PICTURE BY via Flickr – Jan Bommes
BY STEVE RAMSEY
I was a new nurse at our hospital, and only been working there a couple of months.
I had brought a patient of mine up to day surgery from the ER for an endoscopy and they called back down and asked me to bring her family up because she only spoke Italian (and not enough English) and they needed someone to consent for the procedure.
After dropping them off, I I walked past the waiting room to head back down the hall to the elevators. I took the back way to get to the ER and the hallways are all deserted – it used to be the pediatric wing of the hospital, but that is all shut down for years and the rooms are just empty and full of broken equipment and beds and crap.
As I reached the old nurses station at the T junction between the pediatric hallway in the hallway that goes to the elevators, I saw a little girl standing across from the nurses station further down the hall. She had big pigtails, was wearing a brown dress, white shoes, holding a teddy bear. I thought perhaps she was a family member who had walked away from the day surgery waiting room. I was concerned that she would go into one of the rooms and get hurt or lost, so I said “hey little girl, what are you doing? You don’t need to be over there, you’re going to get hurt…” and I walked around the nursing station to go grab her hand and bring her back.
I shit you not, she VANISHED as I got about 15 feet away from her.
Every hair on my body stood up straight and I turned and ran like a bat out of hell down to the elevator. I pounded that button for what seemed like an eternity until the elevator got to the floor. As I got back to the ER I walked up to the nurses desk, white as a sheet, and one of the older nurses looked at me and said “Jesus Christ what’s wrong with you?”
I remember babbling like an idiot as I tried to tell them what happened. After listening to me for a moment or two, the nurse said “oh you saw the little girl ghost… she’s been around here for years…” and I remember saying “well thanks for telling me about it before this…!”
Apparently the ghost has even been seen down in the ER, ducking in and out of patient rooms and peeking around curtains. My wife worked up on the 7th floor and she said that one time on nights a whole row of patient rooms started yelling about a little girl that was running around in the rooms. I guess she gets around.
STROY NUMBER 2 ;
I work in intensive care a small community hospital. We have a 9 bed unit that is completely closed off from the medical floor via two doorways. Two nights ago, we were all sitting at our the station, charting, when we all heard footsteps coming down the hall. Its a completely open unit where you can see every room from everywhere. No one was in the unit with us. CT is below us and they close at 5 (unless and emergency comes in) and we only have people on the second floor, the third is used as storage, so no one was above us. It happened two or three times.
Then last night cupboard doors kept opening and shutting in the two empty rooms. I finally asked my coworker WTF was going on and she just told me that it usually happens after someone passes, especially if it was sudden. We had two codes last week that we lost and I guess everyone has had weird stuff happening for a couple days.
STORY NUMBER 3
Not mine, but a fellow nurse of mine. We were talking about patients’ hallucinations when he told me about this time he was walking past a patient’s room, an elderly woman with dementia, and she was chatting up a storm with someone. He asked her who she was talking to, and the woman replied “that nice man in the black and white striped shirt.” A while later he went into another patient’s with dementia room, and that different patient asked where the man with the striped shirt had gone.
STORY 4
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
STORY 5
One night I was caring for a dying male patient. He was scared and I spent quite some time with him, trying to calm and reassure him. Eventually he calmed and I left the bedside and went over to the nurses station which was about 15 feet away. As I sat down I glanced over to him and there was a black shape standing over the bed, looking down at the patient. I was terrified, and am sure it was something evil.
STORY 6
I used to work in a state institute for developmentally disabled. We were temp relocated to another building for remodeling of our bldg. Anyways…I was working one night, 2nd shift. We had a locked pica unit. I saw one of the residents walking down the hall. Very distinct gait and very distinct yellow t-shirt w/ a happy face on it. I went into the ward to let staff know that they had an escapee. This was a serious situation because this particular resident, Larry, would ingest absolutely anything (from clothing to pens to belts to *ugh* a bird’s head)…literally anything. He was also very reluctant to go back to his home ward (hence why I didn’t bring him back myself…he needed two escorts). When we got back into the hall, less than 15 secs later, Larry was gone!! We searched the entire building! Outside, downstairs, all wards…he was NO WHERE to be found!!! This whole search lasted last than 10 mins because I had all extra staff looking for him.
I was just about to call the house supervisor to let her know that we “lost” someone when out from the bathroom walks Larry with one of the staff. He had been getting his bath in the bathroom for the last 30 mins or so. Kind of freaky! I absolutely, without a doubt, saw Larry in the hallway. I never would’ve short-staffed the wards like I did if I hadn’t seen him! Like I said, very distinctive gait, look, clothing. I took a lot of razzing that nite! They all thought that I was crazy. Anyways, come to find out the next day, after the story goes around that I am crazy…Larry had an identical twin brother who died in that building 10 yrs previously.
STORY 7
We had a black girl, about 10 in ICU that was severely injured in a car accident. Lots of brain damage. She didn’t die there but was moved to another facility after weeks and weeks.
After that, I know of 3 older black males, in their 50’s, that, if they were even mildly sedated, would ask about the little black girl with the ribbon in her hair who was sitting at the foot of their beds.
