Get Premium
Dark mode theme is available exclusively for premium users. Learn more about the benefits of subscribing.
No fees, cancel anytime.
Dark Mode 
No fees, cancel anytime 
49 Times Nurses Thought They Were Being Paranoid, Only To Face A Real-Life Terror
Your day-to-day job in healthcare is stressful enough as it is, with burnout an ever-present danger. But spend enough time in hospitals around illness, and you might find yourself witnessing some truly bizarre events that are difficult to explain rationally.
Night shift nurses and other healthcare specialists opened up online about the weirdest and creepiest things they’ve ever seen while on the job, and we’ve collected their best stories to share with you. Scroll down to read their spookiest unexplained encounters that haunt them to this day.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
As a hospital night shift nurse, I have taken care of many people who were actively dying and were on comfort care (this means that we are no longer trying to save the person's life, instead we're trying to manage their symptoms to keep them as comfortable as possible while they are dying). Sometimes people hold on a lot longer than we expect them to. You'd think by their vital signs, breathing pattern, skin color, etc that they should go fairly quickly, but instead they hold on and you can't quite figure out how they're still alive. These are people who are completely unresponsive, comatose, brain clearly not receiving enough oxygen to sustain life or consciousness for long. Often one of two things will happen:
-They are waiting for a family member to show up, and once that person arrives, the patient passes fairly quickly. OR
-Their family is with them in the room and doesn't want to leave because they don't want the patient to die alone. Finally the family leaves to get some sleep, or maybe they fall asleep in the room so that they are no longer talking to the patient. Then the patient dies fairly quickly after that. It's like the family doesn't want to leave the dying person, and the dying person also doesn't want to leave the family? It's an odd phenomenon but I've seen it quite a few times.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 15 hours ago
My ex's dad was like my Second Dad because I'd been together with my now-ex for 25 years. Ex's dad passed away recently, three weeks ago. He had been ill with kidney failure and cardiac issues for years, but he had a sudden sharp decline in his health and had to go into skilled nursing. We expected him to get a little better, enough to go to an assisted living facility, but he crashed unexpectedly and the decision was made to place him on hospice. We visited every day, sometimes multiple times a day. He stayed alive longer than the nurses expected. Then, one day, we had lunch in the room, hoping the smells of familiar loved foods might reach him and comfort him. He died the next day, about an hour after we had visited. I like to think that he was able to smell the familiar traditional Chinese foods and glided out of life on the wisps of scent.
RELATED:
#2
I’m not medical staff but when my dad was in the ICU in 2024 (at the VA) they warned him that there was a guy who would talk to himself and check the rooms, he meant absolutely no harm, he did this every single night he was there (he was inpatient psychiatric patient with a heart condition so he was in the ICU a lot) he would not sleep at all until the sunrise.
He was a Vietnam vet and was “on watch” over the fellow military in the hospital. It makes me f*****g sad as hell, poor dude had gone his whole life not knowing he had such severe PTSD and it ate and ate and ate away at him… he still stood guard.
patricia patricia 10 hours ago
I once read somewhere that former prisoners in concentration camps "return" to the camp when they get dementia. I guess the brain never, ever gets over such traumatic experiences. It was one of the saddest, most disturbing pieces of information I've ever read.
#3
When I worked as a CNA at a psychiatric facility, we had one patient with schizophrenia who would occasionally get naked, slather herself in Vaseline and run the halls like that. She was a larger woman, and it was always chaotic getting her under control.
Burnout is what happens when you’re bombarded with chronic, unmanaged stress at work, and it can happen in any job sector. Broadly speaking, workers with burnout are mentally and physically exhausted, try to distance themselves from their jobs, are cynical, and are far less efficient at their jobs than before.
Nurses are very much at risk of burnout. Typically, they do incredibly physically and emotionally demanding tasks, which have life-saving consequences, for very long stretches of time. There’s also the stress associated with witnessing someone pass away.
