Every nurse has a ghost story

[poostinkywink]

That’s according to my guilty pleasure - Haunted Hospitals! Love watching this on a Saturday evening with my cat and way too much chocolate. So, come on nurses, is their opening statement true?

And if so, what happened…👀

A friend works in a very old part of a hospital and they have complaints of one room feeling icy cold even though the heating is on.
They don’t mention it to the patients for fear of freaking them out but at least a few times a year someone will comment on it.
The really odd thing is that several of them have described it in the same way “cold as a grave”

Complete rubbish, sorry

I've heard of this tradition-
When Dad died at home, we opened the window for his Spirit, and ditto when a much loved dog was PTS at home by the vet, we had the window open for her Spirit to be free.

When I saw Dad's body much later at the Undertakers, it most definitely wasn't ''him''- whereas when he had just died, he looked like he was sleeping.

Who knows what happens when we die.

I'd love to believe in an Afterlife, where we are reunited with our loved ones and pets- but if that is the case, what about all the countless animals who also die- unloved and uncared for- is there an afterlife for them too? There ought to be!

That sounds like sleep paralysis - it's quite possible to hallucinate with this- it often happens if someone is very tired, or goes to sleep in an unusual place - like falling asleep on a sofa- it's very disconcerting.
One literally cannot move at all. Horrible!

Yep, still do.

I was a sleep in care worker at a home for leaning disabilities. There was a woman who no one liked as she cursed and swore and could be aggressive.

I liked her, used to make her a hot choc and sit and have a chat, it was lone working so enjoyed a natter with her.

The day after she died I was on night shift and all the portraits of residents flew off the wall at a right angle and landed at my feet. The biggest one was her.

Posted on here at the time but no one believed me 🙄

Yes, @oakleaffy it is a 'sleep paralysis' which affects shift workers so commonly that it is a.k.a. "Night Nurse's Paralysis'.

My mother had recently qualified as a nurse, so was quite young, and the experience terrified her .

As a young person, I used to be thrilled with her ( re) telling of the scary story!

Yes, definitely open a window to let the soul out.

I'm sure I've got some tales, there was always urban myths going around the hospitals.

Firstly, the ward where whenever the call bell rang in the top bathroom when empty, someone would then die.

Another story was on a night shift a nurse prac was on their way to a cardiac arrest. As they were arriving to the ward, a lady was leaving. On arrival, the person in the bed was the person they'd just seen on the way in.

Another story was patients calling nurses in the night to say they could hear babies crying. The ward used to be a maternity unit before it was moved to another site.

I bet every hospital has the same stories, to be honest. Everyone loved telling them on a night shift.

The scariest thing that ever happened to me was as a newly qualified nurse. I was working a night shift, and my friend was working on the ward next door. We took our break at the same time and met outside the ward for a chat. As we were chatting the all the lights went off. We both hot footed it back to our wards. They were sensor lights we'd obviously stayed still for too long, but we were in our early 20s and scared in the middle of the night 🙄

The only place I wouldn't stay alone was in the office when we were based in an old sanatorium hospital.

DH and I are NHS , (not in Nursing ) he has worked in some old buildings where twice he swears he saw my double . He called out once " 70isa wjhat are you doing here "
I am not a ghost , but it creeped him out a bit

But I must have An Evil Twin

I've namechanged for this as I have recounted this story to people IRL.

I'm a former nurse and hospital manager. I was called in one night and decided to walk the wards while I was on site and speak to some of the night staff. One of the wards was an extension to an old theatre block. It was a portacabin type structure and housed short stay surgical patients as well as the pre-assessment clinic. Access was easy during the day but at night there were 4 different places where you had to swipe your access card to get to the front door of the ward.

On this night I entered the ward and nodded to acknowledge an older lady with grey hair and wearing a purple high neck dressing gown who was sitting in the pre assessment area. I went round the corner and had a short conversation with the three nurses on duty. Aside stood up to leave I mentioned the lady round the corner and said perhaps she was anxious and finding it hard to sleep. The staff looked at me and the nurse in charge said that they had only just been commenting that it was unusual that both sides of the ward were male beds on that night (usually one side was male and the other side female).

Thinking we had a lost / confused / wandering patient form another ward we all shot round the corner to indicate the space empty. I paged security who did a full site check and pulled the cctv footage from the entrance to the ward. No trace was found of the mystery lady, no patient was reported missing and she could not be seen on the cctv entering or leaving the ward. The footage did show me raising my hand to greet her as I closed the ward door.

I have no idea who or what she was.

