Ghost Stories Told by Those Who Work around Death

1.

I used to work in a nursing home. The residents in certain rooms would complain about a man in their room at night but hallucinations are common in the elderly so it wasn't really noticed. One night I was mopping the dining room which had huge windows over looking the garden, it was around 1am so pitch black outside and low lighting inside.

I had this horrible feeling of being watched so looked up and reflected in the window was a man behind me. He had a brown suit in, a bowler hat and the cruelest look on his face, he grinned and his mouth was too big. This happened in seconds and when I turned around there was obviously noone there but I'll never forget that look of evil on his face. I paid more attention to the residents after that and they'd all seen the same man, he just enjoyed terrorising people. -mycatiscalledFrodo

2.

I used to be a security guard at a hospital. One night, while doing my rounds, I went into the surgery wing and was walking down a hallway when I saw a doctor looking at the whiteboard where all the scheduled surgeries are written down. I said “hello doctor” and kept going. The doctor didn’t say anything back, just kept studying the whiteboard.

When I got back to the security office, I was telling one of the guys that’s been there for years about how I greeted this doctor and he didn’t say anything back, I asked if thats the asshole they told me to watch out for. I was asked where I saw him and I said the surgery ward, and he gave me a smirk.

He then explained that the surgery ward closes at 9pm and that all patients are moved into the monitoring wards; there should be no one there. He then asked me if this doctor was studying the schedule board. I said yes and he then told me that I just met Dr. Luisitti. Apparently, some many years ago, one of the surgeons went up to the helipad and jumped off the building. Seems like he never stopped working though. -addictedpunk

3.

I used to be a nurse assistant on a cancer floor that also served as the hospice floor. The number of times a patient would pass and be removed from a room, only to have that room's call light continue to go off without anyone inside was just nuts. And before you say maybe the light was just damaged or moved strangely in the process of removing the body, that's the only time it would happen. Broken call lights, in any other circumstance, just wouldn't come on at all. -OutrageousOnions

4.

I am an ICU RN. We had a septic patient in the unit. She was 29 weeks pregnant. She went into labor on my shift and we delivered her baby, stillborn. I did post mortem care on the baby, retrieved the proper transport container and walked the baby down to the morgue. It was the middle of the night, I’m in an elevator alone. I hear a baby start wailing. I absolutely lose my shit and rip open the cover, and just as I go to zip down the bag, I hear a calming male voice say, “hush little one, I’ve got you, no need to cry.”

The crying stopped immediately. Shaking, I opened the bag and saw exactly what I expected to see, a deceased 29 week only baby. I am a big bearded 40 year old ICU nurse and that was the scariest shit I’ve ever experienced. No one believes me to this day. I don’t even want to speculate what the crying or the voice was. -Nighthawke78

5.

I used to be a driver for a funeral home corporation. Like, drive the hearse and pick up the bodies. Never had anything creepy happen, a few funny things, a few traumatic things. In general it was a chill job.

However. I did get incredibly uncomfortable one night picking up a man who died at home, he still had the defibrillator leads on his chest and his eyes were closed, which is unusual because the eyes are always open. He just looked like he was asleep or unconscious. Not rigid or pale or anything. I just had this sinking feeling for about half an hour in traffic that he was going to suddenly gasp and wake up in the body bag. Then it hit me.

That would be the coolest thing ever. I’d take him home and he’d be back with his family. So I just kind of drove slowly and turned up some music and sang along and talked to him. When I got him to the funeral home I left him out of the cooler for about an hour while I did paperwork and played on my phone. When I got another call I checked on him and his limbs had started to stiffen. I was kind of bummed. I put him in the cooler and went on my next call. -Chemistry-Least

6.

During my apprenticeship, I worked at a funeral home said to be "haunted" by an old funeral director assistant who had a heart attack in the building and died. All he ever did was mess with the chapel lights and if you called him out, something like "John the family is coming, please don't" they would return to normal. Not really sure if I believe it was really haunted, but saying something always fixed the issue so I kept doing it my entire time there. -_bobbykelso

7.

I worked within hospice and long term care. The spookiest phenomenon was the man in the corner. It happens all the time for people actively dying. They see a shadowy man in the corner of their room. -LeftandLeaving9006

8.

I have a million that are more grotesque and gory than this one, but it stands out to me. I was once working at a mortuary and had to go pick up a man from the medical examiner’s office. When you do that (at least where I’m from) you get a receipt when they release the body to you.

The receipt has all of the personal belongings that are with the deceased. When I brought the man back to the office I opened up the body bag to make sure all the belongings were there and double checking the receipt. When I opened up the bag I was stunned to find this dude looked almost exactly like me. He was my age, had similar tattoos In similar spots, had the same long hair I do, even had the same style of jewelry I was wearing.

It took me so off guard that I stood there in an existential crisis until the embalmer came in and was like “hey SpartanM00 how’s it goin—ahhh holy shit that guy looks like you!” It’s the only case I’ve had nightmares about. I’ll be the one in the body bag with the deceased man opening me up. -SpartanM00

9.