#4
Worked in a hospice for years. One particular room had a ceiling corner that numerous patients would engage with in different ways. Some people would be mute and just stare at the corner, some people would point at the corner, some would smile and laugh, and others would specifically name family members that had passed before them.
It just became routine for me. I'd enter a room and ask a family member how the resident was doing, and they'd report that they had begun saying their deceased sisters name while pointing to this specific corner. I'd ask if they'd ever done something like this before (had any moments of confusion) and the family would report it was new behaviour.
After a year or so of working there and experiencing this, one time staff were discussing "ghost stories" in the staff room, and an older staff member mentioned that they had one time had a medium come to the hospice, and reported that there were "portals" in this specific room, and another in the basement.
I typically do not believe in ghosts or paranormal activity, but I truly cannot explain this phenomenon. Everyone seemed happy/comforted by whatever they were seeing in this corner, so I just stopped questioning it.
#5
Sundowning is still relatively unstudied. Patients with cognitive impairments lose their mind when the sun goes down. Could be Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, brain bleed, TBI, metabolic encephalitis, I worked in brain injury rehab so I've seen it happen a lot.
It would be around 8pm and you could literally see the sense drain out of a person's eyes. They would be exhausted from the day of therapy and winding down in bed when they would begin to get restless and try to get out of bed. On my unit, patients were required to have assistance getting out of bed. You'd ask what they needed or where they were going and they don't know or they say they have to go to work. You reorient them to the time of day and that it's time to sleep and get them comfy. Half an hour later, they are trying to get out of bed again. You try to talk to them but no one is home. It's like theyre a husk. They keep trying to get up and wander around. Eventually, you get them up at the nurses station so you can keep an eye on them and get your work done.
Medicating sundowners was always a c**p shoot. I swear, most of the ones on my floor had paradoxical reactions to sedatives. Trazodone and Seroquel were the big ones because you can't give haldol to brain injury patients.
I had one big male with a subarachnoid hemorrhage who was fully ambulatory but would go into full blown psychosis at night. He tried to go into other patients rooms to throw them out because he thought they were homeless people living in his store. He elbowed the resident out of the way and almost put hands on the security guard. The resident gave an order for a ridiculously small dose of IM zyprexa and an order for an enclosure bed. It took about 8 people to get him medicated and zipped up into the enclosure bed. He fought the bed until about 6am when he finally fell asleep. He was perfectly lucid during the day. And he promptly began to lose it again when I came in for my shift the next night.
#6
I can’t believe I’m being called to the front of the congregation. It’s finally my time. After years of working as a night shift nurse on a complex medicine unit, I am happy to report, I have never seen s**t.
I feel like I’m receptive to it? I don’t believe in supernatural/superstitious things at all. I am not religious, I would consider myself spiritual, but I don’t practice or follow anything in anyway.
With all that being said we have a lot of deaths on our unit. Last week for example, we were on some kind of blitz and had 5 deaths within a 4 day span. I always wonder, how come none of us have ever encountered one single spirit in this entire monstrosity of a hospital? That’s 30 years old.
Each nurse also gets an individual room for break each night, we grab stretchers and sheets and each get a few hours break. It’s all different rooms including staff/overstock/change rooms, more stock rooms. Some used to be patient rooms now changed to stock rooms that we sleep in during break. I ain’t never seen nothing, felt nothing, smelled nothing. Nada.
There are weird things I can’t explain sometimes. For example, two of the patients who have passed last week were both in room 22A. The patient before both of them was there for about 1 month passed. Patient before that had a code blue in 22A. 4 consecutive people. But when I’m in 22A I don’t feel anything, I don’t see anything. There’s nothing going on, but for some reason everyone just keeps dying or coding in god d**n 22A. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it. There’s no explanation for it, it just keeps happening.
I also do rounds about every 30-45 minutes on the floor. That means I will walk down wing A or wing B alone between 2-3-4am looking into each individual room with a penlight to check on the patient. Never seen s**t in anyone’s room or corner or anything. Ever.
