Morgue Workers’ Real-life Scary Stories

Morgue Workers’ Real-life Scary Stories

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Story number one, I work as a morgue attendant in a City
Hospital. Mostly the night shift or odd
hours when the place is at its quietest.
Too quiet sometimes. People always ask me if I get
spooked. I usually say no, and I mean it.
The dead, in all my experience, have never given me trouble.
Sure, bodies purge fluids, make noises, twitch, things that

(00:23):
would freak out most people, butif you learn the science, you
learn not to take it personally.At least that's how I always saw
it until a few months ago. The case was of a teenager, a
girl brought in during the graveyard shift, hit by a train
on her way home late, her limbs mangled to the point where they
needed two of us to reassemble her for identification.

(00:45):
I work with professionals. Meticulous, steady hands, every
movement with purpose. The main wounds got packed, the
body washed and stitched, face surprisingly barely marked
except for a single nasty gash by her mouth.
We did what we could for decency, wrapped her in a shroud
and tagged her drawer. My partner signed off and the

(01:07):
shift change whistle blew. But I'm slow with paperwork,
always have been. That night I went back, figuring
I'd clear my backlog before my supervisor started noticing it
was well past one in the morning.
I remember the corridors seemed emptier than usual, the hum of
the fluorescent lights louder. Nothing felt wrong until I
opened the morgue. The room was always cold, but an

(01:30):
edge hung in the air, sharper, like when you open a freezer
full of dry ice. I sat at my desktop near the
morgue drawers, typing out my notes, listening to the distant
hiss of the air vent and the cold clicks of the old
compressor. I just finished logging the
girls admission time when I saw it.
A thin dark trail trickling fromthe base of her drawer and

(01:50):
seeping across the floor. Not a lot, but thick enough to
raise concern. I figured it was a leak, maybe
the shroud hadn't held. You see all kinds of post mortem
fluids, blood, bile. Worse still, the color bothered
me. Bright arterial red, not the
dark ooze that seeps after death.

(02:10):
And it was fresh. I opened her drawer, expecting
the usual mess, but what I foundmade my skin tighten.
There she lay, right where I'd left her, but from her nose,
sharp and neatly drawn, 2 fresh droplets of red ran down toward
her lips. Her mouth wasn't gaping, just
slightly parted as if to begin aword, but her eyes.

(02:32):
That's what got me. Wide open, glassy but not
clouded, staring up at the steeltop of the drawer like she was
awake and waiting. The pupils were blown lifeless,
but there was something about the whites too clear, like she'd
been frozen in that stair. I know about post mortem
purging. I've seen bodies bleed, twitch,

(02:55):
even sit up if you're unlucky, but closing her eyes should have
worked. I did it gently.
The eyelid slid down, stuck for a moment, then as I shifted I
heard a faint snap, like a tendon releasing, and the lids
crept open again. The worst part was, each time I
passed her drawer, the eyes werewide again.

(03:15):
Every single time. I told myself it was just a
shroud dragging, or maybe some play in the lids from the way
we'd stitched her, So I pressed the edges shut.
Even use tape, the medical kind,gentle and neat.
Not 3 minutes later, after finalizing her chart, I turned
around. The tape had slipped off,

(03:36):
resting on her cheek and the eyes open.
The blood from her nose kept coming, just a little, freshly
dripping. Nothing else in the room moved.
The cold metallic smell of the place was stronger than ever, A
mix of chemicals and copper. I heard a thud from the pipes
when I touched the skin of her wrist, frozen firm.

(03:57):
Her pulse point was a dead knot,No chance of error there.
There was something else too. A feeling pressing into my ears,
making them ring. The kind of pressure that builds
before a storm, only deeper, hollow, like descending in a
lift. Too suddenly.
When I stepped away from her drawer, the feeling eased up,

(04:17):
but each time I approached it, pressed in.
It made my vision shimmer at theedges, like looking at heat
rising off a road. I snapped some photos for the
chart. Standard procedure, Nothing
unusual in the pictures, but herreflection in the steel wall
above her drawer looked off. Her face elongated, the eyes
wider, the teeth almost visible beneath her lips.

