"I Can't Explain This": 49 Terrifying Real-Life Experiences These Nurses Lived Through

As a hospital night shift nurse, I have taken care of many people who were actively dying and were on comfort care (this means that we are no longer trying to save the person's life, instead we're trying to manage their symptoms to keep them as comfortable as possible while they are dying). Sometimes people hold on a lot longer than we expect them to. You'd think by their vital signs, breathing pattern, skin color, etc that they should go fairly quickly, but instead they hold on and you can't quite figure out how they're still alive. These are people who are completely unresponsive, comatose, brain clearly not receiving enough oxygen to sustain life or consciousness for long. Often one of two things will happen:

-They are waiting for a family member to show up, and once that person arrives, the patient passes fairly quickly. OR

-Their family is with them in the room and doesn't want to leave because they don't want the patient to die alone. Finally the family leaves to get some sleep, or maybe they fall asleep in the room so that they are no longer talking to the patient. Then the patient dies fairly quickly after that. It's like the family doesn't want to leave the dying person, and the dying person also doesn't want to leave the family? It's an odd phenomenon but I've seen it quite a few times.

I’m not medical staff but when my dad was in the ICU in 2024 (at the VA) they warned him that there was a guy who would talk to himself and check the rooms, he meant absolutely no harm, he did this every single night he was there (he was inpatient psychiatric patient with a heart condition so he was in the ICU a lot) he would not sleep at all until the sunrise.

He was a Vietnam vet and was “on watch” over the fellow military in the hospital. It makes me f*****g sad as hell, poor dude had gone his whole life not knowing he had such severe PTSD and it ate and ate and ate away at him… he still stood guard.

When I worked as a CNA at a psychiatric facility, we had one patient with schizophrenia who would occasionally get naked, slather herself in Vaseline and run the halls like that. She was a larger woman, and it was always chaotic getting her under control.

Worked in a hospice for years. One particular room had a ceiling corner that numerous patients would engage with in different ways. Some people would be mute and just stare at the corner, some people would point at the corner, some would smile and laugh, and others would specifically name family members that had passed before them.

It just became routine for me. I'd enter a room and ask a family member how the resident was doing, and they'd report that they had begun saying their deceased sisters name while pointing to this specific corner. I'd ask if they'd ever done something like this before (had any moments of confusion) and the family would report it was new behaviour.

After a year or so of working there and experiencing this, one time staff were discussing "ghost stories" in the staff room, and an older staff member mentioned that they had one time had a medium come to the hospice, and reported that there were "portals" in this specific room, and another in the basement.

I typically do not believe in ghosts or paranormal activity, but I truly cannot explain this phenomenon. Everyone seemed happy/comforted by whatever they were seeing in this corner, so I just stopped questioning it.

Man, I just recently got out of a 100 day hospital stay and 8 weeks of it were spent in the ICU, nearly dying, and pumped full of d***s. You get something called ICU Delirium which is a general state of confusion but can also include hallucinations and delusions. Think like very lucid dreams that can last for days on end, but sometimes you're awake, sometimes you're asleep. And the nurses are the ones to deal with them all.

Anyway the change in my room between night and day was drastic enough to confuse me, and my delirium at night would get significantly worse. Those poor night nurses 😢 I would regularly wake up very confused and start pulling at my wrist restraints (which I had because I wanted to pull every tube out of my face, which could k**l me) and yelling for help. One time I woke up from a very lucid dream and was convinced I was pregnant (lile a month in, I had hundreds of blood tests at this point, there was no way.) Another time I was fully convinced that the nurses hated me because they wouldn't give me another blanket (I was feverish, they couldn't) and then I was even more convinced that they were secretly human trafficking patients (...they weren't.) Then one time I actually did manage to pull a line out and accidentally sprayed a nurse with bl**d. My husband had to sign paperwork so they could test me to make sure she couldn't catch anything from it.

Sorry, none of this is inexplicable, but more an appreciation post for all the nurses that go through some serious s**t on night shift, in the ICU and out. Y'all are hardcore. ❤️.

Sundowning is still relatively unstudied. Patients with cognitive impairments lose their mind when the sun goes down. Could be Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, brain bleed, TBI, metabolic encephalitis, I worked in brain injury rehab so I've seen it happen a lot.

It would be around 8pm and you could literally see the sense drain out of a person's eyes. They would be exhausted from the day of therapy and winding down in bed when they would begin to get restless and try to get out of bed. On my unit, patients were required to have assistance getting out of bed. You'd ask what they needed or where they were going and they don't know or they say they have to go to work. You reorient them to the time of day and that it's time to sleep and get them comfy. Half an hour later, they are trying to get out of bed again. You try to talk to them but no one is home. It's like theyre a husk. They keep trying to get up and wander around. Eventually, you get them up at the nurses station so you can keep an eye on them and get your work done.

