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See exclusive new images of Art the Clown in gory Christmas horror movie 'Terrifier 3'

Let’s hope you’re asking Santa Claus for a stocking full of blood and gore this year, because Art the Clown is coming to town.

Though he’s back just in time for Halloween, the silent horror villain plans to have a very bloody Christmas in the slasher movie “Terrifier 3” (in theaters Oct. 11). USA TODAY has a selection of exclusive images from the film before a new teaser trailer drops online Wednesday.

The cult franchise has become a hit for scary-movie fans and a litmus test for more squeamish audiences. And with the new threequel, writer/director Damien Leone couldn’t pass up a chance to have the silly and sadistic Art (played by David Howard Thornton) in yuletide wear.

"You can put this character anywhere, in any setting, in any time, and he would work. He's just so ridiculous in any situation,” says the filmmaker, who wanted to do his own spin on the “maniac” Santa. “If I put Art the Clown in the Santa suit, now that makes Art fresh again.”

“Terrifier 3” catches up with Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her younger brother, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), five years after the events of the previous film, which ended with Sienna embracing an warrior angel spirit and decapitating Art (who since the first “Terrifier” has been possessed by a mysterious evil entity). They’re spending the holidays in Miles County with their aunt and uncle, but the ensuing years have been hard coping with the past trauma.

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“Especially for Sienna, it hasn't been an easy road,” Leone says. “She's been in and out of a mental health facility just dealing with all of this – not only just what she's been through but what she's becoming and what her role is in this universe.”

Art returns, naturally, and “still has his eyes set on them with a lot of unfinished business,” the director adds. “Terrifier 3” will reveal more about the evil entity, which took the shape of Art’s “Terrifier 2” sidekick, the Little Pale Girl, and fans will learn “why it resurrected Art and what its intentions are and why it's trying to target Sienna.”

In addition to building out the “Terrifier” mythology – Leone teases he’ll “address” Art’s connection to Sienna and her late father – the film features Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi) in a significant role: The disfigured final girl from the original “Terrifier” is possessed by the entity, too, and was last seen in “Terrifier 2” giving birth to Art’s head in a mental health institute.

Among the supporting cast, AEW wrestler Chris Jericho reprises his role as hospital nurse Burke and Jason Patric will make his franchise debut as a “really amazing” character, Leone says. “I literally have a ‘Lost Boys’ magnet on my fridge.” The filmmaker heard that Patric, a “Terrifier” fan, dressed up as Art for Halloween and didn’t believe it. “Sure enough, it was true.”

“Black Christmas” and Robert Zemeckis’ seasonal “Tales from the Crypt” episode are holiday horror influences on “Terrifier 3,” as well as “Bad Santa,” Leone says. “Pretty much any classic Christmas movie trope you could imagine, I try to put Art the Clown in that situation and see how he would handle that.”

But a silent night for Art equals a deadly night. Even with ornaments and decorations all over the place, Leone’s making sure “Terrifier 3” lives up to the franchise’s grisly reputation, which in the past has included reports of people fainting and puking at showings. The new flick “certainly is way more relentless and gory, that's for sure.”

But trying to outdo his own kill scenes and those of other slasher movies is one of the harder parts of Leone’s job. “There's only so many things you can do to the human body,” he says. “It's easy to really just hack somebody to pieces for five minutes. Can you also be creative when you're doing it.” Thankfully, Art’s inherent levity, like his penchant for wearing sunflower sunglasses, keeps the film from leaning too dark and grim to be accessible. “As evil as he is, he's equally charming and there's something sweet about him. You almost want to be his friend.”

The success of the “Terrifier” movies “remains very surreal,” Leone says. In 2022, “Terrifier 2” grossed $15.4 million on a reported budget of $250,000 , and the third film looks to make even a bigger splash this fall, when fans can get their hands on new life-size animatronic "Terrifier" Halloween decorations and Art Funko Pop toys .

“You know you've made it when they make a Funko,” Leone says. “I’m always pinching myself.”

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Chaos and Confusion: Tech Outage Causes Disruptions Worldwide

Airlines, hospitals and people’s computers were affected after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, sent out a flawed software update.

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By Adam Satariano Paul Mozur Kate Conger and Sheera Frenkel

• July 19, 2024

Airlines grounded flights. Operators of 911 lines could not respond to emergencies. Hospitals canceled surgeries. Retailers closed for the day. And the actions all traced back to a batch of bad computer code.

A flawed software update sent out by a little-known cybersecurity company caused chaos and disruption around the world on Friday. The company, CrowdStrike , based in Austin, Texas, makes software used by multinational corporations, government agencies and scores of other organizations to protect against hackers and online intruders.

But when CrowdStrike sent its update on Thursday to its customers that run Microsoft Windows software, computers began to crash.

The fallout, which was immediate and inescapable, highlighted the brittleness of global technology infrastructure. The world has become reliant on Microsoft and a handful of cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike. So when a single flawed piece of software is released over the internet, it can almost instantly damage countless companies and organizations that depend on the technology as part of everyday business.

“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of Britain’s National Cyber Security Center and a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.

A cyberattack did not cause the widespread outage, but the effects on Friday showed how devastating the damage can be when a main artery of the global technology system is disrupted. It raised broader questions about CrowdStrike’s testing processes and what repercussions such software firms should face when flaws in their code cause major disruptions.

How a Software Update Crashed Computers Around the World

Here’s a visual explanation for how a faulty software update crippled machines.

While outages are common, often caused by technical errors or cyberattacks, the scale of what unfolded on Friday was unparalleled.

“This is historic,” said Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at WithSecure, a cybersecurity company. “We haven’t had an incident like this.”

George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, said that the company took responsibility for the mistake and that a software fix had been released. He warned that it could be some time before tech systems returned to normal.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this,” he said in an interview on Friday on NBC’s “Today” show.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, blamed CrowdStrike and said the company was working to help customers “bring their systems back online.” Apple and Linux machines were not affected by the CrowdStrike software update.

A White House official said the administration was in “regular contact” with CrowdStrike and had convened agencies to assess the impact of the outage on the federal government’s operations.

CrowdStrike, founded in 2011 by Mr. Kurtz and others, has built a reputation over the years as a firm that could solve even the toughest security problems. It was tapped to investigate a 2014 hack of Sony Pictures and the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee, which exposed Hillary Clinton’s emails.

But problems stemming from CrowdStrike’s products have surfaced before. In April, the company pushed a software update to customers running the Linux system that crashed computers, according to an internal CrowdStrike report sent to customers about the incident, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The bug, which did not appear to be related to Friday’s outage, took CrowdStrike nearly five days to fix, the report said. CrowdStrike promised to improve its testing process going forward, according to the report.

On Thursday, the tech issues began when Microsoft dealt with an outage on its cloud service system, Azure, which affected some airlines .

Then CrowdStrike sent an update for its software called Falcon Sensor , which scans a computer for intrusions and signs of hacking. If everything had gone according to plan, CrowdStrike’s software would have received minor improvements and customers would have hardly noticed.

Instead, when CrowdStrike’s faulty update reached computers running Microsoft Windows, it caused the machines to shut down and then endlessly reboot. Workers around the world were greeted with what is known as the “blue screen of death” on their computers. Insufficient testing at CrowdStrike was a likely source of the problem, experts said.

As computers restarted themselves over and over, known as the “doom loop,” there was little CrowdStrike could do to fix the problem. Tech staff at affected companies were faced with a choice: walk around to each machine and remove the bit of flawed code, or wait and hope for a solution from CrowdStrike.

The problems cascaded instantly. At Sydney Airport in Australia, travelers encountered delays and cancellations, as did those in Hong Kong, India, Dubai, Berlin and Amsterdam. At least five U.S. airlines — Allegiant Air, American, Delta, Spirit and United — grounded all flights for a time, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

How the airline cancellations rippled around the world (and across time zones)

Share of canceled flights at 25 airports on Friday

50% of flights

Ai r po r t

Bengalu r u K empeg o wda

Dhaka Shahjalal

Minneapolis-Saint P aul

Stuttga r t

Melbou r ne

Be r lin B r anden b urg

London City

Amsterdam Schiphol

Chicago O'Hare

Raleigh−Durham

B r adl e y

Cha r lotte

Reagan National

Philadelphia

1:20 a.m. ET

Health care systems were crippled, forcing hospitals to cancel noncritical surgeries. In the United States, 911 lines went down in multiple states, though many of those problems were being resolved later on Friday. Britain’s National Health Service also reported issues.

“We knew we had a catastrophe on our hands,” said B.J. Moore, the chief information officer for Providence Health, which has 52 hospitals in seven states. He said 15,000 servers were down and 40,000 out of Providence’s 150,000 computers were affected, adding that it was “worse than a cyberattack."

The United Parcel Service and FedEx said they were affected. Customers with TD Bank, one of the biggest banks in the United States, reported issues accessing their online accounts. Several state and municipal court systems closed for the day because of the outage.

At CrowdStrike, engineers described an atmosphere of confusion as the company struggled to contain the damage.

Executives urged employees not to speculate on why the mistake happened and directed them to focus on a fix for the computers that were affected, said two engineers who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Computers not connected to the cloud required a physical fix to the error introduced by CrowdStrike, they said, which could take weeks.

Within several hours of the faulty software going out, CrowdStrike sent out a software patch as a fix that would stop computers from endlessly rebooting.

Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant, said the outage would still take time to resolve because a suggested solution for some organizations involved rebooting each computer manually into safe mode, deleting a specific file and then restarting the computer.

While that is a relatively straightforward process, security experts said, it may not be easy to do at scale. Those with organized and well-staffed information technology teams could potentially fix the issues more quickly, Mr. Olejnik said.

Unlike the iPhone software updates that Apple sends to customers, the incident highlighted information technology systems that operate in the background. The CrowdStrike issues were compounded because the software being updated performed critical cybersecurity tasks, giving it access to scan a computer to look for viruses and other malicious attacks.

Cybersecurity tools operate quietly in the background to defend computers against attacks. The software is frequently updated with new defenses as hackers develop fresh methods of attack, but constant updates mean there are many opportunities for mistakes to happen.

“One of the tricky parts of security software is it needs to have absolute privileges over your entire computer in order to do its job,” said Thomas Parenty, a cybersecurity consultant and a former U.S. National Security Agency analyst. “So if there’s something wrong with it, the consequences are vastly greater than if your spreadsheet doesn’t work.”

On Friday, the stock price of CrowdStrike, which reported $3 billion in annual revenue last year, closed down 11 percent.

CrowdStrike’s stock price so far this year

The company faces questions about what liabilities it and other software makers face for major disruptions and cybersecurity incidents. The consequences for significant outages can be so minimal that companies are not motivated to make more fundamental changes, experts said. While a car manufacturer would face stiff penalties for faulty brakes, a software provider can often issue another update and move on.

“Until software companies have to pay a price for faulty products, we will be no safer tomorrow than we are today,” Mr. Parenty said.

Meaghan Tobin , Aaron Krolik and Jill Cowan contributed reporting.

Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent for The Times, based in London. More about Adam Satariano

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul. More about Paul Mozur

Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected]. More about Kate Conger

Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel

21 Travel Horror Stories You’ll Be Glad You’re Not Telling

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When you think of travel horror stories , what anecdotes come to mind?

That is exactly what I asked some of my favorite travel bloggers, whose scary travel experiences I’ve compiled below!

Get ready for your jaw to drop, as you read crazy travel stories about deadly scorpion bites, unexpected hospital visits abroad, failed car brakes on mountain roads, and more.

While each of these scary travel experiences is unique, they do all have one main thing in common:

Every story involves a situation you’ll be glad to be reading and not telling yourself.

Note that each story also comes with a lesson so that you can learn from these scary vacation stories and avoid the same fate on the road.

Table of Contents

Inspired Storyteller Printable Travel Journal (Free Gift!)

Now, before we dive into this list of scary vacation stories …

I want to invite you to grab my free printable travel journal !

The journal comes complete with 56 prompts to help you relive your favorite trips and get creative with your writing.

Grabbed the journal?

Then let’s dive into the scary short travel stories .

1. A Travel Horror Story Turned Beautiful On Italy’s Amalfi Coast

When I think about horror travel stories , there are a few that come to mind — because let’s be real, travel isn’t always the pretty picture that Instagram paints it out to be.

The anecdote I’ll be sharing today in the video above is one of my more dangerous travel stories that takes place on Italy ‘s Amalfi Coast.

Without giving too much away, it does have a happy ending that also shares a reminder about the kindness of strangers .

Oh, and you’ll also be reminded to not put all of your faith in Google Maps.

Watch the video above for the full story, and if you enjoy it, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon so you get notified when future videos publish.

Then continue reading for more crazy short travel stories you’ll undoubtedly hope you never have to experience yourself.

2. An Angry Camel In Egypt

One of the activities on my Egypt bucket list was to watch the sunrise while standing on top of Mt Sinai. 

It’s a challenging hike topping at 2,285 meters (~7,497 feet) above sea level. I hiked all the way, but many tourists choose to ride a camel instead.

Here’s where my story gets interesting.

The camels can’t be ridden the whole way and when you’re almost at the top, the camel is seated and you get off. Once everyone has dismounted, there is a long line of camels waiting along the narrow pathway.

I didn’t have far to walk to get to the climb and all the camels were sitting – except for one!

As I passed it, this camel let out an immense roar and opened his massive mouth, coming within centimeters of my face. I screamed and fell to the ground, though the camel backed off momentarily.

Within seconds, two camel guides came to my aid and tried to control the angry camel. This upset the camel further and it tried to attack the guides, who retreated by climbing a rock wall. The guides then yelled at me to get up on the rock wall, as well.

It was then a waiting game for the camel to calm down.

Eventually, some other guides helped to get the camel seated. After about 15 minutes, we came down the rocks and climbed the 700 stairs to the top of Mt Sinai.

It’s a funny travel story when I talk about it now, although at the time I could already picture YouTube videos of the camel picking me up by my head and tossing me around like doll.

I guess the poor camel just had a bad day of lugging tourists up the mountain.

Chris from the The Aquarius Traveller

3. A Neverending Trip To Brazil

I was excited about my very first trip to Brazil , even though it meant taking a plane from NYC to Atlanta and then another long flight from Atlanta to Rio.

To make matters worse, a massive blizzard canceled my flight to Atlanta, and the best I could get was a flight from Philadelphia to Atlanta where I could make a connecting flight to Rio.

I thought I could just take a bus down to Atlanta. If I left right away, the bus would get me to Atlanta seven hours before my plane to Rio left. The plan seemed flawless.

The first part of the bus trip proceeded from New York to Washington DC without much incident. There I needed to transfer buses to continue to Atlanta, which was fine.

It was at Richmond, Virginia that the trip began turning into a travel horror story.

Our driver told us we needed to make a brief stop there. Well, that brief stop turned into two hours. 

Finally, our driver announced that our bus had been canceled due to a technical malfunction. We would have to wait in the station for several hours for the next possible bus — and spaces were not guaranteed!

I burst into tears and a nearby driver took pity on me and informed me he could take me as far as Raleigh, North Carolina. Even though it was four in the morning and I was running on no food, no sleep, and no shower I could see that all I needed to do was get to the Raleigh Airport and beg Delta Airlines to put me on a plane to Atlanta.

I was short on cash, but fortunately I found a woman on the bus to split a cab with me to the airport. When we arrived I managed to drag my near-corpse to the help desk where I relayed the entire story — in one breath in a high-pitched wail.

My pleas paid off and about an hour and a half later, I was onboard the brief flight to Atlanta where my uncle was waiting with a shower, lunch, and a place for me to nap before my flight to Brazil.

Even though this was my worst travel experience ever, it taught me to never give up and never be embarrassed to ask for help.

Stella Jane from Around the World in 24 Hours

4. Stranded In The Middle Of Nowhere In New Zealand

My partner and I were on an epic road trip around New Zealand.

With our trusty campervan, we were experiencing New Zealand the best way possible – driving around, camping in our van, and exploring all the most remote destinations the South Island has to offer! 

There was one big mistake though that left us stranded on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. We ran out of gas!  

We didn’t realize how far the next gas station was and highly underestimated how long the drive would take. So there we were, stranded on the side of the road without any gas or cell phone service.  

Unsure of what we could do, we decided that we would just stay put for the night. It was getting late in the afternoon and we didn’t want to be walking anywhere once it got dark.

Luckily, our campervan was set up for spending the night and we had plenty of food and water (and wine!)  

Just as we were getting our campervan set up for the night, another campervan drove by! My partner waved at them and a couple of New Zealand locals slowed down and asked if we were okay.

