According to these doctors and nurses from Ask Reddit, it’s not as unusual as you think to see the paranormal during their shifts.

1. Did a rotation in a burn unit. There are tons of stories that go around, but I’ll share my favorite. A pimp lit one of his prostitutes on fire, and she immediately bear hugged him causing them to both suffer pretty severe injuries (unfortunately hers included an inhalation burn). They both were being treated in the same ICU but on opposite ends.

Weeks later she ends up coding and passes away, and after about 30 minutes as things start to quiet down, the guy starts screaming from his room, “Get her out! Get the god damn bitch out of my room!”

2. I’ve worked in a small family run nursing home for 6 years as a nurse aide. It was an orphanage before it became a nursing home, and unfortunately before being shut down the orphanage had a history of severe abuse and neglect. It’s not gossip, the owner herself has told us. When residents get close to death they always see a little girl. One of my patients was a very alert gentleman, he knew all our names and was very alert and oriented. I was passing dinner trays and saw that he had his back turned and was talking and laughing in the corner. I knocked and asked him who he was talking to and he chucked and said, “This little girl came into my room, she was scared.” He died 3 days later. About 6 months later had another patient screaming about a little girl grabbing his feet and she needed to leave him alone. He died that night. She’s come up over the years it’s always the same thing they see her and then they die. Other coworkers have had the same experience. It’s very unsettling.

3. A ward I worked on once had a patient who was a psychic/medium as a patient. We had a bit of a laugh with her as she was on the ward for a while (she’d had a stroke which affected her mobility) and she would do ‘readings’ for the staff from time to time. I took it all as just a bit of fun until one evening when she pressed her nurse call buzzer and told us to go check on a patient in a side room as he was dead. We went to check and sure enough found that the gentleman had died. Later on we asked our psychic patient how she had known and she told us she had seen him coming out of his room obviously distressed. She realized he had died and had to explain to him what had happened and help him to pass over/go to the light… now I am not a believer but that gave me the creeps.

4. I’m a psychiatric nurse; early in my career, I worked at a residential mental health facility. There was a resident I’ll call Marion Duchene. He was an elective mute, which simply means that he didn’t/wouldn’t/couldn’t talk but there were no pathological findings as to why. He had spoken earlier in his life and in fact seemed quite normal back then, with the notable exception of being close to seven feet tall. He’d been raised in the Deep South and joined the military when he was nineteen. After boot camp, he was stationed somewhere in the south. One night, he just vanished. It was declared an AWOL for years, and finally 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 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. He was well-fed and in good health, except for his refusal to speak. 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 said he was a “haint” and a stand-in for their dead relative and demanded not to be contacted again.

Marion paced all day every day. Not in a frantic way, but just lumbering up and down the halls and outside. He smiled all the time and would be moving his mouth in a way that indicated talking or muttering, but he was dead silent. 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 told to go to the dining room for a meal, he’d go and eat. But if nobody told him, he just kept pacing, never indicating hunger. If offered a cigarette, he’d smoke it in an oddly formal way, almost delicately, if that makes sense. But he never seemed to crave smoking. The man wanted nothing. If I talked to him, he appeared to listen, periodically throwing his head back in that laughter-mimicking way of his.

There was nothing to do for this man. 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, on my way to something better, 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.

5. Oh I have so many I don’t know where to start. I worked in Geriatrics (nursing homes) for years, so most of our patients died within a few years of being with us. Anyways I had a new patient move into one of the rooms on my hall that my previous patient had just passed in. My new patient kept calling at night saying that there was this woman who kept coming into her room and trying to talk to her. At first I just passed it off on her being in her 90’s and struggling with dementia, so I assured her that I would lock her door at night to make sure no one could come in. After about a week of this continuing to happen, I sat down with her and was asking what this women looked like (thinking she may just be hallucinating her daughter or sister or something ) and she proceed to tell me that this woman had a pink robe on with blue fuzzy slippers and her hair up in curlers, and the woman would come in sit at the foot of her bed, pat the new patient’s feet and try to talk to her but she couldn’t understand what she was saying. I almost pissed myself. The patient that I had had in that room prior to my new one, went to bed, EVERY NIGHT, in her pink house robe, blue slippers and her hair in curlers. It stopped after about two weeks.

