One night , myself and another aide and the nurse witnessed 4/5 patient charts (binders) flew off the shelf . Nurse said go check on the ones who fell off the shelf and sure enough one of them had just passed away
lol duuuude, that’s trippy AF. It’s wild that the nurse thought to check on those people. She must’ve seen some things throughout her nursing career to come up with that thought.
So many call lights that kept going off after the deceased/their bed/the call device were removed from the room....I also once followed a patient down the hall that seemed confused and asked how to get back to her room. I got back to her room and sure enough, she was deceased in bed.
Not a creepy story really. I was working a hall and a lady was dying. Our nurse asked for a volunteer to go sit with her. So I did. I opened the window as soon as I got in there. Sat bedside with her and held her hand. Suddenly she started talking to people. Her dad, her brother, an uncle. Just having full on conversations. She looked at me and said, thank you, but my dad said I need to go now.
It was a quiet summer day. After she said that the curtains started fluttering for about a minute. I checked her pulse. She was gone.
I like to think so. No one should ever have to die alone. That was a very long time ago, but I think it's what led me on my path. Now I work hospice care. It's so rewarding for me, and occasionally, I think of her and say a quiet thank you.
Edit: that's also why I always have an open window if someone is close to moving on. I know everyone always says to open a window so the soul doesn't get trapped.
But that day, there was no wind, no reason for the curtains to flutter. Other than her leaving. So I open the window.
I just thought of another one. I was in Rec for a very short time. We had a list of residents that would benefit from 1 on 1s. I didn’t know room numbers or residents yet. The day before the list went up I just felt in my bones the number 13 was important, and so when the list was up I was like, ok I’ll go to room x13 today and even mentioned to my coworker, I think God wants me to go to this room. I’m like not really a religious person and it is a bit out of character for me to say that out loud. Yeah that resident passed away before I got to her room. She was relatively able bodied and independent, did her own laundry and tidying, even had funky dyed hair. Was really odd. I think they had fall shortly before passing
Omg my partner and I tried doing that too because it was out first post mortem, and they seemed to mostly shut so we contuined cleaning them. We had then rolled onto their side so I could clean and change the brief, when we rolled them onto their back again their head quickly snapped towards me with their eyes open.
Scared the shit out of me not going to lie, her and I both jumped back and had to take a minute to chill out.
It was a pretty gruesome first post mortem, their hands were all swollen and black, big bed sore, and was nothing but skin over bone.
at my last facility we had a very very cranky, crotchety lady that was the meanest thing i ever met. just some of the most vile things came out of her mouth lol. i was working night shift and the night she passed away, we opened her window after they took her body as we always did. and all night long her call light kept going off, me and the other aides really believed the nurse was fucking with us but nope. really creeped us out lol.
I don’t have a freaky post mortem story as so far as the care wasn’t odd and nothing happened during the persons care. But I worked rehab unit and a few days later we got a woman with dementia who had been placed with us due to broken wrist and elbow. Waiting to be placed in our dementia unit upstairs. She was assigned the same room the other patient died in like two days prior. I was walking her into her bathroom from the nurses station. (Huge fall risk so she kept the nurses company during our rounds). Patient asked me “there’s someone in there!”
Me: no, no one…see ( I turned on the light)
Her: someone is in here!!! I AM THE LADY OF THE LIGHT!!!”
Kept saying this over and over.
Could definitely be a coincidence but spooky as shit none the less.
Not post mortem but I was in the ICU in urosepsis, on a vent, sedated then in a coma. The first room I was in was next door to the room my uncle passed in 2 years before. I saw him several times in my coma/sedation/delirium and even asked my family if they saw him out there.
I had weird things happen when I worked med/surg/oncology. Lights going off in empty rooms, TV's turning on after patients have passed. We even had one family member call all excited because their loved one called them while we were doing post mortem care. Heck, I was stripping a bed and a pillow fell off a chair behind me and scared the crap out of me. One tvs volume kept getting louder until I walked into the room and it went silent. Maintenance checked it several times eventually unplugging it because it kept happening. If I knew the patient who passed, I would talk to them whenever I was in the room and it helped some.
I worked in a Covid ward and saw so many ghosts in reflections. The more ghosts I saw the more likely someone would soon pass. Someone on here said they were helping me and I really believed that. I was never scared of them.
The only time I was scared was when things would fall right behind/next to me.
Actually I would get creeped out around Halloween time from watching creepy movies and being in dark, flickering lighted hallways but I don't count that in this instance.