One guy said, “she asked me how I was doing, and then got up and walked that way” while he was pointing towards the 2nd floor window. He paused, a wide-eyed look came over his face, and then he said, ‘But I guess she really couldn’t have left the room that way, huh?”Personally, I think she was taking care of grandfatherly figures.
STORY 8
I worked in an ICU where a prisoner convicted of murder died in ICU 1 – and nobody would put a patient in that room after that cause the air was too heavy and the room was too spooky and ‘dark’. It was so bad that the hospital eventually closed down the room and knocked out a wall to make it a separate entrance into the unit because nurses would refuse to put patients in the room even if it was the last available bed. They’d triage out a patient before they’d trust putting a patient in that bed.
STORY 9
I was working in the NICU when we had a threat of a tornado. Some Nurses got pulled to go to a sister hospital in town to assist in the disaster plan. When all was over one of the nurses returned with this story: She was assisting the nurses in giving some meds before pulling all into the hallways. Every pt she went to said they already had their meds from that nice nurse in the white uniform and hat. She realized after she left that its been awhile since a nurse has worn a hat. That story revealed the urban legend of Nurse Betty. Story goes she had an affair with a married MD, became pregnant then agreed to allow him to perform an abortion on her on the 2nd floor OR room.She died and he went to jail. She never left the hospital and was seen frequently. The local newspaper would do an article of her every year around halloween on her sightings. The hospital has since been replaced with college dorms. Hmmmm i wonder if any students have seen her?
STROY 10
The story of “Rocking Mary.” We closed room 12 in our MICU because just about every patient that has been there since Mary died complaints of seeing a woman in wearing a white habit rocking back and forth by their bedside. Apparently this nun never makes eye contact…just stares outside the window which happens to be on the patient left side over their head. This window overlooks the hospital cemetery where nuns that have died where buried. Mary was a nun that died of a car accident outside the hospital back in the 50’s. She was only about 30 years old and all patient describes her as a young woman. We all thought that it was the “sun-down syndrome.” Anyways, since then room 12 became our storage room where no one goes in by themselves unless it is absolutely critical.
STORY 11
We had a patient, chronic CHFer, always on the call button, hated being on fluid restrictions. you know the type: the nurses have to take turns during the shift answering the call button so the primary can actually do other work.
And this was a frequent flier cause he was very chronic, very borderline, and the hospital was the only place he wouldn’t fluid overload.
I work 7p-7a. He died about 8pm. Oh the look on his face, like, “how could you let me die!” – Like it was our fault.
Anyway, family came and gone by 9pm, funeral home gone at 930pm.
About 10pm, the call button starts going off. I was there – call button going off every 5 minutes.
One of the nurses was a very spiritual girl. At about 2am, after like 4 HOURS OF THIS, nurse Mary snaps, ‘Enough!’
She walks down to the room, and, practically screams into the empty room, “Mr X, you have died. You can’t be in here bothering us anymore. Move along. In the name of Jesus, I’m exorcising you from this plane of existence. Go to the light and be happy!”
And I kid you not, the call button stopped going off then and there.
NUMBER 12
Not a spooky story but a lonely ghost.
One of the rooms, if it was being used regularly, fine. no problems. But, since it was a room at the end of the hall, it was used for ‘storage’ lots of times.
If a couple of weeks went by and there were no patients/activity in the room, the call light would start going off, 4-5 times a shift. But, if you went into the room and turned on the TV, the call light wouldn’t go off anymore.
So, needless to say, when the room was being used for storage, the tv was always on w/ the volume down low.
NUMBER 13
Like most very old hospitals, at one time our hospital was run by nuns. One particular unit had been converted into a sleep study lab area for outpatients tests. One shift in the middle of the night I was watching the video monitor and five patients simultaneously began removing their monitoring equipment. I went into the first room to ask what was going on and the patient said that old nurse with the cap told her the study was over and that she could leave. All the patients reported the same story.
NUMBER 14
I work on a coronary care unit with mostly post-heart attack patients. My charge nurse told us this story, not sure if she’s just messing with us, but she sounded serious. So our unit was empty, we consolidated our last couple patients onto the ICU because we had low pt. census. My charge nurse was over in CCU at the nurses station doing something on the computer. All of our rooms were empty. She heard a bedside monitor alarming, so she went into the room where the noise was coming from, and there was an EKG strip coming out of the bedside printer (which we never use) and it was a long continuing strip of clear VTach. She said she had just coded someone there the week before who had been in VT. Creepy. As. Fuck.
TL;DR: Ghost in pt room printed her last VTach rhythm strip out of her bedside monitor one week post death.
NUMBER 15
I do inter-facility transfers as an EMT so get to see all the skilled facilities and hospitals in the state.
Two places give me the hair raising just bad negative juju creeps: an abandoned “school of the feeble minded” and the state’s prison mental health facility that use to be a huge tuberculosis ward when there were massive outbreaks back in the day.
A third creepy place is the old birthing hospital that got turned into a long term care facility. The top floor is mostly padlocked off. Jokingly, I asked a nurse on the elevator if the building was haunted and she matter of factly said yes. Little kids shapes on the top floor and residents report older women in dresses. She said there were areas of the building she refused to go without another person.
KEEP SENDING YOUR STORIES
READ PART B,C,D AND MORE
STEVE RAMSEY- CANADA