(04:40):
It could have just been the curve of the metal, but I
deleted the image and retook it.The new shot looked fine, but
those earlier moments stayed fixed in my mind.
The next morning, the doctors checked her case.
No one mentioned the eyes. Maybe I sounded paranoid, but
the chill in that room kept sitting on me, heavy and silent,
for days after. The temperature in the drawers

(05:02):
felt off. Not just cold, but wrong biting.
I wondered more than once if we'd misdiagnosed something,
missed a trace of life. But I checked her pulse.
Breathing temperature flat. No sign of brain activity.
I still check her case file, probably more than I should.
The family released her for burial.

(05:23):
There's no sign anything was offin her records.
But when I close my own eyes at night, I sometimes see her
staring. Sometimes, in that almost sleep
where thoughts blur, I picture her mouth moving just a
fraction, like she's about to say something, her lips and nose
bright with stains that never dried.
I keep telling myself there's a reason.

(05:44):
Pressure, rigor, maybe the angleof the drawer, maybe a reaction
to cold. It could be any of those things,
any of the ordinary explanations.
That's what I repeat. And yet, whenever I pass that
end of the morgue, the air feelscolder.
Even now, just thinking about it, my scalp contracts and a
crawling sensation starts behindmy ears.

(06:07):
Maybe I just work too many nightshifts, but the look in her eyes
in that cold metal drawer made me feel more than I'd care to
admit that some part of her wasn't finished.
Whatever happened, whatever science explains it, I can't
shake the feeling she was tryingsomehow, to get someone to
notice. There's nothing left in her
drawer now. But sometimes, just sometimes, I

(06:30):
still see a faint rusty line on the steel where the blood ran
away, and I find myself checkingtwice that her eyes are closed.
Story #2 This happened on a stormy night while I was on my
shift in the hospital morgue. It's an old brick building added
on to in weird faces, full of chill corridors and white tiled

(06:51):
rooms lit by those shuttering lights.
Stuff happens here sometimes. Most of us have a story or two.
Jokes about ghosts, nerves goingbad at 3:00 AM.
What happened to me isn't a jokeand even thinking about it now
makes my skin crawl. There's one room at the end of a
service hall that we all avoid if we can.

(07:11):
Technically it's a dry storage space, A cramped windowless room
with a shitty frostbitten overhead light and plastic
sheeting hungover a single chairin the corner.
That chair is for unidentified arrivals or unclaimed property
cases. Mostly it never gets used for
long. What's weird is how everyone
started acting around it soon after I started here.

(07:34):
No one said much, but even the day guys seem to avoid dealing
with anything in there. If you drew keys for it, you'd
grumble and then put it off. I never really thought about it.
Old places collect bad stories. One night last spring, I was
working a double. It was raining.
The place was empty. No new admissions, nothing on

(07:54):
the radio, just the hum of the air handling unit and the rattle
of water on the windows. I was walking the hall near
storage, holding a stack of forms, when I heard something
weird from behind the locked door.
It wasn't a slam or a Creek, just a sound.
You know when you hear it. A chair leg scraping hard over
the tile. Not a random noise, a physical

(08:16):
object moving. There was a pause, then
footsteps. Slow, measured, muffled, like
someone in soft slippers. The steps came right up to the
door and stopped. I instantly assumed someone was
inside who shouldn't be A late visitor or maintenance.
Maybe I even knocked. Called out, but no answer.

(08:38):
Before I even touch my keys, thefluorescent lights inside
flicked on. The older bulbs always stutter
before they come up, but these kicked in with a buzzing snap.
I let myself in, expecting to catch someone, but there was no
one. It was a nothing.
Little room, shelves, a low table, that single chair.
The chair had never left its spot in the corner in the few

(09:00):
months I'd worked there. Now it was in the middle of the
floor, facing the door, plastic cover crinkled and gathered like
it had been scooted and spun. Nothing else seemed touched,
just the visible skid marks on the pale tile, like someone had
muscled it halfway across. Some part of me thought this was
a prank, a weird setup. I looked around, checked behind

(09:22):
every box, even under the table.Nothing.
Just the faint reek of cleaning solution and something else, old
sweat or worse. Everything went silent, kind of
thick. That's the only way I can put
it. Silence has a wait sometimes,
especially in morgues. I heard it next, a low humming
that didn't sound like the air vent or my own breathing.