I don’t know. Some of the s**t we see in hospitals, I don’t really know if seeing a ghost would be the scariest thing thats happened there. Human beings are f****d up. The way people treat their partners, parents, kids is still shocking to me sometimes. Anyways fellow colleagues, if you do see a ghost put that m**********r to work. We’re probably short-staffed. Ain’t nobody got time for this s**t.
Aside from all of this, nurses also have to provide compassionate care, adapt to changing shift schedules, and be physically on their feet for long stretches of time.
On top of that, they also have to deal with stress arising from systemic issues. Namely, when there’s a greater demand for nursing but a shortage of nurses, the people who already hold jobs have to take on longer shifts and do more work.
According to the American Nurses Association, the burnout rate in nursing comes in at around two-thirds. It is especially common in younger employees under 25.
#7
Man, I just recently got out of a 100 day hospital stay and 8 weeks of it were spent in the ICU, nearly dying, and pumped full of d***s. You get something called ICU Delirium which is a general state of confusion but can also include hallucinations and delusions. Think like very lucid dreams that can last for days on end, but sometimes you're awake, sometimes you're asleep. And the nurses are the ones to deal with them all.
Anyway the change in my room between night and day was drastic enough to confuse me, and my delirium at night would get significantly worse. Those poor night nurses 😢 I would regularly wake up very confused and start pulling at my wrist restraints (which I had because I wanted to pull every tube out of my face, which could k**l me) and yelling for help. One time I woke up from a very lucid dream and was convinced I was pregnant (lile a month in, I had hundreds of blood tests at this point, there was no way.) Another time I was fully convinced that the nurses hated me because they wouldn't give me another blanket (I was feverish, they couldn't) and then I was even more convinced that they were secretly human trafficking patients (...they weren't.) Then one time I actually did manage to pull a line out and accidentally sprayed a nurse with bl**d. My husband had to sign paperwork so they could test me to make sure she couldn't catch anything from it.
Sorry, none of this is inexplicable, but more an appreciation post for all the nurses that go through some serious s**t on night shift, in the ICU and out. Y'all are hardcore. ❤️.
#8
Im not a nurse but an imaging tech in a level 1 trauma hospital. We’re supposed to talk to our patients about what their CT exam entails beforehand, which usually means talking along the way to the exam room because of how busy it is. One time I wheeled a patient in to the exam room and they said something like “are we going to do this with all these people here?” I didn’t understand, it was only us two in the room. I ensured there would privacy, and everything proceeded as normal. I took that patient back to the ER and got the next patient. Upon arrival to the exam room the second patient asked “Geez who are your friends?” Again it was only us two in the room. Maybe some good painkillers on board? This happened one more time with the very next patient who asked “what’s with the choir in here!?!”.
Maybe it’s not the strangest story but I had a hard time explaining that away to all three patients.
#9
I worked in behavioral health as a CNA for my first hospital job. The amount of things you would see and hear are beyond any level of messed up that you'd see on TV. We're talking m****r-s*****e, childhood trauma, rubbing p**p on the walls, & psychotic delusions.
Plenty of stories.
One time I was doing my rounds, 18 y.o. by myself, right when I first started. Went to peek into one of the rooms to check on a patient at like 0200. At the time the patient in this room was a middle aged woman with pale skin and long greasy black hair that covered her face and eyes. Basically an irl version of that girl from the grudge. Homegirl was sitting cross legged on her bed, wide awake, chanting some s**t that sounded like backwards latin.
I noped out of that room and back to the nurses station so fast.
David Paterson 12 hours ago
This sounds like a case that I read about. The patient was chanting something that sounded like backwards Latin and the nurses thought she was mad. The doctor came in, a literate man who recognised a few of the words as coming from the Beowulf Saga. It turned out that the patient was completely sane, she was an English teacher and was reciting Beowulf to herself from memory to check that she didn't have any memory loss.