We told them about how we ran out of gas and they laughed as they told us they had a jerrycan with gas we could use. They filled up our campervan and told us about how wrong Google Maps is in New Zealand with drive times.

We learned two things during this mishap:

One, always fuel up before a long drive.

And two, Kiwis (New Zealanders) are super friendly. We gave our new friends one of the bottles of wine we had on hand to say thanks and continued on with our road trip! 

Bailey from  My Queenstown Diary

5. Getting Hit By A Car In Japan

When I was 22, I moved to Japan to work as an English teacher. After only having lived in the country for a few months, I was hit by a car while out for a morning jog.

The lady who hit me thankfully pulled her car over but was hysterical as she dialed emergency services and got out to check on me. 

Fortunately, while I had some pretty bad scrapes on my legs and cuts all over my face and hands, I was able to pull myself off the road and onto the curb.

Now I should add that I am actually half-Japanese and have both Japanese middle and last names— but I was born and raised in the USA. Besides English, I grew up speaking Cantonese (my other half) and not Japanese.

Knowing how confusing this would be for a homogenous society such as Japan, the first sentence I learned in Japanese prior to moving was, “Please excuse me, I’m American and I don’t understand Japanese.”

So back to my crazy story.

Both the driver and medical responders grew increasingly concerned and confused as all I kept repeating was “I don’t understand Japanese” — in Japanese.

As I rode in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, a paramedic asked me the list of routine health questions, but when the Japanese got too difficult, I explained again that I was not from Japan and couldn’t understand much Japanese.

So then he repeated the question louder, as if shouting the question again would help me understand another language better. I began laughing and making sarcastic jokes in English which only made things worse.

Once at the hospital, the whole process of figuring out what my deal was began all over again.

“Why does she keep saying she doesn’t understand Japanese? Her name is Japanese. And she keeps saying she doesn’t understand in Japanese. Her head must have been injured.”

In the end, they were so worried by my repetition of the only Japanese phrase I knew and bursts of English that they did a full head scan and more exams than I can remember to see if the accident had caused any brain trauma.

Despite what could have easily resulted in a terrible day, I learned to find the silver lining in every situation, especially when abroad.

Sometimes you just have to have a sense of humor and roll with the punches— or in my case, wherever the car sends you flying!

Michelle from Wander Eat Write

6. Running Over A Rock In The Australian Outback

On a road trip from Cairns in Queensland to Perth in Western Australia, my partner and I were 200 kilometers (~124 miles) from the nearest town and drove over a rock the size of a fist.

Due to the speed we were going, the rock shot up into the oil tank and burst it.

We checked our phones, but there was no signal.

At that moment we had a snap decision to make. Do we stop and hope we can save the car? Or do we drive until we can get a phone signal to call a tow truck?

If you’ve ever been in the vast Australian Outback, you know that signal is hard to come by, and there’s also hardly anyone else on the road.

Therefore, we drove and drove with the hope we could use our phone to call for help. The result was that the oil leaked from the car and destroyed the engine. It was 40 degrees, and we felt helpless. 

Luckily, we managed to find a signal to call for help at the same time a friendly Aussie couple stopped to make sure we were okay.

There have been devastating consequences of breaking down in remote places in Australia . Thanks to the help of locals, we survived to tell our story.

The tow truck drove us the 200 kilometers back to the town where we had begun driving from that morning and now we can laugh about what happened. 

One of the biggest lessons we learned from this experience was to always keep food and water in the car at all times because anything can happen.

After our incident with the car, we learned that in Australia you can relocate vehicles to travel between places.

We found a fancy SUV that needed relocating to Perth for $1 a day, which meant not only did we finish our road trip, but we also did it inexpensively and in style. 

Since then we have started using this method to travel around Australia, including relocating campervans — which shows that something good can come out of a bad situation.

Rachel from Average Lives

7. Locked In A Park At Night

This creepy travel story happened nearly 15 years ago when visiting Granada in Spain .

My boyfriend and I arrived in the city quite late and totally missed the opening hours of the Alhambra, so we just walked around and stumbled upon a nice-looking park.

It was a bit on the wilder side with plenty of wild greenery, animals roaming around, though it was also beautiful, romantic, and felt quite private.

As dusk fell, we decided to make our way out since it started to get a bit creepy – there were no people around and all that we could hear were strange animal sounds.

However, when we went to pull open the gate we realized in horror that it was locked.

Talk about scary travel experiences !

We were trapped. The whole park had a high brick wall around it.

Desperately, we walked around in the dark (before cell phones had flashlights on them), found the deserted premises of a local keeper, and then bumped into a small group of scared Spanish students. They were freaking out, too.

Together, we roamed the park and found a ladder. In the dark, we managed to find an acceptable spot to climb the wall. And survived to tell the tale.

And now the facts:

The park was in fact The Carmen de los Martires Garden, which closes its gate at 8pm during the summer months.

Apparently, there are only peacocks and ducks in the park, but in our state of distress, we let our imagination run wild. Also, peacocks sleeping in trees look like vultures.

Lesson learned – don’t be lazy and check the opening hours! The least you can do is just glance at a sign upon entering an unknown place.

Veronika from  Travel Geekery

8. That Time We Went Down The Alps Without Braking

We’ve been traveling Europe in a motorhome for years. For us, part of the fun is never knowing what we might find around the next corner, or where we might end up.

But our very first trip to Europe with a van nearly ended in disaster. And, sadly, that’s not me being dramatic. 

It was a gloriously sunny day in Switzerland and we were driving over the Alps.

Our daughter was singing in the back, happy having just passed her latest exams. We’d just survived a trip on an old, rickety funicular, going backward up a mountain.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot as it happens.

In the Alps, whichever way you go, you’re traveling on tiny mountain roads with lots of switchbacks. 

And as soon as we reached the first hairpin, we realized there was   something seriously wrong with our brakes.

As in, they didn’t work.

Talk about dangerous travel stories !

Coming into the bend, the only way my husband could slow us down was by using the handbrake.

The problem with mountain roads is there are very few places to turn around or pull to the side of the road safely. And we’d just left a car park, which meant there wouldn’t be another parking area for a while.

All we could do was continue down the mountain, in our heavy motorhome which was gaining speed, trying hard to slow without working brakes. There were 180-degree bends every 200 meters (~656 feet) or so — and each one was utterly terrifying.

We didn’t know if or when the handbrake would give out, and then we would be in big trouble — there aren’t any barriers to stop you going over the edge on these roads. 

Honestly, I don’t know how we got to the bottom in one piece. Truly, I’ve never been so scared in my life, and I’m eternally grateful my husband was driving and that he was able to deal with it.

Yes, our handbrake was ruined. No, we didn’t care.

At the bottom, we were lucky to find a small town with a garage. There, we quickly discovered the cause — our brake fluid had totally disappeared!

When we bought the van three months earlier, we’d been assured it had just received a full service and an MOT vehicle test.

We did our own checks, too, but we never thought to check the brake fluid.

Turns out, it hadn’t been changed for years and was mostly water — which meant it had evaporated over the past 48 hours as the brakes got hot going up and down the mountains. Until it was gone.

Thankfully, the garage was able to replace it and they also changed our handbrake for us. 

Lesson learned:  

Always do a proper check of your vehicle before setting off on a road trip. And don’t trust the word of a salesman; book your vehicle into an independent garage for a full service before you set off. 

Kat from Wandering Bird

9. Camels & Deathstalkers In Jordan

We spend a lot of time hiking, both near our home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia and North Carolina as well as in our travels around the world. So we like to think of ourselves as experienced outdoor adventurers, with a good understanding of backcountry safety.

But hiking in the Dana Biosphere Reserve – Jordan’s largest nature reserve – brought with it some seriously scary stuff that they don’t talk about in survivalist books.

Our 14-kilometer (~7-mile) hike literally got off to a rocky start, as our experienced Bedouin guide slipped and fell on the rugged terrain several times as we descended the rock-strewn trail into the Great Rift Valley.

But other than searing desert heat and a memorable stop for tea and snacks with a shepherd friend of our guide’s father, the first half of the journey proved uneventful.

Just minutes after our tea break, though, things turned terrifying remarkably quickly.

We were walking ahead as our guide put on his traditional Arabic headdress, called a  Keffiyeh .

Suddenly he screamed loudly, and we turned to see him doubled over in pain. We ran over to see him sucking his finger and speaking in what sounded like agonized epithets. 

As he was adjusting his Keffiyeh, he’d been stung by a Deathstalker scorpion, a dangerous species whose venom holds incredibly potent neurotoxins that can be lethal.

As we watched him trying to suck out the venom, his arm began turning colors and swelling up before our eyes. We were 7 kilometers (~4 miles) from the nearest town in the middle of the desert, with no cell service. 

He explained that Bedouin mothers will throw Deathstalkers into the fire and put the ashes into their baby’s milk to help them build up a tolerance. If one of us had been stung, we quite likely would have needed to be airlifted to a local hospital.

Over the next few hours, the intense swelling began to subside and it appeared he would be okay.

And then we encountered a random camel in the middle of nowhere, who proceeded to chase us as we tried to capture some video of him. 

It ended up being our most memorable hike ever, and not in a good way.

By the time we got to our hotel, nearly eight hours after the hike began, the fear had subsided, but the memory is still haunting nine years later!

Bret Love & Mary Gabbett from Blue Ridge Mountains Travel Guide

10. # Vanlife Troubles

Instagram makes #vanlife look like every moment is a dream — waking up with ocean views and falling asleep beneath the stars.

That’s surely part of it, but there are also many not-so-pretty moments.

One of the worst parts of van life is dealing with vehicle issues. You can’t just call AAA and get a rental car while yours is fixed because not only is that your mode of transport — but it’s your home!

Neither my husband, Ben, nor I really knew much about fixing vehicles before we dove headfirst into building a campervan. So we learned on the road!

While traveling through Utah during the month of June, we had one pretty scary incident…

We had been exploring Canyonlands National Park and just watched an incredible sunset. As we were walking back to our campervan, a man called over to us and asked, “Is that your van?”

We nodded proudly, thinking he liked our campervan setup.

“It seems to be leaking quite a bit of fluid,” he said.

And that’s when we saw a giant puddle beneath the engine that was steadily growing.

We stopped in our tracks. We had no clue what to do.

The man called over to someone and all of a sudden we were surrounded by men and boys — a Boy Scout troop, it turns out. We popped the hood, and everyone huddled around. We started getting all sorts of suggestions as the sun began to set.

“Fill the radiator with water,” one man suggested. “Try to coast back to town instead of using the gas,” another chimed in.

The boys and dads piled back into their cars, wished us good luck and drove into the distance as we were left all alone in a desert that was growing increasingly dark by the minute.

We followed their advice and coasted all the way back to Moab. Luckily, it was downhill for the majority of the drive. We made it to town unscathed and parked across the street from an auto parts shop.

The next day, Ben bought the materials and spent the day under the 100-degree sun watching YouTube tutorials (thank goodness for car vloggers!).

He successfully fixed the leaky radiator hose that nearly stranded us in the desert, and we felt a pretty big sense of pride that we were able to fix it ourselves — with the help of an entire Boy Scout troop, of course!

Having a basic knowledge of how engines work and a few tools will make you feel a lot more confident on the road. Plus, YouTube can come in clutch when you need a bit of assistance!

Katie from Two Wandering Soles

11. Boarding Denied In Africa

Our travel horror story takes place on a recent safari tour while traveling Africa .

We began our trip in Johannesburg and navigated through Botswana and Zimbabwe. Finishing in Victoria Falls, we planned to fly back into South Africa for three nights in Cape Town before departing home to Copenhagen. 

The trip started well in Johannesburg and we had an incredible 10-day safari experience. Our final stop at Victoria Falls would be the perfect conclusion to this bucket-list trip.

With everything in order, we made our way to the airport for our flight to Cape Town and were excited to relax in a luxury hotel and have some time alone after a group tour.

Once we reached the airport, our travel horror story began.

We entered the airport and approached the ticket gate to pick up our boarding passes. My partner received his, but then I was informed that I could not be ticketed. It was explained that I did not meet passport requirements to enter South Africa.

I was puzzled, as I had been there only a week and a half before with no issues. As an American, I also qualified for visa-free entry and only required a single passport stamp on arrival.

Then it was explained to me that I was denied boarding because I received a few stamps during my travels and no longer met passport requirements.

South Africa has a separate passport policy that requires two consecutive empty pages to enter the country, regardless of visa status. I fit the requirements when I started my trip but did not when I was set to fly home.

After some moments of panic, we decided to return to the resort in Victoria Falls and rebook our flights home. This gave us the chance to see more of the area and do some extra activities and excursions.

Luckily, we were able to reroute our flight through Doha and spend two nights in a new city that wasn’t on our original itinerary. 

All in all, it was a lesson in planning and preparation and we will always check passport requirements as well as visa requirements when we travel in the future. We had a fantastic trip and adjusted to the circumstances we were met with.

Derek from Everything Copenhagen

12. An Encounter With Bed Bugs In Thailand

I was only a week into my trip around the world when I got cursed with every traveler’s worst nightmare – bed bugs!

I was so excited to finally get to Koh Tao in Thailand and enjoy some time on the beach; however, my time on this island actually turned out to be one of my worst and most itchy travel memories.

In order to get from Bangkok to Koh Tao you have to take a bus and then a boat. The journey went smooth, but once I arrived, I was so tired that I went straight to the hotel to sleep.

A few hours later, I woke up with an itchy red rash on my back.

I already have sensitive skin, so I assumed it was just an allergic reaction to the sheets. But the next day the rash had gotten even worse. It was more red, itchy, and warm.

Starting to panic, I decided to go to the pharmacy to get something to help calm the allergic reaction. I lifted up my shirt to show my rash and the lady in the pharmacy said, “Oooh bed bugs!”.

There was only one thing to do. We threw all our stuff out on the terrace, took all our clothes to the laundry service, and washed every item we owned.

In the meantime, the bites got worse and it reached a point where I couldn’t sleep from the fiery itch. I did in fact have an allergic reaction; it was just to a small bloodsucking insect.

Upon talking to our hotel manager, we learned that the bed bugs most likely came from the local Songserm ferry because it has long been known as an infested bed bug nest.

I’ve learned that no matter how thorough you check a hotel room for bed bugs, you can always get them from somewhere else.

But I’ve also learned that it isn’t the end of the world. Just do a thorough cleaning of all your belongings, and you can easily get past this.

The worst part about this travel horror story is that I couldn’t be in the sun and salt water for weeks because the rash just got 10 times worse – so my time in beautiful Koh Tao was mostly spent inside a hotel room or in the shadow of a palm tree.

Cecilie from Worldwide Walkers

13. Lost Footage On The Adventure Of A Lifetime

Several years ago, I set off on my most adventurous expedition yet:

To climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

As a once in a lifetime trip, I set out with the aim of capturing the climb on video.

I made sure I had everything I needed, so I packed my GoPro along with two spare batteries — there are obviously no charging points on Kilimanjaro — and a couple of memory cards.

From arriving in Tanzania and daily video diaries to the spectacular views and camp life, I captured all kinds of wonderful footage. After a successful summit followed by a long and painful descent, we arrived back in camp for our final night before the last stretch home.

But I soon realized my GoPro was missing. I’d attached it to my rucksack for ease of access and it had fallen off on the descent.

I was beside myself.

Having had only a couple of hours sleep in the last 48 hours, and still feeling the effects of the altitude sickness, I made the very questionable decision to go and look for it.

My guide did everything he could to dissuade me but I was a woman on a mission. So he finally agreed, sent two porters with me, and off we went back up the mountain.

Within 20 minutes it was dark and I was the only one with a head torch. We hiked 1,000 vertical meters (~3,281 feet) back up Kilimanjaro. It took four and a half hours. I never found my GoPro.

Arriving back to camp, I felt deflated and exhausted. The GoPro itself I could do without. But I was heartbroken about losing all the footage from my climb – every single bit of it. That footage truly held the visuals for one of my most epic adventure travel stories to date.

I learned a very important lesson that day:

Never film everything on one memory card. I’d taken a spare with me, but didn’t think to divide my footage across the two.

Now whenever I travel, I intermittently switch the memory cards. So if something goes wrong, I’ll at least have some footage.

I’d also never recommend trying to hike back up a mountain in the dark with two strangers looking for a lost camera! That was one of the poorest judgment calls I have ever made because the exhaustion of summit night meant I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.

My footage was important to me, but your safety is always more important.

Jessie from Pocket Wanderings

14. Being Pickpocketed In Lima, Peru

A somewhat crazy story happened to us during our trip to South America .

While in Peru’s capital Lima, we decided to spend an afternoon watching the Circuito Mágico del Agua, the magical water fountains in the Parque de la Reserva.

