Nurses Tell Their Ghost Stories

The nurses were probably seeing hallucinations because of the fact that there are dead bodies everywhere in a hospital, and society has imprinted people to automatically think something is a ghost, if it occurs around dead people.

Perfectly explainable. Don't see anything paranormal here.

reply to post by extraterrestrialentity


I have to disagree, I don’t believe in a lot of paranormal stuff.

But seriously there is something about being about death and the moment of death regularly that just makes the experience…well…. Different.

Its very difficult to explain but I would not be discounting all the stories about nurses and ghosts as being wired.

I have seen strange things, like a woman whose dying wish was to see her daughter who lived in Canada one last time. So the daughter gets on the plane to go and see her mum, when she arrives her and her mum have a chat then mum says to her “go get a coffee” (something like that) anyway soon as the daughter leaves she buzzed us. We went in she said “I don’t feel right” and then 5 minutes later was dead.

It was like she was holding out to see her kid one last time.

I bet almost every nurse has a story like that.

There are just wired things that happen in hospitals, its not just the paranormal stuff, it’s the stuff you find out about people. I once found out my patient had been a woman in the SOE who was dropped into France in WWII. How cool is that!

But back on topic, there are some very strange bumps in the night in hospitals and not all of them can really be explained

reply to post by OtherSideOfTheCoin

We meet again old challenger.

Such occurrences can be explained by telepathy, which is much more probable and plausible than a ball of energy flying around and haunting people.

Oh my gosh, I used to work at this trauma center in texas on the 6th floor. The hospital was old. Anyway, I worked night shift at this hospital as a floor tech while I was going to nursing school. One night, there was this young lady on our floor dying of AIDS. She had contracted HIV through her boyfriend who had been using IV drugs. She was bleeding and was receiving countless blood transfusions but she was losing the battle. At about 2 am, I heard her yelling out for someone.....anyone. I went to her room and she said "whose kids are those"? She had been an alert and oriented patient so I was concerned. I asked "What kids"? "The little kids with the blue jean shorts, the blonde kids", she said. I informed her that it was 2 in the morning and that there were no children allowed on this floor at night. She appeared confused staring at an empty space on the wall and pointed at what she said was the children. She died a few hours later. More on this story later

found a few different stories where people see children in there room or running around before they pass. interesting...

i want to quote some stories but theirs so many i dont know which ones to pick.

I worked at a hospital where this was so bad that I was actually told during my orientation to not work alone at night in our area. Saw a lot of strange things there...

reply to post by madmark


Arrgghh...little blonde children...I was in hospital a couple of years ago and there was an elderly patient on the ward, who from time to time would talk to the children. She didn't have an illness that caused hallucinations and mostly she was very aware of her surroundings, time etc, so not crazy.

The first time I saw it, she said to me, "What beautiful children you have" I replied that my daughter was not actually there at that point and she went on to describe them as beautiful blonde children and that they were standing near my bed so she assumed they were mine. After I told her they were not my children, she started to get worried that they were lost and looking for their parents. To be honest I just ignored it first time but the second time she "saw the children" was really freaky, she was actually holding a conversation with them, offering them chocolates, and then saying "Oh I understand why you can't have a chocolate" but her eyes were fixed on a specific area and she was most definitely interacting with something...made the hair on the back of my neck stand up..

She also saw a cat in the ward, on another patient's bed, she was totally convinced it was there...

She wasn't expected to live much longer, but I was discharged before her, so don't know what happened to her.

BTW I've seen the All Nurses thread before and think I posted a link to it on another thread sometime ago, but it is such a fascinating subject, I'm glad you posted it again S+F

Not exactly ghost stories, but when younger brother Billy Bedlam was working ICU as an RN before doing his RN-paramedic bridge, there were rooms in the ICU that, if you had a dying patient in, they would report seeing the same things, despite never having met.

Things like people standing at the door (same description by all), wires running through the room (?), snow outside the window, a few people saw boats going by the door as if they were looking through the wall (there's a river by the hospital). Some saw a doctor standing by the bed, all giving the same description.