Once you’ve read these stories, we’d like to hear from you in the comments down below, Pandas.
What are the most unsettling, weirdest, and most confusing things you’ve personally witnessed at work, whether you’re in healthcare or another job sector? Have you ever seen anything that you found hard to explain rationally?
What advice would you give anyone working the night shift for the very first time? If you do work in healthcare, what do you do to avoid burnout? Let us know.
#10
Women clinging to active dying state for 4 days. I work field nursing hospice.
I have doubled the morphine and ativan as her hospice nurse.
She is getting about 10mg po morphine and 1mg ativan every hour.
I have been there 4 hours now. Usual visit is 1 but something about this case.....
I finally ask, is there anyone still supposed to visit?
"Son is coming tomorrow! Lets FaceTime him!"
I say dont do that....
They do it. He talks to her, says all he needs to, then says bye I love you.
She makes a "uh uh uuuuhhh" noise. They hang up.
Gone 5 min later.
#11
My wife used to work in a nursing home for people with dementia.
My wife was feeding one of the residents who was close to the end of her life one morning when the woman suddenly sat up straight, looked my wife in the eye and said "I just want to thank you all for all the hard work you do to help me and everyone else here. Its important to say this while I can". Then just as quickly she was gone again and died within a day or two.
My wife told the care home manager and he said this is called a "last moment of clarity" and most people working in dementia care experience something similar sooner or later. Of course its impossible to study.
For me that more terrifying that any "ghost" story or tales of psychosis. The thought that even when dementia has reduced someone to a drooling shell of a person they are still present and experiencing everything. If I ever get dementia you can beat me over the head with a 2x2 because I don't want to live like that, especially if I do get one last moment of clarity.
#12
Not a nurse, but was a psychiatric nursing assistant at a state hospital some years ago. Some patients would have to be on direct observation, meaning an aide (or sometimes two) would have to sit with them and watch them, even when they slept.
I was sitting on direct with one patient, it was around 3 or 4 am and they were asleep in their room… which had coincidentally belonged to a patient who had passed away less than a year prior. Pretty boring job usually, so I was just staring at the wall in their room and daydreaming. About 45 minutes into the hour I had to sit with them, I saw a golden orb appear just left of the wall I was staring at, grow, linger, then float to the bed the patient was lying in, shrink, and disappear. Whole thing lasted about 10 seconds. Patient didn’t wake up, and no other witnesses.
No explanation for it, and it wasn’t exactly the best work environment to be able to bring it up with others.
martymcmatrix 5 hours ago (edited)
As a psychiatric ward assistant you should rather be worried if you'd never experience hallucinations, especially during your 13th night shift in a row......the custard of a chocolate pudding told me so, and how could you even disagree on that?!?! 🤭
#13
Possibly the guy who precisely cut off his genitals with a razor blade (impressive level of detail, clean margins, etc—quality work) who was wheeled in from the ambulance bay in apparently zero distress. He greeted the waiting staff with a cordial “how you all doin’” and a nod as he came through the doors. EMS told us later that nobody could ever find the package. Guy did have a large dog.
Plenty of rectal double-C battery stories, etc, but that kind of thing is run of the mill ED weekend night shift stuff.
#14
Worked in an mental health housing facility, it had a nursing home set up. Big lobby/living room and hallways on either end with rooms. Sitting with my coworker and one of the clients who talks to herself out loud constantly was standing at the edge of the lobby, we turn to get up to get her back to bed and she is GONE. Her room is at the very end. We check to make sure she didn’t go in anyone else’s room, nope. She was dead asleep in her bed. No way possible she made it in there in the 2 seconds we looked away.
Another, my favorite client who was also the one who caused the most problems. She loved me but as soon as she started calling me Rachel (not my name) it was over. She HATES Rachel. She came walking up to me with her hair flying in the nonexistent wind and her eyes were BLACK. Sent chills down my spine. My buddy was not in there. Spent the rest of that night in the locked office.
