I'm a Nurse in a Haunted Hospital. We Don't Tell the Patients These Stories...

I work as a nurse in a post-surgical unit in the biggest hospital in my city. Patients come from hundreds of miles away to get their operations here. The surgeons are known to be the best.

But what we don’t tell the patients, what we’re not supposed to tell them, is that there are ghosts here. Just like any other hospital, people pass away and their spirits sometimes linger, or maybe it is just a fragment of them that remains behind, something that science can’t explain yet.

There have been more than a few events that have raised the hair on the back of my neck, and some have sent me into hysterical screaming fits. But those types of reactions are frowned upon in the hospital. So I try to stay calm.

There was that time a few months ago when a patient told me she felt like there were three other people in the ward room with her, in each of the other three beds around her. They were talking back and forth and whispering, she said. But the weird thing was, she was alone in the four-bed room. I pulled back the curtains and showed her myself.

All of the other beds were empty, and there were no visitors or staff in the room with her.

As if that weren’t disturbing enough, a few weeks later a different patient said the exact same thing, when she had been left alone in the same room.

She described it exactly the same way, saying they were whispering back and forth and it was keeping her awake.

I felt a chill up my spine when she told me that, but reassured her that the room was empty, and she was simply imagining things.

People have enough to worry about when they're recovering from surgery, we don't need them fretting about specters and ghosts when they should be worried about physio and discharge appointments, lifting restrictions and medication adjustments.

So we keep these stories to ourselves.

Some nurses said they couldn’t sleep in a certain storage room during breaks on night shift, since they’d had too many bad experiences there. When I asked them about it they said they’d had bad dreams, and felt like someone was in the room with them, standing over them while they slept.

I didn’t believe in those things myself, so I slept in there on the night shift and found out firsthand why nobody else wanted to use it as a nap room during breaks. I had the most realistic waking dream I’d ever had, where I’d awoken in the storage room and felt like someone was in there with me, watching me from the corner of the room - their dark outline visible in the dim room.

When I went to turn on the lights they didn’t work, and the door wouldn’t open, and for some reason in my dream which seemed like reality I chose to lie back down and go to sleep again, while the thing crept closer and closer, vanishing only to reappear just above me. It felt like my eyes were open the whole time and I was forced to watch, paralyzed, as it got hovered over top of me. For what felt like hours, it was watching me while I slept, as I struggled and was unable to move.

I finally came to my senses and finished my break early, going back to work and trying to forget about the horrible experience. But I refused to sleep in that storage room again.

There was another event which haunts me to this day, especially since I’m heading in for a night shift right now, in just a few minutes.

Another nurse told me a story on the night shift last week and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then, and it’s been occupying my mind more and more, especially when I’m alone in the break room at night.

We have a staff room where there are two small couches and a TV. Some nurses go in there to sleep during breaks on the night shift and we try our best not to wake them up.

She was sleeping on the couch there one night and a bright light woke her up. There’s an adjoining room with a bathroom and lockers, so she figured one of the nurses had gone in there and left the light on.

“I looked over at the door,” she told me. “You know how it has that little glass window and you can see through to the other side?”

“Yeah,” I said. I see it everyday.

“So, there’s this woman on the other side of the door. And she’s looking at me through the glass.”

I got shivers up my spine when she said this. Maybe because it was the night shift, maybe because that was where I was going on my break in an hour to sleep, or at least try to.

“And so I see her there, but she’s not really looking at me. She’s just kinda staring straight ahead. And the first thing I notice about her is her hair. It was in this very old fashioned sort of style, not like anything you’d see today. It was like it was from the 70s or earlier maybe. And she was wearing these funky blue pinstripe scrubs. And a nurse’s cap! You know, nobody wears a cap anymore these days. And those scrubs… They looked like the ones, you know in the lobby, how they have those ones on display? From way back when? Yeah, they looked just like that.”

I was nodding along, able to picture all of it, as if I was there with her.

Another nurse walked in and heard us.

