13 People Who Work In Job Fields Involving Death Share Their Creepiest Ghost Stories And I’m Ready To Start EVP Sessions
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Note: This article contains mention of death and stillbirth.
A lot of us see death as something that we would much rather completely avoid than, let's say, work around every day. I just feel like knowing the inner workings of what's going on with the Grim Reaper is absolutely none of my concern.
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But there are also people who are completely fascinated by it or have no real choice but to witness it based on the field they work in. So, when u/8bitEclipse asked the r/AskReddit community, "Redditors who have worked around death/burial, what’s your best ghost story?" People shared things that are definitely going to keep me up at night:
1."I was once working at a mortuary and had to go pick up a man from the medical examiner’s office. When you do that (at least where I’m from), you get a receipt when they release the body to you. The receipt has all of the personal belongings that were with the deceased. When I brought the man back to the office, I opened up the body bag to make sure all the belongings were there and double-checked the receipt."
"When I opened up the bag, I was stunned to find this dude looked almost exactly like me. He was my age, had similar tattoos in similar spots, had the same long hair I do, and even had the same style of jewelry I was wearing. It took me so off guard that I stood there in an existential crisis until the embalmer came in and was like, 'Hey 'SpartanM00', how’s it goin'—ahhh holy shit that guy looks like you!' It’s the only case I’ve had nightmares about."
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2."I used to be a security guard at a hospital. One night, while doing my rounds, I went into the surgery wing and was walking down a hallway when I saw a doctor looking at the whiteboard where all the scheduled surgeries are written down. I said "Hello doctor" and kept going. The doctor didn’t say anything back; he just kept studying the whiteboard.
"When I got back to the security office, I was telling one of the guys that’s been there for years about how I greeted this doctor, and he didn’t say anything back. I asked if that was the asshole they told me to 'watch out for.' I was asked where I saw him, and I said the surgery ward, and he gave me a smirk. He then explained that the surgery ward closes at 9 p.m. and that all patients are moved into the monitoring wards; there should be no one there. He then asked me if this doctor was studying the schedule board. I said 'yes', and he then told me that I had just met Dr. Luisitti. Apparently, many years ago, one of the surgeons went up to the helipad and jumped off the building. It seems like he never stopped working, though."
3."I worked as a nursing home assistant for a bit prior to grad school. I worked for a private nursing home, where I would rotate between three different houses. Each house held six residents and two staff members. When I first started, all the residents were women. One time my coworker and I were in the kitchen prepping lunch for the ladies when we heard a loud voice screaming, 'HELP ME! HELP ME!' We exchanged a quick glance and immediately scrambled away to check on our respective residents."
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"No one was present on my half of the house, so I went back to the kitchen. My wide-eyed coworker was there waiting for me with a perplexed expression on her face. I asked her if she had heard the voice too, and she responded that yes, she had, but that there was no one present on her side of the house. We simultaneously looked outside and saw every single one of the residents enjoying the rose garden. In that moment, we both realized the voice we heard was distinctly male. I came to find out that prior to my employment, there was a male resident who was a WW2 veteran with PTSD who had passed away there. He would frequently hallucinate and scream for help prior to his death."
4."During my apprenticeship, I worked at a funeral home said to be "haunted" by an old funeral director assistant who had a heart attack in the building and died. All he ever did was mess with the chapel lights, and if you called him out, something like 'John, the family is coming; please don't,' they would return to normal. I'm not really sure if I believe it was really haunted, but saying something always fixed the issue, so I kept doing it my entire time there."
5."I used to work in an oncology ward as a nurse. Our side rooms were kept for end-of-life patients on palliative care, and one patient that we had been nursing for a good few weeks died early one morning. The patient had moved to the hospital morgue, so all that remained was to clear the room of personal belongings and tidy up. I sent a student nurse that I was mentoring at the time to do this while I got on with the drug round. The student had known the patient fairly well and was comfortable with this job."
"About 10 minutes later, a colleague came to me and told me that my student had come flying out of the side room white as a sheet and was sobbing in the staff room. I went to find out what the problem was, and the student told me she had been clearing out the sink area in the bathroom and had glanced up and seen the deceased patient reflected in the mirror looking at her over her shoulder. My student was a sensible girl, not given to hysterics, but for the remainder of her placement on that ward, she would not go near that side room."
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6."I'm an ICU RN. We had a septic patient in the unit, and she was 29 weeks pregnant. She went into labor on my shift, and we delivered her baby, stillborn. I did postmortem care on the baby, retrieved the proper transport container, and walked the baby down to the morgue. It was the middle of the night, and I was in an elevator alone. I hear a baby start wailing. I absolutely lose my shit and rip open the cover, and just as I go to zip down the bag, I hear a calming male voice say, 'Hush little one, I’ve got you; no need to cry.'"
"The crying stopped immediately. Shaking, I opened the bag and saw exactly what I expected to see: a deceased 29-week-old baby. I am a big, bearded 40-year-old ICU nurse, and that was the scariest shit I’ve ever experienced. No one believes me to this day. I don’t even want to speculate on what the crying or the voice were. God. Even typing that out, I felt my chest tightening."
