was usually assigned to the Alzheimer’s ward. One night I’m in the linen room stocking my cart, and I heard someone shuffle up behind me, then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, and there was no one else in the room. The door was still shut too.
Another lady started to complain that a man was coming into her room at night (again, Alzheimer’s ward, so I didn’t think much of it). In order to reassure her, I told her I’d check on her throughout the night. She complained of this man for every night for 2 more weeks until I asked her to describe him to me.
‘He’s real handsome, and he wears a black suit. Oh. He’s right behind you now, honey.’
That freaked me way out. Of course there was no one behind me. She died the next night in her sleep.”
“Scaring The Life Back Into Him”
“One time, a patient had been in CCU (where I worked at the time) for a long period of time (six months). We had finally been transferred to med surgical floor, and he coded. We worked on him for 45 min to an hour, but he had no pulse or heart rhythm the entire time. The docs had decided to call it, and his family walked in the room. One family member leans over him, rubs his chest lightly, and says his name. Immediately, the man regains a pulse and regains consciousness.
Another time, a patient comes in coding and we are working on him, but we are getting nothing. We bring in his wife in to say goodbye, and she starts yelling at him at the top of her lungs. Somehow, he comes back, so we arrange transfer to a tertiary hospital. During this process, he codes again, so she comes back and yells at him again. Miraculously, he comes back again.
Cut to him us loading him into the helicopter, where he codes again. They bring him back into our ER after working on him for a bit on the helipad, and his wife yells at him again, and he immediately comes back. Eventually, they decide to have his wife ride in helicopter with him to make sure she can scare him back to life if he were to code again. The guy ended up living and received at heart transplant. He is still alive to this day, all thanks to his wife scaring the life back into him.”
Old Hospital, Shadowy Secrets?
“Back story for this old hospital I worked in: Built in the late 1800s, it was the original psychiatric building for this hospital. Now being the late 1800s, not much was truly known about psychiatric disorders. On top of that, this hospital was known for its medical research. With both of those facts combined, you can infer that some terrible acts were done to many of these misunderstood psych patients in this building. A couple of years before I started working there, this building had been converted into offices after the newly built part of the hospital dedicated a section for an updated psych ward.
My story: My rounds for that night happened to include said building. At night, this building was empty. In some of their haste, employees left their office doors unlocked, which is a big no-no due to medical information being located in their offices. It was our duty to go to each floor, and make sure every door was locked, and if it wasn’t, to secure it ourselves.
I did my initial sweep of the building to make sure it was clear (nobody in the building), and proceeded to do my door checks. The hallways were pretty narrow, so I could check both sides of the hallway’s doors at once. At the end of this hallway, there were two sets of doors you had to go through to reach the final office, which was a dead end. Everything was secure. I exited the two sets of doors from the dead end office and stood absolution frozen from what I saw.
Every door ajar. Set perfectly so their own weight wouldn’t cause them to shut again. And one wheelchair, at the end of said hallway, facing towards the steps. I had heard other security officers outright reject that set of rounds due to strange stuff happening there, but I laughed it off until that night happened. Never took those rounds again.
Another night, I heard a call on the radio, in what could only be described as dry throat terror voice, requesting back up. I was close so I responded to his call, letting him know I was on the way.
When I got there, he had his head between his knees, and he was silently crying with a shattered chandelier a couple feet next to him.
Now, before I had experienced the abnormal happenings in this building, I would have written off his testimony off as idiocy. But he claimed that something held him in that spot as the chandelier started swinging wildly until it started to fall. When it started to fall he was ‘let go’ and allowed to move, and scrambled out of the way before it hit him.
I got him up, calmed him down, and took him back to the supervisor. She yelled to one of our other supervisors, ‘Almost lost another one in that same building!’
The other supervisor laughed and said, ‘Why do you think we send the new guys?! Haha, you know I don’t even like going over there!’
That guy is my roommate and hates when I bring up that experience.”
“My Entire Body Broke Out In Goosebumps”
“I started at a hospital doing transport for a couple of years. The transport home base was in the basement of the hospital, where all the laundry is done and supplies are also sorted there. I hated working late nights after this incident.
On this particular night, I was the only one in the basement when I heard whistling at the end of the hallway by the elevator. I poked my head around the corner expecting to see my only coworker on duty that night, but there was absolutely no one there. I shrugged it off, I’m not easily spooked. Nights are slow, so I ate some snacks and hung out in the break room for a bit. Next thing I know, I hear a loud bang.
