Strange phenomena have been witnessed by people from all walks of life, and far from the common image of these things only being glimpsed by weirdos out in the boondocks or crazy people, a growing legion of very sane and educated individuals have reported brushes with forces they cannot explain, including those considered to be well trained professionals. Many of these weird tales of the paranormal come from paramedics, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), and other such emergency personnel, who more often than you think come forward with tales of experiencing things they cannot explain. It is a rather compelling concept, that these people who devote their lives to being the first to stare at the aftermath of death or look death in the face come into contact with forces beyond their comprehension. These professional emergency personnel are out trying to save lives, and are not looking for the paranormal, yet sometimes the paranormal comes looking for them.

On many occasions this has to do with some sort of ghostly phenomenon, such as one account from Ranker, concerning an EMT/firefighter who says that he had gone out to do a wellness check on a person who had called 911 but had not responded to the operator. When they arrived, a little old lady came to the door, but claimed that she had not made the call and that she had lived alone ever since her husband had passed away some years before. This was all rather odd, but it gets even stranger. The witness and his partner leave the premises and not long after get another call from the same address, making them turn around to head back. The same lady answers the door and once again claims to have no knowledge of such a call. The ambulance leaves once again and this is where things would take a turn for the truly weird. The witness explains:

And just as we get back to the station, same call, same address, no response. We drive out there again, believing that the old lady must have been confused. But this time when we pulled into the driveway the old lady wasn’t at the door to greet us. There was no reply at the door, but it was unlocked. We take a peek inside to find the old lady was on the floor and wasn’t breathing. We rushed in to help and got her to a hospital in stable condition. When she woke up in the ambulance, she still claimed that she never called us and that we arrived almost immediately after she had fallen (it was a 15-minute drive to her house from the station). Before she was admitted to the hospital, she asked me and another EMT if we could bring her knitting needles and bag of clothes, to her in the hospital. I offered to pick up her stuff because I had a friend who lived in that area and we were gonna hang out anyway. I pick up my friend and drive to the lady’s house. I ran inside to grab the bag and knitting stuff while my buddy sat in the car. But just as I was leaving I swear I felt a hand on my back and heard a voice say ‘Thank you.’ When I get back in the car, my friend asked me, ‘Why couldn’t the lady’s husband bring her stuff to the hospital?’ I explained that her husband was dead, but when I said that my friend said: ‘But I saw an old guy in the window, he smiled and waved at me.’ At first, I refused to believe in anything supernatural, so I called the police and asked them to do a sweep of the house (I thought it was a squatter). Nothing was out of the ordinary, and no one was inside. I later brought my friend to visit the lady. He started describing the old dude who was in the window, but the old lady almost immediately started tearing up and said: ‘That’s my Harold.’

What was going on here? Did this woman’s dead husband actually call emergency services and save her life? In another rather ghostly report from Reddit is a witness who claims to have been an ambulance paramedic working the night shift when he had his brush with the unexplained. He had gotten a call for a person who was having trouble breathing, and they arrived to find the victim still alive. However, things were not over yet, and the witness says of what happened:

Upon arrival we entered the patient’s home which was one of the smallest homes I had ever seen. About 400 square feet. You walk into the living room that connects to a kitchen and then connects to the only bedroom. When we walked in we saw the patient in the back of the room. During our assessment of her the cops that were with us kept asking if someone else was in the house because they said they thought they heard something. With the patient’s size and the condition of the front porch we decided to go out of the sliding door inside the patient’s room. After getting the patient into the ambulance I went back inside the home while the police left for another call after helping lift the patient. I was going in the back room to get our bags and turn off the lights. But when I entered the home, the lights were off.(they were all on before and the snow was not bad enough to take down power lines). I tried the lights to no avail. I thought that was weird but didn’t think anything of it. Then I was walking in the kitchen when I looked down to find our bags all piled up and zipped up. I then felt that there was something in the house. I grabbed the bags and ran out. I found out right after getting out that my radio died( it was full battery fresh off the charger). I had thought that the cops put the bags in the kitchen but they were outside the home before us to help the patient. I was the last one out of the house and our bags were opened up all the way because we had to get the patient various items in each bag. I have no explanation for this.

