We all believe in ghosts. Even those of us who have impeccable logic and cold reason, who are perfectly capable of explaining the scientific background of any strange story or urban legend, still face moments when goosebumps crawl on the skin, legs become jelly, and we’re sure something completely weird and inexplicable is going on.

For sure, people like mystical tales. How else can we explain the enduring popularity of horror stories in movies, TV series and literature? Just look at the top ten most popular series of recent years and answer the question – what is it if not an interest in everything beyond, deeply mixed with fear?

Yes, fear and ignorance of what is there, behind the thin curtain of darkness that separates us from the great nothingness – that’s what pushes us into the arms of these mysterious tales and their narrators. And we listen, read, watch – and a chill runs up our spine. We are afraid, as in early childhood – but it is still so exciting and interesting!

A few days ago, there was a thread in the AskReddit community whose author asked netizens just one question: “People who have worked around death/burial, what’s your best ghost story?” And now, after just over a week, we have more than 19.1K upvotes and over 4.5K comments containing an incredible amount of mystical stories and their no less lively discussion.

To be honest, when we prepared this selection of the spookiest ‘hard-to-explain’ narratives for you, it was a tad bit scary, and goosebumps also ran over our skin. But we did it with honor, so here’s the list from Bored Panda – please feel free to scroll it to the very end, upvote your favorite stories and don’t forget, if there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call?

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#1

I am an ICU RN. We had a septic patient in the unit. She was 29 weeks pregnant. She went into labor on my shift and we delivered her baby, stillborn. I did post mortem care on the baby, retrieved the proper transport container and walked the baby down to the morgue. It was the middle of the night, I’m in an elevator alone. I hear a baby start wailing. I absolutely lose my s**t and rip open the cover, and just as I go to zip down the bag, I hear a calming male voice say, “hush little one, I’ve got you, no need to cry.” The crying stopped immediately. Shaking, I opened the bag and saw exactly what I expected to see, a deceased 29 week only baby. I am a big bearded 40 year old ICU nurse and that was the scariest s**t I’ve ever experienced. No one believes me to this day. I don’t even want to speculate what the crying or the voice was. God. Even typing that out I felt my chest tightening.

© Photo: Nighthawke78

#2

it’s kinda custom at the hospital here to open a window for the deceased’s soul to ascend when a patient dies. the doctor or nurse who is with the patient or finds the patient will open the window as soon as they are done tending to the patient. I don’t know if I believe in that, but I still think the gesture is lovely, just a very small act for someone after they died.

#3

I used to be a security guard at a hospital. One night, while doing my rounds, I went into the surgery wing and was walking down a hallway when I saw a doctor looking at the whiteboard where all the scheduled surgeries are written down. I said “hello doctor” and kept going. The doctor didn’t say anything back, just kept studying the whiteboard. When I got back to the security office, I was telling one of the guys that’s been there for years about how I greeted this doctor and he didn’t say anything back, I asked if thats the a*****e they told me to watch out for. I was asked where I saw him and I said the surgery ward, and he gave me a smirk. He then explained that the surgery ward closes at 9pm and that all patients are moved into the monitoring wards; there should be no one there. He then asked me if this doctor was studying the schedule board. I said yes and he then told me that I just met Dr. Luisitti. Apparently, some many years ago, one of the surgeons went up to the helipad and jumped off the building. Seems like he never stopped working though.

© Photo: User

#4

I worked in a morgue, one time one of the bodies sat up, looked at me and then died again. I don’t know what happened that day, but I quit and now do construction