Since the park is located a bit outside the city center, we decided to take the city’s Metro bus. 

Buses are a popular form of transportation in Lima and they are always packed. Upon boarding the bus, we were pushed hard and seconds later, my husband noticed that his smartphone was no longer in his pocket.

Without hesitation, he began asking the people on the bus for his smartphone. A man asked us about our phone’s color and explained that he had just seen a middle-aged lady behind him put a smartphone of the same color in her bag.

When questioned about this, the lady became angry and got off at the first stop. We followed her.

After more than half an hour of discussions, following her getting on and off other buses, and hints from bystanders, a security officer became aware of our situation and suggested we call the police.

When the police showed up around the corner a few minutes later, the lady grabbed our cell phone, which she had hidden in her underwear, and pressed it into my husband’s hand.

By the time the police arrived, we were unable to press charges against the lady, but at least we had our phone back!

Here’s what we learned:

To avoid pickpockets while traveling , never carry your valuables in your pockets.

I live in the pickpocket capital of Europe, Barcelona, and have never been pickpocketed, as I always carry my valuables in a well-closed bag in plain sight.

My husband, on the other hand, is not always that careful.

Also, if you get pickpocketed, seek help from others. Make yourself heard in English or, if possible, the local language.

We were fortunate in this case, as we are fluent in Spanish. Without help from bystanders, we would never have gotten the phone back.

Vicki from SweetVidaHome

15. That Time We Drove Through A Wildfire

Four years ago, we traveled in South Africa .

While we loved the experience, we also had a hell of a fright during the Game Drive in Kruger National Park — a game reserve park in South Africa that is one of the largest on the entire continent.

You are able to visit the park in your own car or with a tour guide on a 4-by- 4; however it’s best to go with a tour guide, as it’s the safest way (or it should be) and the guide takes you to the best places to spot animals.

But when we did our tour, we got caught up in a fire in the middle of the park.

We turned onto a gravel road as our guide wanted to show us a leopard, and we noticed we were driving closer to fire. Along the road, the fire became quite hot and intense, and we could barely see the road due to the smoke.

Fortunately, we were able to drive through the fire without crashing, but it was one of the scariest travel experiences I’ve ever had. Looking back, we could have easily died if we ran into a car problem or small accident.

We were very lucky to escape without any damage, but the guide should have assessed the risk better when decided to drive towards the fire.

Nevertheless, a Kruger National Park Safari is an amazing experience and, apart from this incident, we loved it.

Jorge & Claudia from Portugal Things

16. A Creepy Crawly Travel Experience On A Vietnam Bus

One of my worst travel stories is from a truly terrible night that happened when we were backpacking through Vietnam and we decided to take an overnight 15-hour bus ride to get to our next destination.

Overnight buses are very common in Vietnam, as they save you money since you aren’t paying for accommodation for a night and it also saves you time so you can sleep on the bus while getting to your next destination.

Unfortunately on this bus I quickly realized that I wasn’t getting any sleep.

The first issue was that the beds in the bus were designed like bunk beds — so there were three rows of bunks, each with a top and bottom and with two aisles going down the bus.

I was assigned a top bunk and immediately regretted the decision of taking the bus because I get motion sickness on just about anything that moves.

If you’ve ever been to Vietnam you will know what I’m talking about when I say the traffic and driving are crazy, which just exaggerated my motion sickness.

Immediately, I took a motion sickness pill; but before the pill started to kick in, I started feeling really sick. I asked the driver’s assistant if I could move down to the bottom bunk so the motion wasn’t as extreme as the top bunk and they told me we were picking up more people and the bottom bunk was taken.

Thankfully after a few minutes, the assistant realized how sick I was and told me which seat I could take. By this time the motion sickness medicine was kicking in and the bottom bunk was much better in terms of the motion.

I started settling in and feeling better when all of a sudden I felt a tickle on my arm.

Looking down, I saw an inch-long cockroach on my arm!

I freaked out and tried to kill it but it got away — but my travel horror story wasn’t over.

Looking around, I realized I was surrounded!

There were cockroaches crawling all along the window and going inside the wall of the bus and under my seat.

Because I had just made such a big scene trying to move seats I felt like I couldn’t move back to my upper bunk. I decided to get out my travel sheet, get inside of it, put it around my head, and have a tiny hole just for my nose and mouth and try and fall asleep.

Let’s just say I didn’t sleep a wink on that terrible overnight bus.

Lesson learned:

Take a plane! I looked up flights to our destination later on and realized it was only $20 more dollars to fly.

Jessica from Unearth the Voyage

17. A Cruise Horror Travel Story

In December 2019, I embarked on a 30-day South American cruise expedition.

At first, this may sound like a once-in-a-lifetime adventure; however, about halfway through the trip, it turned into a travel horror story.

Planned over a year and a half in advance, my family and I made sure to have every detail of our dream back-to-back cruise perfect, down to the last excursion in Buenos Aires.

Unfortunately, with this cruise leaving in early December, it was impossible for my 17-year-old sister to join us on the first leg.

Knowing this, we decided to book her flight to Santiago, Chile — which was around 1.5 hours from the departure port — through our cruise line. This way, she was insured by the cruise line during her entire journey.

After her flights, she would be shuttled to the cruise port by the cruise line to meet us on the ship.

Easy, right?

Ironically, no.

All avid cruisers know to get to the departure port at least a day early in case of cancelled flights. Well, our cruise line decided it would be smart for her to arrive the morning of.

Her first flight was delayed over four hours, causing her to miss her connection to Santiago. After calling the cruise line, they found her a flight leaving a few hours later and guaranteed her shuttle once she arrived.

Once landing, she immediately located the cruise line’s shuttle service. They quickly glanced up and down their list, and her name was nowhere to be found!

While the cruise line employee she had previously talked to had guaranteed her shuttle, my sister was out of luck.

Practically in tears and with the cruise leaving in a mere three hours, my sister did not know what to do next. Her phone had died on the flight, she did not speak the local language, and only had $100.

After pacing the airport, she found a taxi driver willing to help her out. Only to make matters worse, about halfway through the drive, the taxi stopped at a rest stop, and somehow, my sister’s phone was stolen.

We eventually found her emotionally distraught in her stateroom — which is a terrible way to start your dream vacation.

At the end of the day, we learned that when traveling, especially internationally, always have your documentation printed out in case anything goes wrong.

Ellie from Ellie’s Travel Tips

18. When Your B&B Owner Decides To Go On Vacation

It was around 11pm and we were desperately trying to find our apartment in the stunning seaside town of Himare in the Albanian Riviera.

The GPS took us to an unknown road and after searching for 30 minutes, we finally found our apartment — only to be told that the owner had left for Greece for a vacation!

The thought of having no place to go that night really freaked us out.

We tried calling a few hotels and B&Bs in the area, only to be told that they were closed for the holidays or there was no response. December in Albania is rather quiet, and a lot of hotels close for the winter season.

We spent another 30 minutes trying to find a stay for that night.

My three-year-old twins, who had been peacefully sleeping in the car until then, woke up and started crying — because the damn car had stopped and mommy and daddy were talking loudly!

We were helplessly stranded in the streets of Himare, trying to pacify the screaming twins while simultaneously attempting to get an apartment for the night.

Not a single soul to be found, we finally accepted that we were going to spend the rest of the night in the car. We made a few last calls and were finally able to get an actual human on the other side of the phone, who offered us a place to stay.

The apartment was not far away from where we were parked, and the host actually came looking for us — the best thing that happened to us that day!

However, we didn’t quite like what he said next:

His apartment was located uphill about 0.5 kilometers (~0.3 miles) away and there was no road. 

Before we could process this information, he made another call and a lady appeared before us in no time. Her daughter ran a holiday apartment which was closed since she was away on holiday, too; however, the lady offered to open the apartment just for us because we had kids. How nice of her!  

The lady charged us €30 per night, and we took it without even looking at the place. 

When we reached the apartment, we were really stunned to see how big and beautiful it was. Nicely decorated, two bedrooms and a shower room. We were so relieved. 

Although the experience was a nightmare and could have easily turned into one of our worst travel stories, we were glad to have found such a warm host who also cooked up a lovely breakfast for us. 

When using accommodation booking platforms, always get a confirmation from the host before your journey begins. 

Anuradha from  Country Hopping Couple

19. A Toilet Issue Turned Travel Horror Story

Shortly after my husband and I checked into our Airbnb in London, it didn’t take us long to discover our toilet had a leak. 

It was enough to cause a small stream of water across the bathroom floor, but it was nothing we couldn’t easily step over. Still, we contacted our Airbnb host to see if he could fix the issue.

He promised to come to check it out on night two of our stay, but when that night came he let us know he couldn’t make it, citing train issues. At that stage, we only had one night left and weren’t the most impressed with the delay.

Our host did keep his promise and arrived the next night, where he went to work tinkering with the bathroom plumbing. 

After about an hour, he emerged from the bathroom, button-up shirt completely soaked with water. He said that while he had not corrected the issue, he put a “temporary fix” on the toilet, and had contacted an emergency plumber in the meantime. 

Then he left.

As we waited for the emergency plumber, I was irritated to see that he hadn’t put the seat back on the toilet. 

My frustrations grew an hour later when our host contacted us to say the emergency plumber couldn’t make it out until 1 am. We declined the service since that time felt entirely inappropriate and we were leaving early to head back to the airport.

Our host did at least have the decency to return and put the seat back on the toilet and left us a bottle of inexpensive wine as an offering.

However, it didn’t take long to discover that his “temporary fix” was not a fix at all. After one flush, water came gushing out from below the toilet. For the rest of the evening, we used the toilet as sparingly as possible.

After doing our best to evade the large puddle to shower in the morning, we used the restroom one last time before heading back to the airport. Upon flushing, we were horrified to not only see water spew out from below, but feces. 

We ran out of there as quickly as we could.

Our biggest takeaway was that we did not have to stick it out in a rental where the bathroom was broken for our entire stay. In the future, we’ll immediately contact Airbnb to cancel for a refund, and look for alternative lodging. 

Theresa from  Fueled By Wanderlust

20. Hospital Trips In Asia

Traveling is something that we love, so we decided to quit our jobs and travel for 12-18 months with our teenage daughters.

There are some travel insurance horror stories out there, so we knew we would need a brilliant policy for our family.

Little did we know how important this would end up being for us. In fact, we ended up visiting four different hospitals in Asia on our 13-month trip.

The first visit was when my husband developed kidney stones in Battambang in Cambodia. We had no idea what the pain was, but we put it down to a couple of dodgy cocktails we had had one night in Siem Reap.

I was woken at 1:30 am by the shower and I knew it was bad. After some help from the hotel desk, we were racing through the streets of Battambang to find a hospital that was open.

The first one looked dark, so our Tuk-tuk driver who didn’t speak English took us to the international hospital, which was only open from 9am to 6pm and we were too late. So, we ended up back at the local hospital.

The language barrier was difficult and unfortunately, they thought Mark had food poisoning, which they treated him for.

After some calls to our insurance agency back in Australia, the nurse we spoke to on the phone diagnosed him with kidney stones and tried to contact the hospital.

Once Mark’s pain was manageable it was decided that we would be medically evacuated by car to Phnom Pehn to a larger hospital.

Once in Phnom Pehn, the pain returned and we ended up at the Vin Mec Hospital where he was diagnosed with one stubborn little kidney stone and given the correct treatment for it. The level of care in both hospitals was excellent even with the language barrier.

Our second hospital visit was in Da Nang, Vietnam . I had been suffering from the sweats and general tiredness for a couple of weeks.

When I had to wear a snow coat because I was so cold, we knew another visit to a foreign hospital was necessary. Again the process was easy and we were well taken care of in a very modern, well-equipped hospital.

Our third and final visit was in Hanoi when our daughter slipped on some stairs and bumped her head.

I had always been so worried about having to visit a foreign hospital, but all of our experiences have been positive so far.

If you are unwell, please don’t be afraid to call your insurance agency and get them to direct you to an authorized hospital in your area. They can help you and also liaise with your agency about the care you need and what you are covered for.

Bec from Wyld Family Travel

21. An Expensive Operation In Egypt

Our romantic trip to Egypt turned out to be a sad event and a life lesson.

We were staying at a beautiful resort on the Red Sea in Hurghada. Everything was perfect: beautiful weather, turquoise water, delicious Egyptian food. The vacation was truly lovely.

Then, two days before our flight back, my husband broke his leg while playing beach volley! 

He was immediately sent to a private clinic in Hurghada and operated on.  My husband spent one night at the clinic, and our flight back to Europe was the next day.

The operation went well — though the doctor said it would cost around $10,000 because he’d put a platinum element inside the bone. 

We had travel insurance, but the insurance company wouldn’t agree to pay $10k. In their opinion, the amount was exaggerated for this type of operation. 

Then, the clinic took my husband’s passport and refused to give it back. 

Obviously, we needed his passport to take our flight home. The flight was in the morning, and we needed to leave the clinic ASAP and head to the airport as we were already late. 

After my calls to the embassy and the insurance company, the hospital finally gave us back the passport. In the end, the insurance paid $10,000 to the clinic.

Always get good travel insurance from a renowned company — and never let anyone keep your passport.

Sasha Naslin from The Alternative Travel Guide  

Bonus Short Travel Stories

Looking for more short stories about traveling the world ? Check out:

17 True Short Adventure Travel Stories To Inspire Your Next Trip

25 Crazy Travel Stories You Need To Read To Believe

23 Inspiring Travel Stories Sharing The Kindness Of Strangers

16 Short Funny Travel Stories That Will Make You Laugh Out Loud

38 Inspiring Travel Love Stories From The Road

Sexual Assault Stories From The Road (& What I’ve Learned)

8 Crazy NYC Subway Stories That Will Make You Hail A Cab

A Host’s Perspective: My Worst Airbnb Horror Stories

21 Travel Horror Stories About Scary Travel Experiences

20 Embarrassing Travel Stories That Will Make You Laugh & Blush

18 Scary Travel Stories From Haunted Hotels To Creepy Cabins

What travel horror stories would you add to this list?

*Featured image via Canva Pro

Enjoyed these travel horror stories? Pin them for later!

Related posts:

About jessie festa.

Jessie Festa is a New York-based travel content creator who is passionate about empowering her audience to experience new places and live a life of adventure. She is the founder of the solo female travel blog, Jessie on a Journey, and is editor-in-chief of Epicure & Culture , an online conscious tourism magazine. Along with writing, Jessie is a professional photographer and is the owner of NYC Photo Journeys , which offers New York photo tours, photo shoots, and wedding photography. Her work has appeared in publications like USA Today, CNN, Business Insider, Thrillist, and WestJet Magazine.

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Great Info in This Blog Thanks For Sharing This

Blog is very interesting and useful

oof that sounds soo cool!!

its nerve wracking.. hehe..

Share some good stories too on Travel please 🙂

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Afraid of Travel Nursing? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Be

You may have encountered a travel nurse at work, or if you are like me, have wanted to be a travel nurse since before you even entered nursing school. You have also probably heard some horror stories and common misconceptions that go along with the travel nursing profession that have made you think twice about whether or not you are up for the task.

Many of these fears and misconceptions are mostly rooted in hearsay and are in need clarification. But travel nursing has lots of perks. Here’s why you shouldn’t let those stories keep you from taking a travel nursing assignment.

Start your travel career here!

Ways to Combat Common Fears when Transitioning from a Staff RN to a Traveling RN

The best way to ease the fear of change is to educate yourself and be prepared. Lets address some of the more common concerns:

• Moving to a new city : If you have never been to that city before or don’t know anyone there, it is in your best interest to let your travel agency supply your housing for you when you take a new assignment. They will make sure it is in a safe neighborhood and close to work. I recommend letting your agency find your housing for you for the first couple assignments until you get the hang of it. Prior to starting your new job, do some research on the city you will be going to. I have found that most cities are virtually the same; they all have Walmarts, Targets, grocery stores and malls. It’s just a matter of finding out where they are (that’s what GPS’s are for). You are not traveling to some barren land with no food and water so don’t fret.
• New work environment : If you know that you are going to be traveling in the near future, it would be a good idea to start floating to different floors at your current hospital just to get you used to being in an ever changing work environment. Travelers do tend to get floated to different units when they are on assignment. I can tell you from personal experience the more you float the easier it gets. Remember that nurses take care of patients virtually the same everywhere in the nation. The hardest part about working on a new unit is finding out where they keep their bedpans, how to get a hold of the doctors, and what the door codes are.
• Leaving friends and family : The first couple of weeks of any travel assignment can be very lonely, especially if you don’t know anyone close. It is important to plan for downtime and find activities to keep you busy until you make new connections. I suggest buying a kindle, finding a gym, subscribing to Netflix and doing puzzles; that’s what I did and it kept me busy. You will eventually make connections with your co-workers, neighbors and other random people, it just takes a little time. Before you leave on assignment, plan for your friends and family to come visit you. I’m pretty sure my mom visited me in every city. I also made it a point to call all my closest friends and family every Friday, just to keep in touch. Being away from the ones you love will only make you appreciate them more.

