The things that go on in hospitals can be extremely creepy - or downright terrifying. You might not expect it, but doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers see some scary things and have some horrifying stories. These 19 stories from doctors, medical staff, and psychiatric workers about patients (dead or alive) that we found over at AskReddit will keep you up at night. Read these scary hospital stories at your own risk, and vote the creepiest ones to the top.
19 Creepy Stories From People Who Work In Hospitals,
Paramedics Respond to Despondent Elderly Woman Who Just Witnessed Gruesome Suicide
"There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn't really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast. We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn't sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they're all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you're digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?"
Paramedics Respond to Despondent Elderly Woman Who Just Witnessed Gruesome Suicide
"We got a call to go out to a scene for an elderly woman with chest pains. I arrive at the house, front door is open. We knock, hear the old woman calling out from the back 'I'm in the back room' in a very monotone and calm voice. My partner and I go to the back of the house looking for this woman, and that's when we smelled it. Nothing prepares you for the smell of rotting corpse. I've smelled it a dozen times, and it never gets any less disturbing. We radio for police and ALS backup as we move through the house. We opened the door to the master bedroom, and there is our patient. She is approximately 80, and she is staring at the master bathroom with these cold, dead eyes. She never once looked at us as we approached her and began talking to her. I got to the bedside and got in front of her gaze, and she just looked right through me. I turned around to see what she could possibly be looking at, and there was the source of my smell. A man, about the same age as my patient, is on the floor with very little left of his head still attached to his body. A shotgun lay on the floor next to him, and most of his head was strewn about the walls and bathroom counter. We loaded the woman up in the ambulance, and our police backup pulled up. I don't think that woman blinked once the entire time she was in our care. Totally fu*ked me up."
Med Student Delivers Baby From Dead Woman
"When I was on an ER rotation during med school we got a call about a 23-year-old woman who was shot in the head, and who was already completely gone, but was reportedly five months pregnant so they were doing CPR until they got her to the hospital to see if the baby was viable. They got her to the ER and did an ultrasound and turned about baby was full-term and they did a C-section in like under a minute and got the baby out.
I don't think it's so incredibly uncommon but it was pretty surreal to see a baby delivered from a dead person with their brain exposed and she was pretty close to the same age I was at the time."
Dead Man's Body Slips Out of His Skin
"Motorcycle driver, accident, third degree burns, arrived DOA. Had to transfer him from ambulance gurney to ER bed. As we were moving him with a transfer sheet, the liquefied/cooked subcutaneous fat caused the charred skin on his back to separate and his body slipped onto the floor (despite several of us trying to 'catch' him)."
Psych Staffer Napping on Break Has Dreadful Premonition in Dream That Comes True When He Wakes
"I work with geriatric patients and there was this incident about three years ago. Before I explain, let me say that I DON'T believe in ghosts.
Anyway, this one time I was working the night shift and I was super sleepy so I decided to skip lunch because I wasn't hungry and go to my car and sleep for 30 minutes. I got inside my car, covered myself with my sweater, set the timer on my phone and immediately knocked out.
I'm dreaming, but in my dream I'm still awake just sitting there. Someone taps on my car window and I see that its one of my patients (we'll call her Dee). Surprised, I asked Dee what the hell she is doing outside, and she tells me she is looking for her daughter. I tell her to go back inside and that we will call her daughter in the morning. My patient becomes angry and starts banging on my car window. I kinda freak out and try to reach for the door handle to get out and calm her down, but I quickly realize I can't move. Let me add that I frequently experience sleep paralysis, so even though I am asleep, I realize what is happening.
I fight it and try squirming my body in an attempt to wake myself up. I finally manage to wake up and my heart is racing and my forehead is a bit sweaty. I sit there for about a minute, realize it was all a dream and roll the window down to cool myself off.
My break is over and I clock back in and see that my supervisor and two other nurses are huddled in front of a room. I am still by the station clocking in when they see me and call me over. I walk over thinking maybe something was wrong with the ventilator, or the patient fell, but my supervisor tells me Dee died while I was on my lunch break. Since most of our patients are Do Not Resuscitate, I was not paged. It took a couple of seconds for the message to register and I freaked out internally. I got goosebumps but didn't mention anything to my supervisor about the dream.
I don't believe in ghosts or anything like that and I most likely had that dream because she was the last patient I interacted with before my break, so she was still on my mind and I was mentally going over my patients charts in my head."
Psych Patient Literally Fights Invisible Demons
"A girl spent my entire eight-hour shift fist-fighting the same ghost. She would throw a few punches, and obviously landed knockout blows, so she'd bend over and twist her hand around like she was wrapping some long hair around her wrist. She'd drag her opponent down the hallway, give a few good kicks, then set up for a curb stomp. Starts off kinda funny, then gets a little disturbing when you think about the graphic things going on in her mind, then just sad after you watch this replay for hours on end."