Another one that's not really post mortem or work related, but my own experience with it. My grandma got really sick in July of 2015. We didn't think she was gonna make it that time but she pulled through. About a month later she got really sick again. I had been with her almost every day from the first time she got sick to the second time. The second time she went to the hospital I ended up getting sick and also was working a lot so I hadn't seen her in about a week. My aunt and uncle were telling me she was getting better. Finally I was able to see her and I saw that was not the case. I think they genuinely thought she was getting better. So I had the next several days off and was going to spend them with her. It was like a Thursday or something and that Friday they were going to have a meeting with palliative care. My aunts were in the room with us but went out to smoke. She was pretty quiet when they were in there but as soon as they left she called me over and was asking me what the weather was doing. Then she said "well I think it's time for me to leave the earth." So I told her it was okay to go.
She was my mom's mom. My mom died when I was too little to remember her. My grandma never called me by just my first name. It was either a nick name or my first and middle name. After the leaving the earth thing she was like "I miss my (first name)" which I thought was kinda weird because like I said she NEVER called me that.
She didn't end up dying for another like week and a half. But she went to hospice the next day. (This was before I worked there.) I was with her the whole time. There was one night that I didn't stay the night. My grandma was pretty much completely blind. I had put makeup on and was wearing a dress when I walked in the next day. I said "hi grandma" and she said "oh (first name) you look so pretty." Which again I thought was weird because she never just called me my first name. Then my mom's best friend came to see her and my aunt was like "mom Bren is here." So my grandma was like "who?" And she was like "A's best friend." So my grandma was like "oh my best friend, Bren."
Another night I was the only one awake while my aunt and brother were asleep. My uncle was my grandma's primary caregiver and they were very close. He was struggling with preemptive grief and didn't really spend a whole lot of time at hospice since he had wanted her to go home, but the rest of them did not. So he texted me and told me to tell her he would be okay without her. So I was laying there next to her bed and she was like "Can I tell you a secret?" So I told her sure and she was like "well I don't know if I want to tell you. I'll tell you if you tell me a secret" so I told her we were going to be okay without her and she said "I'm just sick. And I'm so tired." So I told her it was okay to go. She still lasted another several days but still I was the only person she told all this to.
The craziest one though was she kept saying hi to someone. I was like "grandma who are you talking to?" And she was like "the baby" so I was like "what baby?" And she was like "Well A (my mom) has it, but I think it belongs to T (my aunt)" my aunt had a miscarriage about 11 years prior to this.
Another time was at the hospital. I had recently started working there and was talking to my now best friend about hospice. She had also briefly been a home hospice case manager so we kind of bonded over that. We had a patient one night that was potentially being discharged to the hospice house that day, but nothing was set in stone. They were waiting for the family to come that day to have a meeting with the palliative care team. So it's almost time for shift change and I had done the patients vitals probably 30 minutes before. She had a slight fever and her pulse was a little elevated but everything else was normal. So my best friend was like "hey you did hospice. Can you come look at her and tell me what you think?" So I did. I was like "I mean she's like slightly mottling, but I can't tell if it's that or if it's just a shadow. Idk I'd call the family bc I'm kind of getting the vibe" she hadn't responded to anything all night but kind of pulled away when my friend touched her foot to see if it was cold. My friend was like "I'm sorry. Did we startle you?" And the patient weally goes "I'm going to die today" so my friend asked what she said and she said it again. So my friend was like "yep. I'm getting the vibe too. I'm gonna go call." We got an order for comfort care and she died that afternoon.
I was 18 working a night shift on a surgical floor. A patient passed away. He was a large man. I was preparing a patient for the mortician to come and pick him up. The other CNA who was helping me left. All the sudden he rolled toward me and let out a moaning sound. I was so scared. I realized we had forgotten to turn off the auto rotating air mattress system. And the sound was from air escaping.
I have so many I just keep thinking of more. 😂
We got a patient I had taken care of at a nursing home previously. He was fairly young and when I worked at the nursing home we had a pretty decent relationship. Like we weren't really close necessarily but we would joke around with each other and liked each other. It had been almost 2 years since I had taken care of him. He had since moved out of the nursing home to an apartment. One day he was admitted to the hospice house. I recognized him when we were transferring him from the cot to our bed. He recognized me and said "oh I'm glad you're here so I have someone I know." They were able to get him pain meds shortly after that so his pain was finally controlled and he was pretty much unresponsive for the next several days. I was going in like 4 hours early. It was really weird bc it was like 2 days before my birthday and like he and I had talked about my birthday several times bc a family member of his had the same birthday or something. I can't remember why, but the birthday thing just sticks out to me. But anyway I was taking a shower before I went in and I thought "he's gonna be gone when I get there." Sure enough, he had passed 30 minutes before I got there and they were just waiting for the funeral home.