In another report we have another report from ThoughtCo. of a medical assistant at a hospital who received an emergency call to the room of an Alzheimer’s patient who had gone into seizures during the night. She turned out to be fine, but then began experiencing intense, very realistic hallucinations, saying that she could see her dead husband right there in the room with them. The witness says of what happened:

She insisted her husband was there and she talked to him, scooted over so he could sit next to her, etc. etc. Just generally acted like there was another person was there when there wasn’t. Her husband, Jim, had been dead for a couple of years. She seemed happy, and there’s no point arguing with someone with dementia anyway, so we left ‘them’ to visit. After a while, she quiets down and says Jim left. Across the hall, the lady in that room turns on her call light. Her complaint? ‘This man won’t get out of my room!’ We don’t see anything and ask, ‘What man? Who is it?’ She turns to the nothingness beside her bed and says, ‘Who are you?!’ Then turns back to us and says, ‘His name is Jim.’

Roaming dead husband or something else? Who knows? Also of a rather ghostly nature, but at the same time sinister and almost demonic is a story told by a Reddit user who says he is a medic on an ALS unit and that his experience occurred in Fresno County, California in 2015 at approximately 3 AM. They had gotten a call for a suicide hanging from out on a dark, rural farm property, where they arrived to find the victim quite alive and with the Sherriff/ PD on the scene already. The 34-year old victim was described as dressed all in black, and had suffered some lacerations on his neck after having tried to hang himself from an “oddly large, wicked looking, gray, skeleton of a tree” on the property. It was decided to take him in for treatment, and after being put into restraints for his own safety he was driven off in the ambulance, and out on that gloomy road they would have an experience they would never forget. The witness says of the incident:

On the way to the hospital (a few good miles down the road, we made a wrong turn, got a little lost, and took a “back road”), he was quiet and trembling. He wasn’t fighting the restraints, he almost seemed to feel safer in the back of the ambulance while i concluded assessing that I got this bone cold shiver down my spine. I looked out the window and saw this house, mind you every house are acres apart from one another…well the house was okay alike the others, looked normal, but next to this house was this big tree/bush and in a separate tone and position this old 4 door sedan was parked. The car looked out of place and was clearly separated from the house and tree/bush, it was like its own place. It was odd and creepy. I could normally see in the cars cab and see the headrest of the driver’s seat from a far, but this car was pitch black on the inside, almost if the darkness was coming out of the windows because it was the deepest and darkest black I’ve ever seen on the inside. All i saw inside was the deepest and darkest black and Two Neon Dark Blue Eyes staring back at me a little above were a tall and big man’s eyes would be in a car. Immediately felt the back of the ambulance get colder and the goosebumps and hair on my skin stood up. At first i thought it was a security light or reflection in the car, but as we passed the house, the car turned on, pulled out, and started following us in the ambulance. The neon blue eyes were still there and the cab was still dark as can be. The car followed us miles to the highway, still with the eyes staring and deepest darkest black in the cab even with the street lights i could not see into the car!! I was almost mystified by this and forgot about my patient in the ambulance and partner, but i did not at all feel welcomed by these neon dark blue eyes. It was almost threatening and felt as if it wanted my patient. We were on the highway and this car still following us almost +20 miles now, the neon dark eyes were still there and even with the highway lights I could not see into this car. It got colder. I started to feel as if it noticed me watching and was watching and focusing on me now instead of focusing on my patient. The car then sped up and pulled up next to the ambulance in the next lane while we were driving and looked at me. I was very literally 5 feet from this car and could not see into the cab from the window, all I could see were those DARK NEON BLUE EYES and DARKNESS but it wasn’t looking ahead, it was looking at me! And in that moment I said out loud challenging it “Go away. You are not touching this man. This man is my patient. If you want him you will have to come through me. I am stronger than you and I will not let you have him”. After i said that not even a moment later the car and my ambulance split off as it went on one off ramp and i did the other. It was no longer cold in the ambulance and my patient was no longer gray in the cheeks but now his cheeks were pink and a normal. It wasn’t til after the call and we got the patient inside the hospital when I realized what just happened. I truly feel and felt that whatever the Deep Neon Blue Eyed thing was not human and it wanted that man.