© Photo: deviousdiesel2500

#5

When I was a kid I had a great uncle who was the caretaker for a local cemetery. Sometimes my dad would go work with him just to make some extra dough. One time, my pops was unavailable so he gave the job to me. Had to bury a guy. Nothing ghostly happened. It is a strange dichotomy though. On one hand here’s a family on one of the worst days of their lives and on the other there’s me and old Uncle Pete waiting to fill the grave. It had rained all that week. Graves fill up with a lot of water when that happens. As the lift was lowering the vault (in case peeps don’t know, a burial requires the coffin to be sealed in a huge concrete vault) into the grave, my uncle looked at me and said, “S**t, I hope he’s got his swimming trunks on!” And that was the day that I learned you can inject humor in a dark situation. For about a year I delivered in-home medical equipment to Hospice patients. Saw some people in really bad shape. The kinda shape where if it were me I’d be saying, “Y’all need to end me, show me some [darn] mercy here.” I also learned that cancer has a very distinct aroma. The stronger the aroma the sooner that person would be passing on. I’d be in the middle of a hospital bed setup with an oxygen concentrator and everything else and I’d be like, “Me or one of the other guys will be back here tomorrow or the day after.” And usually that’s what would happen. There was a time I pulled up to a residence just to deliver some backup oxygen tanks. A guy probably in his 40s meets me in the driveway and says he’s not sure if they’re gonna need it. Then he hears his name called from inside followed by, “He’s gone, he’s gone!” Dude went back inside and I just said call your nurse right away and I got in my truck and left. The denial some people fall into is tough sometimes. We would have families that’d be like, “Can you park your truck really far away so nobody in the neighborhood knows we have Hospice in here?” Sorry it’s a s****y time but no, I sure can’t do that. The worst were the children cases. Ugh. I remember one kid, he was maybe 11? His room was just plastered with photos all him with nearly every player on the local NFL team. He had been gifted so many things from that team his room looked like a storefront. I set up his equipment on a Tuesday and an aide was telling me, “Obviously they know it’s terminal but they’re just looking forward to getting him out of the hospital so he can at least be at home for his last few months.” I was back by Friday clearing everything out because the little fella was home a grand total of like 36 hours before he left. F****n dagger in the heart. His mother was a complete disaster, walking around the house clutching his framed school photo she had taken off the wall. No ghostly stuff, tho. No weird occurrences, no weird noises or anything. Also worked in a hospital when I was younger and would mop and buff the floors in the morgue. The orderlies told me they used to prank new guys by having one of them lay on the table and then jump up at them. Thankfully they never did that to me haha. Wow I just rambled way too long. Sorry errybody. Ain’t nobody give a good [darn] about yo stories, foo! And now you talking to yoself, people gonna think ya nuts!

© Photo: hamsolo19

#6

I used to be a driver for a funeral home corporation. Like, drive the hearse and pick up the bodies. Never had anything creepy happen, a few funny things, a few traumatic things. In general it was a chill job. However. I did get incredibly uncomfortable one night picking up a man who died at home, he still had the defibrillator leads on his chest and his eyes were closed, which is unusual because the eyes are always open. He just looked like he was asleep or unconscious. Not rigid or pale or anything. I just had this sinking feeling for about half an hour in traffic that he was going to suddenly gasp and wake up in the body bag. Then it hit me. That would be the coolest thing ever. I’d take him home and he’d be back with his family. So I just kind of drove slowly and turned up some music and sang along and talked to him. When I got him to the funeral home I left him out of the cooler for about an hour while I did paperwork and played on my phone. When I got another call I checked on him and his limbs had started to stiffen. I was kind of bummed. I put him in the cooler and went on my next call.

© Photo: Chemistry-Least

#7

Corpses move when you cremate em. People who don’t know this get spooked a lot.

© Photo: rocharox

#8

My roomie/best bud is a mortician, and I’m around the funeral home a fair amount myself and know the staff pretty well. I’ve spent the night there before. Nothing weird happens there. I have had some experiences I can’t explain, so I was a little surprised none of the staff ever had an odd experience, especially since some of them do believe in ghosts and whatnot. But they told me, if ghosts were real, why in the world would they linger at a funeral home? It’s just a transition space, like an airport. No one wants to just stay in the [darn] airport. Haunt the place you died, or the people you love, or the home you never want to leave, or however it works, if it works. Who would want to linger in a funeral home they have no attachment to, that their body only visited after they already were gone?

© Photo: Sleepwalks

#9

I’m not in the funeral business but I was a cop in the 80’s. Three in the morning walking the streets checking business doors to make sure they were locked. A few days before, our only mortuary caught fire and burned. It was basically burned to the ground but it was still standing. The front door was intact. As I was walking past it, I instinctively checked the door and found it unlocked so I went in. The ENTIRE building was charred black. I could see nothing but black charred wood anywhere. I walked the length of the hall to the sanctuary. What I saw next made me step back a few. In the middle of this charred blackened room, on a small pedestal, was a white crushed-velvet child’s coffin. It looked like it would hold a toddler. Not. One. Drop. If. Soot. Was. On. The. Coffin. Not a spec. Nada. The entire building was totally destroyed but here sat this pristine coffin. I turned and left.

© Photo: User

#10

Back when I worked in cardiology. We had this one single room at the a*s end or the floor. We’d put palliative patients or patients that needed isolation in there. I swear three different patients in the years I worked there told me they had woken in the middle of the night and seen an old man and a little girl holding hands, both standing at the foot of the bed, doing nothing.

© Photo: Doumtabarnack

#11

I worked within hospice and long term care. The spookiest phenomenon was the man in the corner. It happens all the time for people actively dying. They see a shadowy man in the corner of their room.

© Photo: LeftandLeaving9006

#12

While I was in nursing school, I worked as a night shift tech on a general hospital floor. Our “sister floor” became the COVID floor during the pandemic. One night we got a call from upstairs that a patient had passed away and they were out of body bags, so a nurse and I went upstairs to bring them one. On our way back to our floor, the elevator doors closed like normal but the elevator didn’t go anywhere. All of a sudden the doors opened back up and then closed again, and we were moving. We looked at each other and the nurse said out loud, “it’s ok, we’ll show you the way out”. Hospital windows don’t open like the old days, so I guess souls have to take the elevator.