Man Non-Fatally Skins His Own Throat, Makes Hospital Staff Vomit
"The ER received a call from the PD stating that we were to keep an eye out for a man with self-inflicted stab wounds. Story goes, the wife left for the grocery store, but forgot something and ran home. She found her her husband molesting her daughter (his step daughter), a fight ensued. The husband fled the house with a large kitchen knife.
A police officer found him a few blocks from the home, collapsed in a yard. When they brought him in, he had a stab wounds on both inner thighs, two stab wounds to the abdomen and he slit his throat from end to end. The creepy part was that he managed to miss all arteries, including the carotid. The skin was hanging on the neck and his trachea was clear as day. I mean that you could just reach in and grab it! No blood, just a clean trachea. He was able to talk, and his blood pressure was decent. The officer who found him left the room sick, as well as two nurses. The clean, visual trachea that moved with every word, was unreal."
Doctor Has Frightening Experience Verifying Woman Is Dead
"Verifying death is always sad but my friend tells the funniest story about how creepy his first verification of death was. This is not meant to disrespect anyone; black humour is a huge part of doctors' coping strategies.
He was on a night shift a few weeks into his first job as a qualified doctor and got a call from a ward to say a lady had passed away - an expected death hence he hadn't been called about her before - and could he come verify and do the paperwork. It's a busy shift with lots of sick people to see first so he takes several hours to get there.
He goes up and they tell him she's in Room 8. The door to Room 8 is slightly ajar and the room is dark. Now, she was in a side room but most patients there were in shared bays of six beds so you get into the habit of not turning lights on. In his nervous haste to make sure it didn't look like he was nervous, he slipped into the room armed only with his little pen torch. The window was slightly open and (he swears) the blind rattled against the sill as he crept towards the bed, the tiny circle of light from his torch picking out the rumpled white hospital blanket, only a very slim rise showing where she lay as she was a tiny old lady, just skin and bone. Finally, the light plays over her face and he has to bite back a little scream, nearly dropping the torch.
For whatever reason, her pose in death is one of a horrified and horrifying snarl, lips drawn back to bare (likely false) teeth, the whites of her eyes showing in a fixed blind stare, and both hands up close to her face curled into claws, slightly over-long nails shining grimly in the meager torchlight.
Now, to verify a death, the doctor has to listen for heart and breath sounds for two minutes while feeling for a pulse, check for pupil reactions and check for no response to pain. He flicked the torch dutifully across her glaring eyes, forcing himself to shuffle close enough to touch - first to check for a response to pain and then to settle shaking fingers on her throat - so close to those furiously grinning teeth - to feel for a pulse. To get his stethoscope under the collar of her gown under the blankets, he has to lean in even closer, almost nose to nose with her now, unable to draw his gaze away from hers. And he has to stand like that for two minutes. The seconds crawling away as he stares into that screaming face.
He says there's no way he would have heard heart or breath sounds even if she had been alive. All he could hear was his own racing heart in his ears and, on a loop in his head, "Please don't let her move, please don't move, oh dear god don't move..."
Psych Tech Meets 7-Year-Old Psychopath
"As a tech in psych years ago, there was a seven-year-old kid sent to the floor because the mom didnt know what to do with him. Sadly common thing to happen, even if the kids don't have psych issues. Anyway, the mom was shaking and crying, and they had to take the kid into another room. She was genuinely afraid of her own son. She had suspected something was wrong when she kept finding mutilated animals in the back yard, but never heard or saw coyotes or anything around. The neighbors' smaller pets started disappearing. The boy had an obsession with knives, hiding them around the house. Denying anything when the mom confronted him. Then when the two started getting into arguments, he would get really violent and hit her, push her down and kick her, threaten to kill her. On multiple occasions she woke up in the middle of the night with him standing beside her bed, staring her in the face. She put extra locks on her bedroom door to feel safe while she slept. The last straw was when she lifted up his mattress and found 50+ knives of all shapes and sizes under there. So she brought him to us.
I remember talking to him, treating him like he was just any other kid that came through. He seemed remarkably normal, until you spoke directly to him. He had this way of looking right through you, or maybe like he didn't see you at all while you were speaking. He would respond like a robot, like he was just saying words because that's what we wanted to hear. And he would always put on this creepy, dead-looking smile. Like all mouth and no eye involvement in the smile. Especially when he would get away with something, like taking another kid's markers and they couldn't figure it out. Still gives me chills laying here thinking about him. I had to get up and close my bedroom door.
I believe I met a seven-year-old psychopath."
Dead Lady Reaches Up, Grabs ER Nurse's Wrists
"I was doing CPR on a lady whose heart had stopped. They initially rolled her into the room unconscious and not breathing. This lady is pretty much dead. However, in the middle of doing chest compressions, her hands reach up and grasp my wrists and then fall back to hanging off the table. We never got her back."