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Psych ward stories have a spooky glamour to them, unmatched by any other spine-tingling tale. Haunted mental hospitals, spirits in captivity, sadistic nurses and orderlies - it's enough to make the hardiest of hearts consider a nightlight. Many consider abandoned mental hospitals to be creepy, but based on the stories from actual psych ward workers below, the ones still populated with patients are far worse.
15 Creepy Stories from Psych Ward Workers,
Pilot with Amnesia Could Be a Human Experiment
I work in an ER, and due to my country and state's poor mental health system, we see acute psychotic episodes daily. Over time, you get desensitized to it, but there is still one that turns my stomach.
A guy was found in a burning abandoned building. He wasn't hurt, but was acting so strange the paramedics brought him in. He was homeless, had no ID, did not know his name, and had zero drugs in his system. Looking into his eyes, you could tell he wasn't seeing the same thing I was.
So I'm trying to get his name or anything out of him, and he keeps telling me he was a pilot for the Air Force and flew experimental airplanes, because he could withstand the G-force and his blood was naturally thin. The blood tests that measure this actually were fairly higher than normal, but not elevated to the point he was on medication for it. So he was right on that account.
I was at the desk telling a coworker about the stuff this guy was saying, when a resident overheard me. He was former Air Force as well, and looked like he had seen a ghost. As soon as I mentioned the name of the base, this doctor freaked out. He said that that city/base has no roads in or out and a lot of top secret testing goes down there. He said that you don't know about it unless you've been there. He told me not to talk about it or make a big deal.
This gave me an even weirder vibe...
Patient Gouges out Own Eyes
My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I've ever heard.
This was during the night shift, and generally all the patients' bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member's legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.
When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.
The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.
My mom screamed for help, and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.
Patient Is (Too) Hot for Teacher
I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients' medications, and being a 5'2" girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.
His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me "Miss Jones" or "ma'am."
One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.
This escalated to the point of him calling her "Mom" and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn't be his mom because that would hurt his real mother's feelings, and that she already had that job covered.
So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.
So, don't judge a book by its cover, I guess.
Jane May Be Possessed
We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We'll call her Jane. On Jane's first night at our facility, staff performing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out, Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.
Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room, she would walk to every wall and touch them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours, she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. One night, Jane's pace was frantic. Our night staff observed the entire interaction, and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When one staff member went to check on Jane, she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong, and Jane replied, "What makes you think you are speaking to Jane?"
That's some pretty creepy stuff, but not as bad as this.
Old Lady Speaks in Tongues
When I first started working in the hospital, I was sitting with this sweet little old woman. I had sat with her, talking about her family and such for six hours. Towards the end of my shift (9 pm) they decided she didn't need to have a heart monitor, so they transferred her to a different unit.
Once we got to the new room, she started acting differently - just generally angry, I would say. Then all of a sudden, she tried to jump out of the bed (a big no-no at hospitals), so I immediately got up to stop her. She started screaming bloody murder about how her house was on fire, and her family was inside and she needed to get them out. I tried to calm her down, but to no avail.
She started yelling at me about how I'm going to rot in the flames of Hell because God told her so, and how I was responsible for her family's death. Staring deep into my eyes, she told me all about how I will burn in eternal flames, and that I am filled with evil. I thought, "Okay, at least she isn't worried about her family or trying to get out of bed."
But then she started screaming at the top of her lungs in what I can only describe as Latin or maybe even gibberish. She then ripped out her dentures, threw them at me, and pulled all of the skin on her face back into this long, stretched-out, creepy smile. She let out a blood-curdling scream while her eyes rolled back into her head like some sort of possession scene in a movie. Just as she let up my relief came into the room. I wished her luck and booked it out of there.
The second I got off the unit, I called my mom and cried for a good 15 minutes. I still think of her stretched-out face sometimes.
Patients Predict Their Own Deaths
Well, my mother was a nurse that specialized in geriatrics, and she worked for several hospice hospitals for many years. She often described situations at her work with several of the patients. She would say that each person tends to have a very similar "checklist" that they follow right before death. This checklist often ended in a very similar way.
They would get caught talking to someone that wasn't there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, "Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00." Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.
Sometimes It's Scariest When They Make Sense
I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody - often the CIA - is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.
"It's precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects," he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?
"You can see I'm not irrational," the man said. "I'm just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am."
Sleeptalker Communes with the Dead
My clients have dementia, and there's one who creeps me out a lot. During the day, she's the sweetest old lady, but at night she sleep-talks.
And it's not normal sleep-talking. Her eyes are open, and sometimes she's sitting up. Sometimes it's impossible to tell when she has gone from sleeping to being awake, until she turns to you and asks if you've seen the little girl that was just here, the one she was talking to. She talks about people being there all the time, including a little boy that has died, and she wonders what we should do with the body. She mentions a little girl that sleeps with her, a man that orders her around, and her dead husband who is always looking for her.
I heard her talking once, and she was being very loud, but as I reached the open doorway, she said "Shhh. They're all sleeping. Better not talk about it now." And she promptly stopped talking and just lay there very still.
Patient Issues Disturbing Warning about Abduction
I was working an overnight shift on an Alzheimer's ward at a nursing home. It was about 2:30 am, and I was making my rounds, peeking into the rooms to make sure the patients were where they should be.
I went into one room, and this 83-year-old woman was sitting straight up in her bed, staring at the wall. I slowly walked into the room and calmly asked her if she wanted to lie back down. She turned her head slowly, looked me right in the eye, and said "They're coming for you, dear." Then she started laughing - I'm talking full-on hysterical, insane cackling. I almost pissed myself right there. She finally calmed down, and I got her to lie back down. When she was just about to go back to sleep, she looked at me again and said "I'm going to miss you when they take you," and went right back to sleep.
I was terrified the rest of the night.
Young Girl Displays Truly Disturbing Behavior
This story is sad, so brace yourself.
I was working in a mental health ward around Christmastime a year ago. Long story short, it was shower time for one of the patients. She was a young girl - maybe 13 or 14-years old - with a really intense history of physical abuse. My coworkers got her to the shower and undressed her. She coughed up a great deal of saliva and spat it on the ground, really slowly. Before we can do or say anything, she knelt on all fours, licked it all up, laughed, and said "I'm ready, Daddy."
I was shaken up for weeks after and I still try not to think about it.
There is a happy ending to this story, though. Her scum father is in jail now, and the girl has been adopted.