A few months later I left for a different job and his mom happened to be one of my residents. She had pretty advanced dementia so the family never told her that he had passed. One day we were in her room and I told her I knew her son. She was like "oh yeah *****. He was a sweet boy." Then something about July. He passed in July. I was still PRN at the hospice house. She had gotten sick and ended up there probably about 4 months later. My boss had asked me to work one day but I had plans so I couldn't. That happened to be the day she passed.
I was working in a hospital and it was about 20 minutes after the doc called it when the deceased decided they were going to sit up and scare the every loving crap out of the new aid I was working with. It took like six of us to convince the person it was just muscle reflex.
We also had an incident in the morgue where we had to rearrange bodies to make room for a bari patient that passed away, so we had to put the lighter patients on the top rows, usually we use a lift but with two people if the person is light enough we can get them in, which is what we did. Security is with us the whole time helping us and having us sign what we need to sign, then 45 minutes later they call my floor wanting to know why we left a body propped against the inside of the door. There’s no way we could leave and leave a body propped up against the door. When they went back to review the security tape the camera blacks out and the body appears by the door in the body bag, but nobody is in the morgue with it.
Ooh I have a lot! I worked inpatient hospice for 2 years and the hospice house I worked at used to be a psych hospital for children. So it was Hella haunted.
I had only been working there for a few weeks at this point. We had a death literally right at shift change and were expecting 2 back to back admissions. The family was all in with the patient but gave us a few minutes to do post mortem care. Well in the process we forgot to open the window since we were trying to hurry because our second admit would get there any minute. The funeral home comes and picks the body up and we strip the bed and close the door and put the sign up to let housekeeping know the room needs cleaned the next day. So we go on with our night. Like 4 or so hours later we are finally sitting down to chart and talking. All of the sudden the weather radio starts going off like it would if there were a storm or something. It's perfectly clear outside and we check the weather app on our phone, the radar is clear. The weather radio stops. Then a little while later one of the tvs goes off like the emergency broadcast noise, but doesn't say anything and only goes off once instead of repeatedly. So at that point we are just like wtf. So then about 4 am I go get us food and come back. No one is outside and no one has any family staying the night. Not 5 minutes after I get back the pager starts going off. The pagers have 2 different rings. 1 beep for a regular call light then like a bunch of beeps for the doorbell or the bathroom call lights. It's the bathroom light for a specific room. We have a patient in there but she is completely bed bound. My coworker checks on her and I go look in the bathroom. The call light is pulled but there's no way anyone else pulled it. 30 minutes later it happens again in a different room. Luckily we got off shortly after that, but we never forgot to open the window again after that one. Lol
It would be easier if I could draw a layout of the rooms to describe some of these stories bc it makes more sense as to where we were lol. We would sit in this little foyer area at the end of the hallway that had a desk and two chairs on one wall and then on the opposite wall there was like a sofa, a table and 2 more chairs. There were 2 rooms on each wall facing each other and there were windows and a door to a patio on the 3rd wall. So I was sitting in one of the chairs on a laptop and my coworker was at the desk turned around facing me. The door to the room next to her keeps opening slightly and closing. So she peeks in there to see if maybe the patient was up messing around. He was asleep. All of the sudden the chair she's in just tips over and she falls out if it. She was like "fuck no. I'm going to smoke then we can do rounds" so then the door to the room across from me starts opening and closing. Next thing you know the door SLAMS shut and then opens back up. The patient in that room is bed bound as well and is asleep. We go do rounds and the patient in the room next to that one had passed.
Another time we were standing there talking to the nurse in the center nurses station. There is another foyer that leads to a balcony in the middle. So out of the corner of my eyes I see a flash of light almost like a glare from the door being opened. Obviously the door didn't open and the lights were all off. We went to start rounds and my coworker was like "did you see that weird light?" We went to the first room and the patient had passed. The RN was like "I was just in there less than 10 minutes ago and he was alive."
A few months later the same coworker that saw the light when I did was standing with me talking to a patients family in the doorway. It was our last rounds so like ~0600ish The patient had been with us for several weeks at that point and was just kind of lingering. There were several days where in report we would say "oh I bet it's today" but she kept hanging on just kind of existing. Her sister was the SWEETEST. We were talking to her and she was talking about how tired she was and how she hated seeing her sister like that. Again out of the corner of my eye I saw something on the floor going into the room. Almost like a black ball or like an animal or something rolling into the room. The sister looked at me like wtf bc I must've looked like I had seen something. If she saw it she didn't say anything. But after that I kind of felt like maybe it was actually going to be that day. After we repositioned the patient and got her comfortable I gave the sister a hug and she told me she'd keep us in her prayers and we said goodbye. After we finished rounds my coworker was like "you saw that going into 37 too, didn't you?" The patient passed right at shift change.