#15
A couple actually.
No one ever believes the full moon thing. Until you work in a hospital with a 100-bed emergency department during a full moon and 75 of the 100 beds are psych patients.
Or the time a guy got drunk and thought it would be a good idea to pet a skunk hanging out near a dumpster behind the bar. Somehow the entire 100-bed department was saturated with the scent despite trying to keep him contained in the back.
#16
My dad was really sick and he was on hospice in the hospital. The whole family came to see him….he was supposed to be moved upstairs to a larger more comfortable room for family to visit that night. We all said our goodbyes and told him we would be back the next day. As I was hugging him goodbye I whispered to him that I loved him and that it was ok to go.
He died a few hours later. I’m glad he is no longer suffering. I was his only girl and he loved me a lot….its been 6 years and I miss him a lot.
#17
I used to work in a haunted facility. It used to be a hospital way back in the early 1900s.
There were two elevators, a front one and a back one. Because we were a lock down psych facility, both elevators could only be activated by inserting and twisting a key. You could also flip a switch to lock them open.
The front one was fine, mostly. Did get stuck on it a couple times which was hella stressful but it's whatever.
The back one, however? At night, it had to be taken down to the basement (where no patients were) and locked open. Otherwise without fail it would take itself up and down at random hours throughout the night. A few times over the many years I worked there this was forgotten and we'd go do rounds and find someone missing.
Yes, the wiring had been checked so many times. Nothing wrong with it... Just haunted.
#18
We had a guy come in via ems because of excessive bleeding due to an amputated p***s. Apparently, family found him in the garage with a bloody knife nearby. He firmly denied chopping off his junk. According to him, he went on a nature walk when he happened upon an angry raccoon. It bit off his p***s and "gobbled it up."
He was perfectly calm and content the whole time. He ended up damaging the scrotal sac, so all of it had to be removed. He admitted to pe*****lia and said that he was glad it was gone. The p***s was never found.
#19
So, I’m fresh out of nursing school and it’s my first night shift just off orientstiin. I’ve got this 90-year-old patient in for sepsis, and she’s got this eye mask on the whole time. A little odd, right? Anyway, it’s around midnight, I’m heading to her room with her IV antibiotics, ready to check her vitals.
As I get closer, I see something out of the corner of my eye through her door window. There’s this tall, skinny dude in a suit bent over her. My heart drops because, I mean, it's the middle of the night, and there are no visitors allowed. I throw open the door, ready to confront whoever’s creeping in there, but nope—it’s just her, sound asleep. I’m thinking I must be seeing things, so I shrug it off, hang the IV, take her vitals, and ask if she’s good. She just mumbles, “Yeah, I’m fine,” and goes back to sleep with her eye mask on.
After I leave her room, I can’t shake what I saw. I head to my charge nurse and tell her about the tall guy I thought I saw. She goes pale and asks if I’m sure it was that room. I confirm, and she tells me that just a couple of nights ago, this same lady was freaking out because every time she opened her eyes, she’d see a tall guy in a suit leaning over her! Instant chills, right?
Fast forward to around 4 AM, I head back in to check her again. I ask her to describe what she saw. And lo and behold, she starts saying there’s a faceless, tall guy in a suit who leans over her when she wakes up. That’s when it hit me—this was the same figure I saw! The poor lady only wore the eye mask so she wouldn’t have to see him.
I’ve shared this wild story with my coworkers, and it always creeps them out, especially since my charge nurse and the patient both backed it up. It’s one of those things that makes you wonder what else might be hiding out in the hospital during the night shift.
#20
Second-hand story. My wife was a nurse in the cardiac care unit at the University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock. Time: late 1970s. A male patient arrived and she noticed a pattern of round, reddened spots, like slight first-degree burns, down his sternum. When she asked an older nurse what that was, she learned that those were the marks from drops of hot wax, from the voodoo candles his family was using to try to heal him.