7."My mom told me stories when I was growing up. Her first job out of nursing school was as an RN in the ER of an old hospital in Virginia in the mid-1980s, and there was the 'man in the hat' and 'patient 1.' Most of the nurses had stories about them."
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"The 'man in the hat' would show up and stand outside of rooms after visiting hours, and the patients often died soon after. 'Patient 1' was a woman in a very old hospital gown; she'd walk through the halls before entering random rooms, and those patients usually coded. They took the man to be an omen of death and the woman to be a heads-up to grab the crash cart."
8."I used to work in a nursing home. The residents in certain rooms would complain about a man in their room at night, but hallucinations are common in the elderly, so it wasn't really noticed. One night I was mopping the dining room, which had huge windows overlooking the garden. It was around 1 a.m., so it was pitch black outside and there was low lighting inside."
"I had this horrible feeling of being watched, so I looked up, and reflected in the window was a man behind me. He had a brown suit on, a bowler hat, and the cruelest look on his face. He grinned, and his mouth was too big. This happened in seconds, and when I turned around, there was obviously no one there, but I'll never forget that look of evil on his face. I paid more attention to the residents after that, and they'd all seen the same man; he just enjoyed terrorizing people."
9."I was an RN and working in a very well-off town in Mississippi. The hospital had two ICUs, with the second one being an overflow unit on the third floor. There were seven rooms in that unit, and room two was haunted. Numerous times, different nurses watched something walk into the room, but the room would be empty without a patient in it. One time, a nurse had an actual patient in room two. It was about 4 a.m., and the nurse was going to do a dressing change."
"She took the stuff into the room, and the patient asked what she was going to do. She said, 'Change your dressings.' The patient said, 'Oh no, that other nurse was just in here about 30 minutes ago and did it.' The nurse looked, and yes, the dressing was fresh. She went out to the desk and told the other nurse thanks for doing that. The nurse was baffled and said, 'I didn't change the dressing.' They both freaked out a bit. Rumor has it that an RN who had worked for the hospital for a long time died in that room. The hospital is now a dorm for a big college, so fun times may be had by a bunch of college students."
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10."I used to be a nurse assistant on a cancer floor that also served as the hospice floor. The number of times a patient would pass and be removed from a room only to have that room's call light continue to go off without anyone inside was just nuts."
"And before you say maybe the light was just damaged or moved strangely in the process of removing the body, that's the only time it would happen. Broken call lights, in any other circumstance, just wouldn't come on at all."
11."I work in a cardiac ICU, and we have quite a lot of deaths around here. That being said, we had one patient that comes to mind... I'll call him Greg G. Greg was on the unit for months. He fought very hard to stay alive every day, and to his credit, he had been getting better for a good amount of time. Greg was fairly old. Late 70s or early 80s. The thing is, he initially looked very young and acted very hip. He became a meme around the unit, and everyone loved him because he was an old white dude who loved rap (2pac and Biggie). He also had his family bring mood lights into his room that synced with his music. I kid you not, his room was playing rap in rave mode sometimes. We called him DJ Greggie G and he loved it."
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"Unfortunately, he took a turn for the worse. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and ultimately he died. We were devastated as a unit. His family let us keep his mood lights on, and to this day we keep them plugged in at the nurses station. However. One day, the mood lights turned off. We were saddened. Nobody could get them working. But then they turned on. We were so happy, and then they started flashing super irrationally. Then we heard the patient who was in Greg's old room start screaming, and we went in to check on her. She was a confused old lady who would say some pretty wild things, but this one was weird. She said that she was watching the flashing lights in the hall (she could see them from her room, to be fair), and then she said that she saw a silhouette of a man cast into the wall by the lights. Then she started yelling, 'Tell Greg to leave! It's not his room anymore! Tell Greg to go!' There is no way she knew it was Greg's room. And with her memory being the way it was, there is also no way she would have remembered even if she had been told. Kinda spooky..."
12."I was a cop in the '80s. It was three in the morning, and I was walking the streets and checking business doors to make sure they were locked. A few days before, our only mortuary caught fire and burned. It was basically burned to the ground, but it was still standing, and the front door was intact. As I was walking past it, I instinctively checked the door and found it unlocked, so I went in, and the ENTIRE building was charred black. I could see nothing but black, charred wood everywhere."
"I walked the length of the hall to the sanctuary, and what I saw next made me step back a few steps. In the middle of this charred, blackened room, on a small pedestal, was a white velvet child’s coffin that looked like it would hold a toddler. Not. One. Drop. Of. Soot. Was. On. The. Coffin. Not a spec. Nada. The entire building was totally destroyed, but here sat this pristine coffin. I turned and left."
13.And finally, "When my cousin was 18, he was in a bad wreck, and he, his girlfriend, and her sister were all pronounced dead at the scene. The police arrived to inform my aunt (his mom), and she asked that he be sent to a specific funeral home. While they were preparing to embalm him, he rose up and asked, 'Where the hell am I?'"
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"The funeral director said it was the first time he ever had to go home and change pants. I should add that the top of his head was open and his brain was exposed. He was sent to the hospital, and the same police officer came to my aunt's to tell her he was not dead but in the hospital. They thought he'd be in a vegetative state, but a few weeks later, he walked out of the hospital. My aunt said it was the worst and best day of her life."