(09:45):
It sounded too human, thin and sad, a song I didn't recognize,
fading in and out behind me, exactly in the spot where I'd
expect someone to stand if they wanted to watch me.
I spun so hard I felt dizzy. No one was there.
Before I could move, the room fell into pitch darkness.
My first thought was the breakerhad blown.
The difference was immediate. Black as a coffin, like the

(10:08):
walls shrank in closer, swallowing the chemical lamp
glow. Shadows pooling.
My skin prickled. Something I see touched the back
of my neck, abrupt and unmistakable.
A breath or a hand, or both. I remember freezing completely,
unable to move or breathe. It was as if I'd been shoved

(10:29):
sideways into water, with an invisible pressure pulling me
toward the chair. After what felt like a long
time, but was probably just a second or two, the lights
sputtered back on. The humming stopped instantly.
That chair, the one covered in plastic, was moving.
And then, in the blink of an eye, it stopped.
Like I had been dreaming. Maybe there was no earthquake,

(10:52):
no draft, just a subtle slow scraping movement as if someone
was sliding it back into the corner.
But there was no one there. I nearly bolted out right then,
but I forced myself to look up because I dropped my keys.
That's when I realized I couldn't breathe quite right.
My chest felt like something heavy was pressing down on it.

(11:13):
A wait so real I staggered, gasping, all while some rotten,
sweet chemical smell filled my nose and mouth.
Panic made it worse. I tried to rationalize the
cleaning fluid, my tired lungs, low oxygen, but it wasn't like
that. It felt like someone, someone
very cold, had their hand over my mouth, their palm pressing so

(11:36):
close I could feel the lines of their skin, though no one was
there. When I finally stumbled back to
the door, I realized my keys weren't working.
Not stuck, exactly. They refused to turn, like the
lock itself had warped. I had to wiggle the mechanism
until the inside bolt finally popped with a sound too loud in
the quiet. When I stepped out, blinking

(11:58):
from the glare, I noticed something else.
The automatic door closer click shut behind me, slower than
usual, as if something else had slipped out behind me, unseen.
I chalked all of it up to being exhausted, or just plain
suggestible. Maybe I'd let the stories get to
me, but I haven't been back in that room alone since.
Others avoid it too. When pressed, the older guys

(12:21):
mention stuff. Lights flickering, hearing
scraping voices when there's no one inside, things left out of
place, keys jamming from the inside.
They joke that the chair is for someone who never got found,
that no matter how many times you move it, it never wants to
stay away from the door. I still work nights sometimes,
and every so often I'll walk past that room.

(12:43):
The air near the door is always colder.
Honestly, I think that it's probably nothing.
Nerves jangling and playing tricks, That's what I tell
myself. But sometimes, when the halls
are really empty, I catch a hintof humming drifting out from
under the door, and I hurry on by.
I don't know if I believe in ghosts, but I know I'll never go
in that room alone again, and I never, ever want to hear that

(13:05):
breath on the back of my neck. If there's something in there,
it's still waiting. And sometimes I worry it's not
waiting for the next unclaimed case.
It's waiting for someone who will stay and listen.
Story #3 I work security and transport night shifts at the
City Hospital. Two years ago I switched from
days to nights. Pressure for overtime and an

(13:26):
extra shift allowance pulled me in.
The work itself was easy enough,Wheeling patients between
floors, signing off equipment incoming after hours, doing
rounds, keeping myself awake. But the nights, well you'd
understand if you ever did them,are strange in ways you can't
explain. By midnight, the staff thin out.
There are two nurses downstairs,a sleepy receptionist, and

