Nurses Break Down Their Most Bizarre Graveyard Shift Experiences

I hate hospitals.

I've seen too much grief and sorrow play out in them.

That's why I could never work in the medical field.

Going to work day in and day out, experiencing the worst or last moments of people's lives, can take a toll.

Nurses are the backbone of the medical profession.

They see it all and do it all and often get less recognition.

The nurses on the night shifts deserve special praise.

Those witching hours can be brutal.

Redditor fave_slinger wanted to hear from all of the night nurses out there, so they asked:

"Nurses on Reddit, what's the most bizarre thing that has ever happened while working graveyard shift?"

Playing Bags

"I showed up at a Nursing home one morning, and the nurses looked like they'd had a rough night. I asked, and they said that one of the residents had 'Played the colostomy bagpipes.'"

- Crashthewagon

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MURDER

"One elderly lady escaped and walked to a police station at 3 am in torrential rain. It was 3 miles away, and she suffered a lot of falls, etc, covered in blood by the time she arrived. Asked to report a murder. She reported a nurse for murdering all her patients. Turned out the nurse had refused to give her a cigarette, and this was her way of getting her back."

- Gc1981

Elder Care

"Didn't happen to me, but someone I work with (elderly care.) She found one of our dementia patients (who was barely able to walk, mind you) standing in her dark room, scraping the wall with a spoon. When asked why, she was convinced her Husband was stuck in the wall and she tried to dig him out."

"Said Husband never lived with us and passed away years ago."

"One situation that actually happened to me was another resident convinced I spoke French to her, she would always come up to me (and only me) and be like 'we French people we can talk in private!'"

"When asked, she said she couldn't speak French, and neither can I."

- VisionOfChange

EMPTY

"I came in one night to find my charge nurse standing by the elevator, having a very clear and distinct back-and-forth conversation with somebody inside, and apparently the elevator was stuck and somebody was in there and everyone was trying to figure out who to call or what button to push to fix the problem. Eventually, it's decided that we'll call the maintenance guy, and so the charge nurse turned around to go call them, and when she did, the elevator doors opened behind her and the f**king thing was empty."

- Mysterious_Bag_9061

Lady in the Black Dress

"Third shift nursing home:"

"Lots of people will call to let you know they are going to die soon, which is polite and creepy."

"Multiple residents who don’t leave their rooms, seeing the same 'hallucinations.'

"For me, the worst one was a woman in a black dress. In one night, I had three residents ask me why that woman kept walking through their rooms.🫥"

- coffee-rain-books

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Shenanigans

"I’m a physician, but was on graveyard shift in the ICU during the dark days (COVID), and I left for a few minutes to handle a patient off the ward. When I came back, the nurses looked like they’d seen a ghost. One of the books on the crash cart had apparently flown off horizontally, with force, like six feet across the hallway; no one was near it, and it wasn’t placed in some sort of precarious position to fall over. The nurse described it as though some invisible thread had pulled it straight off the shelf."

"Then, nearly immediately after, one of our patients who’d been hanging on by a thread passed away (was DNR, so no action needed)."

"To this day, I consider it related. Like he was causing shenanigans on the way out."

- flowercurtains

Good Boy

"The Black Dog visitations. Hospice unit, night shift. When patients reported getting a visit from a large, friendly black dog, we'd pass the sighting to the incoming day shift. Inevitably, death followed soon."

"To be clear, we didn't have any therapy pets at night. Even though it was a Hospice ward, some patients were just there for respite care, and many were there to get symptoms under control before they returned home. So the patients who told us about the Dog obviously were conscious and not actively dying."

- Ok_Instruction7805

First Solo

"Was working in a child and adolescent psych facility. While the doors technically locked, where I live has strict legal regulations around locked facilities and emergency release. There was an emergency release on all doors accessing the building, where if you held the bar down for a certain number of seconds, the locks released."

"My first solo night shift, the entire unit (about a dozen or so kids) coordinated to release all the doors at the same time during separate activities. This split the staff. The entire unit escaped. Kids were running through yards, down the highway, and in a nearby parking lot. I had gotten one in a security hold and had to wait for EMS to transport. Police were chasing the ones on the highway. Staff gathered the rest."

"Nobody was hurt, and everyone was back in time for med pass. I was known for being generous with chats and water/juice. A couple of those kids learned that night that if you make me chase you through multiple lots and wait an hour for EMS while I have to hold you, you are absolutely, unequivocally, not getting chats and juice. Took me 4 hours to document it all."

- mediocre_mom

Falling...

"I was on my 2-hour break. Had a sudden, panicky feeling about 1.5 hours into my break. I felt an intense urge to go back to my unit immediately."

"The moment I stepped onto the unit, my patient had fallen to the floor while the nurse who was covering for me was assisting him to the bathroom."

"He died within a minute or two— likely a heart attack or something similar. He was not full-code, so there wasn’t much to do but hold him as he passed."

- Throwawayyawaworth9

The Circle of Life

"My Mother was a nurse; the funniest story she ever told was when they had three elderly men, each one suffering from Sun Downing, each with a wife having a similar name. All night long, she heard 'Edie! Edie!' and then 'Elsie! Elsie!' and, finally, 'Emma! Emma!' Then they'd start up again."

"The last few months of her life, she ended up in the same ward she'd cared for all those elderly patients over the years. The nurses apparently took really good care of her, too. The circle of life."

- zerbey

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That’s some freaky stuff, dude.

"Not a nurse but a patient here. I had a quadruple bypass, and when I came through, I had a case of pump brain. That is the first time I’ve ever experienced some sort of psychosis. I was convinced that they tricked me into going to the hospital, and they were never going to allow me to leave. They took all of my forms of communication away from me except for an iPad because I kept trying to escape."

"During the graveyard shift one night, I installed Uber on my iPad and booked a ride out of the hospital."

"Turns out they pay attention. They wouldn’t let me escape. 😂 My brain started working again a couple of days later, and it took me a long time to even have any memories of what happened when I was having my episode."

"That’s some freaky stuff, dude."

- JudgementDog

3 AM

"Looked down a long, dark hallway at 3 am. There was a nurse in a cap, white dress, and shoes with her face turned away from me. You could only see about half of her. I stared goggle-eyed, and a split second later, she walked away."

"I mentioned it to the one other nurse (19-bed hospital, so low staffing) and she calmly said, 'Oh yeah, that's our ghost.'"

- Liv-Julia

Spoooooky...

"None of my patients fell. No one deteriorated. I liked both my colleagues. The patients slept all night. There were no 2 am admissions. We weren't asked to do meal breaks for the other wards. The morning staff showed up on time, and the handover was quick. Oh, and the traffic was light on the way home. Spooooky."

- SunBehm

No, not yet

"My patient had just gotten an epidural and was finally feeling comfy. I had my charge nurse come in to help me reposition her so that she could get some rest before we started pushing. I said, 'Do you want me to turn off these lights?' And the patient said, 'No, not yet.”'

"As soon as she finished her sentence, the lights went off. My charge and I still talk about it to this day, and how the timing of it was so impeccable. Sorry, ma’am, but the spirits want you to get some rest, too!"

- m-616

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God bless our nurses and doctors, all the medical caregivers.

And a special shout-out to the night shift.

Clearly, that takes a special kind of spirit to have.

The graveyard shift is not for the faint of heart.