Speak to a staffing agent today.

Misconceptions about Travel Nursing

There are fears and there are misconceptions. Fears are created from the unknown and misconceptions are rooted in hearsay. I heard numerous horror stories and travel nursing tales prior to starting my first assignment, but I also heard of amazing experiences so I took the misconceptions with a grain of salt.

According to pantravelers.org , there is an estimated 15,000 travel nurses actively working in the US. I figured if they could do it, it must not be that bad.

Some common misconceptions/myths about travel nursing include:

• You have to change jobs and move every 13 weeks : The reality is that you can choose to extend your healthcare contract at any facility as long as there is a need. If there isn’t a need at that particular hospital and you don’t feel like moving, then have your recruiter find you another assignment in the same city.
• Travel nursing is for young people : According to The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation , in 2010 the average age of registered nurses was 47. Medical facilities want experienced nurses who know what they are doing. I have encountered multiple couples and single nurses, who are older than myself, who just load up the RV and hit the road.
• Travel nursing isn’t a stable source of income : The United States Bureau of Labor and Statistics predicts a 19% job growth for Registered nurses by the year 2022. On top of the existing nursing shortage, the high demand for travel nurses is only expected to grow. Becoming and maintaining a career as a travel nurse requires a little more thought and financial planning then a staff position requires only because of downtime between assignments and the off chance that a contract gets canceled. No matter what profession you are in you should always have money saved in case of an emergency. Many companies offer matching retirement packages and a competitive salary, not to mention all of the tax benefits. Financial freedom and the freedom to travel are just some of the many benefits of the travel nursing profession.

See the country while doing what you love!

Like with any profession, being a traveling nurse has its benefits and downfalls. If you are bored with the same mundane routines and are looking for something a little more challenging and exciting, then a travel nursing career is right for you. The money is great but the experiences are even better.

You will learn and see things that you would never otherwise get to partake in as long as you stay in your comfort zone. If being comfortable is where you prefer to be, then a permanent staff job may be the right thing for you.

Don’t let fears and misconceptions prevent you from experiencing your personal and professional life to its fullest. Be prepared, get educated and create your own travel nursing tales.  

Ready to start travel nursing?

Travel nursing agencies can help you navigate the world of travel nursing jobs. They can help you find the best travel nurse assignments and even help you negotiate your pay package.

Travel nurses typically enjoy lots of incentives, including higher pay, a housing stipend, healthcare and travel reimbursement — all while gaining valuable nursing experience and making new friends.

So if you’re ready to start enjoying the benefits of travel then talk with a staffing agency today.

Talk with a recruiter about a new travel assignment today!

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Join the many nurses already traveling.

Don't miss out on your adventure..

Traveling Without a Passport

10 Reddit Travel Horror Stories That’ll Keep You Up At Night

Many would like you to believe that the scariest stories are full of vengeful spirits, but anyone with a passport can tell you what really makes a person tremble with fear…

Who doesn’t love a scary story? You know the kind; ones that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, your heart rate quicken and your palms sweaty. While some people would like you to believe that the scariest stories are full of demons, demigods, and vengeful spirits, we know better than that.

Anyone with a passport can tell you real scary stories.

A few of the classics include Tale of the Lost Luggage, The Thing On My Bed: an Airbnb Rental From Hell, Rosemary’s Passport…Has Been Stolen , and my personal favourite, The Silence of the Disgruntled TSA Agent.

So in celebration of all things scary, we’ve hand selected  the best travel horror stories from the Reddit community that will have you sleeping with one eye open!

1. When Bad Directions Attack!

So my sense of direction is pretty horrific and there was a time I was in a very remote part of Austria (Grünau) and wanted to go meet up with some friends at a lake. I grabbed a bike, and set off, map in hand. All was going well until I realized I was in a really, really remote part of the town, and pretty soon realized I was also on an incline. My poor sense of direction and my infantile relationship with maps inadvertently led me up a mountain.

I was 2.5 hours into my voyage, there was no sign of any life around me, the noises got stranger, and there was definitely no lake in sight. I looked at my map wondering how it could deceive me and where our relationship took a wrong turn (pun intended). Then, I turn around and BOOM, I get a flat tire. It was getting darker, I was shitting bricks by the second, and any moment now, something was going to jump out and eat me alive, because of logic.

I eventually stop caring that my bike will collapse on me and start riding it down a very rocky trail at a pretty fast pace just hoping to get out of there as fast as possible. Safety hazard, absolutely, but again, logic.

Several minutes later, I finally see a highway, so I get back on a known trail and just a few kilometres up, I see the sign where I missed my turn for the lake. After my 2 hour detour, I had no desire to be near anything wet as I was already soaked from exhaustion, so tried to get reception to call and see if anyone could pick me up. Eventually, I was able to track down some elderly Austrian men who could see my dilemma and gave me their phone, and a large pint of Austrian beer to save the day.

Story by Gloria Atanmo, The Blog Abroad , originally appeared in HuffPost

2. Nightmare at Check-In

I was traveling to Spain with my ex-boyfriend, and we were connecting in some small Spanish airport to get to the even smaller city we were going to for a comics convention (we were guests). I ALWAYS just use my iPhone for boarding passes, but after running full throttle through this tiny Spanish airport to get to the gate for our tiny plane, they wouldn’t let me through because it wasn’t a “real” boarding pass.

So we stood there and quite literally watched our plane fly away as the gate person just stared at us. Then, we got fucked around with for about three hours trying to figure out when the next flight was. I swear they were doing it on purpose – we had to walk back and forth from kiosk to kiosk multiple times. At this point, I hadn’t slept in about 20 hours and I was trying so hard not to go all bitchy American.

Finally, we managed to get new boarding passes, but our flight wasn’t for six hours. So we met an old English gentleman and got wasted at 11 am.

Story by Reddit User walnutwhale  

3. The  Friendly Stranger

I was 18, and it was my first time travelling alone. I went to Argentina for 3 months. My first week in, and I’m wandering around Buenos Aires. At the time I knew enough Spanish to get by, and a man approaches me and asks for directions in Spanish. I tell him that I’m not from here. He then asks me if I am a tourist. I say yes, and he seems delighted, quickly telling me that he is too. He offers up the idea to explore the city together. I, alone in the big city, agree.

We start walking together, and he seems like a really nice guy. After about an hour, he says ‘tengo hambre’, I’m hungry. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it’s about 1, so we go to a nice restaurant. He tells me I have to try the steaks and red wine. I’m not much of a wine fan, but he convinces me. We are there about an hour, and the bill comes. It’s 140 pesos. He pulls out 100 pesos. I try to pay for my half, but he only lets me pay 40 pesos. He tells me I can get the beers later. We continue on our little adventure and eventually come to a bar with outdoor seating. The waitress brings out a litre of beer, and we relax. Soon enough, another litre comes out. We finish the second litre and leave this bar. Then I wake up 8 hours later, missing my debit card, iPod, cellphone, and travel guide.

Story by Reddit User Peter176

4. An American Tourist in Paris (and only Paris)

So last summer I went on a petite Eurotrip of Western Europe with two friends of mine. Our first destination was Paris. On our last night there, we spend the night drinking at the Garden of Tuileries with our Irish hostel mates. We end up getting pretty blasted, and my friend becomes unattached from his bag for about two minutes. After these two minutes, he realizes he put his bag down and rushes back to where we were to go grab it, only to realize that it’s gone. Completely gone.

Along with the 250 Euro he just extracted from an ATM, his debit card, his passport, his Eurail pass, and pretty much everything else important in his life at that time. Again, this was the night before we had to hop on a train to Amsterdam. We end up having to stay a couple of extra days to help try to recover the damage, etc. Of course, this turns out to be July 4th weekend as well, meaning the U.S. embassy wouldn’t open until the following Tuesday (I believe it was a Friday night the event occurred). In the end, it was cheaper for him to stay in Paris and have us complete the Eurotrip than for him to come along with us. Plus it would take him another two weeks to get another passport reissued.

Story by Reddit User Fuhiapplesyum  

5. Flight of the Living Dead

On Lufthansa flying to Germany, I was relaxing listening to my music and suddenly a woman stands up a few rows ahead and starts screaming and pointing. I sort of flinched and took my headphones off trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Then a couple of other people stand up and move away from the middle row of seats were I eventually figured out that a man was unconscious and his wife right next to him was completely frozen. Then the flight attendant comes and completely overreacts, slapping him and yelling scaring the cabin. A couple more flight attendants arrive and carry the (still) unconscious man to the food prep area and call for a doctor over the plane intercom.

Thankfully there was a doctor on board and he assessed the situation. An hour later the man walked out of the food prep area and sat back down in his seat. He was checked on periodically by the doctor. After we landed I saw the man that was unconscious and I asked him how he was doing. He replied “everything is ok” and walked away just fine. Amazing.

Story by Reddit User Lilodude

See Also: The 10 Most Haunted Places on Earth

6. Let the Right One…Take You to the Border

I landed in Kenya the day a coup started. Ended up stuck in the hotel for 3 days. We kept waiting for things to calm down enough to get out of town, but it never did. Eventually, the concierge let us know that the guy who did the hotel’s laundry had a brother who was running a minivan to the border at 4 am.

So we put our complete faith in this person we had never met. He was incredibly nice and got us to the border without incident. It was a bit of a hassle trying to re-plan the trip on the fly in Tanzania, rather than do all the things we planned in Kenya. But it was still fun.

Story by Reddit User Hemlockecho  

7. Orange Juice: Portrait of a Ruined Flight

I spilled a litre of orange juice on myself about 3 minutes into a ten hour flight from Tokyo to Vancouver. I sat in a puddle of sticky orange juice for the entire time. Then after a really rough landing (I get bad motion sickness), I puked on myself in the aisle waiting to de-plane. In hindsight, this was probably worse for (1) whoever sat beside me and (2) literally everyone trying to get off the plane.

Story by Reddit User Banterbandit

Travel to: Vancouver from Toronto

8. Dawn of the Very Drunk

I left Oktoberfest at 11 pm with my friends and took the subway towards our campsite. I got off the train to go get something. I got off the wrong stop at 1 am, lost my phone, didn’t know where I was, didn’t speak German, and didn’t know the address of the place I was going. I was drunk btw, but I managed to find a hotel concierge who was kind enough to find the address of the place I was staying and I taxied it back. Returned at 4 am.

Story by Reddit User Kanji_sasahara

9. Tale of the Disappearing Hostel

Recently a friend and I stayed in the Amazon jungle near Iquitos (Peru) on a camping trip. After five days out in the wild, I was ready for a nice warm shower and a good nights sleep in a decent bed. The hostel was a set of floating buildings right on the river. We decided to go for dinner out in the city. It started to rain incredibly hard. I have never seen rain come down harder than this. We waited it out for a couple hours and enjoyed a few beers. Once it stopped we went back to find out that our hostel had dislodged from its anchor and floated out and pretty far down the river. The only remaining building was the reception office. I guess the hostel owner didn’t see us leave for dinner.

They thought that we were in our rooms and called the police to go pick us up. When they didn’t find us in our room they started to search the river with spotlights and every boat they could spare. Needless to say, the police and hostel owner were relieved to see us walk up completely dry and alive.

Story by Reddit User   Safetybreak

See Also: The 11 Most Haunted Places in America

10. The Turkish Bathroom Project

In Turkey, a lot of the public toilets have attendants outside that you have to pay some small amount of money to in order to use them. We were out one day and my dad wanted to use the toilet, so my dad handed the money to the woman outside, and went to go in.

Except, this woman wasn’t a toilet attendant. As the realization of what my dad thought she was spread over her face, she started screaming “You think I am a toilet attendant? YOU THINK I AM A TOILET ATTENDANT??? RAAARRGHH!!!” in broken half German half English and started chasing him down the road waving her handbag at him.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are just about dying from laughter and a very confused German man comes out of the toilets wondering where his wife has gone to.

Story by Reddit User  TheAngryGoat  

Terrifying stuff right? If you’ve been left shaking with fear like me, then let’s do the online equivalent of leaving the lights on and look at some tours that won’t leave you stranded without your wallet in the City of Love or chasing after a stray hostel in Peru.

Do you have a killer travel horror story you want to share? Let us know in the comments!

Jackie is a travel-addicted Canadian who currently resides in Vienna, Austria. When she’s not writing travel guides or reading her new favourite book, she’s planning her next weekend getaway somewhere in Europe.

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49 Real Nurses Share The Terrifying Hospital Ghost Stories That Scared Them To Death

• https://thoughtcatalog.com/?p=570819

1. The Vanishing Girl

I was a new nurse at our hospital, and only been working there a couple of months. I had brought a patient of mine up to day surgery from the ER for an endoscopy and they called back down and asked me to bring her family up because she only spoke Italian (and not enough English) and they needed someone to consent for the procedure. After dropping them off, I I walked past the waiting room to head back down the hall to the elevators. I took the back way to get to the ER and the hallways are all deserted – it used to be the pediatric wing of the hospital, but that is all shut down for years and the rooms are just empty and full of broken equipment and beds and crap. As I reached the old nurses station at the T junction between the pediatric hallway in the hallway that goes to the elevators, I saw a little girl standing across from the nurses station further down the hall. She had big pigtails, was wearing a brown dress, white shoes, holding a teddy bear. I thought perhaps she was a family member who had walked away from the day surgery waiting room. I was concerned that she would go into one of the rooms and get hurt or lost, so I said “hey little girl, what are you doing? You don’t need to be over there, you’re going to get hurt…” and I walked around the nursing station to go grab her hand and bring her back. I shit you not, she VANISHED as I got about 15 feet away from her. Every hair on my body stood up straight and I turned and ran like a bat out of hell down to the elevator. I pounded that button for what seemed like an eternity until the elevator got to the floor. As I got back to the ER I walked up to the nurses desk, white as a sheet, and one of the older nurses looked at me and said “Jesus Christ what’s wrong with you?” I remember babbling like an idiot as I tried to tell them what happened. After listening to me for a moment or two, the nurse said “oh you saw the little girl ghost… she’s been around here for years…” and I remember saying “well thanks for telling me about it before this…!” Apparently the ghost has even been seen down in the ER, ducking in and out of patient rooms and peeking around curtains. My wife worked up on the 7th floor and she said that one time on nights a whole row of patient rooms started yelling about a little girl that was running around in the rooms. I guess she gets around.

2. Like The Dead Are Leaving The Hospital

I work in intensive care a small community hospital. We have a 9 bed unit that is completely closed off from the medical floor via two doorways. Two nights ago, we were all sitting at our the station, charting, when we all heard footsteps coming down the hall. Its a completely open unit where you can see every room from everywhere. No one was in the unit with us. CT is below us and they close at 5 (unless and emergency comes in) and we only have people on the second floor, the third is used as storage, so no one was above us. It happened two or three times. Then last night cupboard doors kept opening and shutting in the two empty rooms. I finally asked my coworker WTF was going on and she just told me that it usually happens after someone passes, especially if it was sudden. We had two codes last week that we lost and I guess everyone has had weird stuff happening for a couple days.

3. The Man With The Striped Shirt

Not mine, but a fellow nurse of mine. We were talking about patients’ hallucinations when he told me about this time he was walking past a patient’s room, an elderly woman with dementia, and she was chatting up a storm with someone. He asked her who she was talking to, and the woman replied “that nice man in the black and white striped shirt.” A while later he went into another patient’s with dementia room, and that different patient asked where the man with the striped shirt had gone.

4. “Don’t Let Them Take Me!”

The best I have heard is from a nurse who said that one night she was floated to oncology at the hospital she used to work at. She was given a patient who was passing away and had been unconscious for several days. At one point during the night the nurse went into the room and the patient was at the top of the bed and looked at her and said, “don’t let them take me!” The nurse was freaked out and asked her who was going to take her and she said that black thing up there and pointed up in the air. This patient died within minutes.

5. An Unexplained Black Shape

One night I was caring for a dying male patient. He was scared and I spent quite some time with him, trying to calm and reassure him. Eventually he calmed and I left the bedside and went over to the nurses station which was about 15 feet away. As I sat down I glanced over to him and there was a black shape standing over the bed, looking down at the patient. I was terrified, and am sure it was something evil.