I walked into the hallway and a bed is rolling down the hall bumping into the sides. At this point I think that my coworker is having fun with me. I radio him and he says he’s upstairs in the cafeteria. Ah, I still don’t believe him and think I’ll catch him in the act. I walk past the laundry room and the machines start. Pop my head in there expecting to find him, but it’s completely empty. Okay. Starting to get a little nervous.
I walk into the laundry room, and the machines completely stop. I freeze, then run out and head towards the elevator when I hear whistling again. At this point, I know I am the only worker in the basement. As I am standing there waiting for the elevator, things start falling off of the shelves down the hall. Boxes of gloves, tissues, packages of tubes. I am literally standing there watching them fall off one by one at the opposite end of the hallway. My entire body broke out in goosebumps, my hair stood on end, and I had this strong gut feeling I was being watched. I was not alone. As I’m getting into the elevator, I feel what feels like someone brushing my arm. I went upstairs and found my coworker in the cafeteria, where I freaked out to him. I got out of there and transferred soon after that. The creepiest feeling ever.”
Standoff With A Mysterious Creature
“I used to work in the city, and our company covered surrounding towns, including a couple of hundred thousand people with suburbs, woods, and a river valley. We had to respond to the fringe of our coverage area in another town one night, and after almost getting there we wound up being cancelled by first responders en-route. It was 4:30 AM on a Wednesday in autumn. The ride back to civilization is only a 20-minute trip, but it’s a long, straight road with dim street lights and thick forest on both sides. I was riding in the passenger seat, mentally preparing to go home after a long night, when my partner asked, ‘Do you see that?’ and began to slow down.
I saw it only one hundred feet or so in front of us. A dog. A large dog. A large dog that’s silver/gray with little tufts atop of the ears, walking away from us ever so slowly. That beast had to be four feet at the shoulders. My partner slows to a crawl thinking it’s hurt and maybe it has a tag or collar. Surely such a magnificent beast has an owner.
As we slowed to a crawl, something happened that I will never unsee. We’re creeping at about 5mph and gaining, I was on the passenger side, and the creature was on my side of the road. The plan was for him to put flashers on and for me to whistle or hoot to see if our new friend would leave in fear. We closed the hundred-foot gap to around 25-30feet.
As we closed our distance, my partner and I simultaneously got a sense of dread. My blood turned cold. The giant dog stood up. The beast’s shoulders would put any football player’s to shame. It was a massive animal. My partner stopped the truck. The beast cocked its head ever so slightly to the left revealing a single yellow eye shine, then turned to my side (right side) of the woods and bolted. It was over as soon as it started.
The thing that has always bothered me though is that little head tilt. I got the sense of dread before he stood up, it was almost telekinetic if that makes any sense. I just got this feeling the dog was trying to say, ‘I know you mean well, move on, and I was never here.’
Then it vanished. We have a few black-bears around here, and they’re like big dumb bulbous puppies who are adorable to view from a safe distance. Whatever this mass of muscle and fur was, it was the wrong color and shape, and it had a lot of weight to be a black bear. My partner in this story doesn’t like to talk about the story much, but insisted ‘It wasn’t any sort of bear.’
World’s freaky man, could have easily been sleep deprivation. But it’s stuck with me.”
Haunting Both Mother And Daughter
“My mom worked night shift at the hospital in Arizona, in an old mining town by the border. She’s going room to room when an old lady, who walked the halls due to insomnia, told her some weird goat man kept trying to get in through the doors. My mom didn’t think anything of it, but she is Catholic and had those moments of silently praying to herself.
After a few moments, there was a shriek, it was a horrible shriek that made your blood turn to ice. She then went to the nurses station to ask if anyone else heard that, in which they did. Come to realize that shriek was heard all around the hospital. Freaking everyone out, especially religious ladies and men. A few of them go to look out the windows and see hoof marks by the doors and windows, and the marks had no trail towards or away from the building.
My story was pretty creepy. I followed in my mom’s footsteps with my career, and I ended up working a locked down dementia and Alzheimer unit at night. I’ve had creepy moments. But this one will always stick with me.
I was finishing up my binders when a light goes off out of the hall, I go into the dark room and ask if everything is ok. Sleepily, my patient tells me there’s a darn woman who keeps knocking on her window wanting to come in, and that she really wants to go back to sleep. She insists I go and let this mysterious woman in, and I’m thinking to myself my mom’s experience. I reassure her, peek out the window, and there’s nothing. Maybe she was dreaming mistook something outside as her roommate.
