10 Creepy Nursing Ghost Stories

Nurses see things on the night shift they cannot explain. Here are ten encounters submitted by nurses who lived them.

"I'm Okay"

"I was working a night duty on the ward. One night, while writing down each patient's name, I spotted a patient I had not seen for a couple of weeks. I thought he had been transferred to our surgical hospital. He looked me in the eyes and smiled, and I gestured back that everything was fine. He looked better than I remembered. But when I went to add his notes, I could not find his name on the patient census. I looked him up and saw that he had died two days earlier. It was like he came back to say he was okay."

The Supervisor

"At the district hospital where I worked, it was common for the staff to see a lady in white walking down the hallway in the early hours of the morning. Patients saw her too. We had lost one of our nursing supervisors a couple of years before. She died unexpectedly. Our med room call light goes off when no one is in there or anywhere near it. We all believe it's Sup Dolor, checking in."

Smile

"Doing my rounds as a new RN, I saw an old lady in a hospital gown at the far end of the hallway. Thinking she was lost or couldn't sleep, I signaled to ask what was wrong. She turned to me, smiled, and walked straight through the wall into a patient's room. I froze. I found out later that she had died three days earlier in a car accident, and she was watching over her husband, who was hospitalized in the room she walked into."

Out of the Window

"I was on a night shift when the call light went off for room 130. As far as I knew, that room was empty, so I canceled the light from the desk. It wouldn't cancel. I walked down to check. Inside, I heard a budging sound at the window, like something was trying to get out. I took a breath, turned on the lights, walked over, and opened the window. A soft breeze passed by me and went out. I learned later that a patient had died that morning and the nurses on the earlier shift never opened the window. When someone passes, let them go and open the room's windows."

"Bless You"

"I worked the night shift alone at one of the oldest nursing homes while in college. I have a lot of stories, but this one changed my spunky attitude. I went to get extra linen from a room and I sneezed. From behind me, clear as day, I heard 'Bless you.'

Then, as I started to pray, a voice whispered near my ear: 'Our Father in heaven.'

After that I stopped myself from sneezing, and I didn't recite The Lord's Prayer for a long time."

The Intruder

"I worked the Noc shift as a registry nurse. It was quiet at 3 a.m. while I did floor rounds. I felt something behind me, turned, and saw a shadowy girl in a hospital gown run into a resident's room. I wasn't terrified. I was thinking intruder. I entered the room and the resident, an Alzheimer's patient, was awake. She said, 'Did you see that?' I said, 'What?' She pointed to the closed bathroom and said, 'She went in there.' I called for help to make sure it wasn't an intruder. The unit was clear. I still can't explain what I saw, or what my patient saw despite her mental status. But that's the job."

Playful Balloons

"It was my second year as an RN, working night shift on a pediatric unit. We had a patient who always wanted visitors to bring balloons. She died after a long stay. Days later, a coworker had a birthday and we had balloons at the station. Two of them floated off, bobbing up and down, drifted to the girl's old room, stopped right in front of the door, and then floated back into the nurses' station. Air currents don't do that."

Crash

"I worked an overnight shift at a hospital in Japan. The main nurses' office stays locked, and only RNs, LPNs, and administration have keys. The nurses' station, where I was sitting, was right next to it. At exactly 3 a.m. I heard a loud crash from the office. The next day I found out a filing cabinet had fallen over with papers all over the floor. The windows were closed, the door was locked, the air conditioning was unplugged. Did someone walk past me that night?"

The Visit

"I worked in a nursing home as an aide. A coworker of mine went to check on a patient who was a nun. A group of nuns came into the room but never spoke to her, except for one she made eye contact with. No one else on the floor saw the nuns come or go. The story goes that the building stood on the site of an old convent that burned down in the late 1800s."

Who's Coming?

This last one isn't quite a ghost story, but it stayed with me.

When I first started nursing, I had a patient who looked exactly like Santa Claus: the white beard, the belly, the cheerful disposition. This was December, which made it better. We told him how much he looked like Santa, and he laughed. We asked who would deliver the toys while he was in the hospital. He laughed again and said he would just have to be out by the big night. As the days passed he stayed sweet and joking, with no sign of any change in his condition. Around 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, he passed away quietly in his sleep. The staff was stunned. Then we remembered what he had told us days before, that he had to be out of here for Christmas. I hadn't believed in Santa since I was eight years old, but that night I looked up at the sky hoping to catch a glimpse of my Mr. Claus. – Deb