Sara Frazer 16 hours ago
Oh, I read candle wax on the skin and thought something else entirely
#21
Worked in an old asylum. Reports of ghosts never really bothered me - used to explain it away with staff being over tired. What really freaked me out was the sluice turning on despite being switched off at the wall.
#22
40 yo male AAOX3 lying quietly in bed. I brought a unit of blood and told him I would return with a witness. I returned in about 3 minutes to find him upside down, wedged between the bed and the siderail, with his head against the floor turned so that his airway was cut off. The siderails would not release because he was so wedged in. Another nurse came in and pulled the mattress off from the other side and I lifted him enough for the siderail to release. Did CPR, got him back and he asked, "What happened?" A UFO tried to abduct you, got you about half-way to the ceiling and dropped you?
#23
My partner was a corrections nurse for a while. He worked the overnight shift at a local jail. he was in the med unit, mostly for psych patients and elderly people with chronic illness.
One night an inmate started acting hysterical. The camera footage showed him suddenly running straight at the door with his body bent, head down. He slammed into that door with the back of his neck and fell down.
He paralyzed himself from the neck down. Fractured his spine in the worst way.
As far as we know, he never recovered. Mental illness is so terrible.
#24
I’ve taken care of plenty in-patient hospice folk, but one patient had his sclera (whites of his eyes) turn BLACK within his last day of life. His cancer had spread within his abdomen extensively but nothing involving his head/eyes. Certainly it must have been a sort of bleed I’m guessing but there was not a period of time where his eyes were red. Only white and then black. I had to bring my coworkers in to look at his eyes when he passed because it was so unusual and has not happened to any other patient of mine since.
Also a recent one where the patient did not flush her bowel movement as she said the doctors wanted us to look at it. This thing was the size of a newborn baby, or even bigger. I have no idea how she pushed that out without it tearing her in half. No blood in the toilet, just the most enormous bowel movement I’ve seen in my life. She was not a huge woman either. I didn’t think the toilet would be able to flush but it did make it down (that hospital plumbing is pretty hardcore) .
#25
Not a nurse, but a friend who works night shifts told me something that stuck with me.
They said sometimes patients who’ve been completely unresponsive for days suddenly become calm and clear for a short moment—like they recognize people, say a few words, or just seem “there” again… and then pass not long after.
They couldn’t really explain it medically in the moment, but it happens often enough that staff quietly recognize the pattern. It’s eerie, but also kind of peaceful in a strange way.
#26
That was my mom. She started her transition the day after Mother’s Day, 2023. I was with her all day, I went outside for some air for 10 minutes and when I came back she was gone.
#27
Monitors in an empty room started showing vital signs. Monitor had been discharged correctly. Granted, they were not healthy vital signs. I opened the window.
#28
Worked night shift in a big trauma hospital. I had at least 8 patients in the same room comment on “a man standing in the corner wearing a suit with sunglasses.” Same corner, same outfit. This happened several times over the course of a year. Varied demographic of patients, none of them died which almost made it creepier.
#29
Night shift just has a different population. the people who show up at 3am are not the same people who show up at 11am and the situations that bring them in are different too. add in the fatigue factor on both sides and you get a lot of things that are hard to explain cleanly in a report.
#30
27 years in medicine. 18 of those as an RN. I have stories for DAYS but here’s a quick one.
I was the charge RN in a 24 bed ICU during covid. If you worked critical care at all during that time, YOU KNOW. Anyway, one night I’m sitting in the office catching up with charting some audits. I hear “NURSE!! NURSE!!” I jump up and go out into the hallway and ask my nurses if they heard that. Yup sure did. We had 8 “clean” ICU patients in the back and 16 covid vents up front with makeshift ante rooms with negative pressure blowers. You couldn’t hear S**T from in the room if you are outside or vice versa. So imagine, 8 beds totally blocked off, can’t go in that part of the unit unless you open doors. 16 beds full of Covid vents. You could basically hear a pin drop because of it.