(13:49):
sometimes me. The hallway lights buzz and
flicker for no reason. It never feels fully dark, but
never fully bright either. The weirdest part is how you get
used to the silence. Sometimes you might hear a
sudden clack of a boiler. You start tuning out real sounds
and picking up on things you think might be sounds.
The phantom echo of high heels, a cough, a voice in the

(14:11):
stairwell, always just out of range.
The night it happened was like any other, at least until maybe
220. AMA, New arrival, an older man,
cardiac arrest, came in through one of the back elevators with
the usual paperwork clipped to his wrist.
My job was to run the Gurney to the morgue, tag him, sign the

(14:31):
record, and log the entry in thesystem.
The morgue was, ironically, the literal coldest part of the
hospital. The industrial freezer there was
always set to the low 30s. If you stood still long enough,
the cold soaked through your bones.
As I wheeled the Gurney in, I noticed every sound seems
sharper. The Gurney wheels screeched on

(14:52):
the tile. My own breath clouded a little
in the air. I always close the steel door
behind me. The corridor light never quite
made it inside, so it glowed only from a tiny bulb above the
counter, flickering with the humof the fridge compressor.
I was just about to turn and leave when I heard a tapping
noise from the row of steel drawers.
At first it was faint, barely louder than the compressor. 3

(15:15):
short sharp taps and then nothing.
I did what anybody would do, Paused, listened hard, shrugged,
told myself it was probably the old machinery acting up again.
I walked to the logbook near thecounter and started filling it
out. The cold pressed against my
cheeks. As I reached the third line.
There was a sudden gust across my face.

(15:38):
Warm, humid. Just for a second, so out of
place in that room it actually threw me off for a moment.
It's hard to describe, but the air felt like someone had
exhaled right on my mouth and nose.
It made me step back, heart pounding a little, and check the
vent above me. I stood there, rubbing my arms,
and realized the vent shouldn't have blown warm air.

(16:00):
The hospital's air system never pumped heat down to the morgue.
I thought maybe the compressor kicked off cycle.
I don't know. But then I glanced over and saw
one of the lower drawers, a longstainless steel thing with a
handle sitting halfway open. The gap wasn't wide, maybe 4
inches, but enough that I could see the corner of a white shroud

(16:20):
inside, motionless. My brain tried to make sense of
it. Maybe the tech had left it open.
Maybe a Gurney had bumped it. Maybe I'd done it myself
earlier. I laughed a little, a short,
anxious sound, and walked over to push it closed.
It slid in easy, with a dull metallic thunk.
I was about to leave, hand already on the door, when

(16:42):
another drawer, this time from the top row, slid open with a
grinding, scraping noise. This one came out almost all the
way, stopping at the rail and the way the light hit it.
I couldn't tell what was inside.The room seemed tighter than
before, air thicker. I stared, half expecting someone
to pop up. My heart was beating so fast I

(17:03):
could feel it in my ears. It got worse.
Not even a second after I processed the top drawer, a slam
echoed off the metal, sharp enough to make me jerk backward.
This drawn out pattern started. One drawer would open, next
would slam shut. Another would rattle open like
some invisible game, the patterngrowing more wild, more angry.

(17:25):
Drawers up top shaking violently, Lower 1 slamming in
and out so hard the metal buckled and shrieked.
At some point, several drawers were just flying open and shut
at the same time, some bending at unnatural angles I'd never
thought possible. They made this muffled,
thunderous banging that I felt through my feet.
I seriously started to fear one would RIP off the racks and slam

(17:48):
into me, but my legs felt rootedto the spot.
The cold was gone, I was sweating, the back of my neck
felt hot and prickly, my eyes watered.
Combined with the smell of disinfectant and something else
raw and mineral, it was all making my head spin.
It's fuzzy what happened next. My memory kind of fractures,

(18:08):
like it's missing time. No sense of running, no sense of
screaming. I must have blacked out.
Next thing I knew, it was morning sunlight in my face and
I was lying outside the morgue on my back in the muddy patch
where the drain leaks after heavy rain.
My jacket was soaked and my headache like I'd hit concrete.