Medicating sundowners was always a c**p shoot. I swear, most of the ones on my floor had paradoxical reactions to sedatives. Trazodone and Seroquel were the big ones because you can't give haldol to brain injury patients.

I had one big male with a subarachnoid hemorrhage who was fully ambulatory but would go into full blown psychosis at night. He tried to go into other patients rooms to throw them out because he thought they were homeless people living in his store. He elbowed the resident out of the way and almost put hands on the security guard. The resident gave an order for a ridiculously small dose of IM zyprexa and an order for an enclosure bed. It took about 8 people to get him medicated and zipped up into the enclosure bed. He fought the bed until about 6am when he finally fell asleep. He was perfectly lucid during the day. And he promptly began to lose it again when I came in for my shift the next night.

I can’t believe I’m being called to the front of the congregation. It’s finally my time. After years of working as a night shift nurse on a complex medicine unit, I am happy to report, I have never seen s**t.

I feel like I’m receptive to it? I don’t believe in supernatural/superstitious things at all. I am not religious, I would consider myself spiritual, but I don’t practice or follow anything in anyway.

With all that being said we have a lot of deaths on our unit. Last week for example, we were on some kind of blitz and had 5 deaths within a 4 day span. I always wonder, how come none of us have ever encountered one single spirit in this entire monstrosity of a hospital? That’s 30 years old.

Each nurse also gets an individual room for break each night, we grab stretchers and sheets and each get a few hours break. It’s all different rooms including staff/overstock/change rooms, more stock rooms. Some used to be patient rooms now changed to stock rooms that we sleep in during break. I ain’t never seen nothing, felt nothing, smelled nothing. Nada.

There are weird things I can’t explain sometimes. For example, two of the patients who have passed last week were both in room 22A. The patient before both of them was there for about 1 month passed. Patient before that had a code blue in 22A. 4 consecutive people. But when I’m in 22A I don’t feel anything, I don’t see anything. There’s nothing going on, but for some reason everyone just keeps dying or coding in god d**n 22A. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it. There’s no explanation for it, it just keeps happening.

I also do rounds about every 30-45 minutes on the floor. That means I will walk down wing A or wing B alone between 2-3-4am looking into each individual room with a penlight to check on the patient. Never seen s**t in anyone’s room or corner or anything. Ever.

I don’t know. Some of the s**t we see in hospitals, I don’t really know if seeing a ghost would be the scariest thing thats happened there. Human beings are f****d up. The way people treat their partners, parents, kids is still shocking to me sometimes. Anyways fellow colleagues, if you do see a ghost put that m**********r to work. We’re probably short-staffed. Ain’t nobody got time for this s**t.

Im not a nurse but an imaging tech in a level 1 trauma hospital. We’re supposed to talk to our patients about what their CT exam entails beforehand, which usually means talking along the way to the exam room because of how busy it is. One time I wheeled a patient in to the exam room and they said something like “are we going to do this with all these people here?” I didn’t understand, it was only us two in the room. I ensured there would privacy, and everything proceeded as normal. I took that patient back to the ER and got the next patient. Upon arrival to the exam room the second patient asked “Geez who are your friends?” Again it was only us two in the room. Maybe some good painkillers on board? This happened one more time with the very next patient who asked “what’s with the choir in here!?!”.

Maybe it’s not the strangest story but I had a hard time explaining that away to all three patients.

Women clinging to active dying state for 4 days. I work field nursing hospice.

I have doubled the morphine and ativan as her hospice nurse.

She is getting about 10mg po morphine and 1mg ativan every hour.

I have been there 4 hours now. Usual visit is 1 but something about this case.....


I finally ask, is there anyone still supposed to visit?

"Son is coming tomorrow! Lets FaceTime him!"

I say dont do that....

They do it. He talks to her, says all he needs to, then says bye I love you.

She makes a "uh uh uuuuhhh" noise. They hang up.

Gone 5 min later.

My dad was really sick and he was on hospice in the hospital. The whole family came to see him….he was supposed to be moved upstairs to a larger more comfortable room for family to visit that night. We all said our goodbyes and told him we would be back the next day. As I was hugging him goodbye I whispered to him that I loved him and that it was ok to go.
He died a few hours later. I’m glad he is no longer suffering. I was his only girl and he loved me a lot….its been 6 years and I miss him a lot.

I worked in behavioral health as a CNA for my first hospital job. The amount of things you would see and hear are beyond any level of messed up that you'd see on TV. We're talking m****r-s*****e, childhood trauma, rubbing p**p on the walls, & psychotic delusions.

Plenty of stories.

One time I was doing my rounds, 18 y.o. by myself, right when I first started. Went to peek into one of the rooms to check on a patient at like 0200. At the time the patient in this room was a middle aged woman with pale skin and long greasy black hair that covered her face and eyes. Basically an irl version of that girl from the grudge. Homegirl was sitting cross legged on her bed, wide awake, chanting some s**t that sounded like backwards latin.