6. In Two Places At Once

I used to work in a state institute for developmentally disabled. We were temp relocated to another building for remodeling of our bldg. Anyways…I was working one night, 2nd shift. We had a locked pica unit. I saw one of the residents walking down the hall. Very distinct gait and very distinct yellow t-shirt w/ a happy face on it. I went into the ward to let staff know that they had an escapee. This was a serious situation because this particular resident, Larry, would ingest absolutely anything (from clothing to pens to belts to *ugh* a bird’s head)…literally anything. He was also very reluctant to go back to his home ward (hence why I didn’t bring him back myself…he needed two escorts). When we got back into the hall, less than 15 secs later, Larry was gone!! We searched the entire building! Outside, downstairs, all wards…he was NO WHERE to be found!!! This whole search lasted last than 10 mins because I had all extra staff looking for him. I was just about to call the house supervisor to let her know that we “lost” someone when out from the bathroom walks Larry with one of the staff. He had been getting his bath in the bathroom for the last 30 mins or so. Kind of freaky! I absolutely, without a doubt, saw Larry in the hallway. I never would’ve short-staffed the wards like I did if I hadn’t seen him! Like I said, very distinctive gait, look, clothing. I took a lot of razzing that nite! They all thought that I was crazy. Anyways, come to find out the next day, after the story goes around that I am crazy…Larry had an identical twin brother who died in that building 10 yrs previously.

7. The “Grandchild”

We had a black girl, about 10 in ICU that was severely injured in a car accident. Lots of brain damage. She didn’t die there but was moved to another facility after weeks and weeks. After that, I know of 3 older black males, in their 50’s, that, if they were even mildly sedated, would ask about the little black girl with the ribbon in her hair who was sitting at the foot of their beds. One guy said, “she asked me how I was doing, and then got up and walked that way” while he was pointing towards the 2nd floor window. He paused, a wide-eyed look came over his face, and then he said, ‘But I guess she really couldn’t have left the room that way, huh?” Personally, I think she was taking care of grandfatherly figures.

8. The ‘Dark’ Room

I worked in an ICU where a prisoner convicted of murder died in ICU 1 – and nobody would put a patient in that room after that cause the air was too heavy and the room was too spooky and ‘dark’. It was so bad that the hospital eventually closed down the room and knocked out a wall to make it a separate entrance into the unit because nurses would refuse to put patients in the room even if it was the last available bed. They’d triage out a patient before they’d trust putting a patient in that bed.

9. Nurse Betty

I was working in the NICU when we had a threat of a tornado. Some Nurses got pulled to go to a sister hospital in town to assist in the disaster plan. When all was over one of the nurses returned with this story: She was assisting the nurses in giving some meds before pulling all into the hallways. Every pt she went to said they already had their meds from that nice nurse in the white uniform and hat. She realized after she left that its been awhile since a nurse has worn a hat. That story revealed the urban legend of Nurse Betty. Story goes she had an affair with a married MD, became pregnant then agreed to allow him to perform an abortion on her on the 2nd floor OR room.She died and he went to jail. She never left the hospital and was seen frequently. The local newspaper would do an article of her every year around halloween on her sightings. The hospital has since been replaced with college dorms. Hmmmm i wonder if any students have seen her?

10. Rocking Mary

The story of “Rocking Mary.” We closed room 12 in our MICU because just about every patient that has been there since Mary died complaints of seeing a woman in wearing a white habit rocking back and forth by their bedside. Apparently this nun never makes eye contact…just stares outside the window which happens to be on the patient left side over their head. This window overlooks the hospital cemetery where nuns that have died where buried. Mary was a nun that died of a car accident outside the hospital back in the 50’s. She was only about 30 years old and all patient describes her as a young woman. We all thought that it was the “sun-down syndrome.” Anyways, since then room 12 became our storage room where no one goes in by themselves unless it is absolutely critical.

11. The Lingering Spirit

We had a patient, chronic CHFer, always on the call button, hated being on fluid restrictions. you know the type: the nurses have to take turns during the shift answering the call button so the primary can actually do other work. And this was a frequent flier cause he was very chronic, very borderline, and the hospital was the only place he wouldn’t fluid overload. I work 7p-7a. He died about 8pm. Oh the look on his face, like, “how could you let me die!” – Like it was our fault. Anyway, family came and gone by 9pm, funeral home gone at 930pm. About 10pm, the call button starts going off. I was there – call button going off every 5 minutes. One of the nurses was a very spiritual girl. At about 2am, after like 4 HOURS OF THIS, nurse Mary snaps, ‘Enough!’ She walks down to the room, and, practically screams into the empty room, “Mr X, you have died. You can’t be in here bothering us anymore. Move along. In the name of Jesus, I’m exorcising you from this plane of existence. Go to the light and be happy!” And I kid you not, the call button stopped going off then and there.

12. The Lonely Ghost

Not a spooky story but a lonely ghost. One of the rooms, if it was being used regularly, fine. no problems. But, since it was a room at the end of the hall, it was used for ‘storage’ lots of times. If a couple of weeks went by and there were no patients/activity in the room, the call light would start going off, 4-5 times a shift. But, if you went into the room and turned on the TV, the call light wouldn’t go off anymore. So, needless to say, when the room was being used for storage, the tv was always on w/ the volume down low.

13. The Old Nun

Like most very old hospitals, at one time our hospital was run by nuns. One particular unit had been converted into a sleep study lab area for outpatients tests. One shift in the middle of the night I was watching the video monitor and five patients simultaneously began removing their monitoring equipment. I went into the first room to ask what was going on and the patient said that old nurse with the cap told her the study was over and that she could leave. All the patients reported the same story.

14. It Was Identical

I work on a coronary care unit with mostly post-heart attack patients. My charge nurse told us this story, not sure if she’s just messing with us, but she sounded serious. So our unit was empty, we consolidated our last couple patients onto the ICU because we had low pt. census. My charge nurse was over in CCU at the nurses station doing something on the computer. All of our rooms were empty. She heard a bedside monitor alarming, so she went into the room where the noise was coming from, and there was an EKG strip coming out of the bedside printer (which we never use) and it was a long continuing strip of clear VTach. She said she had just coded someone there the week before who had been in VT. Creepy. As. Fuck. TL;DR: Ghost in pt room printed her last VTach rhythm strip out of her bedside monitor one week post death.

15. There Are Places In The Hospital That People Refuse To Go Alone

I do inter-facility transfers as an EMT so get to see all the skilled facilities and hospitals in the state. Two places give me the hair raising just bad negative juju creeps: an abandoned “school of the feeble minded” and the state’s prison mental health facility that use to be a huge tuberculosis ward when there were massive outbreaks back in the day. A third creepy place is the old birthing hospital that got turned into a long term care facility. The top floor is mostly padlocked off. Jokingly, I asked a nurse on the elevator if the building was haunted and she matter of factly said yes. Little kids shapes on the top floor and residents report older women in dresses. She said there were areas of the building she refused to go without another person.

16. Never Open That Door!

In the morgue at my hospital, I would always hear knocking coming from inside the freezer. It really creeped me out, especially when the pathologist looked up, grabbed me by the shoulders, stared me straight in the eye and said “you hear that? You never open that door when they’re knocking. Never.” It turned out to be some loose pipes, he thought it was hilarious I didn’t sleep that night.

17. They Die Within 72 Hours Of Seeing Her

I work in a LTC facility, and within lies the legend of the little girl…many people have seen her; few have survived to tell about it…quite a few residents have asked me “who’s that little girl?” and pointed to her…coincidentally, these people would be dead within 72 hours of seeing her. Turns out, about 10 years ago, there was a fatal car accident in front of our LTC…the victim? A little girl, about 10 years old.

18. “Maggie”

A couple, retired military captain and his wife, Margaret, sold their house to move to Florida. It so happens that they sold their house to the State – the state was going to use it as a resident home for mentally disabled teens. After the closing, but before they moved, Margaret died in the house. The Captain had to move cause the house was already sold. Do you know where I’m going with this?? Residents always referred to ‘old lady’ that they always saw. Nursing staff just referred to her as ‘Maggie’. Now, late at night, when the residents were asleep, if the staff put the TV on more adult programming, like ‘Red Shoe Diaries’, etc., the TV would turn off, and when turned back on, would come on on a different channel. There was this one nurse, it was like the house was out to get her. She’d swear that ‘the carpet tripped me’. When cupboards opened, knives would fall out aimed at her. Turns out this nurse was eventually fired for abusing and stealing from the residents. Maggie takes care of her ‘children’.

19. She Died But Then Came Back

I work as a CNA in long term care. We had one resident “Betty” who was totally independent, all ADL’s were done on her own and she did fine on her own, never had an incident. The only time she wanted help was showers and then she only wanted you around to make sure she didn’t slip and fall. Betty came down with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. When she came back she was too weak to do things on her own but too stubborn to ask for help. The last thing the CNA told her before going to bed was “If you want to get up, hit your call light. I’ll come help you.” Of course she didn’t, got rid of the bed alarm, climbed out of bed and fell. Betty died from the fall. No one was moved into bed C (Betty’s bed) afterward. The following week the call light for the room went off at night. Thinking it was the resident in bed B, I walked down to the room to see what she wanted. I walked into the room only to see the call light for bed B and A off, the call light for bed C (Betty’s unoccupied bed) was on. My eyes filled up with tears, I backed out of the room and made someone else turn the call light off.

20. The Inspector

We have a gentleman that we call the inspector. He appears at the end of the long hall (our wings are L shaped). He carries a clipboard in his hand. When he shows up a resident usually dies within the next couple days. We’ve also had residents ring and tell us that there was a man standing next to their roommate’s bed and that we should tell him to leave (no men on nights). The roommate usually dies soon after. And then there’s the children. Several lucid residents have reported children in the halls at night-There’s a children’s home behind us where children have been abused in the past.

21. She Said “Rex” And Then I Saw Him

I was working a night shift job as an aide caring for a lady with terminal cancer on hospice at home as I have for years. She was starting to slip and I woke her family, two girls and DH. We were all sitting around, she was pretty quiet and peaceful. All of a sudden she looked toward the door and said “Rex, Rex you’re here for me. Im ready and they won’t let me go” I saw a shadowy figure come into the room and felt the creepiest evil spirit……..I’m not normally spooked but I was so glad when it was time for me to go home. I turned to watch this spirit and the family was looking at me like “what are you looking at?” The lady died later that day. A few months later her daughter had been sick (just not well, not terminal) and they called my agency to see if I would come and stay with him at night for a few days until he was a little stronger. I stayed two nights. All kinds of weird paranormal stuff in that house. Voices in rooms that were empty, sound of people moving around when everyone was asleep, etc. I decided I didn’t care how sick he was or how much that family liked me, I was NOT doing another shift there.

A couple of stories from the unit. In bed 3 there was a homeless pt “Willy” who, thanks to modern medicine, was kept alive for I believe around 3 months (no family to stop care). Willy eventually died but PTs who are in bed 3 will talk about their friend Willy who brought them a blanket or stopped by to talk. Bed 3 is at the end of the unit and has an ante room before you go in. You can’t see directly in Bed 3 unless you’re in the ante room or looking at the room on the monitor. One night with no pt in Bed 3 the monitor flips to the room and a body was seen laying over the side of the bed (over the side rails)…kind of floating…the room was checked and no one was there. Another night a nurse who has worked in the unit a few years saw someone sitting in a chair behind the door in Bed 3 with their legs crossed. She wondered since we have limited visiting hours how a family member got in the room. She went in the room and no one was there. Needless to say she was freaked out. There was also another pt who was a young woman in her 20s who contracted necrotizing facilitis (flesh eating disease) from one of her kids who had strep. She was in the unit a while and eventually died. One of the nurses coming on to the next shift wanted to know why the PT was standing on the backside of the unit with her twin daughters holding their hands (wondering how she made such a miraculous recovery) she was informed the PT had died earlier that day.

23. The First Patient To Die

The very small step down unit I worked in was having night time staffing issues, I agreed to rotate to nights to help them out. It was a 4 bed, newly renovated unit. It was around 3am, and I was watching the monitors, listening to the patient’s snore. The pencil drawer slid open, I didn’t think much of it since the hospital was on a very busy avenue and I thought it was caused by the vibrations from the traffic on the busy road below. After sliding the drawer back several times, I decided if the drawer felt it needed to be open so be it Several minutes later I heard a noise in the room, the patient’s bathroom door opening and the sound of someone pushing an IV pole. Since I did not have clear view of the bathroom, I just thought one of the staff members from the main floor had dashed in to wash their hands. I looked up from my monitor viewing to see a patient we recently had in the unit. It was Mrs. G, an older woman who came in with atypical chest pain, became septic due to a gallbladder issue. She evidently had expired in the unit. Although the hospital itself had been on this site for years, the unit was newly renovated, right down to tearing down walls and putting up new ones. I heard the patient’s bathroom door open and again I heard the rattling of the IV pole and shuffling feet. I looked up and saw Mrs. G. standing there in the middle of the floor, one hand pushing the IV pole, the other hand on top of the pump on the pole. She stopped walking, turned and waved, nodded her head, said everything was going to be okay, took a few steps, and disappeared. It was quite a site to see. Shortly after that “vision” one of the nurses from the floor came in to see if I needed anything. I told her no I was ok. And asked her if she had ever seen a ghost in the hospital. She looked at me, gasped and asked “no, why” and I explained to her what had just happened. She said she would never step foot in that room again. Mrs. G was the first patient to die in that unit. She was well liked by all the staff and my feeling was that she was watching over us. The day shift came in, and I told them my story. They weren’t surprised. Through the years working at various hospitals, worked as a Nurse Extern my senior year in nursing school and heard older nurses telling their stories about ghosts, I thought they were just burnt out. HA!! Yes there are ghosts in care facilities. If they are not seen their presence is felt. They leave an energy behind.

24. “The Scene Was A Bloodbath”

I was working my regular 7-7 night shift in a bone marrow transplant unit with one other nurse. We had 5 patients, and it was about 3:30 am. My coworker had just come out of room 4 and I startled her as she came around the corner. She had been emptying a urinal when the bathroom door had closed on her, which of course freaked her out, and she spilled urine on herself but I digress. She proceeded to tell me that there was a young gentleman who had been in that room who had died a rather gruesome death…evidently this man was slated to go home, but one night (around 4) the nurses heard a thump…the sound of someone falling…they rushed in the room, and this man was in the bathroom, central line out, and blood everywhere. They coded him, but he died right there in the bathroom. No one is sure why he pulled his line, or what had happened, but evidently the scene was a bloodbath. Horrible, horrible…now here comes the scary part. A few weeks later, a sweet little old lady is in that room and asks the nurse if someone had died in there. The nurse explained that this is a hospital, and it was likely that someone could have died. Well, the lady says, “I think a young guy died in here.” The nurse asks why, the lady responds “cuz he’s talking to me.” Aghhh!! Ok, I’m not making this up….this lady has a central line, triple lumen. The nurse goes in there later and there is blood everywhere. One of her lines is cut. Not pulled out, but cut. There are no scissors in the room. The lady says “he did it.”

25. The Nurse In The White Uniform

I am a South African Nurse who is currently living and working in California. The weirdest thing happened to me one night when I was working Night Shift back in SA. I had a patient whom I thought was playing with his IV causing me no end of headaches – as we have all experienced. I eventually confronted him after having to open the clamp for what seemed like the hundredth time that night. He got really irate with me and said he had done no such thing but blamed it on a young nurse in a white dress whom he said had fiddled repeatedly with it. I was confused because we wear specific uniforms in South Africa and they were not white at this specific hospital. Needless to say I was really irritated and I think we both ended the conversation feeling exasperated. I didn’t think about his story about the young nurse for several weeks until one night I was dealing with a totally different room and a totally different patient. The call light rang and when I went to answer it the patient said he had a problem with one of my staff. Curious, I asked what. He said a young nurse in a white uniform was standing quietly in the doorway of the dark bathroom staring at him and it was freaking him out. At this my hair stood on end but I reassured him that he must have been dreaming and checked the bathroom just to be sure. There was nothing there but I will never forget it. Another instance, there was a patient who was terminally ill with liver cancer in a private room. I was working days but the night shift people said they hated going into the room because something would blow on the back of their necks and shadows would move where shadows shouldn’t be. The man was a Christian, as was his wife, and his wife said she saw this black presence descend above him and his breathing would become labored. She asked myself and a friend to pray for her which we gladly did being Christians ourselves. We anointed and blessed the room and prayed with the family and asked the Lord to seal the room. From that time on the room was filled with peace and love and the man breathed so much more easier. People had no more problems with going in there. This gentle little man eventually passed away, but it was in a place of peace and love.