After that incident I head back into my unit. I sit, eat a snack, chat with my head nurse, and talk with my usual 3 a.m. insomniacs. Light goes off in my unit. Also, this unit has no outbound lines at all. I head down to her hall, and ask if all is ok. My patient says she can’t sleep, someone keeps banging on her window, and she is scared. I pretty much about pooped myself at this point. I am so confused and frightened.
I tell my nurse and she laughs and said how this has been happening for years. Great.”
Was She Even Human?
“I work nights at a hospital. It’s a psych unit so we have cameras all over. It’s also isolated in that there’s pretty much only one direction to enter from, and it has two elevators and a stairwell. Well, I’m at the nurse’s station charting one night, and I hear three staff elevator dings, so I look over see if it’s house charge or what. A woman gets off the elevator and walks through a little hall that’s not on camera, but connects directly to the waiting room, which I could actually see.
This lady never enters the waiting room.
I seriously dropped what I was doing to watch the cameras and she just disappeared. Now, the glass window separating the nurse’s station and waiting room shakes from the pressure change whenever any of the exits are used. That didn’t happen. And, in any case, the elevators and metal door to the stairwell are all very loud. I leaned over the desk, into the waiting room to see if she might be standing by the guest elevator, which wasn’t on camera. Nope.”
Otherworldly Shrieking
“One patient came in for an MI. I was only a tech at the time, so I did the basics, like attach her to an EKG machine, and being on standby for chest compressions in case it was a long code and I needed to rotate in.
So basically I stood to the side as the doctors and nurses are working their magic, then all of a sudden she wakes up. But the look on her face was pure horror. She looked around at all of them and just shrieked. Shrieked like there were monsters gathered around to eat her. One of the nurses tried to explain who they were and where she was. It’s understandable to be confused after such a traumatizing event, but I’m telling you, she tried to jump from that stretcher like her life depended on it. Then out of nowhere she was out cold again.
The doctors and nurses went at it again, and a few minutes later she came to. This was the freakiest part to me. She looks over to me, looks me straight in the eye and points. She says,’It was you! There was a light and I saw you. Thank you so much, thank you, thank you.’
I know I should’ve been touched, but I had chills, it freaked me out so much. It was like she had died and gone to purgatory, saw us as some kind of devil (when she first got revived), died again, was about to head into the light, saw my face out of everyone else’s, then was revived again. Thinking about her shriek still gets me to this day. And I still don’t know how or why it was me she saw.”
Christ Reborn
“My Mom has definitely had some interesting stories. But one story stands out in particular. It’s relatively important to preface with how my mom is not a very religious person. I definitely don’t remember it word for word but this is the important bits I do recall well.
When she started as an EMT, she was doing a transfer to a psychiatric hospital of someone who thought they were Jesus Christ. They had gone to another hospital for something, and were being transferred back. My mom was in the back talking with him, and apparently he was a perfectly normal mid-twenties guy who happened to 100% believe he was Jesus.
He had been admitted in the hospital by his family because of that, and my mom asked him if he was mad at them. At that point he smiled, and the vehicle turned a corner and put the setting sun right behind his head, illuminating him like a halo. He said something to the effect of, ‘It’s easy to be scared by what you don’t understand, I forgive them.’
Horrifying Hospital Corner
“I have had my share of odd happenings. One of the creepiest took place on the night shift at a hospital in Texas. I was caring for a man who was dying from liver failure. He was fairly young, and his mother and girlfriend had been staying at his bedside for days. He was nearing death and had been unresponsive for days. Late one night, I realized he was going to die shortly, so I woke his mom and girlfriend so they could say their goodbyes. His girlfriend sat next to his bed to hold his hand. Suddenly the man, who had been completely unresponsive for days, sits upright in bed with the most terrified expression I have ever seen. His eyes were huge and terror filled, his mouth was curled into what I can only describe as silent shrieking, and he was staring up at a ceiling corner. His girlfriend of course was thrilled, thinking that he was suddenly okay. She puts her hands on his head and tries to turn his head towards her so he could see her. She’s telling him she loves him and to look at her but he just continues to have the most bone chilling look of pure fear on his face. When she manages to turn his head, his eyes continue to focus on the same spot on the ceiling. So there she is, holding his face towards her, shrieking at him to look and her, but he won’t take his eyes off the same spot on the ceiling in the corner.
And then he just simply fell back and died. It was awful.”