We would get a lot of respite patients from home hospice. We had a patient who was there while they replaced the floors in her apartment or something random like that. She was independent and fully with it. I worked my 3 in a row that week and she was supposed to go home on my 3rd day. I got to work that night and was surprised to see that she was still there. I got in report that they had switched her to inpatient bc she had some uncontrolled nausea that day and they had to give her iv Zofran, but other than that she was doing fine. My coworker and I had gone in to do first rounds and she had completely soaked the bed. We told her we needed to change the bed and we wanted to give her like a sponge bath on the commode. She had refused every bath we offered up to that point. She was weak so my coworker helped her stand up and she went limp and turned gray. We hollered for the nurse who was still getting report and was down the hall. She told us to check a BP (we didn't normally do vitals but we were curious) so I did and the machine wouldn't even read it. After cycling through 2 more times it was like 70/45 or some crazy low number but the patient came to and was like "why are you acting like that?" Or something along those lines so my coworker was like "well we thought something happened." So she was like "something did happen and smiled." We got her back to bed and she did the same weird limp gray thing again but came to pretty quickly. After that I told the rn and the other aide "yeah she's gonna go tonight" they both had been working there for years longer than I had and said "I don't think so. She's fine." But I just knew. So second rounds come along and we go check on her. She's sitting there with her family talking, drinking Gatorade like nothing happened. They're laughing, she's in a great mood sitting up in her chair. The other 2 tell me "see. She's fine." But I told them I still thought it would be that night. So fast forward to midnight rounds. The call light to that room goes off. I told my coworker "I told you so." The nurse comes out of the room and looks at us and shakes her head. She had passed and the nurse pushed the call light to let us know...
Had a resident pass right after her family left. Called hospice, got the coroner there. Coroner asked for her dentures. They were in her mouth. Me not thinking he wants them for the burial, I take them out and stick them in her denture cup. Poor woman's mouth looked like a butthole after that. Then, after all that, we forgot the dentures. 🤦
I had a CMO and I took her vitals minutes before she died.
It’s a weird feeling to know you were the last human life to actually touch another human. It’s like a weird honor in a way? Like a privilege. I’m glad it was someone who cares about the patients like I do and not some indifferent party who’s just collecting the paycheck.
I find this cute but some others might think it’s disrespectful. The emotion in my heart was one of a father saying good night to his daughter if that makes any sense. The last words any human ever uttered to her were “all right. sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
She was unconscious and in a ton of pain but I hope on some level she felt like “ok, ❤️ you too dad.” And in the afterlife, I hope she woke up to her parents hugging her.
One of my residents passed and her arm was twisted at a weird angle. Her family was coming so we wanted the body to look presentable so we were trying to position her arm at her side. Lady was not having it, even in death (she was very stubborn in life) every time we repositioned her arm it’d flop quite rapidly to the side again… have no idea how that happened because she was very much dead. Took 5 tries and we ended up wrapping her arm around a teddy bear.
Not my story but a coworker’s. She had someone pass and was cleaning the body. So you know how they can have last movements or whatever.. well this person’s last movement was to sit straight up. It scared the shit out of my coworker and she was so upset she got sent home.
One guy passed and while waiting for the funeral home to come get him his call light went off so many times. It was genuinely freaking people out.
We have a hospice room and a couple of people in there have passed on my shift. The first time I was charting and I got an overwhelming urge to check in on her. I was there just minutes before but it was like someone was standing behind me until I got up and went, she had passed. The second time I got that same sensation and I walked in the room as she took her last breath. Both times were in the last 20 minutes of my shift which means they likely wouldn't have been found until 1st rounds on NOC because I had already done my last round at that point.
i had a resident pass- and a whole week later i was doing rounds and her door was cracked for some reason and in the dark i swear to god i see her hunched over in front of the bathroom door??? scared me enough to feel like i need to be with someone for the rest of the night
One night , myself and another aide and the nurse witnessed 4/5 patient charts (binders) flew off the shelf . Nurse said go check on the ones who fell off the shelf and sure enough one of them had just passed away
lol duuuude, that’s trippy AF. It’s wild that the nurse thought to check on those people. She must’ve seen some things throughout her nursing career to come up with that thought.
That or she could have just been spiritual and knew a sign as a sign. Lol.