6. I worked as a Medtech at an assisted living facility. One day a resident (I’ll call her Margaret) suddenly passed away and her family left all her belongings in the room that night including her pendant to call the staff for help. The next night Margaret’s neighbor called the staff because someone was talking in the room next door and keeping them awake. We brushed the resident off knowing that Margaret’s room was empty. About an hour later Margaret’s pendant started going off from her empty apartment. I was the only one willing to go turn it off so I walked into the room and it was FREEZING COLD in the middle of summer (the air conditioning was off.) Suddenly the bathroom door slammed as I was turning off the pendant light. I locked the door and ran back to the nurse’s station. We forced one of the older male staff members to go check out the entire room and he claims the door was still locked when he got down there and no one was in there.

7. I am a nurse in a hospital and my patient was a well known card reader in town (not too unheard of in Louisiana). I had actually gone to her about 10 years prior and she was eerily accurate. While caring for her for a few days I walk into her room and she is unresponsive. She had been very lethargic all day but now she was out. Her daughter is at the bedside and is trying to wake her up. I sternal rub her and inflict pain with no response and a very thready pulse. I call a rapid response. This woman then wakes up randomly and was full of energy within a 30 second span. She told me she was dead and watching me in the room the whole time. Knew exactly what happened. She said God told her it wasn’t her time and sent her back. She went home a couple days later and she is still doing card readings. She’s in her late 80s now.

8. Ok, I am a nurse but this did not happen to me, but several other nurses who worked at these units. There is a little girl who haunts the burn unit of a large Military Medical treatment facility in the US. She has been seen by both staff and patients. Haunts may not be the correct term, but she has been witnessed by several.

I used to work at the old Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In the old one that moved back in 2011, there was a VIP ward, I believe it was ward 72. Any retired General Officers would be stay there, along with any Higher ups in the Govt, think Secretary of State and other Cabinet Officials. There was also a room for the First Lady and President. This ward is private, locked at all entrances and very nice. It is furnished with very high end furniture and a lot of it was donated by Mrs. Mamie Eisenhower, the wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Well, per my friend who worked there, the ghost of Mamie Eisenhower is very particular about any one staying in her room, and if anyone did sleep in that room, she would yank off the bedsheets. My friends also said decorative pieces would randomly fall off table of fly off the walls when they were the only ones up there. Mamie would also apparently page the supervisor, who would call the ward back to a very confused nurse as to who paged them.

9. Worked in a nursing home/long term facility for multiple years. Personally hadn’t experienced anything too crazy apart from mystery call lights (call bell system going off, no buttons lit up, no rooms lit up, system would have to be reset from the electrical room to clear it), hearing doors close shut, toilets flushing, faucets running. These were by no means commonplace.

Other staff had some more direct experiences though, apparently in one hall a little girl would occasionally be seen walking. This had been reported by multiple staff as well as patients

A staff member was sitting out in her car during night shift when some woman who knocked on her window quickly disappeared. The next day she was discussing this out loud with the oncoming shift when someone pulled out a picture from old files based on the description provided. Apparently, it was a match to a former patient that had passed away at least 10 years before that staff member was hired.

10. I worked in a pediatric hospital and had always heard that the fourth floor right outside our oncology unit was haunted. I worked three twelves normally but would pick up overtime and picked up a night shift. I was working in the NICU which happened to also be on the fourth floor but on the opposite side. The oncology unit had a staircase that was a short cut down to the cafeteria which was on the second floor. At about 3am I was ready to take a short break and wanted a cup of coffee from the cafeteria so I decided to take that staircase. I walked through the automatic double doors and saw a kid skipping down the hall. I called out to him as I was afraid a little kid had snuck out of a patient room. As soon as I called out to him he turned and in the blink of an eye totally vanished. A lot of other nurses and docs had seen the same little kid skipping in that same hallway. Of course I chalked it up to just exhaustion and didn’t really think about it much after that. But you are damn sure I didn’t use that hallway at night ever again.

11. I was working at night and one of the patients died while I was in the room, we tried everything to revive this person but it didn’t work so after doing the papers and everything I went to another place in the hospital and I swear to god that this patient who I saw dead, touched my right arm. I think that I have never cried that much in my life.

12. I used to work in a nursing home as both a CNA and an LPN, and while nothing too crazy happened there were definitely things that happened out of the ordinary.

I remember one time after someone had died I was cleaning up her body and the door to the room swung wide open even though it had been firmly latched and nobody was there. It gave me the creeps.

There were instances of furniture being moved, lights turning on and off by themselves, and toilets randomly flushing by themselves as well. I also remember I had one resident one night who asked me to make sure I closed the door to the closet that was at the end of her bed–and she told me that when it was open “that woman” kept going in and out of it all night and it kept her awake.