Although no personal experience these I do know of two wards in two different hospitals in the midlands which have been exorcised due to patients reporting disturbingly similar things.

Left the body or the room?

When I was a student nurse on an ITU placement, no one liked a particular bed. Apparently, pumps would malfunction, alarms would go off, things would switch off. No one liked having a patient in that bay.

I have worked years as a vicar and a nurse. No ghost stories. Know a lot of nurses not telling tales.

none of this is made up, I swear it.

when I had my eldest I was rushed in, in an emergency situation, placed in a private en suite side room, it was quite hairy for a while as I had a hypertensive crisis and I was in and out of consciousness.

when I was woozy the day after they’d worked on me, I kept saying to my partner - there is blood and hand prints on the walls, they could have at least cleaned it before they put me in here. He’s just saying yeah yeah whatever as I’m still really not well and he’s shattered.

next day it was gone and I said to thanks the nurse for cleaning up the blood on the walls. She said look, being honest we don’t use this room very often as none of the nurses like it, we all get a weird feeling in here and it’s only in use in emergency’s as it’s not got a great history. There were no hand prints on the walls.

i do hallucinate with morphine and with my epilepsy so ok I do see weird stuff a lot. But I know for absolute certainty, there were bloody hand prints on those walls.

Night shift in a hospital. An apparition, female, in a nightdress spooked me on a few occasions by appearing and whispering "death!" in my ear when I wasn't expecting it.

She was an actual patient, not a ghost, though. But it was still disconcerting!

I have a spooky story, which isn't really spooky but comforting, I feel. I called to a patients house to carry out a brevement visit, following their death. The people in this house had experienced a lot of pain and suffering (more than your average person). I sat down and just felt peace. The only way I could describe it was like an angel was present. I said to the people there's such a lovely feeling in this room. " yes," they said, "that's what everyone says." They could feel it too. I really hope someone was looking out for them.

I also had a similar feeling following the death of another patient. There was such a calmness in the room, it was lovely.

Rushing to get home after finishing late, I walked past an elderly woman in a raincoat in the corridor outside my ward. As I passed it occurred to me she was lost: there were two wards on that end of the corridor- mine and a disused one on the opposite side 15 metres further towards the entrance, which was the door she was at. I turned back around and she wasn’t there. I checked the door to the disused ward and it was locked as it should be. My ward was too far for her to have walked to in that time (I’d literally just passed her).

In a different hospital I was in the office of an all-male ward, which was between airlock doors just before the fire escape. I saw a tall woman in a dressing gown walk past the door window towards the fire escape, so went after her. No one was there, both airlock doors were locked, no one was on the fire escape and the bottom door was alarmed.

In a nursing home built in the 19thC I heard heavy breathing/ wheezing on the stairs and saw a shadowy figure. Several staff reported feeling pushed on those stairs.

I love these kinds of thread but WHY do I read them at night alone 😂

Nurses open windows after death because they were taught to do it by superstitious older senior nurses, and because mainstream British culture is really bad at dealing with death — not because they have some magic connection to the ‘spirit world’. And some of them have spooky stories because they are exhausted but awake at all hours of the night, dealing with the very ill and dying, often in old buildings with stories told them by other staff.

@ImNotTheMatix my dad died at home, after being terminally ill with cancer. When he died my mum opened all of the windows to let his spirit go. She wasn't a nurse! But I thought it was a really nice thing to do:)

I can honestly say if someone died in a bay and the bed wasn’t on the side by the windows no windows got opened as it would have been too cold and disturbed the patients with the window beds .

This.

I've worked in the NHS for ten years, including night shifts, and not one spooky sausage.

I used to work nights in a really old Psychiatric Hospital about 20 years ago.

One night a nurse call buzzer was activated in a bedroom.
We all marched down to the bedroom in silence.
We opened the bedroom door in silence.
The entire room was filled with a dense white “fog”.
The “fog” was odourless.
The patient appeared in a deep sleep.
None of us spoke, we all left the room in silence.
We walked back to the office in silence.

When back in the nursing office I said to an agency nurse did you see that
fog. He replied yes I did, he then said did you see that ghost walk down the corridor earlier 👻

I later found out the hospital had been built on an old morgue.

You've ignored all those who have told you categorically this does not happen, yet jumped on the echo post.
No point contributing to this thread then, if you are a nurse or a person sensible enough to know not all nurses have a ghost story because once your are dead, you are dead.

This.
Sensible.
True
Tiredness and superstition cause nurse-observed ghosts. Our night sister had to close the shutters over a picture of one of thee hospital's founders each night or there would be a 'surfeit of deaths' during the night. Such bollocks, yet continued for years