26. Voodoo People

Night nurse for 4 years now at an old folk’s home. Had a palliative who couldn’t sleep because of incredibly vivid hallucinations. She would describe voodoo people around her room that would just stare at her waiting for her to die. I didn’t take it seriously until the lady across the hall (who rarely ever spoke) starting seeing them in her room too. Legitimate shivers.

27. The Hissing Cat

I work in a cardiovascular surgical ICU. We have a lot of fucked up people (both physically and mentally) that come through our unit. We had a stretch of nights were each corner room of our unit (it is a perfect square) reported seeing a cat walking around. Not a friendly cat either, apparently. The thing was hissing at them. The accounts were so similar to each other we actually spent probably a half hour looking around for a cat and then had security/plan ops come look as well. No cat was ever seen or found. Two of those four patients coded the next day.

28. Common Spirits

I work a stroke/telemetry floor on the bought shift. Most of our patients are elderly. Apparently, there are two things that patients see before they pass away. Some will say that two men are walking in their rooms and telling them to get ready to leave. The patient will call and tell us that these men are big and abrasive in their demeanor. They are either terrified or annoyed when they see the two men. The other thing they will see is a little boy who will go into their rooms and try to wake them up. The boy is usually loud and runs around their rooms. The patients will call and ask who’s letting children just run around late night. Several nights or even that same shift we’re coding or cleaning the patient for the funeral home to pick up.

29. Hand Prints

My town has two really old hospitals. One no longer functions as overnight, and the stories are unsettling. No one cleans the old ER alone, because all the lights and call bells go off. On other floors there’s a kid with his ball, a lady in a white dress, etc. A coworker was cleaning an entire floor utterly solo (the norm) and bounced between rooms because the cleaning solution stays wet for a few min. Upon returning to a freshly wiped bed, hand prints were clearly visible.

30. “Please, Don’t Let Me Go Back There!”

Not my personal story, but when my mom worked as an E.R. nurse a guy came in from a car accident and was losing blood. In the midst of resuscitation, the man jolts awake and screams “Don’t let me go back there! Please, please, please don’t let me go back!” A few seconds later they lost him.

31. “Those Things Can’t Be Explained”

I work midnights in a long term care facility as a nurse’s assistant. I have two men under my care and both of them are unable to use their call lights. They have severe dementia and debilitating Parkinson’s disease but still their lights are looped around their bed rail. One night their light came on and I went to answer it already confused and creeped out. I turned it off and left the room. Before I could get two doors up the light came back on. I went in there and both lights were unplugged from the wall and thrown under their beds. I fished them out, plugged them back in and left. I’ve seen shadows standing over the dying and felt a tap on my shoulder while doing chest compressions so I knew that lady had passed. I’m not a believer but some of those things can’t be explained.

32. “I’ll Leave The Light On For You”

I was pulling a guard shift in the CHS on FOB Speicher on night in Iraq. There hadn’t been any action for the whole previous week so the staff was all racked out. I was walking the halls and everything was supposed to be off or on standby. I walked passed one room that they used for Locals who were victims of trauma. The lights were on so I toggled the switch down to turn them off. I started walking down the hall again and I saw the lights come back on out of the corner of my eye. This is when I went into alert mode (safety off, at low-ready). I cleared the corner and looked into the room. Nothing. I put the switch back in the down position again and went to call it up on the intercom. The radio was on the fritz. So I began walking back to the CQ desk to report it in person. The lights turned back on. At this point, I’m a little on edge. I can’t radio in for help, there is nobody on this side of the compound that would hear me yell, and the light switch position keeps changing when the lights go back on. Keep in mind that I’m on a Forward Operating Base in a combat zone. I don’t know what I was expecting when I went to clear the corner and look into the room again, but I saw nothing but an empty room, a gurney, a heart monitor, and a crash cart. I couldn’t tell you to this day why I said what I did, but I was worried that if I didn’t, the lights would keep switching back on. I said “If you’re scared of the dark, I’ll leave the light on for you.” I finished my shift and left the light on. I left a note with the desk that one of the surgeons had asked me to always leave that light on just in case they had an emergency come in. For the remainder of my shifts, that light had always remained on.

33. “I Got The Fuck Out Of There”

Worked at a hospital doing transport for a couple of years. The transport home base was in the basement of the hospital, where all the laundry is done and supplies are also sorted there. I hated working late nights after this incident. On this particular night, I was the only one in the basement when I heard whistling at the end of the hallway by the elevator. I poked my head around the corner expecting to see my only coworker on duty that night, but there was absolutely no one there. I shrugged it off, I’m not easily spooked. Nights are slow, so I ate some snacks and hung out in the break room for a bit. Next thing I know, I hear a loud bang. I walked into the hallway and a bed is rolling down the hall bumping into the sides. At this point I think that my coworker is bullshitting me. I radio him and he says he’s upstairs in the cafeteria. Ah, I still don’t believe him and think I’ll catch him in the act. I walk past the laundry room and the machines start. Pop my head in there expecting to find him but it’s completely empty. Okay…starting to get a little nervous. I walk into the laundry room, and the machines completely stop. I freeze, then run out and head towards the elevator when I hear whistling again. At this point, I know I am the only worker in the basement. As I am standing there waiting for the elevator, things start falling off of the shelves down the hall. Boxes of gloves, tissues, packages of tubes.. I am literally standing there watching them fall off one by one at the opposite end of the hallway. I shit you not, my entire body broke out in goosebumps, my hair stood on end and I had this strong gut feeling I was being watched, I was not alone. As I’m getting into the elevator, I feel what feels like someone brushing my arm. Went upstairs and found my coworker in the cafeteria, freaked out to him. I got the fuck out of there and transferred soon after that. The creepy thing to add to it is that I usually whistle mindlessly to myself at work, it was almost as if the spirit was mimicking me. Creepiest feeling ever.

34. She Yelled At Him And He Came Back

First story: Patient had been in CCU (where I work at the time) for a long period of time(six months) we had finally been transferred to med surg floor and he coded. We worked on him for 45 min to an hour and he had no pulse or heart rhythm the entire time and the docs had decided to call it and his family walk in the room leans over him and rubs his chest lightly and says his name and immediately regains a pulse and regains consciousness. Second Story:  Patient comes in coding and we are working on him and we are getting nothing, so we bring in his wife to say goodbye and she starts yelling at him at the top of her lungs and he comes back so we arrange transfer to a tertiary hospital and he codes again so she comes back and yells at him again and comes back again, cut to they are loading him into the helicopter and he codes again, so they bring him back into our ER after working on him for a bit on the helipad and his wife yells at him again and once again he immediately comes back. Eventually they decide to have his wife ride in helicopter with him to make sure she can scare him back to life if he were to code again. The guy ended up living and received at heart transplant and is still alive to this day all thanks to his wife scaring the life back into him.

35. The Old Psych Hospital

I worked overnight security in one of the largest, best, and oldest hospitals in the US. My fellow security officers and I all have stories about one building in particular, but the one that I’ll tell is the one that happened to me. The Backstory:  This hospital was built in the late 1800’s and it was the original psychiatric building for this hospital. Now, being the late 1800’s, not much was truly known about psychiatric disorders. On top of that, this hospital was known for its medical research. With both of those facts combined, you can infer that some terrible shit was done to these misunderstood psych patients in this building. A couple years before I started working security there, this building had been converted into offices after the newly built part of the hospital dedicated a section for an updated psych ward. My story: My rounds for that night happened to include said building. At night this building was empty, due to recently being converted into offices and the drones who worked there wanting to leave promptly at 1700,if not earlier. In some of their haste, they left their office doors unlocked, which is a big no no due to medical information being located in their offices. It was our duty to go to each floor, and make sure every door was locked, and if it wasn’t, to secure it ourselves. I did my initial sweep of the building to make sure it was clear (nobody in the building), and proceeded to do my door checks. The hallways were pretty narrow, so I could check both sides of the hallway’s doors at once. At the end of this hallway there was two sets of doors you had to go through to reach the final office, which was a dead end. Everything was secure. Awesome. Time for the next floor. I exited the two sets of doors from the dead end office and stood absolution frozen from what I saw. Every door ajar. Set perfectly so their own weight wouldn’t cause them to shut again. And one wheelchair, at the end of said hallway, facing towards the steps. I had heard other security officers outright reject that set of rounds due to strange stuff happening there, but I laughed it off until that night happened. Never took those rounds again. Second story: The old children’s ICU is currently under construction to be turned into medical labs, so we have to patrol the area. Once again to make sure the area is secure, or to report if the contractor / foreman stayed to plan for the next day. When patrolling this area, several security officers have reported seeing a single white male child around the age of 5-7 with short brown hair (think 90’s bowl cut). I personally dismissed this (this was before the psych ward incident) as a tall tale told with the intent to scare me because I was new at the time. I got that buildings patrol one night, and a foreman who stayed late called security and asked for a security officer to come up ‘because a kid locked himself in a room, and I don’t want him to get hurt with all the open wires in there.’ Or something to that effect. I unlocked the door for him. Looked in what could only be a 10 x 8 room for about 10 min. No kid. Called it in as a false alarm, and finished my patrol. Third Story:  Had a special detail (aka babysitting) a violent psych patient, along with another security officer. He woke up in the middle of the night, recognized the other officer, and said hello. He sees me and immediately starts screaming at me not to hurt him. Now, I’m a rather large gentleman (at 6’2 and 250 lbs), but I try not to make myself too intimidating around psych patients as to not escalate the situation. Well, he keeps screaming for me not to hurt him, and he says if I promise not to, he would make something good happen for me. I promise, he calms down, goes back to sleep, and I forget about it. Next day I got a permanent set of rounds and a pretty good promotion. Easily a coincidence, but interesting nonetheless. Fourth Story:  Fellow security officer had rounds in the aforementioned psych building. Heard a call on the radio, in what could only be described as dry throat terror voice, for one officer for back up. I was close so I responded to his call letting him know I was on the way. When I got there he had his head between his knees, and was silently crying with a shattered chandelier a couple feet next to him. Now, before I had experienced the abnormal happenings in this building, I would have written off his testimony off as idiocy. But he claimed that something held him in that spot as the chandelier started swinging wildly until it started to fall. When it started to fall he was ‘let go’ and allowed to move, and scrambled out of the way before it hit him. Got him up, calmed him down, and took him back to the supervisor. She yelled to one of our other supervisors ‘almost lost another one in [insert building name here]!’ The other supervisor laughed and said ‘Why do you think we send the new guys! Haha, you know I don’t even like going over there!’ That guy is my roommate and hates when I bring up that experience.

36. The “Sweet” Old Lady

I had cared for an elderly woman with no family who came to us when her husband died. She didn’t speak often but when she did it was usually just words that made no sense together. I felt so bad for her because ever since she had arrived so many of the residents in her area that she seemed to enjoy spending time with had passed in such a short timespan. She put up a picture of each of them next to her pictures of her husband and several others who were probably family to remember them. I had ad always felt sorry for her and showed her extra attention and we became close. It just seemed so unfair that she had such luck and kept losing people that she cared about. One day she looked at me and said plain as day “sweetie, I think I’m done now” and handed me a picture. It was a picture of me and I smiled because it touched my heart that I was that important to her. She passed nearly a week later and I cried for days, it hit me really hard. She knew it was the end for her and she said goodbye as best she could. A little less than 2 years later I was talking with a colleague and she came up in conversation. My colleague referred to her as “that crazy bitch” which seemed very out of character for her and it shocked and offended me deeply. I expressed this to her, not so nicely and she looked at me with this shocked look and said “oh dear, do you not know?” and then explained something to me that I hadn’t known. As it turned out, it came out sometime after she had passed that she had killed her husband by poisoning him and that there was an investigation because it appeared that she had a ritual of befriending someone, obtaining a picture of them, and hiding the picture until she could kill them (usually by poisoning) and then displaying the picture as a sort of trophy. It was suspected that this may have been the reason for the spike in mortality rate during her stay and the considerable number of photos in her “collection”. The last I heard, the old “family” photos weren’t any relation to her and the police were trying to ID the individuals and compare them to several cold cases.

37. The Man In The Hospital Gown

Psychiatric RN here….I worked in an acute care adult unit, but was sent to work with the kids one evening shift. It was after 10pm, all patients were in their rooms and in bed. I heard a child screaming and a psych tech trying to calm him. I ran to the room, the 7 year old boy was hysterical. He was crying, sweating, and shaking. He said he saw ‘something’. After he settled down, he told me that he saw a white man with gray hair in a hospital gown in his room. While we discussed what he saw, the child froze in fear, tears rolling down his face….he said “Ms., whoawhoawhoathere, be still. Oh my God he’s right behind you.” We decided to address ‘the man’ and tell him that the little boy was scared…the boy said the man turned around and left after that. The only thing anyone in the unit would have heard was the boy screaming at the beginning…all other discussion was in his room and quiet. Not even 3 minutes later, a 17 year old male at the end of the hall started screaming. I ran to his room…he was standing on his bed trying to get away from a white man in a hospital gown.

38. A Skinwalker?

I have a couple stories, one from my mother and one from me. My mother’s is probably the most creepiest and has always stuck with me. Especially with all the paranormal stuff she has seen. My mom worked night shift at the hospital in Arizona, in a town by the border, and go figure. Old mining town. Well anyways, she’s working her night shift going room to room when an old lady who walked the halls due to insomnia told her some weird goatman kept trying to get in through the doors. My mom didn’t think anything of it, but she is Catholic and had those moments of silently praying to herself. After a few moments, there was a shriek, she couldn’t explain it, but that it was a horrible shriek that made your blood turn to ice. She than went to the nurses station to ask if anyone else heard that, in which they did. Come to realize that shriek was heard all around the hospital. Freaking everyone out, especially paranormal religious ladies and men. A few of them go to look out the Windows and see hoof marks by the doors and windows, and the marks had no trail towards or away from the building. My story was pretty creepy. I too became a cna, and worked a locked down dementia and Alzheimer unit at night. I’ve had creepy moments. But this one will always stick with me. I was finishing up my binders when a light goes off out of the hall, so I took it, punched my code in and went out since the other cna was busy with someone else. I go in, ask if everything is ok. Sleepily my little lady tells me there’s a darn women who keeps knocking on her window wanting to come in, and that she really wants to go back to sleep. She insists I go and let her in, and I’m thinking to myself, Ohhh No, this sounds all too familiar… I reassure her, peek out the window, nothing. Maybe she was dreaming, and really tired and mistook it as her room mate. After that incident I head back into my unit. Sit, eat a snack, chat with my head nurse, talk with my usual insomniacs, mind you it’s around 3ish am now. Light goes off, and in my unit. Also, this unit has no outbound lines at all. I head down to her hall, and ask if all is ok. My lady says she can’t sleep, someone keeps banging on her window and she is scared. I pretty much about crapped myself at this point. I again reassure my lady thinking, what just happened. I tell my nurse and she laughs and said, this has been happening for years. Great.

39. The Dog

CNA here, have been working night shift at hospitals for 7 years now and I have quite a few stories. Came into work one night and Jen, one of the nurses, told me and my other coworker Jay the creepiest thing happened a few hours earlier. A patient had passed in one of the rooms abruptly. The room was cleaned and was quickly occupied by another patient who had coded, was pronounced dead, but was resuscitated. Soon after being admitted in his room he complained to the nurse, “I can’t be in here. This man won’t stop looking at me. He’s really worried about his dog. His dog doesn’t know that he’s dead.” She had assumed he was just seeing things and said, “Oh yeah? What does he look like?” He described the deceased patient perfectly. I could see the chills running down her spine as she was telling us her story. Turns out the man did have a dog as well. The new admit was moved to another room. Jay said, “I don’t believe in ghosts. Those aren’t real. I wanna see it. Tonight I’m gonna provoke it so it can show itself.” 3 AM rolls around and all 3 of us are at the nursing station. Jay starts playing YouTube videos of various puppy sounds. Soon after two lift team guys come up, we forget what we’re doing and start another conversation. Suddenly, we all hear it, except for Jay. A dog bark. In the same room. Loudly, clear as ever. The lift team guys say, “Does someone have a dog in here?” Jen and I simultaneously shit ourselves.