(18:29):
A nurse came running down and shouted my name.
She asked if I'd been attacked or had a fall.
All I could remember was the chorus of steel drawers
slamming, rattling again and again.
They found nothing out of place in the morgue, no drawers
broken. The cameras in that hall didn't
record anything abnormal except me walking in, then being found

(18:50):
10 feet outside in that mud, passed out.
I checked the vents and compressors myself.
Nothing reported wrong. No complaints from maintenance.
Some colleagues joke the night shift makes people see things.
Maybe I'd had a panic attack. Maybe I slipped and hit my head
and dreamed the rest. But I never went into that
morgue again. Even during daytime rounds, I'd

(19:12):
walk the long way around. My supervisor still laughs about
it, but I can't explain it away,not fully.
I tell myself I was exhausted, or the old machinery just
glitched. I want to believe it.
I do. Sometimes, though, just before
sleep, I hear banging metal on metal behind my eyelids.
Something about those drawers, how they open with

(19:34):
determination, with force, like something inside needed out,
sticks with me. There are explanations for
everything, I just don't know which explanation I need to live
with. Story number four.
I'm not really a storyteller or the kind of person who puts much
faith in unusual activities. I'm more of a practical, keep

(19:55):
your head down kind of guy. I work in healthcare at a rural
hospital out in the middle of nowhere.
Something happened that still nags at me, and even after
convincing myself there was an explanation, a small part of my
brain just won't leave it alone.The hospital's not even that
old, maybe 30 to 40 years, tops.But people hate going to the

(20:15):
basement anyway. Sometimes the power's iffy out
here and there are plenty of local rumors, but in the medical
field you learn to ignore noise and get the job done.
The morgues in the basement justpassed laundry.
I've had to do late night paperwork, rundown for supplies
stored near the big metal drawers, and yeah, sometimes
move a body if an ambulance brought in someone from a car

(20:36):
crash or heart attack. I'd gotten used to the lights in
the morgue flickering, always convinced it was some wiring
issue. I actually mentioned it to
maintenance a few times, but they never really seemed to get
around to fixing it. The result was a cold, dim
corridor with the lights buzzingand the sensation you were
underwater. That's how hospitals feel at

(20:57):
1:00 AM, like you're in a place just a little to the left of the
real world. One shift, things were really
routine up until almost the end.I'd settled in with coffee at
the nurse's station when the buzzer suddenly went off, a
harsh mechanical sound that signals a door's been opened or
the alarm's been tripped. Standard procedure is to check

(21:17):
on it, log the reason, and resetthe system.
We had no new admissions, so it should have been dead quiet down
there. Walking toward the basement,
just the echo of my footsteps, Ifelt that annoying pins and
needles crawl up my spine that you only get when you're
utterly, pointlessly alone. That's normal for me.
Fear is just your brain reactingto silence and shadows.

(21:40):
I kept reminding myself of exactly that, but the closer I
got to the morgue, the more obvious it was something was
off. The flickering overhead light
was worse, erratic strobing likesomeone was fiddling with a
dimmer switch. The door to the morgue was
closed, and when I reached for the knob, it didn't move.
Not a millimeter. It was stuck, not locked

(22:03):
exactly, but like it had been welded shut.
I rattled it once, called out even though I knew no one would
answer, and told myself maybe the air pressure shifted in the
building. A weird vacuum lock, nothing
more. I was going to fetch the
skeleton key from the supply closet when the door just
clicked open. Not gradually, a sudden

(22:25):
releasing jolt, like it had beenwaiting for me.
Switching on. The light was useless.
The bulbs overhead glowed a dim,angry red.
I figured maybe the emergency bulb was on, but it didn't match
the usual color spectrum. My eyes took a second to adjust,
and then I realized that nothingabout the room was right.