"What are you guys talking about?"

"Ghosts," I replied simply.

He scoffed.

"You guys believe in that stuff?"

The two of us shared a knowing look. He hadn't been working on the floor long enough to have seen them himself. And some people just aren't attuned to these things.

The nurse went back to her story.

“So she’s just standing there, staring straight ahead. And I thought it was the IV nurse at first. Because sometimes they’d come in during the night shift and use the bathroom or whatever. So I yelled at her, ‘Hey! Turn that light off, will ya!? I’m trying to sleep in here!’ But she just kept staring straight ahead. So I just put the pillow over my head and tried to sleep some more. Then when I woke up later on and that light was still on. So I asked around. Nobody came in there during the night. And that room is locked, so it wasn’t a patient. And I saw the IV nurse later on and they were not dressed like that… So, yeah. I’m pretty sure I know who it was, though.”

According to her, the woman was the ghost of a nurse who had died driving home after a long night shift, and had fallen asleep at the wheel. Based on the description she’d given, an older coworker had recognized her. She’d said that was exactly what an old nurse who used to work there looked like. And from that point on, the nurse who told me this story always remembered to stay awake behind the wheel on the drive home.

“Every time my eyes start to blink and I’m getting tired, man, I think about that old nurse with the curly gray hair standing behind the glass and I’m wide awake again. Better than a frickin’ cup of coffee, I’ll tell you.”

Something occurred to me as she finished the story.

“That’s really weird. My patient in room fourteen told me last night that they saw someone peeking their head in the room and looking at them. And sometimes they would stand in the doorway and just stare at them for a while. She said the person had a very old fashioned haircut, and old fashioned scrubs. She thought it was a ghost or maybe a hallucination.”

Ghosts and hallucinations are commonplace on the post-surgical floor, and sometimes it can be difficult to tell the two apart. Pain medication induced post-operative delirium is not unheard of, especially in the elderly.

“She thought it was the Dilaudid. So none of that tonight. Just sticking with Tylenol.”

“Good idea,” the other nurse said, and I excused myself.

I figured I’d check on my patients. Especially the ones in room fourteen.

I was somewhat unsurprised to see a woman in blue pinstripe scrubs with a cap looking in at them from the doorway. Despite my terror, I began to walk on shaky legs down the hall towards her.

She turned to look at me and went away from the patient’s room, going down the side hall at the end of the unit.

I ran to catch up with her, needing to see for myself who she was.

When I got to the end of the hall, I looked to the left.

She was gone. But it had only been a few seconds.

I ran down the short length of hallway to the next corridor. This other one was much, much longer. She could not have disappeared so quickly unless she went into a patient room.

But again, she was gone.

My heart hammering in my chest, I refused to believe it was a ghost. Such things didn’t exist. They just couldn’t.

Room nine was the only one she could have gone into in such a hurry. I went in and found all of the patients were wide awake, despite the late hour of the night. It was 3AM, and everyone should have been asleep.

“It’s freezing in here, can you get me a warm blanket?” asked the patient by the door.

I told her I would and she nearly screamed in fright.

“Oh my goodness,” the old woman said, startled. “I didn’t see you there.”

“So who were you talking to?” I asked.

“The other nurse. The one who just came in. Where did she go?”

I felt a presence behind me and looked to see the shape of something moving but then it was gone, like a wisp of smoke on a windy day.

Not wanting to tell the woman it had been a ghost, I just made up an excuse and told the woman I’d get her a warm blanket.

Nothing seemed to help, though. None of the patients in that room slept very well that night. If at all. They kept saying they felt like there was something laying in the bed right next to them.

Come to think of it, it's the same room where patients kept imagining other people were in the room with them. Except this time it really was full.

I haven’t seen the ghost nurse since that night. And I’m hoping I never do again.

It’s terrifying to say the least, since I don’t really understand why she’s here.

And you never know exactly when she’s going to show up.

I’m heading into work for another night shift now. Wish me luck.

I’m gonna need it.

JG

TCC