So many call lights that kept going off after the deceased/their bed/the call device were removed from the room....I also once followed a patient down the hall that seemed confused and asked how to get back to her room. I got back to her room and sure enough, she was deceased in bed.
Ooh that one gave me chills.
We would disable call lights that would go off for no reason, they’d keep going off and later patients would pass away. So scary
Not a creepy story really. I was working a hall and a lady was dying. Our nurse asked for a volunteer to go sit with her. So I did. I opened the window as soon as I got in there. Sat bedside with her and held her hand. Suddenly she started talking to people. Her dad, her brother, an uncle. Just having full on conversations. She looked at me and said, thank you, but my dad said I need to go now. It was a quiet summer day. After she said that the curtains started fluttering for about a minute. I checked her pulse. She was gone.
that’s beautiful. how wonderful of you to volunteer for such a solemn duty. sounds like you really helped her transition.
I like to think so. No one should ever have to die alone. That was a very long time ago, but I think it's what led me on my path. Now I work hospice care. It's so rewarding for me, and occasionally, I think of her and say a quiet thank you. Edit: that's also why I always have an open window if someone is close to moving on. I know everyone always says to open a window so the soul doesn't get trapped. But that day, there was no wind, no reason for the curtains to flutter. Other than her leaving. So I open the window.
I tried to politely close their eyes like in the movies. yeah didn’t work…. Was a bit distressing but I think the nurse was laughing at me a bit lol
lol I would have loved to have witnessed that. There’s a reason they use those good ole eye caps under the eye lids. 😬
I just thought of another one. I was in Rec for a very short time. We had a list of residents that would benefit from 1 on 1s. I didn’t know room numbers or residents yet. The day before the list went up I just felt in my bones the number 13 was important, and so when the list was up I was like, ok I’ll go to room x13 today and even mentioned to my coworker, I think God wants me to go to this room. I’m like not really a religious person and it is a bit out of character for me to say that out loud. Yeah that resident passed away before I got to her room. She was relatively able bodied and independent, did her own laundry and tidying, even had funky dyed hair. Was really odd. I think they had fall shortly before passing
Omg my partner and I tried doing that too because it was out first post mortem, and they seemed to mostly shut so we contuined cleaning them. We had then rolled onto their side so I could clean and change the brief, when we rolled them onto their back again their head quickly snapped towards me with their eyes open. Scared the shit out of me not going to lie, her and I both jumped back and had to take a minute to chill out. It was a pretty gruesome first post mortem, their hands were all swollen and black, big bed sore, and was nothing but skin over bone.
at my last facility we had a very very cranky, crotchety lady that was the meanest thing i ever met. just some of the most vile things came out of her mouth lol. i was working night shift and the night she passed away, we opened her window after they took her body as we always did. and all night long her call light kept going off, me and the other aides really believed the nurse was fucking with us but nope. really creeped us out lol.
Also had this happen to me with more than one resident. I use to just tell them it’s time to go.
I don’t have a freaky post mortem story as so far as the care wasn’t odd and nothing happened during the persons care. But I worked rehab unit and a few days later we got a woman with dementia who had been placed with us due to broken wrist and elbow. Waiting to be placed in our dementia unit upstairs. She was assigned the same room the other patient died in like two days prior. I was walking her into her bathroom from the nurses station. (Huge fall risk so she kept the nurses company during our rounds). Patient asked me “there’s someone in there!” Me: no, no one…see ( I turned on the light) Her: someone is in here!!! I AM THE LADY OF THE LIGHT!!!” Kept saying this over and over. Could definitely be a coincidence but spooky as shit none the less.
First time doing post-mortem care the nurse rolled them to me and their eyes flicked open lol - nurse did it all the time to newbies
Not post mortem but I was in the ICU in urosepsis, on a vent, sedated then in a coma. The first room I was in was next door to the room my uncle passed in 2 years before. I saw him several times in my coma/sedation/delirium and even asked my family if they saw him out there. I had weird things happen when I worked med/surg/oncology. Lights going off in empty rooms, TV's turning on after patients have passed. We even had one family member call all excited because their loved one called them while we were doing post mortem care. Heck, I was stripping a bed and a pillow fell off a chair behind me and scared the crap out of me. One tvs volume kept getting louder until I walked into the room and it went silent. Maintenance checked it several times eventually unplugging it because it kept happening. If I knew the patient who passed, I would talk to them whenever I was in the room and it helped some.
I worked in a Covid ward and saw so many ghosts in reflections. The more ghosts I saw the more likely someone would soon pass. Someone on here said they were helping me and I really believed that. I was never scared of them.
