In a place where people shuffle off the mortal coil on a daily basis, it's hardly surprising that most hospitals are overflowing with ghost stories. Where life and death are just part of the job, nurses from around the world have been sharing their most terrifying true accounts of supernatural encounters. Prepare yourself for tales of haunted hospital wards, ghostly apparitions and even the occasional visit from the Grim Reaper himself.
As the following blood-curdling ghost stories go to show, you don't just need healing hands to work in a hospital; you also need nerves of steel.
1. Don't Let them Take Me
"The best I have heard is from a nurse who said that one night she was floated to oncology at the hospital she used to work at. She was given a patient who was passing away and had been unconscious for several days. At one point during the night, the nurse went into the room and the patient was at the top of the bed and looked at her and said, "Don't let them take me!" The nurse was freaked out and asked her who was going to take her and she said that black thing up there and pointed up in the air. This patient died within minutes." – Chad
2. The Empty Room
"I heard an interesting story a few weeks ago. Part of the hospital has been rebuilt and faces on to our unit. A nurse doing something near the window looks across and sees two people moving about in one of the clinic rooms (it's after hours and clinic is shut). She called a colleague over who also saw these two people. They call security who go over and check out the room; nobody there. A while later the nurses again see these two people moving around so they call security. This time the security guys split up – one stands with the nurses while the other one went over to the clinic to check again.
The scary part of this is that the security guys were talking on the radio. The one in the clinic states that the room is empty, but the other security guard standing in our unit with the two nurses could actually see these two people, standing right beside the security guard while he was talking." – MaryAnn_RN
3. The Sound of Children Playing
"My mother-in-law has been a CNA for 15ish years, and like many new CNAs, one of her first jobs was at a nursing home for the elderly. Soon before patients at that nursing home passed, they would complain about "the children outside being noisy"...in the dead of night. There were also patients that would comment on the children playing outside their window in the daytime (when clearly there were no children to be seen).
She has plenty of other weird stories, but that one is my favorite." – iamsookiestackhouse
4. Straight to Hell
"Okay, not my story, but something my sister witnessed when she was a med student at a level one trauma facility. Guy comes in from an MVA, motorcycle vs. truck, she said he was a "Waffle House hash brown" — sliced, diced, and chunked. The guy is able to talk at the beginning, drunk, cussing the nurses and docs trying to help him, not a nice guy. The end up intubating the guy to preserve the airway and the guy's going down hill fast. He codes, but they manage to bring him back.
Suddenly, the guy comes completely to, rips out his tube, grabs my sister's hand and lets out this breathy little scream, "Don't let me die, I'm going to hell. Please don't let me die!" This freaks out everyone, including my sister. The guy says he "woke up" in hell, on fire, and keeps begging someone to check his feet for burns...nobody could believe he pulled out his tube and was talking.
Despite everything they did, the guy still died. My sister said they were all freaked out about it for weeks." – nerdtonurse?
5. The Man Sitting in the Corner
