Every night nurse has haunted hospital stories. Call lights from empty rooms. Elevators that open on the wrong floor. Mine is about the whiteboard in Room 612, which kept writing my name on it in someone else’s handwriting. I’ve heard my share of hospital night shift horror stories in the break room. This is the one I don’t tell.
In 2019 I was a night shift nurse on a medical floor at a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. Seven p.m. to seven a.m., three or four nights a week. Mostly older patients. Pneumonia, heart failure, broken hips. I’d been a nurse for six years.
Every patient room on our floor has a whiteboard on the wall across from the bed. At the start of every shift, the nurse writes on it. “Your nurse tonight is” and your name. Then the date, the patient’s goal for the day, their pain level, and a planned discharge date if there is one. It’s so patients and families know who to ask for.
Room 612 was at the end of the hall. It had been closed since the summer for a plumbing problem. Something in the bathroom kept leaking into the room below. Maintenance had shut off the water and put a sign on the door. Nobody had been in it for months.
My Name on the Board
In October, I was walking past 612 at about midnight to get supplies from the clean utility room. The door was cracked open. I could see the whiteboard from the hall in the light from the window.
It said, “Your nurse tonight is” and then my name.
My first name. Written in blue marker, in a neat, slanted cursive that was nothing like my handwriting. Mine is all capitals and messy.
Under that, it said, “Goal for today: go home.” “Pain: 0.”
I laughed. I figured one of the other nurses was messing with me. We do that on nights. It gets boring at 3 a.m. I grabbed an eraser and wiped it off, and I asked around at the nurses’ station. Everybody said it wasn’t them. One of the techs said it was probably day shift.
The next night I worked, it was back. My name, in the same cursive. “Goal for today: go home.” “Pain: 0.”
I erased it again. The night after that, it was back again.
I asked the charge nurse, a woman named Bev who’d been on that floor for thirty years. I asked it like a joke. Bev didn’t laugh. She asked me which patients I had that night.
I told her. She asked if any of them were near the end of the hall. I said Mr. Ostby, in 614. Right next door.
She said, “Keep an eye on him.”
The Haunted Hospital Stories Bev Wouldn’t Tell
Mr. Ostby was eighty-eight. A retired ore boat engineer from the Duluth docks. He had congestive heart failure and he was doing pretty well, actually. He was sharp. He liked to tell me about the ships. He was supposed to go home to his daughter’s in two days.
That night, around two in the morning, he hit his call light. When I went in, he was sitting up in bed, wide awake, looking at the wall between his room and 612.
He said, “Who’s the lady next door?”
I said nobody was next door. That room was closed.
He said, “No, there’s a lady. She’s been talking to me through the wall. Very nice. She’s a nurse, I think. She says she’s going home tonight.”
He smiled at me, kind of shy. “She asked if I wanted to come along.”
I checked his vitals. They were fine. Oxygen fine. Heart rate fine. No fever. He wasn’t confused. He knew where he was and what year it was and who the president was. I told him to try to get some sleep. He said he would.
When I walked out of his room, I looked at the door of 612. It was cracked open again.
The board said, in neat blue cursive:
“Discharge: 0315.”
3:15 A.M.
I didn’t erase it. I want you to know that. I stood in that doorway and read it four or five times, and something in me said not to touch it.
The room smelled like cold air and bleach. The bed was stripped. Just the bare blue mattress. The window blinds were open and the lights of the harbor were down there below, orange and far away.
I went back to the nurses’ station and told Bev. She didn’t say anything. She got up and walked down to 614 with me, and we checked Mr. Ostby again at 2:45. He was asleep. Breathing easy. Vitals perfect.
At 3:10, I went back in to check on him again. He was awake. He looked at me and said, “Thank you, honey. You’ve been very good to me.” He said it like you’d say goodbye at a bus station.
At 3:15, his heart stopped.
We called a code. We did everything. Bev ran it. We worked on him for twenty-five minutes. He didn’t come back. He had a do-not-resuscitate order we hadn’t known about, and his daughter called in the middle of it and asked us to stop, and we stopped.
The doctor wrote that it was his heart. Sudden, which happens with heart failure, even when everything looks fine. That’s the truth. That’s what it was.
After it was all over, I walked down to 612. The whiteboard was blank. Wiped clean. Not even a smudge.
What Bev Told Me
At the end of the shift, at 7 a.m., Bev took me down to the cafeteria and bought me a coffee. She told me that the whiteboard in 612 had been doing that since before whiteboards. She said back in the eighties, when she started, it used to be a little card in a slot by the door.
She said it only ever writes on one board, and it only ever writes the name of whoever is going to be with the patient at the end. She said she’d seen her own name on it nine times in thirty years. She said it was never wrong about the time.
I asked her who wrote it. She said the old nurses used to say it was a night nurse named Marion who worked on that floor in the 1950s, who died in that room after a car hit her on the way to work. She said she didn’t know if that was true. She said the handwriting looked like the old Palmer method cursive they taught in schools back then.
She said, “I don’t think she means any harm. I think she just doesn’t want anybody to go alone.”
I worked nights for two more years. I saw my name on that board four more times. I stayed with every one of those patients. None of them went alone.
Last spring, I moved to days. On my last night shift, before I left at seven, I walked down to 612 one more time.
The board said, in neat blue cursive:
“Your nurse tonight is” and then my name. And under that:
“Thank you. Go home.”
So I did.
If paranormal hospital stories aren’t enough, read the late night radio horror story about song requests from a blue Corolla, our gas station horror stories post about calls from corporate, or a creepy town story about clocks that run slow on purpose.
Do you have haunted hospital stories from the night shift?
If you’ve ever worked nights in a hospital, you know some rooms feel different. Share your haunted hospital stories, or any night shift ghost stories from a ward where the patients knew something you didn’t, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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The Song Requests for the Woman in the Blue Corolla