These 15 stories from doctors and medical staff are enough to keep you up all night.

I was a new nurse at our hospital, and only been working there a couple of months.

I work in intensive care a small community hospital. Its a completely open unit where you can see every room from everywhere. 

I work in palliative. One time while doing post-mortem care I walked into the room and thought “that’s weird, how come nobody has closed his eyes yet?” He had that movie-perfect dead look, with pale blue staring eyes and slack jaw and greyish, waxy skin. I closed his eyes and started the care, and when I looked again those eyes, still staring at me, were slowly opening, one slightly slower than the other. He groaned when we turned him to wash his back and his hand managed to clamp onto the bed rail and we had to pry it off. When we finally got him onto his back again, there was a foul-smelling, oily black, viscous liquid on the pillow case. I cleaned his mouth again thinking it must have come from there, but his mouth and nose were clean. The best I could figure the stuff had come from his eye. I couldn’t wait to get that bag zipped up.

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.

Was doing CPR on a lady whose heart had stopped. They initially rolled her into the room unconscious and not breathing. This lady is pretty much dead. However, in the middle of doing chest compressions, her hands reach up and grasp my wrists and then fall back to hanging off the table. We never got her back.

I worked for a rural hospital and we had a patient that came in with a heart attack. We worked on her fruitlessly for 30-40 mins. The doctor declared her dead, and invited the family in. Her body lay in front of the grieving family for almost another half hour. Her family members begged her to come back and say goodbye, she promptly obliged. She sat up hugged one of them and said goodbye.  She had no pulse and was cold when we started the first time, and worse when we ran the second. She never made it. But she was back to say goodbye. It was one of the most unsettling things I ever saw there.

I was asked to do post mortem care. As I was rolling the patient with a coworker, the patient was rolled towards me and almost up against my body as the nurse cleaned her backside. At that moment she began to vomit and she kept vomiting, all over my white scrubs. Vomit sucks. But a dead lady vomiting on you takes it to a whole other level.

He died right there in the bathroom. No one is sure why he pulled his line, or what had happened, but evidently the scene was a bloodbath. Horrible, horrible…now here comes the scary part. A few weeks later, a sweet little old lady is in that room and asks the nurse if someone had died in there. The nurse explained that this is a hospital, and it was likely that someone could have died. Well, the lady says, well, i think a young guy died in here….the nurses asks why, the lady responds “cuz he’s talking to me.” Aghhh!! Ok, I’m not making this up….this lady has a central line, triple lumen. The nurse goes in there and there is blood everywhere. One of her lines is cut. Not pulled out, but cut. There are no scissors in the room. The lady says “he did it.” OHMYGOSH!! Even the doctors were trying to get a priest or something to come in and say some prayers in that room!!!

Night nurse for 4 years now at an old folk’s home. Had a palliative who couldn’t sleep because of incredibly vivid hallucinations. She would describe voodoo people around her room that would just stare at her waiting for her to die. I didn’t take it seriously until the lady across the hall (who rarely ever spoke) starting seeing them in her room too. Legitimate shivers.

A police officer found him a few blocks from the home, collapsed in a yard. When they brought him in, he had a stab wounds on both inner thighs, 2 stab wounds to the abdomen and he slit his throat from end to end. The creepy part was that he managed to miss all arteries, including the carotid. The skin was hanging on the neck and his trachea was clear as day. I mean that you could just reach in and grab it! No blood, just a clean trachea. He was able to talk, and his BP was decent. The officer who found him left the room sick, as well as 2 nurses. The clean, visual trachea that moved with every word, was unreal.

In bed 3 there was a homeless patient “Willy” who thanks to modern medicine was kept alive for I believe around 3 mos….(no family to stop care)….Willy eventually died but patients who are in bed 3 will talk about their friend Willy who brought them a blanket or stopped by to talk. Another night a nurse who has worked in the unit a few years saw someone sitting in a chair behind the door in Bed 3 with their legs crossed. She went in the room and no one was there.

I was on the ground floor of the old section of hospital and the call was to the far end of the top floor of the same section. I ran up 5 flights of stairs to bring me to the right floor but the wrong side. I had to pass through a massive abandoned ward that was completely pitch black to get to the ward I wanted. I sprinted down a long dark corridor, huffing and puffing I nearly smashed into an elderly lady. She grabbed my arm, I’ll never forget how ice cold her grip was – “how do I get out?” she said. I pointed towards where I had just come from and told her to get into the elevators. I continued my sprint.

Not my personal story, but when my mom worked as an E.R. nurse a guy came in from a car accident and was losing blood. In the midst of resuscitation, the man jolts awake and screams “Don’t let me go back there! Please, please, please don’t let me go back!” A few seconds later they lost him.

Every night before the next shift comes in, I check on all my patients, make sure their briefs are clean, refill water pitchers, etc. This is usually right after sunset. Three different patients in three different rooms have told me they’re frightened of the tall, thin man standing in the corner, pointing right over my shoulder.

We had this one old guy who liked to walk the halls of the facility at night. He was always so quiet. One night, I went into a resident’s room and I started to hear soft whistling. I couldn’t quite figure out where it was coming from. As I was leaving the room, I saw slight movement out of the corner of my eye. It was that resident, standing between the open door and the wall. He just stood there, softly whistling. Scared the holy crap out of me. It wasn’t his room, so I took his hand and walked him back to his room. Took me several minutes to get my heart rate back to a normal beat.

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