Was this ghosts, demons, or what? Why were they following that man? Did any of this even really happen at all? Your guess is as good as anyone’s. Other reports from emergency personnel are a bit harder to categorize, but deeply strange nevertheless. From Reddit we have a report from a user called “Compsci2000,” who says that as an EMT he had been called to the scene of a head on crash between a car and a bicycle. Things were immediately odd in that the victim who had been riding the bicycle was totally alone out there on the street, despite it being the middle of the day in a quiet suburb, and no throngs of macabre curiosity seekers had gathered to gawk at the mayhem. The victim was sprawled out in a pool of blood and things did not look good at all. The witness explains the whole gruesome incident:

So his skull was pretty much smashed in and he was unresponsive. It was the worst head injury I’d ever seen. We assessed that he had a major skull fracture, a concussion, and he was bleeding profusely. He was also missing teeth and had a minor road rash, but fortunately he wasn’t missing much skin. To give you an idea of how bad it was, this was the kind of injury that most people don’t survive. If you did survive, you’d basically be a crippled vegetable. Normally we would’ve moved him off the road, but when someone has a head/neck injury that isn’t very safe. My partner, who was also training me as I was still kinda new, went to check his pulse while I began to unload our gear. He crouched down, felt for a pulse for a while, and then stood up and opened his mouth to say something. Suddenly, the guy f*cking jumped up. He didn’t use his arms to pick himself up, he just f*cking jumped to his feet. It startled the two of us. He looked at us, smiled, and attempted to grab his bike. We tried to stop him, but we didn’t exactly want to wrestle him to the ground given his condition. He gets away from us and bolts into the woods without his bike. My partner was in even more disbelief than I was. He just stared at where the man had run off, mouth agape. Then he turned to me and muttered, ‘He had no f*cking pulse, man.’ I asked him if he was sure and he swore up and down that the biker was clinically dead. We contacted the authorities for assistance and they sent a search and rescue team into the forest. I don’t know if he was found or not, because we normally don’t get much information about patients after they go to the professionals.

How could this have been? Where did this man go? Was this a ghost, a phantom, a medical miracle, or what? Did they ever find this victim? It is unknown. In a similar case of bizarre vanishing accident victims, we have a report from Unresolved Mysteries, concerning an emergency worker who showed up to an accident scene after getting a report of a serious car crash. The site would prove to be rather odd indeed, because although the accident was quite obviously very horrific and had left behind plenty of damage and blood, the victims would not be found. The witness says:

So we showed up to the scene and at the end of a very long dirt road there was a 90 degree turn with an embankment. The car was clearly going at a very high speed, missed the 90 degree turn, hit the embankment, flew through the air and the front of the car hit the ground so hard it gouged out a pretty sizable hole upon impact. The windshield showed two shattered impact zones where the passenger’s heads hit, covered in blood and hair. There was more blood in and around the car. The scene was gruesome and didn’t look like a survivable crash- especially given the mangled condition of the car. We expected to find bodies nearby. Police, police dogs, firefighters and now an entire search and rescue party was not able to locate the victims after several hours. As night set in it began to get more and more eerie. There was this horrible looking car crash but no bodies to be found. Finally, after about 3 hours of searching, there was a 911 call that came in: a report of a bloodied dead body found in the bed of a parked pickup truck in a rural home’s driveway a couple miles away. Apparently a family was coming home from a vacation, and when they pulled into their driveway, they noticed the body and immediately called 911. So two police units dispatch from the search to respond to the call. We all assumed this would be the end of the story. Well, the police showed up to the house and to everyone’s surprise- no body to be found. Somehow the body had vanished. There was blood, but no sign of anything else. So a second search radius started from that house. We searched practically the whole night. We’re called back the next morning and nobody ever found the bodies, we eventually called the search off. To this day I have no idea what happened.

This has been merely a selection of some of the more outlandish tales I have been able to dig up from emergency first responders, but there are many more such stories out there. It is curious to imagine just what these trained professionals have come across out there while cruising the dark streets waiting for that call to come, and what has happened when they arrive. These are level-headed, sober professionals who are there to do a job, yet these mysterious occurrences have come for them and cannot be easily brushed off as the mindless ramblings of some attention-seeker. Whatever has gone on in these cases, they are certainly pretty intriguing, and one wonders what other such weird things have happened to these life savers while out on their jobs.