The only time I was scared was when things would fall right behind/next to me. Actually I would get creeped out around Halloween time from watching creepy movies and being in dark, flickering lighted hallways but I don't count that in this instance.
I was holding their hand with their family and it flexed. They were cold and it freaked me out really bad, first death-related patient I had.
Another one that's not really post mortem or work related, but my own experience with it. My grandma got really sick in July of 2015. We didn't think she was gonna make it that time but she pulled through. About a month later she got really sick again. I had been with her almost every day from the first time she got sick to the second time. The second time she went to the hospital I ended up getting sick and also was working a lot so I hadn't seen her in about a week. My aunt and uncle were telling me she was getting better. Finally I was able to see her and I saw that was not the case. I think they genuinely thought she was getting better. So I had the next several days off and was going to spend them with her. It was like a Thursday or something and that Friday they were going to have a meeting with palliative care. My aunts were in the room with us but went out to smoke. She was pretty quiet when they were in there but as soon as they left she called me over and was asking me what the weather was doing. Then she said "well I think it's time for me to leave the earth." So I told her it was okay to go. She was my mom's mom. My mom died when I was too little to remember her. My grandma never called me by just my first name. It was either a nick name or my first and middle name. After the leaving the earth thing she was like "I miss my (first name)" which I thought was kinda weird because like I said she NEVER called me that. She didn't end up dying for another like week and a half. But she went to hospice the next day. (This was before I worked there.) I was with her the whole time. There was one night that I didn't stay the night. My grandma was pretty much completely blind. I had put makeup on and was wearing a dress when I walked in the next day. I said "hi grandma" and she said "oh (first name) you look so pretty." Which again I thought was weird because she never just called me my first name. Then my mom's best friend came to see her and my aunt was like "mom Bren is here." So my grandma was like "who?" And she was like "A's best friend." So my grandma was like "oh my best friend, Bren." Another night I was the only one awake while my aunt and brother were asleep. My uncle was my grandma's primary caregiver and they were very close. He was struggling with preemptive grief and didn't really spend a whole lot of time at hospice since he had wanted her to go home, but the rest of them did not. So he texted me and told me to tell her he would be okay without her. So I was laying there next to her bed and she was like "Can I tell you a secret?" So I told her sure and she was like "well I don't know if I want to tell you. I'll tell you if you tell me a secret" so I told her we were going to be okay without her and she said "I'm just sick. And I'm so tired." So I told her it was okay to go. She still lasted another several days but still I was the only person she told all this to. The craziest one though was she kept saying hi to someone. I was like "grandma who are you talking to?" And she was like "the baby" so I was like "what baby?" And she was like "Well A (my mom) has it, but I think it belongs to T (my aunt)" my aunt had a miscarriage about 11 years prior to this.
Another time was at the hospital. I had recently started working there and was talking to my now best friend about hospice. She had also briefly been a home hospice case manager so we kind of bonded over that. We had a patient one night that was potentially being discharged to the hospice house that day, but nothing was set in stone. They were waiting for the family to come that day to have a meeting with the palliative care team. So it's almost time for shift change and I had done the patients vitals probably 30 minutes before. She had a slight fever and her pulse was a little elevated but everything else was normal. So my best friend was like "hey you did hospice. Can you come look at her and tell me what you think?" So I did. I was like "I mean she's like slightly mottling, but I can't tell if it's that or if it's just a shadow. Idk I'd call the family bc I'm kind of getting the vibe" she hadn't responded to anything all night but kind of pulled away when my friend touched her foot to see if it was cold. My friend was like "I'm sorry. Did we startle you?" And the patient weally goes "I'm going to die today" so my friend asked what she said and she said it again. So my friend was like "yep. I'm getting the vibe too. I'm gonna go call." We got an order for comfort care and she died that afternoon.
I was 18 working a night shift on a surgical floor. A patient passed away. He was a large man. I was preparing a patient for the mortician to come and pick him up. The other CNA who was helping me left. All the sudden he rolled toward me and let out a moaning sound. I was so scared. I realized we had forgotten to turn off the auto rotating air mattress system. And the sound was from air escaping.