13. One of the rooms we have is obviously having something of a haunting. A man in a gown gestured one of the techs to come in, she went in and he was gone. One week earlier a female patient was asking to get a different room, because a man wouldn’t leave her room. We just thought it was some sort of delirium. Multiple others have seen him, too.

14. Back when I was a paramedic in Oakland I was taking care of an elderly gentleman in the back of my ambulance he looked up into the upper corner of the ambulance and said, “It’s okay Lulu, I’ll be with you soon.” His daughter was with him and told me that Lulu was his wife who died 20 years earlier. A few minutes later he went into cardiac arrest and passed on.

15. I am a psychiatrist and during my training years I worked for 6 months at a ward treating patients with depressive and anxiety disorders. It was an old building which had been housing psychiatric patients since the mid 1920s. On our floor we had 13 beds and a nursing station, a living room, and a few conference rooms. One day a few weeks in I am interviewing a patient who tells me she has heard a baby crying at night, waking her up. There are no babies in that hospital as the place is situated far away from housing areas and there were restricted visiting hours. Afterwards the nurse pulls me aside and tells me that the baby crying thing is not a psychotic symptom. She is very serious about this, but won’t elaborate. I kind of shrug it off, as either way it does not change the diagnostic or treatment, and forget about the experience.

Around 3 months in my stay I sit in the nurses station and three nurses behind me are talking. One of them says, “She is very active today” and the other says, “Really? Oh, hadn’t noticed.” I turn around and ask them who they are talking about. They look at each other, and then one of them hesitantly says, “Well. There is a baby here. She cries sometimes.” I of course says no, but they just kind of shrug and smile. Not 30 seconds later I hear it – it sounded far away but not to far. A cry, clearly a baby’s cry, sounding like it is separated from us by maybe 2 or 3 walls. I am perplexed and look at the nurses. They look at me like “told you so.”

Since then I heard it maybe 2-3 times a week. I told a new doctor about it who laughed, however a few weeks into her stay, she came to me, white as a sheet, and told me she heard it in their coffee break. All the nurses just kind of knew about it, and being in psychiatry, hearing that kind of stuff is not really something you brag about. I was transferred and haven’t heard it since. I think about it sometimes, but I don’t really know what to make of it.

16. My mom used to work as a night nurse in the burn unit at a hospital in Dallas, TX. She told me that people would always talk about how the burn unit was apparently haunted. She wasn’t really sure whether or not to believe this until a little girl came into the unit with horrific burns. The little girl did not always have parents stay the night with her, so my mom would try to check up on her pretty often when she worked. One night, my mom asked the girl if she ever got scared at night. The little girl responded, “No. I don’t get scared because an old woman comes to read to me every single night and sits beside my bed while I fall asleep.” This shocked my mom because there were no older women working in the burn unit at night and she would usually be the only person on duty during those times. It isn’t that scary, but she always recalls it being one of the craziest things that has ever happened as a healthcare worker.

17. Student nurse here, I once had a patient say, “Do you ever feel the chill whenever you’re on the computer? Don’t worry it’s just a nurse who worked here a long long time ago, she doesn’t understand your technology so she’s trying to learn.”

I always feel someone is looking over my shoulder when I’m on the computer so this freaked me out.

18. One day a patient had to go to the X-ray which he was taken to in a wheelchair. About 5 minutes later the notification from the patient’s room went off and me and my favorite work buddy went to the room. As we stepped in we saw that the room was empty and the windows were closed. Even the bed was missing in which the patient did not go to the X-ray. We both told a fully examined nurse and even she had no idea where the bed went. At the end we had to fill the room with another bed.

I’m still a nursing student but this was the most paranormal thing I witnessed so far.

19. I‘m a Labor and Delivery/Nursery nurse. We have a button to push after a delivery to play a lullaby over the PA system announcing a birth through the hospital. One night no one was even in the same room as the button and the lullaby started playing. It did that twice then we unplugged the entire thing. It still went off once more that night, and again a few days later despite being entirely disconnected. That was a few years ago and no one ever heard it do that before or since.

20. I am a medical student. Back when I was doing internship at an obstetrics hospital, I usually ended my night shift at around 2am. As I walked back to my quarter, I would occasionally see a baby girl, probably 5-7 yo, running and playing in the hall. When I brought this up with one of my professors, he just told me to turn a blind eye. According to him, “they” were just playing and would do no harm if you pretended not to see them.