40. The Lady In Pink

When I worked in a nursing home there was an elevator between the levels as well as stairs at the far end. It was shaped like a u with the nurses station on one tip of the u and the residents spread out around the unit so hypothetically you could see all the exits and stop any confused residents. I was studying to be an RN at the time so I always did night shift. Here’s the thing though. The elevator would randomly one a night go from the top floor to the bottom, and then about an hour later come back up to the floor you were on. I didn’t think anything of it thinking it was a quirk of the system or something. That was until the night I saw her, the “lady in pink”. I was in the nurse’s station studying and looked up to see what looked like a resident who had sundowners in pink walking without her walker to the elevator from her room on the other end of the unit. So me being a good nurse I ran to stop her falling or falling down the stairs. But here’s the thing. I get there and she’s not there. So I check her room and the sides of her bed are up and she is unconscious. Then as I’m walking back I notice the call button is lit up. The elevator opens, the door closes and the elevator moves with no one in it. I tell my coworkers the next morning (just me on nightshift) and they tell me it’s the lady in pink. Tell me they had this huge Samoan guy who worked there 2 weeks doing nights until he saw the lady in pink then he quit. So me being the big, strong, masculine figure I was, I did the only logical thing. I quit and got a job as security in a high security psych facility. I prefer my danger visible thank you very much.

41. The Tall Cowboy

My mom used to be a RN at a hospital in a small western town. This hospital was connected to a senior living home and at night, the RN over-watched both sides of the building (hospital and living home). She was usually the overnight RN and would have either one or two CNAs working as well. She has experienced this apparition about 6 or 7 times during her 10 year stint there and everyone has referred to the apparition as “The Man in Black”. Each experience was identical except for the location in the building. Frequently throughout the night, she would have to do her rounds (checking vitals, etc.) and would have to walk around a corner from the nurses’ station/ER towards the (6) beds in the hospital and towards the senior home. She would see the apparition either right after rounding the corner or right after walking out of a room and walking to the next. Outside of the next room, she would see the same apparition. The apparition was of a person in a black, old (old west type) suit with worn black cowboy boots and worn black cowboy hat to match. The creepiest thing about this man (assuming) is that his face was not very distinct. She would describe it as though a man’s face was drawn with charcoal and slightly smeared making it slightly blurred. He was about 6’5″ and would tower over her 5’5″. But when ever she would see him (whether its 10 feet or 3 feet away), he would stand there looking at her and then turn and walk into the room he was outside of. When she would walk into that room, there would not be any other person in there or anything out of place. The first few times scared her to a panic but she slowly just went on without letting it freak her out. But with this man came some extra attention to the patient. The kicker was that, in about 90% of all the experiences seen by other RNs as well, the patient’s health would deteriorate in the next few days and the patient most often passed away shortly after. So, whenever the over night RN saw “The Man in Black”, extra precautions would be taken with that patient. Another weird thing about the apparition is that it is always seen by just the RN. Not a single CNA has personally seen the apparition. My mom always said that he knew who would be able to help the most at the time. I, on the other hand, took it as the completely opposite. I always thought that it was almost to mock the RNs because he would let them know that something was going to happen but they could not do anything about it. Even though I am not an RN to see him, it still creeps me out every time I walk down the halls and she points out where she has seen him.

42. “Pointing Right Over My Shoulder”

Every night before the next shift comes in, I check on all my patients, make sure their briefs are clean, refill water pitchers, etc. This is usually right after sunset. Three different patients in three different rooms have told me they’re frightened of the tall, thin man standing in the corner, pointing right over my shoulder. It’s really unsettling.

43. The Lonely Boy’s Friend

I work on a pediatric bone marrow transplant unit, and sadly we have a lot of kids that pass. Our kids stay here for longer periods of time (usually 1-6 months just inpatient) so we have to rotate them to different rooms to make sure everything is clean. One particular 3-year-old boy doesn’t have family come visit. He never really communicates with staff and would only occasionally chatter to himself. We moved him to a room where a little girl had recently passed and we started noticing him talking to different places in the room and staring/nodding when alone. Then he started saying new English words though he hadn’t had an increase in visitors. My coworkers are convinced he’s talking to the little girl that died there, and though I’m a pretty skeptical person, I still get the creeps when I walk by and see him talking to himself.

44. The Lost Visitor

I work in a level 1 trauma center receiving for 11 counties (implying a fair amount of carnage routinely). One morning between 3 and 4am I was alone in the bay (we have 4 trauma bays and 2 resus rooms in a rectangle surrounding a nursing station) catching up on documentation. I became aware of a man walking from behind me on my right, outside the nursing station and into one of the trauma rooms. Except I hadn’t heard any doors open (big noisy motion activated doors). He looked at me over his shoulder as he walked through the room doors, but didn’t answer when I called out, “Hello?” I walked around (losing site of the bay door as I rounded a big column) to make sure it wasn’t a lost visitor and there was no one there. There’s no way out other than the door, and it was out of my sight line for maybe a second max. I later related the story and heebie-jeebies I felt while I was looking for the strange dude to another nurse. She said she’d had an identical experience that same week. People bring it up from time to time, same story. Guy walks into the room, and then is gone by the time you go look for him. We’ve decided to just leave him alone. I hope he finds what he’s looking for though.

45. I Was No Longer Sure They Were Just Hallucinations

I was working a night shift, looking after one patient who needed supervision due to his hallucinations. This patient had a routine where he would like to go out for a cigarette every hour, I took him out on a wheelchair for a cigarette which seemed to increase his hallucinations. I had been taking this patient out multiple times during the night. At around midnight I took him outside, for his last cigarette before going to sleep. Once we were outside, he asked me if I could see a small ginger boy trying to get out of the locked cafe in front of us. I said no as I did with all of his hallucinations, this seemed to help reduce the length of time they appeared for. He then informed me he could see a man and a dog running towards us, this is the dead of night with no around in the hospital, there was no man or dog. However when the automatic doors 50m behind us opened with no one in sight, I was no longer sure if they were just hallucinations. I moved us back to the ward very quickly after that.

46. The Hand-Washing Spirit

My mother trained as a nurse at the old Westminster Teaching Hospital in London in the 1950s. On one of her first night shifts she was doing rounds in the children’s ward. Everything was fine, all the kids were asleep, but in one of the rooms she found the sink faucet running, which was a bit weird, because it had been fine when she’d been by a few minutes before. She figured that one of the kids had got up and been thirsty or something, turned it off, and carried on with the rounds. When her shift was over she checked out with the Matron, who asked if she had anything to report. She said there was nothing, except that someone had left a faucet on in one of the rooms. The Matron looked horrified and gasped out “oh no!” She then explained that the ward was haunted by a ghost which washed its hands – leaving the faucet running – whenever a child was going to die. My mother laughed this off, pointed out that none of the kids in the ward were seriously ill and went home. When she came in for her shift the next evening she discovered that a previously perfectly fine child in that room had had a sudden seizure and died only a few hours after she’d found the open faucet.

47. “I See Ghosts On The Regular”

Just a volunteer at a local place where people go to die, and I see ghosts on the regular. I’m generally there at night, and ghosts make the doors open or close or stick together, I’ve offered to help someone and started walking only to turn around and see that there was nobody there in the first place. There’s a particularly nice ghost who wears a plaid shirt, he moves flower pots away from the edges of the countertops. All in all it’s a very freaky experience but most of them are nice, just lost.

48. It Just Kept Knocking

Hospital I used to work at had a geriatric unit. One night I floated to help out, and was told that all patients placed in a certain room at the end of the hall would have the same “hallucinations” of a tall man in a suit, and another of a baby in a baby carriage sitting outside the room. On my unit, a general med/surg unit, a patient had passed in a room the previous evening and was now empty. The call light for that room kept going off ALL NIGHT, even after unplugging it from the wall until finally we went in the room and said “Can I help you?” My unit was shaped like a plus sign (+), with the nurse station at the center. One of the wings was blocked off by double doors because it had been redone as a GI clinic where you would go to get a colonoscopy done and such. On that same med/surg unit on night shift, we heard a loud knocking coming from those double doors as if someone were locked out and trying to get to the nurse’s station. One of my coworkers walked over and saw nobody on the other side of that door, all the lights were turned off. It kept happening, BANG BANG BANG. We even called the security guard up to investigate because we were so spooked, but there was nobody there. Sometimes I’d have to go through the empty GI clinic as a quick way to get to another elevator or area of the hospital, and occasionally I would walk into strong “clouds” of perfume in the empty vacant hallway, which nobody would have walked through for some time. Spooked me every time it happened. That hospital has been around since the 30s, and after working there I am a firm believer in ghosts/the supernatural.

49. Basically, The Hospital Was Completely Haunted

LTC nursing is a great place to see weird shit. There was the church lady “prophetess” who routinely let girls know they were pregnant and asked me about people in my life. There was the room that would go pitch black occasionally, couldn’t see any light for a minute or two. There was the room that had three consecutive residents screaming about the murderer killing children. There was the patient that kept telling us to help “that old man” and described the prior patient perfectly. He died weeks before she was admitted. There’s the squeak of shoes all night in the Alzheimer’s unit, the random screams, the chairs rocking on their own. I could go on and on. Read this: 7 Creepiest Moments In History (That You Probably Haven’t Heard Of) Read this: I’m On My Deathbed So I’m Coming Clean: Here’s The Gruesome Truth About What Happened To My First Wife Read this: My Parents Let Me In On The Terrifying Secret That’s Been Kept For Two Generations Read this: I Hacked Into A Cam Girl’s Computer And What I Found Truly Terrified Me Read this: An OR Nurse Talks About The Most Gory, Disgusting Thing They’d Ever Seen At Work Read this: Creepy History: 9 Notorious Female Serial Killers Read this: You’ll Never Want To Work As A Phone Sex Operator After Reading This Story Read this: 36 People Reveal The One Baby Name That Makes Them Want To Punch Someone’s Face Read this: My Wife Stopped Listening To Me, Then She Did Something That Separated Us Forever Read this: 17 Former Hospital Patients Reveal What It Felt Like To Be In A Coma Read this: How A Normal Girl Like Me Became Somebody’s Sex Slave

Read more Spooky .

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Eric Redding

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11 Of The Scariest Ghost Stories From Reddit

Leave the lights on when you read these bone-chilling stories of average people encountering the paranormal.

Lady Ghost on Staircase

[via Discovery Inc.]

It wasn’t a little girl

I was camping with my husband and his family at a small, remote lake in New Mexico. There were about 10 people in our group and another group of six people in the next campsite. It was nighttime and both groups were doing typical activities: making s’mores, having a few drinks and telling stories, when we all heard what sounded like a little girl yelling out for help. Neither group had children with them, but we were all positive we were hearing a little girl and decided to search the area we heard the noises from together.

There was a field behind our campsites, and we all saw a very tall, pure white figure standing maybe 100ft away from us in the field, making the noises. We all agreed this thing looked maybe 6 feet tall, skinny, and white as can be. We made our way closer to investigate, but whatever it was that we saw started backing off as we got closer, and it disappeared into the trees. All night we continued to hear a little girl calling for help as we tried to sleep.

The walking dead

I'm a psychiatric nurse and early in my career, I worked at a residential mental health facility. One of our residents was an elective mute, which means that he didn't/wouldn't/couldn't talk, but there were no medical reasons as to why. He had spoken earlier in his life and in fact seemed quite normal back then, with the exception of being close to seven feet tall. He'd been raised in the Deep South and joined the military when he was 19, but one night he vanished. He was declared AWOL, and eventually he was declared missing and dead.

Ten years later, a seven-foot tall man walked into a VA Hospital emergency room in my part of the Midwest and said to the receptionist: "My name is Marion Duchene (not the real name), and I've been dead for ten years."

Those were the last words he ever spoke.

He was covered with dust, and he was wearing the same clothes he'd been reported to be wearing the night he vanished. His social security number had not been used and he had no identification on his person. However, they were able to identify him, I guess via fingerprints. The family was notified but they said they had already grieved their lost man and that whomever was claiming to be him simply could not be. They demanded not to be contacted again.

Marion paced all day every day, moving his mouth that looked like talking or muttering, but no sound came out. He had an unnerving habit of throwing his head back with his mouth wide open as if he were laughing heartily, but not even a breath could be heard. If I talked to him, he appeared to listen, periodically throwing his head back in that laughter-mimicking way of his.

Various medications were tried, but they did not affect him either positively or negatively. Occupational therapy did nothing because Marion would just grin and unless told to stay put, he'd get up and start pacing again.

On my last day at that job, the last thing I saw was Marion, pacing in the parking lot, throwing his head back to "laugh." Later I wondered if all along I'd been dealing with a ghost. All these years later, I still don't know.

The unrest stop

I was driving across country with my mom and sister when I was 16 and my sister was 20. It was late, but we were well rested still and alert. We were driving along an interstate and needed gas and a bathroom break, so we stopped at the only rest stop in 200 miles. There was a van full of teenagers on a road trip at the gas station, as well as a small grey car parked at the pump in front of us with two young men standing still outside of it.

When we got there everything felt wrong. We'd been on the road for days and seen many rest stops at night and had never been afraid until then. My mom and sister went inside and I stayed in the car. I heard the teenagers say they were creeped out and couldn't get the pump to work, and they left in a hurry. I was watching the car in front of us, and the two men had not moved at all. Not an inch. They weren't talking. They weren't on phones. They were just standing there, still as stone.

My sister and mom came running back out to the car and when they got in, the two men slowly turned to look at us while not moving or pivoting the rest of their bodies, and I swear to fucking shit, we all saw the same thing - they had eyes dark as pitch and empty. Truly empty. Not black, not reflecting any light at all, just a void.

We sped out of there and didn’t stop until we were in the next city. The worst thing about the entire experience? We couldn't find the place on any map. We knew exactly which spot on the interstate to look, and we couldn't find it on Google maps or any paper map we had. We even asked locals about the creepy gas station out on that stretch of road and got only confused looks. We've traveled on that interstate since, and there is no rest stop.

It came for us in the graveyard

We were driving my friend’s really old beat up Subaru through a massive graveyard. We stopped and walked down a hill and came across a little pond. There was someone sitting on a rock on the other side of the pond. The figure was all black and we couldn’t make out any features other than the fact it looked like a man who was wearing some old-style top hat. We stupidly waved and shouted “Hi!”. He didn’t show any acknowledgement and continued sitting still on the rock. All of a sudden, he jumped to his feet, started running to us on the water and then vanished in thin water about halfway on the pond. My friends and I screamed and ran back to the car.

The car wouldn’t start, and we heard something banging on the back of the car. It wasn’t a constant bang, but every few seconds or so we’d hear it. Nobody was outside from what we could see in the dark, but something was making a noise on the car. I opened my phone and started dialing my mom to come give us a boost, but I had no service. None of us had any cell service. The next 30 minutes were spent trying to get her car started. No banging was heard afterwards, but we felt this heavy pressure around us.

Finally, the car started and she hit the pedal to the metal. We sped out of the graveyard so fast. Immediately crossing the gates, all of our phones regained cell service. One thing I know for certain is that someone or something was out there, and it was not an animal or a human.

It was good to see an old friend

When I was 37, I went to my high school reunion. I flew into the nearest airport and rented a car. The distance was about 35 miles through a very rural and almost abandoned part of the country. About three miles outside of town I see someone on the side of the road, flagging me down. It turned out that it was one of the guys I had attended school with. Jim (not his name) gets in the car and we start talking. I had not seen him in twenty years, but he still looked the same, maybe a little older. We get to town and I ask him if he wants to come to the VFW and have a drink. He says "No, just take me home." Jim's parents had lived only a few blocks from my grandmother’s house, and I turned in that direction but he said to take him to the outskirts of town. There was a mobile home park out there, and I figured that is where he lived. When we reached the end of the turn off he said, "Just drop me here. It was good to see you again" and he walks off into the night.

I go to the VFW, met some of my old classmates, we start to talk. As we are talking about who is coming to the reunion, I mention that I had just picked Jim up three miles east of town and had dropped him off. Everyone gets quiet; even the guy singing karaoke stops and lays down the mike. My cousin goes white as a new t-shirt.

"Barb, Jim died on that curve eight years ago. Rolled his car. We were all at his funeral," I was told. I started to feel really dizzy, and I went out to the car to take some deep breaths. There on the seat is the local newspaper, printed eight years previous, containing Jim's obituary. I still have the paper.

Someone take Reddit away from me. I can’t stop reading ghost stories — rym (@fiincheresque) March 25, 2021

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned

After we moved into our home, we were told a woman had died there at the hands of her abusive husband. She hated men. My dad would wake up with scratches all over himself, and whenever my brother was mean to my sister or I, he would have scratches on him as well. One day, my brother hurt our sister he hit her with something. When he woke up later that night he had a horrible bloody nose.

The day we moved out, my brother accidentally broke his twin’s arm trying out a wrestling move. He swears that he would have died that night if it wasn't our last in the house.