He also said it was not unusual for people to wake up out of comas just before dying, to the point that if a neuro ICU patient of his that wasn't supposed to recover suddenly woke up and looked around, he'd grab the crash cart then and there. I remember him telling me that this one patient who was related to one of the ICU docs had had a stroke and was not expected to come off the vent. One night Billy was in the room, the guy opened his eyes and looked right at Billy. Billy asked "do you hear me?" thinking the guy was running on brain stem, but the guy nodded. "Give me a thumbs up on your left hand". He did. "Show me two fingers on your right hand". He did. So Billy says "I grinned and told the guy what a great thing this was, he wasn't expected to wake up - I'll go get the doc, he'll never believe this!"

And right then, the guy's heart stops. Tout fini. They coded him for a couple of hours because it was the doc's relative, but he never responded again. Billy thought about it but decided never to tell the doc.

He also said a lot of people know when they're going to die, even if it didn't seem likely. One guy called it to the hour early in the evening, Billy kept telling him he was recovering, the guy was insistent Billy call in his wife and his brother-in-law "because after I pass she won't be able to drive home safely", they all came up and were humoring the guy, and bam! he dies right on the dot. Billy said it was the easiest death he'd ever seen, the guy just switched off. His wife was talking to him and Billy was mixing an epi drip at the bedside with the ICU doc, and Billy looks up, the guy goes from sinus to asystole, in one beat. No PEA, no flutter, no random beats just click, gone. Bill said "I'll be shot, he's gone", the doc said What?, looks at the monitor and says "How long has he been dead?" (normally you see a lot of non-perfusing beats where the heart is going through the motion but not really working)

Billy says "He went in one beat. The art line wave matched the last beat on the ekg, and that was it. Game over"

No agonal breathing, no spasms, no PEA, nothing. His wife was holding his hand when he shut down and never noticed.

I've been a mental health nurse for more than 20 years and have experienced one or two weird things, but probably no more - or spookier - than anyone else in any other profession over a similar period.

Death is a common experience; just recently two of my patients died, and they weren't old.

But I haven't noticed anything untoward so far, and don't expect to.

I don't now, but I used to work in elderly units where death is obviously quite common, and I have prepared a number of deceased patients for the undertaker.

Not exactly the most pleasant of tasks, but no ghosts or rattling of chains.

The spookiest phenomenon I have witnessed is when people seem to be aware of their impending death.

They will typically become upset and tell everyone they are going to die then, in a matter of weeks or days, they do indeed die; this is often against medical expectations.

But again, not very often.

Same goes for my colleagues...some have been nursing for thirty odd years yet can count on one hand the number of strange things they've witnessed.

It's probably the same for any job over that length of time.

Thank you for posting. I think the possibilities of finding ghosts in hospitals are greater than normal houses because hospitals are the place for so many terrible things to happen to people. You can think of many terrible accidents and incidents with so many people concentrated in one place.

I also have some ghost stories in my book. Probably I will share some of them later here.

I have experienced strange things at the hospital I worked for.

Patients who I know have died in a room were described sometimes by the patients that were currently in there.

I used to hate preparing a body for the funeral home then clean the room and turn around just to put a new patient in there a few hours later. It never sat right with me....

On our floor, we (nurses) had a current visitor I named Joe. We never actually saw him but sometimes the curtain blinds would move real fast then coldness and the elevator door would open on its own. We would joke but sometimes we felt as though he was trying to find a way out and was stuck. This happened daily.

Other times, I would walk down the hall and get a sense that the hallway was packed full of souls who had not crossed over......weird.

reply to post by CJCrawley

The spookiest phenomenon I have witnessed is when people seem to be aware of their impending death.

I agree while it may not qualify as a “ghost story” the strange things people say and do before death can be really freaky but also sometimes really make you glad to have witnessed them. I can think of a few occasions where I am pretty sure the patient knew death was imminent.

I currently work in a place (care home for the elderly) that has sporadic episodes of strange activity, mostly always centred on the older wings of the building, but not exclusively so.

I'll start with the milder stories and work my way up.