Checked every patient room anyway but yeah never found where the disembodied voice came from. That ICU is very haunted and I have a ton of stories from the 11 years I worked there.
#31
Not a nurse but my mom worked night shifts in a nursing home for years. She always talked about how patients would suddenly become lucid and start saying goodbye to people who werent there, then pass away within the hour. Happened way too often to be coincidence. She stopped trying to explain it and just accepted it as part of the job. Full moon nights were always the weirdest though.
#33
I caught my charge nurse in coitus with a CNA. I certainly can’t explain that. Nor can I get the image out of my head all these years later.
#34
A patient who was completely unresponsive suddenly sat up, said a full sentence clearly, then went right back to being unresponsive like nothing happened.
#35
I was on shift for a code on a elderly lady. She had cardiac arrest several times earlier in the week. Very sick but of course a full code. I take the roommate out of the room while they work on her. After 25 min they call it as they were unable to resuscitate her. So nurses go in to pronounce her. Well after 15min they come running back saying call another code as she has pulses again. Like two attendings and several residents ran the code. But sure enough she came back. Went to ICU to eventually code again and die. But it was so weird calling the code and having all the docs show up again in complete disbelief that her heart was still going. Haven't had anything happen like that before or since.
#36
My mum was a nurse on paediatrics and cancer (fun combo as you can imagine). They had a young kid on the ward who was dying.
One of the nurses in particular was very close to the kid and their family. One night she had a vivid dream that the kid came and spoke to her and said it was all ok. They were happy and she shouldn’t be sad. They hugged and she woke up.
When she went into work that morning she was told the child had died in the night.
Needless to say the nursing team were kinda shaken up but also comforted.
#37
Not a nurse, but a friend is an ER nurse. A female patient came in one night very concerned because ‘something’ fell out of her v****a. Upon inspection, it was determined to be a French tickler. Apparently her date didn’t tell her….
#38
One specific hallway in long term care has multiple reports of a lady in a black dress staring at people.
People who work in memory care all have similar nightmares about getting locked in a specific room.
Dementia patients in general just have a tendency to act haunted. Ripping up bibles at 2am, staring right behind you and talking to their hallucinations, etc.
#39
I walked into the room of my recently delivered patient. There was white fluff n the air, and bloody fried chicken strewn all over the floor. Patient was completely naked, standing, IV and epidural catheters torn out. The blood was from her flailing her arm with the dislodged IV around, and also…. lochia. I literally didn’t understand what I was seeing.
Baby daddy came to visit shortly after delivery, brought fried chicken, they got in a fight. Stuff got thrown everywhere. The fluff was from a torn open chux.
I kicked him out, got mom to the bathroom and cleaned up. Got housekeeping in to clean up while mom was in the bathroom. I apologized profusely to housekeeping.
And now I’ve outed myself to any former coworkers, because this can’t be a routine thing, right?
Nikki Sevven 2 hours ago
Lochia = post-childbirth våginal discharge. Chux = the pad put under patients to contain bodily fluids (like a puppy pad).
#40
My retired last year in her 70s as a med/surg/trauma icu nurse. Let’s just say - if you can imagine it, it happened.
#41
My sisters first day working at a hospital she saw a nurse crying and asked why, she said her patient died and instead of being sad about the patients death, she was sad that she had to do more paper work right before her shift ended.
#42
I'm not a nurse, just the cleaning staff at a nursing home for a few years. I always thought it was odd how they would tell me they usually keep 1 of the rooms empty unless someone is on the brink of passing away because everyone they put in there passes faily quickly. I'll never forget the time they became fully booked and had to put someone in there who was alert and oriented x3. I would have awesome conversations with her, she was so sweet and easy to get along with...they stuck her in there and she proceeded to basically go crazy and not sleep. She started exhibiting really weird and disturbing behaviors. Wouldn't positively respond to my presence while I was tidying up. She passed after like 2 weeks, it was so strange.