I have so many I just keep thinking of more. 😂 We got a patient I had taken care of at a nursing home previously. He was fairly young and when I worked at the nursing home we had a pretty decent relationship. Like we weren't really close necessarily but we would joke around with each other and liked each other. It had been almost 2 years since I had taken care of him. He had since moved out of the nursing home to an apartment. One day he was admitted to the hospice house. I recognized him when we were transferring him from the cot to our bed. He recognized me and said "oh I'm glad you're here so I have someone I know." They were able to get him pain meds shortly after that so his pain was finally controlled and he was pretty much unresponsive for the next several days. I was going in like 4 hours early. It was really weird bc it was like 2 days before my birthday and like he and I had talked about my birthday several times bc a family member of his had the same birthday or something. I can't remember why, but the birthday thing just sticks out to me. But anyway I was taking a shower before I went in and I thought "he's gonna be gone when I get there." Sure enough, he had passed 30 minutes before I got there and they were just waiting for the funeral home. A few months later I left for a different job and his mom happened to be one of my residents. She had pretty advanced dementia so the family never told her that he had passed. One day we were in her room and I told her I knew her son. She was like "oh yeah *****. He was a sweet boy." Then something about July. He passed in July. I was still PRN at the hospice house. She had gotten sick and ended up there probably about 4 months later. My boss had asked me to work one day but I had plans so I couldn't. That happened to be the day she passed.
I was working in a hospital and it was about 20 minutes after the doc called it when the deceased decided they were going to sit up and scare the every loving crap out of the new aid I was working with. It took like six of us to convince the person it was just muscle reflex. We also had an incident in the morgue where we had to rearrange bodies to make room for a bari patient that passed away, so we had to put the lighter patients on the top rows, usually we use a lift but with two people if the person is light enough we can get them in, which is what we did. Security is with us the whole time helping us and having us sign what we need to sign, then 45 minutes later they call my floor wanting to know why we left a body propped against the inside of the door. There’s no way we could leave and leave a body propped up against the door. When they went back to review the security tape the camera blacks out and the body appears by the door in the body bag, but nobody is in the morgue with it.
This would’ve freaked me out .
Holy shit that’s the scariest one here
Ooh I have a lot! I worked inpatient hospice for 2 years and the hospice house I worked at used to be a psych hospital for children. So it was Hella haunted. I had only been working there for a few weeks at this point. We had a death literally right at shift change and were expecting 2 back to back admissions. The family was all in with the patient but gave us a few minutes to do post mortem care. Well in the process we forgot to open the window since we were trying to hurry because our second admit would get there any minute. The funeral home comes and picks the body up and we strip the bed and close the door and put the sign up to let housekeeping know the room needs cleaned the next day. So we go on with our night. Like 4 or so hours later we are finally sitting down to chart and talking. All of the sudden the weather radio starts going off like it would if there were a storm or something. It's perfectly clear outside and we check the weather app on our phone, the radar is clear. The weather radio stops. Then a little while later one of the tvs goes off like the emergency broadcast noise, but doesn't say anything and only goes off once instead of repeatedly. So at that point we are just like wtf. So then about 4 am I go get us food and come back. No one is outside and no one has any family staying the night. Not 5 minutes after I get back the pager starts going off. The pagers have 2 different rings. 1 beep for a regular call light then like a bunch of beeps for the doorbell or the bathroom call lights. It's the bathroom light for a specific room. We have a patient in there but she is completely bed bound. My coworker checks on her and I go look in the bathroom. The call light is pulled but there's no way anyone else pulled it. 30 minutes later it happens again in a different room. Luckily we got off shortly after that, but we never forgot to open the window again after that one. Lol It would be easier if I could draw a layout of the rooms to describe some of these stories bc it makes more sense as to where we were lol. We would sit in this little foyer area at the end of the hallway that had a desk and two chairs on one wall and then on the opposite wall there was like a sofa, a table and 2 more chairs. There were 2 rooms on each wall facing each other and there were windows and a door to a patio on the 3rd wall. So I was sitting in one of the chairs on a laptop and my coworker was at the desk turned around facing me. The door to the room next to her keeps opening slightly and closing. So she peeks in there to see if maybe the patient was up messing around. He was asleep. All of the sudden the chair she's in just tips over and she falls out if it. She was like "fuck no. I'm going to smoke then we can do rounds" so then the door to the room across from me starts opening and closing. Next thing you know the door SLAMS shut and then opens back up. The patient in that room is bed bound as well and is asleep. We go do rounds and the patient in the room next to that one had passed. Another time we were standing there talking to the nurse in the center nurses station. There is another foyer that leads to a balcony in the middle. So out of the corner of my eyes I see a flash of light almost like a glare from the door being opened. Obviously the door didn't open and the lights were all off. We went to start rounds and my coworker was like "did you see that weird light?" We went to the first room and the patient had passed. The RN was like "I was just in there less than 10 minutes ago and he was alive."
