Nursing home ghost stories: Death Watch

When I was in my twenties I worked at a small nursing home as an aide. I was one of two aides on third shift, each of us working one of the two halls in the place. There was only one nurse on staff during the night and between the three of us, we were the entire staff.

Third shift wasn't too bad though. We came in at ten each night, did our first rounds then, checking to make sure all the patients were dry and comfortable. After that we would pass out fresh water pitchers with ice, replace the towels and wash rags in the rooms for morning, and do the laundry. Every two hours we would again do rounds, checking people to make sure they were dry, getting the few ambulatory patients up and helping them to the rest rooms, and then just checking the rooms to make sure everything was in order. Between rounds we would of course have to answer call lights but we didn't have a lot of people that woke during the night and in the three months that I had worked there, it had mostly always been pretty quiet.

This one particular night when I went in we had a patient that was on her death bed. I had honestly expected her to have passed before I made it back in that night, but she hung on all during the day. The nurse on staff was certain that she wasn't going to make it till morning though so we were told to keep an extra close eye on her. At this point, there were no orders to try and save her, we were told to just make her as comfortable as possible and wait for the inevitable.

Sandy, the other aide that I was working with, had just gone in to check on our patient. She was non-responsive, and had what we referred to as a death rattle. A death rattle is a raspy kind of breathing that patients get right before they expire. It was a sign that she was ready to go. I'd always sort of had a sixth sense as well about when a patient was close to dying and this night was no exception. I had an eerie feeling all night like something dark was hanging over us. Not really anything bad, just a dark cloud that seemed to follow us down the hallway, always stopping outside of our dying patients room. At one point I even thought I'd heard foot steps stopping outside her door.

I mentioned this to Sandy who was really interested in the paranormal. She was in her late forties and had been an aide for over twenty years. She had some good stories that she would often share with me. Being new to the profession I hadn't really had any over the top ghostly encounters at work. Just the shadowy figure here and there or a whisper in an empty room. The few really scary encounters that I had had were while friends and I had ventured into areas that we heard were haunted such as abandoned houses or graveyards. This was way before smart phones and youtube channels so I don't have any photographic evidence of any of these encounters, but I can say that they made a believer out of me.

When Sandy had come back from the patients room, she joined me in the lounge and we began to fold linens. The nurses station was a small space directly behind us that consisted of a half moon shaped desk that the nurse sat behind, and a locked medication room located behind her. On the desk was a small black and white, soundless, monitor that looked directly into the dinning room that was at the front of the building and out of our immediate view.

While our night nurse was doing her paper work she happened to glance into the black and white screen where she saw two people sitting at a table near the dinning room doors. She looked up at us and asked who was out of bed. Sandy and I both looked up and shrugged. We hadn't noticed any of the patients being up let alone out of their rooms. I got up and looked in the monitor and sure enough, there were two people seated in the dinning room. They appeared as two dark, silhouettes. They were sitting there, just casually talking with each other. We could see them move around, turn their heads, and lean forward or sit back. It was obvious that it was not some trick of the light, there were two people in the dinning room seated at one of the tables.

The nurse instructed us to go down to the dinning room and ask the two patients to please go back to bed. There was no kitchen staff in yet and the dinning room was dark. With no one to stay down there with them it was just too dangerous to allow them to remain there on their own. Sandy and I got up, thinking nothing of going to the dinning room, and made our way out of the lounge.

The dinning room was located at the end of the main hall where all of the offices were located. We had to walk down a corridor that lead from the main hall to the nursing hall, and then turn to the left. Once we'd turned the corner we could easily see the dinning room. The lights were off but the large double doors were standing wide open so that we could see directly into the room. The table that we had seen our two rouge patients sitting at was right in front of those main doors. As we came closer to the doors we saw the table, the chairs had been pulled out where the two had been sitting, but there was no one there.

I shrugged. Maybe they'd went back to bed on their own. That seemed the least likely case though since they would have had to pass us in the hall but I couldn't figure out where else they could have gone. The kitchen was locked and there were no other doors in the dinning room. All of the offices were locked, as were any doors that led outside. If they had gone down the main hall towards the front entrance we would have seen them walk in front of us, but we didn't see anything. Still, I couldn't really wrap my head around where these two people could have gone.

Lacking any better ideas, Sandy and I decided to just push the chairs back in, and go back to the lounge. As we came back up the hallway to the nurses station the charge nurse looked up and asked us where the patients were. We were a bit confused and so explained to her that there was no one there. Now, it was the nurse who was confused.

"I just saw them." She told us. "When the two of you pushed the chairs in, the people got up and stood behind you. After you left the dinning room they pulled the chairs out and sat back down."

Sandy and I both looked in the monitor and sure enough, there they were again, seated at the table and back to talking as though we'd never interrupted them. The nurse again told us to return to the dinning room and fetch the patients. Reluctantly we obeyed though I had a sneaking suspicion that we weren't going to find anything other than two chairs that were pulled away from the table. Just as I'd thought, no patients, and the chairs were in deed pulled away from the table.

This time we left the chairs where they were and returned to the nurses station to tell her once again

that there was no one there, even though she'd seen the two people in the dinning room look up at us when we'd entered.

We went about our normal duties the rest of the night, though we kept an eye on the two guests in the dinning room. They remained there until around four-thirty in the morning when our patient down the hall finally passed away. After her death, we no longer saw the two people sitting in the dinning room, though I'd once again heard footsteps going down the hall towards the room were the woman had died. Two sets of foot steps stopped outside that room, but I heard three sets of footsteps leave.

We believe that the guests in the dinning room where there waiting.  Maybe they were angels, or maybe they were family members that had already passed, and were waiting to welcome their loved one to the other side. Either way, they had left that night as mysteriously as they had arrived and we never saw them again after that, though it was far from the last ghost sighting we'd witness in that facility.