No amount of medical school prepares a person for the bizarre, unnerving experience of working at a hospital. Even if a person gets a doctorate, there are still so many unexplained events that haunt them for decades after. These spine-chilling stories have no rational explanation for why they happened. But each story left a deep, unnerving impact on it's unfortunate victim. This eerie content has been edited for clarity.
He Was Never A Doctor
“When I used to be in x-ray school, we had a separate building off campus that we would go for all our lab courses. This building used to be a cancer center, but the old building turned into a small clinic, and they only used the first two floors of the eight that were there. We were allowed to use the old operating room for whatever educational purposes we needed (labs, practical tests, etc.). If you have been in an operating room, you’d know they’re usually pretty compact with equipment, but since this one had been abandoned for years, it was just as creepy as it was empty. That set the mood.
Come to find out a couple of months before graduation, some overnight custodian discovered a homeless man that had been living on the sixth floor for several months. He kept his face shaved, and whenever he needed something from wherever in the building, he’d wear scrubs that he found in the building and hide in plain sight as a doctor. No idea how he got away with it for so long. The custodian caught him popping popcorn in the cafeteria in the middle of the night.
Of course curiosity got the best of us students and we took a trip up there once we heard the news. It was just creepy. It was unsettling because you could tell by the setup that someone had been living there. Chairs in certain rotations and tables in weird spots. Knowing this guy had only been a handful of floors above us the entire time just gives you that weird feeling of being watched all the time, even after he was gone. I’ve got to give it to the guy though, it wasn’t a bad gig for him.
I’m perfectly ok with not ever having to go back there.”
Banging On Death’s Door
“We had an old lady come in by ambulance, near death. She was a DNR, so we weren’t going to do much for her. She didn’t have any family that we could find. The hospital was full, so we had to keep her in the ER for the night. Again, she was near death. When you’ve seen enough people die, there’s no mistaking it, and she was almost there. Barely responsive, pale, cool, and her breaths were really irregular. Heart rate was up and down too. We just turned the lights down and kept an eye on her monitor, basically waiting for her to die.
About an hour later, she’s standing at the door of her room. She’d gotten up and put on all her clothes. We were all completely astonished. One of the nurses went to check on her, and she said she was hungry. Not knowing really what to make of things, we got her a chair, a bedside table, and went to the cafeteria and got her a tray of food.
This lady sat there, ate all her food, talked with the staff a little. After about an hour, she told her nurse that she was tired and wanted to lie back down. We helped her back into bed, and within 30 minutes she was dead. Not exactly paranormal, but in 22 years in busy inner city ERs, it’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen. I think it was remarkable in that she was SO close to arresting before she rallied. Either way, it’s the one thing that’s always stuck with me.”
“Scaring The Life Back Into Him”
“One time, a patient had been in CCU (where I worked at the time) for a long period of time (six months). We had finally been transferred to med surgical floor, and he coded. We worked on him for 45 min to an hour, but he had no pulse or heart rhythm the entire time. The docs had decided to call it, and his family walked in the room. One family member leans over him, rubs his chest lightly, and says his name. Immediately, the man regains a pulse and regains consciousness.
Another time, a patient comes in coding and we are working on him, but we are getting nothing. We bring in his wife in to say goodbye, and she starts yelling at him at the top of her lungs. Somehow, he comes back, so we arrange transfer to a tertiary hospital. During this process, he codes again, so she comes back and yells at him again. Miraculously, he comes back again.
Cut to him us loading him into the helicopter, where he codes again. They bring him back into our ER after working on him for a bit on the helipad, and his wife yells at him again, and he immediately comes back. Eventually, they decide to have his wife ride in helicopter with him to make sure she can scare him back to life if he were to code again. The guy ended up living and received at heart transplant. He is still alive to this day, all thanks to his wife scaring the life back into him.”
Everything Was A Gruesome Lie
“I had cared for an elderly woman with no family, who came to us when her husband died. She didn’t often speak, but when she did, it was usually just words that made no sense together. I felt so bad for her because ever since she had arrived, so many of the residents in her area that she seemed to enjoy spending time with had passed in a short time span. She put up a picture of each of them next to her pictures of her husband and several others, who were probably family, to remember them. I had always felt sorry for her and showed her extra attention, so we became close. It just seemed so unfair that she had such luck and kept losing people that she cared about.
One day she looked at me and said plain as day, ‘Sweetie, I think I’m done now,’ and handed me a picture. It was a picture of me and I smiled, because it touched my heart that I was that important to her. She passed nearly a week later and I cried for days, it hit me really hard. She knew it was the end for her and she said goodbye as best she could.
A little less than 2 years later I was talking with a colleague and she came up in conversation. My colleague referred to her as ‘that crazy witch’, which seemed very out of character for her, and it shocked and offended me deeply. I expressed this to her, not so nicely, and she looked at me with this shocked look and said, ‘Oh dear, do you not know?’ and then explained something to me that I hadn’t known.
As it turned out, it came out sometime after she had passed that she had killed her husband by poisoning him, and that there was an investigation because it appeared that she had a ritual of befriending someone, obtaining a picture of them, and hiding the picture until she could kill them (usually by poisoning). Then displaying the picture as a sort of trophy. It was suspected that this may have been the reason for the spike in mortality rate during her stay and the considerable number of photos in her ‘collection’. The last I heard, the old ‘family’ photos weren’t any relation to her and the police were trying to ID the individuals and compare them to several cold cases.”