© Photo: PurpleCow88

#13

As a student I worked with cadavers. Nothing creepy ever happened except every cadaver that came in had nail or toenail polish that matched mine exactly. I started changing colors frequently, with different colors on my nails and toes, but each one would come in with a matching color. I’d custom mix colors, but the same thing happened. I stopped painting my nails and it solved the problem, but that was a surprisingly stressful six months.

© Photo: FormerWindow

#14

Not a ghost story, but When I was in the army, I served on a few honor guard duties for transporting soldiers remains. One time we were taking Korean war era remains that had been uncovered in Korea and transported to the USA for identification. For most of the remains, the transfer cases (industrial aluminum caskets) were very light, like you’d expect with 40 year old remains. A couple of the cases were heavy, like a couple hundred pounds. I’ve never stopped wondering what was in those cases. It wasn’t 40 year old bones

© Photo: McFeely_Smackup

#15

I work in long-term enhanced care, people don’t get better but we keep them comfortable. A couple stories I can think of: 1. A husband and wife both with severe, almost non-verbal dementia in the same room but different beds. I have my back to the husband as I’m turning the wife who is facing him. Suddenly her eyes get wide and she looks terrified. She says, “He doesn’t look very good with his face blue like that.” I’m like oh s**t did he die? But when I turned around he was alive and sleeping. I don’t know what that woman saw. 2. A tall shadow man on one specific unit. Multiple people have seen it, some even following it into rooms thinking it’s a patient, but then no one’s there. 3. There was a man who had a cardiac event while sitting on the toilet. He fell forward and put a hole in the bathroom wall. He died. Soon after, a new woman moves into the room after everything is fixed. She comes out to the nurses station one night [angry] off. She says, “Who’s going to tell that man to get out of my room? And when are they fixing the giant hole in the bathroom?” 4. A very nice family was sitting with a resident while he died. The man had been basically comatose for two days already. The sister comes out and asks for a Bible. This was not a religious family. She said he had sat straight up, eyes bugged out and started screaming, then flopped back down. I was like, say no more and found her a Bible.

© Photo: chut2906

#16

I was an RN and was working in a very well off town in MS. The hospital had two ICUs with the second one being an overflow type unit on the third floor. There were seven rooms in that unit and room two was haunted. Numerous times different nurses watched something walk into the room but the room would be empty without a patient in it. One time a nurse had an actual patient in room two. It was about 4 am and the nurse was going to do a dressing change. She took the stuff into the room and the patient asked what she was going to do. She said “change your dressings.” The patient said “oh no that other nurse was just in here about 30 min ago and did it.” The nurse looked and yes the dressing was fresh. She went out to the desk and told the one other nurse thanks for doing that. The nurse was baffled and said “I didn’t change the dressing.” They both freaked out a bit. Rumor has it that an RN that had worked for the hospital a long time died in that room. The hospital is now a dorm for a big college so fun times may be had by a bunch of college students.

© Photo: User

#17

I had a buddy who worked in forensics and s**t, figuring out how people died. He had a body come in from the city, and the corpse was covered in scratch marks. Like deep, horrid scratches as well as bite marks around the collarbone. It obviously came from an animal, but they couldn’t figure out what it was. The more wild thing is that the guy died in an apartment in the middle of a city.

© Photo: User

#18

Not paranormal, but my wife grew up in a funeral home (mom was a funeral director). They had a cat that would wander into viewings and the relatives would always comment that it was grandma or whoever visiting in cat form.

© Photo: midwestisbestwest

#19

I’ve gotten lab results which suggest that the patient’s condition should be incompatible with life and yet according to the paperwork they stubbornly persist in biological undeath. And the answer is always that their healthcare provider sent the wrong sample with the wrong label on it for testing. The solution is to ~~recommend the termination of the patient because computers are never wrong~~ call up the provider and yell at them.

© Photo: ThadisJones

#20

I used to work at this very old country club, I think it was built in the late 1800’s. There was a really bad natural disaster and the ballroom type room became a temporary morgue while they cleaned up the town. I usually was responsible for closing up shop since I was a bartender and would normally be the last one left. [darn] man, did that place gimme me the heebie jeebies. Nothing outwork ghostly, but many many times I’d be leaving the parking lot only to see that lights still on in the bar room, which I swore I had turned off, so they worse part was having to go back in and walk through the dark building to go turn off some lights. Not only that but the stereo would turn back on all the time. Silverware and dishes would go missing all the time, when you could have swore you had left something in that spot. Overall, great place to work at, but the open secret was this place was haunted as [darn].

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