When Redditor u/lizashea asked the nurses and other hospital workers of Reddit to share the most paranormal/weirdest thing you have ever experienced while working, the answers ranged from bizarre to downright frightening.
Here are some of the strangest and spookiest stories people told in the comments:
1. This near-death experience
"I'm an ER nurse. I 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, 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 like, WTF? 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.
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-ass, inner-city ERs, it's the weirdest thing I've seen." —Anonymous
2. And this one
"When I was a student, I got called in on a stroke patient. She had coded, and they were doing CPR. They worked for 45 minutes, but she died. They cleaned her up and called on the family to say goodbye. By the time the family left, she had been both braindead and without a pulse for more than 45 minutes. Blood had filled her brain, and she was completely grey and started to smell. Suddenly, she sat up and called for her family. The nurses rushed to get monitors and equipment back on her. Started working on her again, she stabilized, said goodbye to her family, and promptly died a second time." —u/simplesimon6262
3. This man in black
"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, so I didn't think much of it), so to reassure her, I told her I'd check on her throughout the night. She complained of this man every night for two more weeks when I asked her to describe him to me.
'He's real handsome, and wears a black suit. Oh. He's right behind you now, honey.'
That freaked me the fuck out. Of course, there was no one behind me. She died the next night in her sleep." —Anonymous
4. These hallucinations
"LPN here, I work in long-term care currently. A lot of palliative residents always claim to hallucinate either small dogs or children eating ice cream before they die... It's always facility-specific, too. At one facility I work at, I've had about 6-7 residents claim to see a little girl eating ice cream, then they die that night. I'm going to find that little shit; she is causing me so much paperwork." —Anonymous
5. And these ones
"About 2 years ago, we treated patients during a fungal meningitis outbreak. Our acute care floor has a census of 20. During this, at least 10-15 were meningitis patients, age ranging from twenties to nineties. There are no shared rooms, and all the patients were in isolation, no contact with one another. Many of them had the same hallucinations, children in the corners of their rooms and auditory hallucinations of religious music." —u/RN_Waitress
"I had bacterial meningitis and had similar hallucinations. Kids' voices talking to me, people walking around my room staring at me, like I was naked in a train station. My dad later assured me he was the only one there.
It continued randomly for a few weeks after I left the hospital. I put it down to all the drugs they were giving me, but it seriously fucked me up for a while." — u/something_python
6. This creepy knocking
"In the morgue at my hospital, I would always hear knocking coming from inside the freezer. It really creeped me out, especially when the pathologist looked up, grabbed me by the shoulders, stared me straight in the eye, and said, 'You hear that? You never open that door when they're knocking. Never.' It turned out to be some loose pipes; he thought it was hilarious I didn't sleep that night." — u/eaturliver
7. This spooky but sweet goodbye
"I'm an RN, and while I was a student, I was caring for a lady who had end-stage renal failure, had a DNAR, and was shutting down. We were having a little chat when she stopped, looked over my shoulder, and said, 'Bill's here, love. I've got to go,' and swiftly stopped breathing. Read her old notes, and Bill was her deceased husband." —u/Jesspandapants
8. And this surprise hello
"I did my clinical as a CNA in a memory care unit. I helped feed this woman. She never really moved. Never talked. It was like she was in a coma or something. I would wheel her into the dining room. I can hardly get any real food in her. I'm able to slide in some special ice cream. For days she doesn't move or have any response.
I'm feeding her and talking to myself pretty much. After about 10 minutes, she slowly turns her head and says, 'Oh hello,' then she rotates her head back to her blank staring position." —u/SoberHungry
9. This ghostly patient
"Used to work in a personal care home. A couple of times, a day or so after a resident had passed, their call bell would go off in their room. No one was in the room when the call bell went off on any of the occasions.
We had one resident die pretty traumatically (nurses had to perform CPR because he was a full code). That night, the midnight staff said they saw him at the end of the hall just walking down like he always did. Then, the alarm on the door to the outside (it was a secured unit for Alzheimer's/dementia) went off. It was the door he always tried when he was looking to get out." —u/samster338
10. This grim cat
"I work in a cardiovascular surgical ICU. We have a lot of fucked up people (both physically and mentally) that come through our unit.
We had a stretch of nights where each corner room of our unit (it is a perfect square) reported seeing a cat walking around.
Not a friendly cat either, apparently. The thing was hissing at them.
The accounts were so similar to each other we actually spent probably a half hour looking around for a cat and then had security/plan ops come look as well.
No cat was ever seen or found. Two of those four patients coded the next day." — u/ajh1717
11. This plot twist
"Never anything paranormal, but I had an older patient who kept every piece of paper from every hospital stay. His heart was in bad shape, so I was desperately looking for anything to help our cardiologists out. I finally found his records from when he had heart surgery. It was in Perris, California in the 1980s. I was just reading a book about nurses who became serial killers when sure enough I see records with the name Robert Diaz. I was the nurse for a man whose former nurse was a serial killer." —Anonymous
12. These haunted hospitals
"My town has two really old hospitals. One no longer functions as overnight, and the stories are unsettling. No one cleans the old ER alone, because all the lights and call bells go off. On other floors, there's a kid with his ball, a lady in a white dress, etc. A coworker was cleaning an entire floor utterly solo (the norm) and bounced between rooms because the cleaning solution stays wet for a few minutes. Upon returning to a freshly wiped bed, hand prints were clearly visible." —u/SapphireStarr
13. This ghostly little brat
"This might get buried and is not really nurse-related other than the fact my grandmother's nurse's told me. My great-grandmother was 94 and just started suffering from dementia. She told the home nurses and me that there was a little boy in the corner of the living room who would taunt and tease my great-grandmother while laughing at her, telling her she was going to die. Well, at first it was a little disturbing, and we all shrugged it off because of her dementia. But then shit got real when my best friend came over with his little boy who is about 3 or 4. The little guy pointed over to the same corner and yelled, "I'm going to beat you up!" When we asked him what that was about, he told us that he saw another little boy in the corner, and he is not nice! We flipped the fuck out! I got shivers just typing this... Maybe Nana wasn't hallucinating." —u/smellycheesefeet
14. This haunted bed
"Nurse here! I worked the night shift when a ward patient's relative came running to the nurses' station in a panic.
'Nurse! Come quick!' she cried.
'What happened?'
'You have to see it for yourself!'
I ran to the ward where this little old lady patient was crying and holding on to the bed for dear life. Her bed was shaking.
Now, you're probably thinking that the lady was the one causing all that shaking. But she was this frail, practically emaciated thing. She couldn't have barely rattled the bed rails. The ward had only two other patients in it and their respective watchers. Everyone was huddled in a corner, shaking in fright.
Apparently, that particular ward was seldom used, and the bed that old lady lay in was rarely occupied. People who have laid in it complained of nightmares where they hear screams and laughter of angry children. I guess some restless spirit called dibs on that particular bed." —u/joowulz
15. This reaper in purple
"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 was imagining 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, but I swear to god 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 see 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."
16. And finally, this patient who was scared to life
"Patient comes in coding, and we are working on him, and we are getting nothing, so we bring in his wife to say goodbye, and she starts yelling at him at the top of her lungs, and he comes back, so we arrange transfer to a tertiary hospital, and he codes again, so she comes back and yells at him again and comes back again. Cut to: They are loading him into the helicopter, and he codes again, so 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 once again, he immediately comes back. Eventually, they decide to have his wife ride in the 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 a heart transplant, and is still alive to this day all thanks to his wife scaring the life back into him." —u/feng_gui