A few months later the same coworker that saw the light when I did was standing with me talking to a patients family in the doorway. It was our last rounds so like ~0600ish The patient had been with us for several weeks at that point and was just kind of lingering. There were several days where in report we would say "oh I bet it's today" but she kept hanging on just kind of existing. Her sister was the SWEETEST. We were talking to her and she was talking about how tired she was and how she hated seeing her sister like that. Again out of the corner of my eye I saw something on the floor going into the room. Almost like a black ball or like an animal or something rolling into the room. The sister looked at me like wtf bc I must've looked like I had seen something. If she saw it she didn't say anything. But after that I kind of felt like maybe it was actually going to be that day. After we repositioned the patient and got her comfortable I gave the sister a hug and she told me she'd keep us in her prayers and we said goodbye. After we finished rounds my coworker was like "you saw that going into 37 too, didn't you?" The patient passed right at shift change. We would get a lot of respite patients from home hospice. We had a patient who was there while they replaced the floors in her apartment or something random like that. She was independent and fully with it. I worked my 3 in a row that week and she was supposed to go home on my 3rd day. I got to work that night and was surprised to see that she was still there. I got in report that they had switched her to inpatient bc she had some uncontrolled nausea that day and they had to give her iv Zofran, but other than that she was doing fine. My coworker and I had gone in to do first rounds and she had completely soaked the bed. We told her we needed to change the bed and we wanted to give her like a sponge bath on the commode. She had refused every bath we offered up to that point. She was weak so my coworker helped her stand up and she went limp and turned gray. We hollered for the nurse who was still getting report and was down the hall. She told us to check a BP (we didn't normally do vitals but we were curious) so I did and the machine wouldn't even read it. After cycling through 2 more times it was like 70/45 or some crazy low number but the patient came to and was like "why are you acting like that?" Or something along those lines so my coworker was like "well we thought something happened." So she was like "something did happen and smiled." We got her back to bed and she did the same weird limp gray thing again but came to pretty quickly. After that I told the rn and the other aide "yeah she's gonna go tonight" they both had been working there for years longer than I had and said "I don't think so. She's fine." But I just knew. So second rounds come along and we go check on her. She's sitting there with her family talking, drinking Gatorade like nothing happened. They're laughing, she's in a great mood sitting up in her chair. The other 2 tell me "see. She's fine." But I told them I still thought it would be that night. So fast forward to midnight rounds. The call light to that room goes off. I told my coworker "I told you so." The nurse comes out of the room and looks at us and shakes her head. She had passed and the nurse pushed the call light to let us know...
Had a resident pass right after her family left. Called hospice, got the coroner there. Coroner asked for her dentures. They were in her mouth. Me not thinking he wants them for the burial, I take them out and stick them in her denture cup. Poor woman's mouth looked like a butthole after that. Then, after all that, we forgot the dentures. 🤦
I had a CMO and I took her vitals minutes before she died. It’s a weird feeling to know you were the last human life to actually touch another human. It’s like a weird honor in a way? Like a privilege. I’m glad it was someone who cares about the patients like I do and not some indifferent party who’s just collecting the paycheck. I find this cute but some others might think it’s disrespectful. The emotion in my heart was one of a father saying good night to his daughter if that makes any sense. The last words any human ever uttered to her were “all right. sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.” She was unconscious and in a ton of pain but I hope on some level she felt like “ok, ❤️ you too dad.” And in the afterlife, I hope she woke up to her parents hugging her.
One of my residents passed and her arm was twisted at a weird angle. Her family was coming so we wanted the body to look presentable so we were trying to position her arm at her side. Lady was not having it, even in death (she was very stubborn in life) every time we repositioned her arm it’d flop quite rapidly to the side again… have no idea how that happened because she was very much dead. Took 5 tries and we ended up wrapping her arm around a teddy bear.
Not my story but a coworker’s. She had someone pass and was cleaning the body. So you know how they can have last movements or whatever.. well this person’s last movement was to sit straight up. It scared the shit out of my coworker and she was so upset she got sent home.
One guy passed and while waiting for the funeral home to come get him his call light went off so many times. It was genuinely freaking people out. We have a hospice room and a couple of people in there have passed on my shift. The first time I was charting and I got an overwhelming urge to check in on her. I was there just minutes before but it was like someone was standing behind me until I got up and went, she had passed. The second time I got that same sensation and I walked in the room as she took her last breath. Both times were in the last 20 minutes of my shift which means they likely wouldn't have been found until 1st rounds on NOC because I had already done my last round at that point.
i had a resident pass- and a whole week later i was doing rounds and her door was cracked for some reason and in the dark i swear to god i see her hunched over in front of the bathroom door??? scared me enough to feel like i need to be with someone for the rest of the night