Death came for him

I was standing in my parents’ room, talking to my very sick dad at the time. He was dying of stage 4 esophageal cancer. I got the feeling something was behind me. I looked towards the doorway to the living room and something about 4'6 and fully black is peeking around the corner, with its hands on the door frame. I ran towards it, and it slipped back around the door. When I got outside the doorway, there was nothing. My dad was completely confused when I step back inside the room when I tell him. People who stayed at my house in my dad’s final days claimed to have seen it. My mom saw the figure on multiple occasions in multiple places until he passed away. We haven't seen it since.

I don’t know what possesses me to binge read Reddit true/real life ghost stories about twice a year when each place I live always has some kind of resident spirit. 😱 — Dr Fish Philosopher Todd (Dr FPT)🐟 (@ZoeSTodd) February 4, 2021

My mother attracted evil

After my parents divorced when I was a teenager, I lived with my mother. I experienced lots of paranormal happenings. Several times when I was reading in my bed, the room would start to feel really “icy.” Next, it would feel as if something/somebody that hated me was staring at me. When I got that feeling, I would leave the room and come back an hour later. Sometimes during the day, I would see a shadow figure sneaking along my bedroom walls.

Something in the flat was pretending to be my dog. I went into my room and heard a deep growl from under the bed. My dog wasn’t capable of making a noise that deep. It sounded like either a really big dog or a man doing his best dog impersonation. Other times, my dog would whimper and pace in the room next to mine but wouldn’t come when called, as if he was afraid of something in the hallway.

When I moved in with my father, the paranormal activity stopped.

Evicted by a ghost

Shortly after college, I got married. We immediately moved into a basement apartment because that's all that was available within our budget. This place had a poltergeist, and my wife was terrified. Whatever resided there with us made it clear it wanted to live alone. Dishes, glasses, and other items would fly off the shelf. My wife was hit several times. There was always an ominous feeling like we were being watched. At night when we walked through the apartment in the dark, there would be insanely bright flashes of light that would illuminate the entire room.

One night while we were going to bed, as soon as my wife and I walked into the bedroom we heard a voice from nowhere say, "[My name], move." My wife looked at me, I looked at her...I said loudly, “you've got it, bud.” We moved out 2 days later and stayed with family. The old lady who owned the place died a few months later, and the house was torn down. It is still an empty lot to this day, nothing but grass and a tree. I still drive by it every now and again.

The Death March

My dad used to work as a corrections officer at a rural prison. He drove the perimeter of the property for his entire shift, where he would check empty buildings for runaway inmates. It was generally a boring job.

One night, my dad was parked on a hill reading a magazine when he started to feel a thumping in his body. He described it as the feeling you get when speakers are playing a song with really heavy bass.

He put the magazine down and checked his rearview mirror where he saw someone outside the truck. He grabbed his pistol and jumped out of the truck with his weapon drawn. Outside the truck, he realized it was a procession of Native Americans walking through the truck (and directly through his seat) only to disappear at the exact spot he was sitting. He said it was clear they were ghosts because many of them appeared injured. This went on for a few seconds, and then the whole procession disappeared.

He called the other perimeter guy on his walkie to try to explain, and the other guy almost immediately stopped communicating. Turns out the other guy had seen this happen before but didn't believe in ghosts, so he wouldn't talk about it.

The demon’s room

I worked as a forensic nurse in a hospital’s lock-up unit. We had one older lady who swore she was being haunted and abused by a demon she would call Tiberius. So many crazy things happened while she was on the unit. We’d go into the room, do normal care, leave, and seconds later she’d start screaming bloody murder. We’d run into the room to find her looking like she’d been in a fight with a boxing champ—bloody lip, black eye, markings all over her body. No one ever saw her doing this stuff to herself. Things would get moved around the room by themselves. At one point she was in protective restraints because the doctor thought she was hurting herself. There was no way she could have moved or done anything to herself while in these restraints, but new marks would always appear or her tray/cart would be across the room. The room was secure so there was no way someone else was doing this. When we asked her questions, she’d just say, “It was Tiberius.”

After she was discharged, we always had trouble with that room. If there was going to be a rapid response or code, it happened in that room. One night a guard reported lights blinking on and off. It was that room.

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13+ Terrifying Two-Sentence Nursing Horror Stories

Nurses, though known to be one of the bravest people in the world, have our own deepest, darkest and scariest stories to tell. Most of us probably had at least one freaky stuff at our hospital workplace or even at home which is the totally terrifying and completely real occurrence.

It is during this time of the year when we are possibly unwilling to prepare ourselves for the many creepy horror stories that are just about to be told, heard and be felt anywhere!

Below is a list of the latest creepy two-liner sentences about supernatural encounters of nurses gathered and submitted through Nurseslabs.com.

You may not want to read these spooky tales on the peak of your graveyard shift , do you? We warned you!

“For a long time we heard the little voices, screams and footsteps of the ghost children in our old clinic, and we got used to them. Then one day they went quiet, which should have been our own cue to leave.” -Lee RN

“The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand.”  -Witty Anne

“A patient of mine died a year ago. I was hanging IVs in her old room and caught a glimpse of the bathroom and saw she was there standing.”  -Anonymous

“She wondered why she was casting two shadows. After all, there was only a single lightbulb in the health unit.”  -A. Galan

“Working the night shift alone tonight. There is a face in the cellar staring at the security camera.”  -stethgirl_08

“The grinning face stared at me from the darkness beyond the window on the hallway. I was about to think that I was assigned on the 5th floor.”  -edward_graveyard

“In the middle of the operation , the surgeon asked why I was breathing so heavily. I wasn’t.”  -Theone Grey

“An empty trauma room and call light goes of for one of the beds. Checking no one is inside, I saw a heart rate show up on the monitor.”  -Unknown

“I always liked this picture of the hospital founder on the lobby. Why does she seem closer to the camera than before?” – Tekla_24

“I was about to take his vital signs and he tells me, “Miss, check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Are.. you.. the.. nurse ..? there’s somebody on my bed.” -RN_tiny

“A young boy and his father are in a car accident and the father dies at the scene. The boy is transported to the hospital, taken immediately into surgery … but the surgeon steps out of the operating room and says, “I can’t operate on this boy – he is my son!” -Surge911

“A coworker was working with a pediatric patient who was playfully tangled in his sheets. She offered to help untangle him and the patient told her to help the man in the chair first, because he had a sheet wrapped around his neck and was choking.”  -Marge

“Just before our chief nurse passed away, I saw a tall black figure walked towards her office. She died the morning after.”  -D. Michaels, RN

“I opened my eyes after a nap in the clinic and everything feels wrong; it’s too quiet. I look inside the clinic’s room and see everyone standing still, including myself.” – Aldreen RN

“I was finishing up my charting at a desk in the nurse station when my coworkers decided to leave me to buy some midnight lunch. I heard someone call my name behind my ear, naturally, I would look behind but no one was there!” – A. M.

Share to us about your ghostly experiences in the comments section below! 

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16 Weird And Creepy Stories From Hospital Workers That'll Give You The Heebie Jeebies

Like I needed more reasons to want to stay out of the hospital.

BuzzFeed Contributor

When Redditor u/lizashea asked the nurses and other hospital workers of Reddit to share the most paranormal/weirdest thing you have ever experienced while working , the answers ranged from bizarre to downright frightening.

Here are some of the strangest and spookiest stories people told in the comments:, 1. this near-death experience.

"I'm an ER nurse. I had an old lady come in by ambulance, near death. She was a DNR, so we weren't going to do much for her. She didn't have any family that we could find. The hospital was full, so we had to keep her in the ER for the night.

Again, she was near death. When you've seen enough people die, there's no mistaking it, and she was almost there. Barely responsive; pale, cool, breaths were really irregular. Heart rate was up and down, too. We just turned the lights down and kept an eye on her monitor, basically waiting for her to die.

About an hour later, she's standing at the door of her room. She'd gotten up and put on all her clothes. We were all like, WTF? One of the nurses went to check on her, and she said she was hungry. Not knowing really what to make of things, we got her a chair, a bedside table, and went to the cafeteria and got her a tray of food.

Lady sat there, ate all her food, talked with the staff a little. After about an hour, she told her nurse that she was tired and wanted to lie back down. We helped her back into bed, and within 30 minutes, she was dead.

Not exactly paranormal, but in 22 years in busy-ass, inner-city ERs, it's the weirdest thing I've seen." — Anonymous

2. And this one

"When I was a student, I got called in on a stroke patient. She had coded, and they were doing CPR. They worked for 45 minutes, but she died. They cleaned her up and called on the family to say goodbye. By the time the family left, she had been both braindead and without a pulse for more than 45 minutes. Blood had filled her brain, and she was completely grey and started to smell. Suddenly, she sat up and called for her family. The nurses rushed to get monitors and equipment back on her. Started working on her again, she stabilized, said goodbye to her family, and promptly died a second time."  — u/simplesimon6262

3. This man in black

"Used to work in a skilled nursing facility. I was usually assigned to the Alzheimer's ward. One night, I'm in the linen room stocking my cart, and I heard someone shuffle up behind me, then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, and there was no one else in the room. The door was still shut, too.

Another lady started to complain that a man was coming into her room at night (again, Alzheimer's, so I didn't think much of it), so to reassure her, I told her I'd check on her throughout the night. She complained of this man every night for two more weeks when I asked her to describe him to me.

'He's real handsome, and wears a black suit. Oh. He's right behind you now, honey.'

That freaked me the fuck out. Of course, there was no one behind me. She died the next night in her sleep."  — Anonymous

4. These hallucinations

"LPN here, I work in long-term care currently. A lot of palliative residents always claim to hallucinate either small dogs or children eating ice cream before they die... It's always facility-specific, too. At one facility I work at, I've had about 6-7 residents claim to see a little girl eating ice cream, then they die that night. I'm going to find that little shit; she is causing me so much paperwork." — Anonymous

5. And these ones

"About 2 years ago, we treated patients during a fungal meningitis outbreak. Our acute care floor has a census of 20. During this, at least 10-15 were meningitis patients, age ranging from twenties to nineties. There are no shared rooms, and all the patients were in isolation, no contact with one another. Many of them had the same hallucinations, children in the corners of their rooms and auditory hallucinations of religious music." — u/RN_Waitress

"I had bacterial meningitis and had similar hallucinations. Kids' voices talking to me, people walking around my room staring at me, like I was naked in a train station. My dad later assured me he was the only one there.

It continued randomly for a few weeks after I left the hospital. I put it down to all the drugs they were giving me, but it seriously fucked me up for a while." — u/something_python

6. This creepy knocking

"In the morgue at my hospital, I would always hear knocking coming from inside the freezer. It really creeped me out, especially when the pathologist looked up, grabbed me by the shoulders, stared me straight in the eye, and said, 'You hear that? You never open that door when they're knocking. Never.' It turned out to be some loose pipes; he thought it was hilarious I didn't sleep that night." — u/eaturliver

7. This spooky but sweet goodbye

"I'm an RN, and while I was a student, I was caring for a lady who had end-stage renal failure, had a DNAR, and was shutting down. We were having a little chat when she stopped, looked over my shoulder, and said, 'Bill's here, love. I've got to go,' and swiftly stopped breathing. Read her old notes, and Bill was her deceased husband." — u/Jesspandapants

8. And this surprise hello

"I did my clinical as a CNA in a memory care unit. I helped feed this woman. She never really moved. Never talked. It was like she was in a coma or something. I would wheel her into the dining room. I can hardly get any real food in her. I'm able to slide in some special ice cream. For days she doesn't move or have any response.

I'm feeding her and talking to myself pretty much. After about 10 minutes, she slowly turns her head and says, 'Oh hello,' then she rotates her head back to her blank staring position." — u/SoberHungry

9. This ghostly patient

"Used to work in a personal care home. A couple of times, a day or so after a resident had passed, their call bell would go off in their room. No one was in the room when the call bell went off on any of the occasions.

We had one resident die pretty traumatically (nurses had to perform CPR because he was a full code). That night, the midnight staff said they saw him at the end of the hall just walking down like he always did. Then, the alarm on the door to the outside (it was a secured unit for Alzheimer's/dementia) went off. It was the door he always tried when he was looking to get out." — u/samster338

10. This grim cat

"I work in a cardiovascular surgical ICU. We have a lot of fucked up people (both physically and mentally) that come through our unit.

We had a stretch of nights where each corner room of our unit (it is a perfect square) reported seeing a cat walking around.

Not a friendly cat either, apparently. The thing was hissing at them.

The accounts were so similar to each other we actually spent probably a half hour looking around for a cat and then had security/plan ops come look as well.

No cat was ever seen or found. Two of those four patients coded the next day." — u/ajh1717

11. This plot twist

"Never anything paranormal, but I had an older patient who kept every piece of paper from every hospital stay. His heart was in bad shape, so I was desperately looking for anything to help our cardiologists out. I finally found his records from when he had heart surgery. It was in Perris, California in the 1980s. I was just reading a book about nurses who became serial killers when sure enough I see records with the name Robert Diaz. I was the nurse for a man whose former nurse was a serial killer." — Anonymous

12. These haunted hospitals

"My town has two really old hospitals. One no longer functions as overnight, and the stories are unsettling. No one cleans the old ER alone, because all the lights and call bells go off. On other floors, there's a kid with his ball, a lady in a white dress, etc. A coworker was cleaning an entire floor utterly solo (the norm) and bounced between rooms because the cleaning solution stays wet for a few minutes. Upon returning to a freshly wiped bed, hand prints were clearly visible." — u/SapphireStarr

13. This ghostly little brat

"This might get buried and is not really nurse-related other than the fact my grandmother's nurse's told me. My great-grandmother was 94 and just started suffering from dementia. She told the home nurses and me that there was a little boy in the corner of the living room who would taunt and tease my great-grandmother while laughing at her, telling her she was going to die. Well, at first it was a little disturbing, and we all shrugged it off because of her dementia. But then shit got real when my best friend came over with his little boy who is about 3 or 4. The little guy pointed over to the same corner and yelled, "I'm going to beat you up!" When we asked him what that was about, he told us that he saw another little boy in the corner, and he is not nice! We flipped the fuck out! I got shivers just typing this... Maybe Nana wasn't hallucinating." — u/smellycheesefeet

14. This haunted bed

"Nurse here! I worked the night shift when a ward patient's relative came running to the nurses' station in a panic.

'Nurse! Come quick!' she cried.

'What happened?'

'You have to see it for yourself!'

I ran to the ward where this little old lady patient was crying and holding on to the bed for dear life.  Her bed was shaking.

Now, you're probably thinking that the lady was the one causing all that shaking. But she was this frail, practically emaciated thing. She couldn't have barely rattled the bed rails. The ward had only two other patients in it and their respective watchers. Everyone was huddled in a corner, shaking in fright.

Apparently, that particular ward was seldom used, and the bed that old lady lay in was rarely occupied. People who  have  laid in it complained of nightmares where they hear screams and laughter of angry children. I guess some restless spirit called dibs on that particular bed." — u/joowulz

15. This reaper in purple

"I worked for a short time as an EMT who spent most of my time with transfers. I had a regular who was an older woman that I took to a dialysis center across town frequently.

One day, she was being moved, and I was in the back with her. She looked under the weather, so I asked what was wrong, and she said a man in purple had been visiting her. I asked if he was a relative or a technician, and she shook her head. She said the man would sit next to her during dialysis and stroke her hair. Thinking this was strange, I asked the center techs about such a person, and no one had seen or remembered such a person. Visitors weren't really a thing at this center anyway, so I assumed the patient was imagining it.

Well, one day we're actually heading to pick her up, and on the way into the parking lot, I see through the window something that chills my heart to think about. It sent shivers up my spine at the time, too, like I immediately recognized it, but I swear to god I saw a man in purple scrubs standing in one of the big windows watching us drive in, and when we pulled out of sight to go to the pickup door, we walked in to see a bunch of techs rushing to my transfer patient. The woman had just suffered a heart attack, and we were unable to revive her even at the hospital she was rushed to.

None of the techs in that place wore purple scrubs."

—u/ Come_In_Me_Bro

16. And finally, this patient who was scared to life

"Patient comes in coding, and we are working on him, and we are getting nothing, so we bring in his wife to say goodbye, and she starts yelling at him at the top of her lungs, and he comes back, so we arrange transfer to a tertiary hospital, and he codes again, so she comes back and yells at him again and comes back again. Cut to: They are loading him into the helicopter, and he codes again, so they bring him back into our ER after working on him for a bit on the helipad, and his wife yells at him again, and once again, he immediately comes back. Eventually, they decide to have his wife ride in the helicopter with him to make sure she can scare him back to life if he were to code again. The guy ended up living and received a heart transplant, and is still alive to this day all thanks to his wife scaring the life back into him." — u/feng_gui

Do you have any creepy or weird stories from working at a hospital? Sound off in the comments!

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