In the new wing, recently constructed, two residents who were in rooms next to each other both complained on the same night that the floors were crawling with insects. They couldn't have heard one another saying it as they were quite hard of hearing. One of those residents would frequently see a man in the en suite of her room, and the room itself now has a drastically different atmosphere now that she has passed away. She was lovely, but the room was heavy and oppressive.
In that same room, other staff members have heard knocking on walls coming from a side where there is no neighbouring bedroom, just a solid brick wall.

Just down the corridor in that new wing, me and a colleague were assisting someone. In her en suite we could both hear very faint music. After hunting high and low, no explanation was found for this.

One night, in the week following the unexpected death of one resident, a colleague was downstairs in the lounge. She came running to me, paler than pale and sweating, looking terrified. Apparently she saw a black hunched figure move from the corner of the lounge into the back room, and to this day I believe her. Her reaction was something even hollywood couldn't act out.
Two hours later she went upstairs to answer a call bell. I saw her when she came back down, the same look on her face. After assisting the client who had called, she could hear a man talking in the corner BEHIND a sink. We only have female residents.
Most of that shift we heard doors in the back rooms opening and closing (they have very distinctive squeaks) and nobody was anywhere near those areas.

Our downstairs bedrooms are in the oldest wing, and have the most activity, which I have experienced first hand.

One resident kept telling us her family member was there. This only happened after that person had passed away, and it was elected that the resident wouldn't be informed of this, so she didn't know that person was deceased. In her bedroom, the call bell would go off randomly without her pressing it. It did that on numerous occasions until she also passed away and hasn't done it since, ruling out the possibility that there is a faulty connection.
Next door to this room, I clearly remember we had a lady in there who was deteriorating quite rapidly. Her bed faced the door, and she liked it propped open so she could see down the hallway. I was finishing my shift and picking a bag up from that hallway. As I lifted it I looked up at her, waving. Both of her hands were holding a sick bowl and her call bell was a few feet away, but it rang as I looked in. I saw the light come on and she had not moved to press the bell.
She died later that same evening.

And finally, the most recent thing that happened to me there was I was standing in the same stretch of corridor. I thought a piece of fluff was wafting towards me and expected it to buffet itself to the ground, or waft elsewhere. It didn't. It got closer and closer in a straight line, looking less and less like fluff and more like a stereotypical orb, and passed right through me, accompanied by a cold draft. Needless to say, I didn't stand there for any extended amount of time after that.

is it ghostbusters2?

reply to post by Hopechest


My thoughts exactly.

reply to post by madmark


OK, I can't get enough of this! I've been reading the stories every night, scaring the crap out of myself!! Thank you lol!

That black hunched figure moving into the back room my colleague saw? A new colleague saw the exact same thing, I kid you not. She wasn't aware of the previous colleague or her experience either.

Wife is an RN on the night shift, she's given me a few. Nothing too creepy, really.

There's the common "shadow people" at the end of the hall, which, honestly, could just be shadows, fatigue, and peripheral vision. The thing is that the other nurses see them too, who knows.

The biggest one, in my opinion, is a little boy. She, and her fellow nurses, see him from time to time. He's dressed like 1920's-30's era, which is strange because the hospital wasn't built at that time. At any rate, he likes to play peekaboo and seems happy and nice.

On another floor, patients will often complain of hearing a little girl playing and being loud in the hallways. Usually, no kids are present on the floor, and it's in the middle of the night. Same floor, you get the standard tvs going on and off, toilet flushing itself, call light pushing itself, window shades opening, etc.

Take what you will from it, these are interesting stories to me. Thanks for the thread.

I Necropostedi because we cant let this die ...lol anybody got some more stories??

a reply to: blackz28

Oh I had forgotten about this awesome thread. Thanks for bringing it back to my attention. I too would love to hear more stories!

Nurses, Night Security Guards, Police, etc there been alot of threads of them running into the supernatural during their late night shift.

A good friend of mine use to work night shift security, at a hospital. He use to tell me he would be hanging out in the basement where the morgue was sometimes. One night, he was down there in a nearby room, alone. Then all of sudden one of the curtains by bed, flaps up as if someone just walked by pushed it. No window, no vents. It looked like someone physically pushed it, to freak him out. He has NEVER seen that happen, in all the times he worked there. That really freaked him out and he quickly exited the room.