I noped out of that room and back to the nurses station so fast.

A couple actually.

No one ever believes the full moon thing. Until you work in a hospital with a 100-bed emergency department during a full moon and 75 of the 100 beds are psych patients.

Or the time a guy got drunk and thought it would be a good idea to pet a skunk hanging out near a dumpster behind the bar. Somehow the entire 100-bed department was saturated with the scent despite trying to keep him contained in the back.

My wife used to work in a nursing home for people with dementia.

My wife was feeding one of the residents who was close to the end of her life one morning when the woman suddenly sat up straight, looked my wife in the eye and said "I just want to thank you all for all the hard work you do to help me and everyone else here. Its important to say this while I can". Then just as quickly she was gone again and died within a day or two.

My wife told the care home manager and he said this is called a "last moment of clarity" and most people working in dementia care experience something similar sooner or later. Of course its impossible to study.

For me that more terrifying that any "ghost" story or tales of psychosis. The thought that even when dementia has reduced someone to a drooling shell of a person they are still present and experiencing everything. If I ever get dementia you can beat me over the head with a 2x2 because I don't want to live like that, especially if I do get one last moment of clarity.

Not a nurse, but was a psychiatric nursing assistant at a state hospital some years ago. Some patients would have to be on direct observation, meaning an aide (or sometimes two) would have to sit with them and watch them, even when they slept.

I was sitting on direct with one patient, it was around 3 or 4 am and they were asleep in their room… which had coincidentally belonged to a patient who had passed away less than a year prior. Pretty boring job usually, so I was just staring at the wall in their room and daydreaming. About 45 minutes into the hour I had to sit with them, I saw a golden orb appear just left of the wall I was staring at, grow, linger, then float to the bed the patient was lying in, shrink, and disappear. Whole thing lasted about 10 seconds. Patient didn’t wake up, and no other witnesses.

No explanation for it, and it wasn’t exactly the best work environment to be able to bring it up with others.

Possibly the guy who precisely cut off his genitals with a razor blade (impressive level of detail, clean margins, etc—quality work) who was wheeled in from the ambulance bay in apparently zero distress. He greeted the waiting staff with a cordial “how you all doin’” and a nod as he came through the doors. EMS told us later that nobody could ever find the package. Guy did have a large dog.

Plenty of rectal double-C battery stories, etc, but that kind of thing is run of the mill ED weekend night shift stuff.

We had a guy come in via ems because of excessive bleeding due to an amputated p***s. Apparently, family found him in the garage with a bloody knife nearby. He firmly denied chopping off his junk. According to him, he went on a nature walk when he happened upon an angry raccoon. It bit off his p***s and "gobbled it up."

He was perfectly calm and content the whole time. He ended up damaging the scrotal sac, so all of it had to be removed. He admitted to pe*****lia and said that he was glad it was gone. The p***s was never found.

My partner was a corrections nurse for a while. He worked the overnight shift at a local jail. he was in the med unit, mostly for psych patients and elderly people with chronic illness.

One night an inmate started acting hysterical. The camera footage showed him suddenly running straight at the door with his body bent, head down. He slammed into that door with the back of his neck and fell down.

He paralyzed himself from the neck down. Fractured his spine in the worst way.

As far as we know, he never recovered. Mental illness is so terrible.

40 yo male AAOX3 lying quietly in bed. I brought a unit of blood and told him I would return with a witness. I returned in about 3 minutes to find him upside down, wedged between the bed and the siderail, with his head against the floor turned so that his airway was cut off. The siderails would not release because he was so wedged in. Another nurse came in and pulled the mattress off from the other side and I lifted him enough for the siderail to release. Did CPR, got him back and he asked, "What happened?" A UFO tried to abduct you, got you about half-way to the ceiling and dropped you?

Worked in an mental health housing facility, it had a nursing home set up. Big lobby/living room and hallways on either end with rooms. Sitting with my coworker and one of the clients who talks to herself out loud constantly was standing at the edge of the lobby, we turn to get up to get her back to bed and she is GONE. Her room is at the very end. We check to make sure she didn’t go in anyone else’s room, nope. She was dead asleep in her bed. No way possible she made it in there in the 2 seconds we looked away.

Another, my favorite client who was also the one who caused the most problems. She loved me but as soon as she started calling me Rachel (not my name) it was over. She HATES Rachel. She came walking up to me with her hair flying in the nonexistent wind and her eyes were BLACK. Sent chills down my spine. My buddy was not in there. Spent the rest of that night in the locked office.

Second-hand story. My wife was a nurse in the cardiac care unit at the University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock. Time: late 1970s. A male patient arrived and she noticed a pattern of round, reddened spots, like slight first-degree burns, down his sternum. When she asked an older nurse what that was, she learned that those were the marks from drops of hot wax, from the voodoo candles his family was using to try to heal him.