“Feels Wrong And Backwards”: 50 Hospital Workers Share Creepy Moments That Left Them Speechless

My mom had a patient who scooped his eyeball out with a plastic spoon because it was bothering him.

My wife is transitioning away from working nights at an assisted living facility. She said for about a week after one resident passed on the memory care side all of the nursing assistants would randomly hear someone with a walker moving around (walkers make an extremely distinctive noise when one walks with one), except they have sensors everywhere so they know when someone's up and every time nobody was up, and they could not find anybody that was up upon walking around looking for the source of it.


She also told me that this job has convinced her that ghosts are real.

I don't have a single event. But from working nights in the operating room of a level one trauma center you run into many awful things. Including the worst of society.

But something that sticks with you is seeing a severely injured person in complete shock. Not like WOW my arm is off, but like body shock.

They're barely aware of the world around them. Eerily calm. Pale, sluggish. Not at all bothered by the bustling room around them.

I remember one person who had a ruptured aortic aneurysm, and due to a communication breakdown we had incised before the patient was asleep (surgeons get tunnel vision in moments like that) and the patient was like "hey that hurts" very chill, almost bored. It was wild.

I went to the morgue to do a temperature check and one of the bodies had sat up on its own, but it was at a 45 degree angle, so at first glance it looked like it was in the process of sitting up. S**t gives me nightmares.

Sadly, every ER doc that has worked for a while has seen a child die of asthma. Doing everything you can and they just get bluer and bluer and die is terrible. Anything involving children is hard.

I spent 16 yrs working mental health and consequently saw a ton of traumatizing s**t. One of the worst was a woman who stabbed herself in the wrist with a shard of plastic from a clock she broke in the doctor’s office. She then proceeded to run laps around the unit spraying blood literally everywhere… the floors, ceiling and walls were just covered in blood. My brain has blocked out some of the details but I think she may have been naked from stripping her clothes off. We ultimately had to wrap a blanket around her and take her down so we could stop the bleeding. I felt terrible for all of the other patients that witnessed this.

When I was an intern (radiologic technologist), I ended up having to take the portable x-ray machine down to the morgue to x-ray 3 garbage bags full of chopped up body parts that had been found buried on a farm in the area. This was done to determine what was in which bag and whether there were any bullets pointing to cause of death. Had to physically move these squishy bags with a two week old corpse in them in order to put the plate underneath them, and got a face full of rotting air from the bag. Some things you can't un-smell.

But hey, I had the best damned case study in class, complete with a news report video to include as part of the "patient history".

I've worked in a locked mental health unit for 12 years and I've seen some s**t but a lot of it seems quite common place at this point. The one that stands out for me, though, was when I cared for a known psychopath and convicted m******r.

There was just nothing at all in his eyes. There's no other way to describe it. I would say something innocuous and he would go silent, all facial expression would leave, and he would just look right into you. I'm a large man and I've rarely felt intimidated but this guy made ice run through my veins. The only time I've ever felt this way about a person, is when I watched the documentary about The Iceman, Richard Kuklinski.

I would ask him if I somehow offended him, apologize, and try to avoid whatever it was in the future. I actually managed to build a pretty solid rapport with him (completely out of self preservation) based on mutual respect. He was even a good enough sport to warn me that there may be uncapped h****n syringes in his personal belongings.

I stated to my team when he was discharged that I was sure he would k**l someone else and a few years later he did. Thankfully I'll never have to see him again.

EMT for the ambulance service. We have two hospitals in our county. One is a general hospital and the other in level II trauma center that most people go to. Even then last week both ERs were filled to the point where the general hospital told us they could no longer accept patients due to being filled up and the level II would only take patients under certain circumstances. While my partner and I were in the ER we kept noticing a man laying in a bed out in the open that looked so peaceful as he was sleeping. We found out from a RN we knew that he had died from unknown circumstances but they had nowhere to put his body. The morgue was full and no one could track down the county coroner. All they could do was was make it look like he was sleeping so the other patients didn't take notice. I thought it was very unethical but the RN kept reminding me that they had absolutely no room for his body unless they put in the janitors closet.

1340 pound female patient I worked with for about a year. Got her down to 680 or so before she left.

I was a supervisor over the admissions department of the emergency room in a VERY small hospital in a rural area. I had two people call in one night so I had to go in and work by myself. Around 3am, EMS arrives with a patient that shouldn’t have been brought to our hospital. She was DOA. Being in the admissions department meant I had to do all the paperwork when patients came to the hospital. I walked into the room with my clipboard and saw a woman on a stretcher with a dog chain around her neck. She had claw marks all around the chain where it looks like she had tried to get the chain off. EMS stated that in the process of hanging herself, she changed her mind but it was too late. Gave me chills.

It was just a bucket. They found him after he had been floating in his bathtub for 2 months, he fit in a bucket.

An arm fell out of the refrigerator when I was putting some pathology specimens away.

It was late at night so I didn’t turn the light on when I entered the room. I just open the fridge door. And this hand starts coming at me, then forearm, then the rest of the arm just rolled right out.

I worked IT for a hospital, and was down working on one of the ER computers when they wheeled in a homeless man that was screaming. They were trying to get his socks off. The nurse pulled off the sock on his right foot...and all of the skin with it. The most horrendous smell immediately spread throughout the whole area. I never found out what happened. I showered for a solid hour after getting home.

Walked into the morgue one time to find someone holding a guys eye in her hand, still attached to the bodies head by the nerve, and was removing the cornea for a donor transplant into a living person. I looked outside the door, leaned back in and said “ you know there’s a slider out here that says ‘in use’ right?” Then slid it to “in use” and left to come back after she was done lol.

I witnessed a patient of mine pull out his catheter. With the balloon fully inflated. He made no facial expression. He was out of his mind. It took 3 of us to get him restrained after that.

I work in an operating room and we frequently get dog bite victims. Once when I went out to the waiting room to update the parents, the child’s father hands me a trash bag with the head of the dog that bit his son in it. He said he thought we’d need it test for rabies. Hmmmm… no, animal control would handle that particular task, thank you very much. I took it though. Details….

Someone who purposely lit themselves on fire.. arms charred and unmovable, like they were doing the robot. I’m sure they didn’t live, I can’t imagine the pain. The smell was horrible.

I am an ICU Nurse. I had a patient who was declared brain stem dead. The family did not want him to become an organ donor so we withdrew treatment. I switched off the ventilator, pumps etc and extubated the patient. A few moments later the patient displayed "Lazarus Sign" which is a reflex that causes the patient to raise their arms in the air. I was by no means new to the role but this really scared me as I had never even heard of it let alone witnesses it.

The behavior of certain doctors are the biggest creeps of them all. Stuff like undressing and calling a nurse into their office.