21. When I was a nursing student up on an ICU floor I was hanging antibiotics in my patient’s room when I heard an audible, “Hey.” I turn around and there is no one else in the room. Mind you, my patient was intubated and sedated so there’s no possible way it was them. It was a woman’s voice as well so I thought it was my preceptor. I go back out to the nurse’s station and I asked my preceptor if that was her in the room trying to catch my attention. She told me no and and I’ve never seen someone’s eyes get so big. Apparently the room I was in has had the most paranormal sightings and activity out of all the rooms on the unit. Sightings as in shadows sitting in the corner of the room, voices being heard and curtains being flung violently across the railings. No one ever told me about this room prior to my preceptorship so it just added to everyone’s beliefs it was haunted AF.

22. I know somebody who is a nurse. She told me a story about how this woman was unconscious when she came into the hospital and when she woke up she was hysterical, and cried nonstop just begging to be taken outside, so eventually they did. When she was outside she calmed down and said she has the ability to see the dead and they knew she could see her so they surrounded her bed all shouting for her help.

23. My mom works in a hospital. During Hurricane Maria the building suffered a lot of damage and administration chose to close a whole floor instead of fixing it. It used to be the pediatrics floor. When people go up there they can clearly hear babies crying even though the floor is completely abandoned and the floor below is for adult patients only. It has been caught on video.

24. Alone in the break room, I would feel the room get cold and then the back of my hair would be ruffled.

25. RN here. I was cleaning up a dead body at work when the head of the hospital bed started moving up on its own.

I was alone and I’m not fat enough for my belly to be hitting the buttons (which I’ve seen happen), so I’m still not sure what caused it to happen.

26. My mom used to work in home care, not exactly a nurse. One day she was at a man’s house feeding him his supper. She cleaned up, made sure the man was set up and said goodbye before leaving. He seemed perfectly normal to her. As she walked down the front driveway to her car she got a weird feeling. She kept walking until a random huge gust of wind stopped her in her tracks. She tells me she heard someone telling her to go back. She turned back and went inside to find that the man had passed. If she had left he probably wouldn’t have been found for a couple of days.

27. We had a little boy come by ambulance and he was a toddler. His parents had put him to bed and he was with a cold. Nothing serious but developed tragically into more and he started coming in and out of consciousness. We had to do a rapid intubation and he ended up passing away a few days later. Before Mom and Dad made it to the hospital, he kept talking about his baby sister Hannah. Not soon after we had to life saving measures. I was distraught because I had a son similar in age and a daughter named Hannah.

Fast forward. Approximately two years later, family comes in with sick infant. They remembered me (I did once I recalled their story) and I was their provider again. Their daughter’s name was Hanna. It startled me and I recalled with clarity the boy speaking of his sister, whom I assumed was alive and at home. Nope, she wasn’t even conceived yet.

Baby, thankfully, went home with parents and doing well but I’ll never forget that. Little boy and his baby sister, Hanna.

28. We were on a night shift, standing/sitting around the nurses station and talking about ‘weird’ things that had happened. One of the HCAs was in a side room and the lights flicked on and off twice… call bells going off when there was no one about to press them… hearing a cough when there was no one there etc, etc. As we were talking, there was a pause in the conversation and very clearly we heard typing from the keyboard at the doctor’s desk which was just around the corner from us. I stepped around the corner to see who it was as usually the doctors would check in with us before sitting down, just to say hello and to see if there were any jobs needing down. So I looked around the corner after hearing the keys being tapped as if someone was typing, only to see no one there! Was very freaky and we had to change the convo as we all felt too uncomfortable after that!

29. We’ve actually had a room sprinkled with holy water several times by our pastoral care due to the amount of deaths we’ve had in the same room.

30. There is probably some medical explanation for this, but still the weirdest thing I’ve seen as a nurse so far. We had a very robust, confused old lady on our floor. Her room was in front of the nurse’s station so we could keep an eye on her, and had one of our nurses aids as a sitter too. She was always fighting, kicking, trying to get out of bed. Very restless and agitated, as some patients I’ve had before can get before death. One day we were called into the room as her heart rate was going down and she lay still with her eyes open. It was 30…20…then flat lined. We checked for a pulse and did not find any. She was a DNR so we did not attempt resuscitation. We close her eyes, prepare to get the body bag and call the family, the sitter remains in there to start getting the body ready. Less than 10 minuets later she calls us back in. The old lady is at it again, hitting, kicking, trying to get out of the bed. She came back to life! Honestly we found the situation hilarious, and I still have never seen any patient come back like that on their own. I think she made it out of the hospital, too.