(22:45):
There were no stainless steel drawers.
Instead, there were things hanging from the ceiling.
At first I thought it was plastic or some kind of
Halloween decoration that got stuck and left behind by bored
night staff. But as my vision adjusted, I saw
they weren't props. There were dozens of faces,
masks but not plastic. Hollowed, dried, stretched like

(23:08):
animal hides, hanging from wiresand swaying, almost breathing
with the hum of the air duct. The eye sockets were empty and
deep rims blackened. Some of the faces had clumps of
hair, some of them had crooked teeth or bruises or the texture
that skin gets after being scraped raw.
What didn't help was the smell. All hospitals smell faintly of

(23:30):
bleach and old sweat, but this was something else.
Iron old meat left to rot. I could taste it in the back of
my throat. At that point.
My chest was heaving, but a rational part of me tried to
process everything. Maybe a prank, maybe a
hallucination. This happened, I told myself to
exhausted night staff all the time.

(23:53):
Maybe it was some kind of nightmare I hadn't snapped out
of some sleep paralysis trick. The door behind me shut with the
exact same sudden click, plunging the room into a deeper,
barely lit red shadow. My hand went immediately to the
knob, but the door didn't move. I swear that's when I felt it.
Pain like a razor slicing along my right cheek.

(24:16):
Cold first, then a sudden sting.I pressed my palm to my face,
expecting my fingertips to come away dark and wet, but there was
nothing but clammy hospital washskin, my reflection in the shiny
corner of a surgical tray. Why one was even there I can't
say. Looked paler but intact.

(24:36):
Sound started low, the hum of the freezer kicking on.
I thought, but it grew, stretching into high, thin
shrieks. Dozens of voices layered, all
distorted and echoing. There was desperate wailing,
sharp gasps, the kind of horror movie noise constructed from
real pain. I remember pressing my hands

(24:56):
over my ears, wishing it would stop, trying not to look up at
the moving flesh, pale faces that seemed to twist every time
the light flickered. I panicked, I really did.
I kicked the door, pounded on it, turned the handle in every
direction. There was another jolt, one last
shriek that peeked in my skull, and the door suddenly popped

(25:17):
open. The hall lights were normal.
There was an empty cart blockingthe door from swinging fully,
but that was it. No mass, no red light, just the
regular hospital basement. Somehow I ended up sprinting for
the main stairwell. I didn't look back.
I spent the end of my shift in the break room, palm sweating,

(25:38):
watching the wall clock. My face itched, but I wouldn't
touch it. When staff came in for the
morning shift and found me whiteas a sheet, I mumbled something
about a fainting spell. When the sun was up, I went down
there, daylight streaming through small high basement
windows. The morgue was normal.
Drawers, fluorescent lights, nota single mask or spot of blood.

(26:00):
The smell was just cleaning supplies and cold air.
I left that day. I typed out my resignation on my
phone while sitting in my car, still shaking.
It's been months. I can almost believe it was
stress, that maybe the mass shapes were lab coats or hanging
sheets or a dream that invaded reality after too many

(26:20):
overnights. But every morning when I shave,
I notice faint pink lines curling on my cheeks.
Not scars, exactly, just shallowmarks, like someone traced my
face with the edge of a knife. They haven't faded.
The doctor I now work with at a cheerful daytime clinic says
they're nothing. Probably from a rash or pressure

(26:41):
during sleep, maybe. But I never sleep on my side,
and sometimes if I close my eyestoo long at night, I still see
100 hollow faces staring with empty black eyes and hear a
shriek in the distance that's not quite gone.
Story #5I work full time as a forensic technician for a County
Medical examiner's office. That's not the weird part.