Before my time in palliative care I worked on a medicine unit at the hospital. One night I was returning from my 2nd break around 3am or so and saw a man standing in the door of my patient's room. He was white, late forties to mid fifties, dark hair which was graying, relatively fit, wearing a hospital gown.

He was standing at the door with his arms crossed and as I walked closer he turned and went inside the room. I followed because I knew it wasn't his room; our unit was big (36 beds) so it was entirely possibly he was a patient I had not met yet. Anyway, you can guess the rest... went inside the room and he was nowhere to be found.

I looked under the beds (ridiculous bc someone couldn't hide there), in the lockers, washroom, behind the curtains. He was nowhere to be found. Later that night my coworker had said she felt like someone was touching her feet when she tried to nap on her break. The break room was right next door to my patient's room, and she was in there at the time that I saw this "patient". -master0jack

10.

I work in a Cardiac ICU, we have quite a lot of death around here. That being said, we had one patient that comes to mind... I'll call him Greg G. (fake name.) Greg was on the unit for months. He fought very hard to stay alive every day, and to his credit he was getting better for a good space of time. Greg was fairly old. Late 70's or early 80's.

The thing is, he (initially) looked very young, and acted very hip. He became a meme around the unit and everyone loved him because he was an old white dude who loved rap (2pac and biggie) and would throw gang signs sarcastically as a non-verbal queue that he was feeling okay (he had a trach in so he couldn't talk). He also had his family bring mood lights into his room that synced with his music. I kid you not, his room was playing rap in rave mode sometimes. We called him "DJ Greggie G." and he loved it.

Unfortunately, he took a turn for the worse. His condition deteriorated rapidly and ultimately he died. We were devastated as a unit. His family let us keep his mood lights and to this day we keep them plugged in at the nurses station. However. One day the mood lights turned off. We were saddened. Nobody could get them working. But then, they turned on. We were happy. And then they started flashing super irrationally. Then we heard the patient that was in Greg's old room start screaming.

We went in to check on her. She was a confused old lady who would say some pretty wild things, but this one was weird. She said that she was watching the flashing lights in the hall (she could see them from her room to be fair), then she said that she saw a silhouette of a man casted into the wall from the lights. Then, she started yelling "tell Greg to leave! It's not his room anymore! Tell Greg to go!" There is no way she knew it was Gregs room. And with her memory being the way it was, there is also no way she would remember even if she did get told. Kinda spooky. -a_burdie_from_hell

11.

Mom told me stories when I was growing up. Her first job out of nursing school was an RN in the ER of an old hospital in Virginia in the mid-1980s. There was the "man in the hat" and "patient 1". Most of the nurses had stories about them. The "man in the hat" would show up and stand outside of rooms after visiting hours. The patients often died soon after.

"Patient 1" was a woman in a very old hospital gown. She'd walk in the halls before entering random rooms. Those patients usually coded. They took the man to be an omen of death and the woman to be a heads-up to grab the crash cart. -TheLonelyScientist

12.

Honestly, the only creepy thing that happened when I worked in the morgue is that one of the staff killed himself in there and I just can’t imagine wanting to die in this cold, grey place surrounded by corpses. -Citrine_Bee

13.

Back when I worked in cardiology. We had this one single room at the ass end or the floor. We'd put palliative patients or patients that needed isolation in there. I swear three different patients in the years I worked there told me they had woken in the middle of the night and seen an old man and a little girl holding hands, both standing at the foot of the bed, doing nothing. -Doumtabarnack

14.

Once upon a time I was doing home hospice and a younger guy in his 50s was dying of occupation related lung cancer. Anyway I knew it was coming and asked his family if they wanted to invite anybody to say goodbye so patient's 90 year old father, brother, extended family and friends came over at about 1am and I left them and sat in the kitchen to give them privacy.

As I'm in there I hear this MASSIVE burst of windchimes which was kind of supernatural (as in did not stop, just a massive burst that went on and on instead of trickling here and there with the wind). A moment later his daughter came in to tell me he had passed away.

I don't usually share my supernatural beliefs about death/dying with families, but I couldn't help but comment on the windchimes later on and his wife said "yeah, he collected windchimes, that doesn't surprise me at all" and turns on the light on the back patio, showing me literally hundreds of chimes which had been silent all night until he passed. -master0jack

15.

I actually worked at this moving company, we had to clear out this old decommissioned hospital. The new hospital was being built right next to it, our job was to move stuff like tables, desks, waiting room chairs etc to the new hospital. At one point we were looking for more rooms to clear and stuff to pick up, when we came across the mortuary of the hospital.

Its not like we saw ghosts or anything, but theres just something very off-putting about seeing an examination table as a regular Joe, in a quiet, abandoned hospital. There's just an eerie vibe that crawls over you and you realize that so many dead bodies have been in that very room. -jeroenh2o