Kim Kermes 16 hours ago
You are not "just" cleaning staff. You are responsible for the cleanliness and well-being of patient environment and you make it possible for the medical staff to do their jobs.
#43
I’m not a nurse, but one thing I’ve heard consistently is how unpredictable the human body becomes at night.
Patients who were stable during the day can suddenly deteriorate, and sometimes without clear explanation. It really shows how much of medicine is still observation and experience, not just data.
#44
To all the people worried about machinery suddenly turning on despite being unplugged or de-batteried. Don’t worry it’s not ghosts messing with you. Some electrical components are engineered to store energy in electromagnetic fields (basically to protect the sensitive stuff inside) so you’re witnessing some electrical f*ckery, not ghostly f*ckery. Think about when you turn off a battery pack and the light stays on for a stupidly long time after.
#45
Probably not the sort of thing you are after. But I was on a night shift, other colleagues were on their break and it was just me and one HCA (very tiny Italian man). There was knock on the ward door, and we both looked at each other confused. At that time of night if someone was coming from another ward or department they would always call first. We were also a rehab ward so no acute patients requiring doctors or anything overnight. Once visitors left, we locked the doors and it stayed that way until morning. He told me to stay back and was very protective. It was very sweet!
Our ward was in a separate sort of block to the main hospital and we had access straight to a car park. Our doors had to be locked due to homeless people sometime sleeping in the toilets out in the foyer bit. Anyway, I absolutely followed him! Opened the door and there were police officers in full swat gear, told us they needed to search the ward. They came in, went in all the bays, went in side rooms, used long mirrors to look under patient beds. Did it all virtually silently. Me and my colleague just stood there completely shocked. They left as quickly as they came. Never got an explanation. This was about 16 years ago now. Day shift did not believe us until we got security to show the ward sister the cctv of the foyer.
#46
Monitors kept alarming in an empty room all night even after we checked everything twice and found nothing wrong.
#47
Call lights going off in empty rooms or where the patient physically couldn’t press the button.
#48
Former ER RN (still an RN just not in the ER) and the craziest one I have is a small drunk Hispanic male escaping full c-collar and backboard and disappearing. He had wrecked his car, no obvious injuries but you never know. EMS protocol is c-collar and tied down on backboard and go to ER. It’s a busy night, we stuck him in a room and ordered CT scans to clear him. EMS left the stretcher like 5 feet off the ground. Dude was asleep when they left. Business as usual until CT tech comes out and says “where’s the guy in room blah blah?” We’re all confused, he’s like “yeah he’s not there!” Go in the room and sure enough, stretcher is 5 feet in the air, c-collar, backboard and webbing are all present, but no patient. No one witnessed anything or heard anything. Dude straight up vanished. Couldn’t even find him on the security cameras. Don’t know how some 5 foot tall drunk guy got out of there without a trace.
#49
I was a PSA and was with my RN walking down the hall to set up an empty room for a new patient. It was July 4th 2017 around midnight. Our unit cleared out at the beginning of the shift and since it was also a full moon on a huge holiday, we were starting to get new admissions. We were walking past a room that had just been cleaned and set up when her and I both stop dead in our tracks. Keep in mind it was only her and I on the floor with maybe two patients on the opposite end of the hall. She asked me if I had heard that and I asked if she had also heard and seen that? What was seen was a little girl in an early 1900s dress with a white apron, pastel pink, and she had pigtails and a little boy in what I can only refer to as ‘Newsies’ attire crouching under the chair begging for help. Now, we’ve had patients pass away in this room but the hospital hadn’t seen children since at least 1917, if at all from what I can remember.
We had to hurry up because the ER was getting antsy about when the new admissions room would be ready so we put it on hold. Fast forward to finishing the room and we go back to investigate the ghost children. The only thing that was off was the air felt heavy and it was freezing more than the AC could accomplish. We avoided the room until a new patient was admitted. Needless to say, this new patient was seeing people in robes carrying crosses…..
Related on Bored Panda