(27:04):
Dead people don't bother me. It's the living you usually have
to watch anyway. When you spend every weekday
beneath harsh white lights, scraping under fingernails and
rinsing blood down industrial drains, your mind gets used to
static reality. At least I thought so until last
September. The autopsy suite has a certain
look. Clean, but not clean like your

(27:27):
kitchen. Clean like something that could
never have been alive. There's a long stainless steel
counter spanning the far wall, the kind with metal storage
doors underneath, the kind that reflect everything above and
opposite back at you in a warped, wide sheet of dim
mirror. I always noticed my shoes,
sometimes my face if I bent down, sometimes the lone

(27:49):
fluorescent fixture glinting overhead.
The surface holds every fingerprint and water spot.
Bosses hate that. That morning, I came in at 5:15.
Nobody else was there yet the place was silent.
I set my coffee near the logbookand began checking toe tags for
the morning's procedures. It was maybe 10-15 minutes in,

(28:10):
bleary eyed from lack of sleep, that I happened to look up.
In the mirrored steel below the counter's rim.
I saw someone standing behind me.
He was tall, broad shouldered, wearing a black suit, impossibly
out of place in the morgue. I could see thick black hair,
but his face was just skin. No features, no mouth, no eyes,

(28:31):
no nose. As if someone had forgotten to
finish making him. I felt an instinctive animal
panic, just a flash, and spun around expecting a prank.
There was nothing behind me, empty aisle shoes squeaking on
the linoleum. I tried to shake it off.
It was early, maybe my brain filled in weird images, but it

(28:52):
happened again and again every time I was near any reflective
surface. Lockers, glass doors, even the
old coffee machine if the light hit it right.
I saw him standing just behind my shoulder in the mirror, suit,
hair faceless. I never saw his hands.
The first week I'd turn, heart thumping, ready to confront

(29:14):
whoever it was, but always nothing.
Silence, empty benches, just thehum and click of cold storage in
the background. By the second week I started
trying to rationalize. Maybe it was sleep deprivation,
we've been running double shiftsafter a bus pile up or some
weird stress hallucination. My mother used to get migraines
with visual auras. Maybe it was genetic.

(29:37):
I started drinking less coffee, caught up on sleep, but the
visions didn't stop. Then it began bleeding into my
dreams. Hard to describe if it hasn't
happened to you. The dreams were sharp, not
blurry around the edges like most always.
I was back in the suite, alone, shuffling paperwork.

(29:57):
I'd feel his presence long before I saw him, that raw sense
of someone behind me. I could never turn around, but I
could always see him in the glass, standing close enough to
feel his breath, which was impossible because he had no
mouth. The air would get cold.
Sometimes he would raise an arm,fingerless stump like, and I'd

(30:17):
wake up gasping, the sheets slick with freezing sweat.
My old Fitbit showed my heart at120 beats per minute for hours.
Maybe it was just stress relatedsleep paralysis.
I started thinking. I tried to laugh it off, brought
it up as a joke once with a buddy who also work nights.
He shrugged, said sometimes the sweet got to him too.

(30:39):
About 3 weeks in it escalated. One night around 2:30 AMI was
sleeping in my studio apartment when I heard my door creak.
It's an old place, that's not uncommon, but something felt
off. My back was to the door, and yet
every hair on me stood up. The air got heavy and sharp,
like that moment right before a power outage.

(31:01):
My body wouldn't obey me. It was like I was pressed into
the mattress by a concrete block.
I could hear slow, dragging footsteps that stopped just
beside me. I tried to turn my head or
scream, but my jaw wouldn't unclench.
My throat wouldn't move, not even to whimper.
I could see, just in the corner of my vision, a pale shape at

(31:22):
the foot of my bed, a head and shoulders where there should be
a face, but instead only blank, bloodless skin.
I remember the faint, acrid smell, like burnt wiring, and
the way breathing felt like I was inhaling crushed ice.
He didn't move. He just looked at me, if you can
call it that, with a featurelesshead angled right at my own.

(31:45):
Something about the shape made me think he was grinning, though
he didn't have a mouth. It lasted in eternity, probably
seconds in reality. Then, as quickly as flipping a
light switch, he was gone. The pressure lifted.
I shot upright, gasping, arms flailing from my phone.
Nothing. My room was empty, light

(32:06):
filtering in from the street. The door cracked just as I'd
remembered. After that night I began
sleeping with the light on the TV playing some background
static. For a week I didn't see him at
all. I started to think maybe the
spell had broken. One Thursday morning, as I was
re tagging a John Doe in cold storage, the day shift

(32:26):
pathologist wandered in. She stopped, frowned at me, and
asked me with a strange tilt of her head who the man was that
had just been standing behind me.
She thought maybe it was a new detective, or a visiting family
member. She only caught a glimpse, but
he was tall, dark haired. She only remembered how strange

(32:46):
it was that she couldn't recall his face.
My hands went cold, chest tight,all the exhaustion returning in
a single wave. I laughed it off again, saying
she'd probably seen someone leaving the other way, just a
trick of the light. But I felt a prickling on the
nape of my neck. I couldn't shake the mirror.
Visions stopped after that. No more dreams, no more sudden

(33:09):
cold, no more faceless man hovering in reflections.
In fact, everything returned to routine.
Dead bodies, paperwork, coffee stains and the squeak of rubber
soles. But sometimes, in the early dark
hours before the day shift arrives, I still walk past the
metal doors and see my own reflection, ghostly and

(33:31):
stretched. And I sometimes get the feeling
that if I looked carefully enough, or if I lingered too
long, I might see him again. Or worse, Maybe he never really
left at all. Maybe he's just standing out of
frame, waiting for me to let my guard down.
There are explanations, of course.
Stress induced hallucinations, sleep paralysis, power of

(33:55):
suggestion, maybe even gas leaksor simple exhaustion.
But if you work in the quiet rooms with the dead, you learn
that not every question has an answer that lets you sleep easy
at night. Story number six.
I have worked over 30 years in acity morgue, the kind of place
that strips you of imagination because reality is unsettling

(34:15):
enough. I spent every midnight shift
with dead bodies for company, and you'd think nothing would
bother me anymore. Decay, the quiet, cold, the odd
noises, buildings make it 3:00 AM.
All part of the job. It happened maybe 5 or 6 years
ago, close to the end of my timeat the morgue.
My colleague Priya and I were sharing the graveyard shift.

(34:37):
She had just brewed us both someterrible vending machine coffee
when her phone rang. I could tell from her face it
was serious. A sick kid.
A panicked husband at home, I told her to head out, that I'd
hold the Fort. It wasn't the first time.
Morgues are always short staffed.
So there I was, sitting beneath those harsh fluorescent lights,

(34:58):
working through the endless log sheets, updating entries, a
radio muttering weather in the corner.
I kept thinking about the sharp smell of disinfectant in the hum
of the fridge units where the bodies were stored.
The city was silent at that hour, except for the distant
whale of an ambulance now and then.
It must have been around 2:30 AMwhen the air changed.

(35:19):
That's the only way to put it. It got heavier, like the oxygen
wasn't reaching the bottom of mylungs.
Little things became magnified, the ticking clock a subtle
rattling from one corner where cold air entered a vent.
Frost shifting on metal with my pen scratching on forms.
I heard definite footsteps from the hallway.

(35:40):
Not the shuffling of someone half asleep, but deliberate,
measured steps. No visitors at this hour, no
guards around, budget cuts. My first impulse was to check
for a stray patient, maybe a local who got lost, or, as
happens, someone drunk looking for shelter.
I got up and walked to the entrance of the Corridor St.

(36:01):
Lights bled a little Gray through the far window, but most
of the place was shadow. I saw a figure about halfway
down in an area where the light from my room didn't reach.
Not moving at first, just standing, facing away from me.
They were pale and thin. My stomach dropped.
It looked wrong. I called out, my voice low and

(36:22):
sharp, but it didn't even flinch.
I stepped forward and briefly lost it in the shadows between
the doors. When I reached the spot, there
was no one. I know old buildings and tricks
of the light can play games. Maybe it was a shadow.
Maybe my fatigue was catching upto me.
My eyes started to itch, my scalp prickled.
I began to feel like I was beingwatched from multiple directions

(36:44):
at once. Every step echoed too loud.
On my way back, the corridor lights buzzed and flickered.
Flickering bulbs aren't unusual there, bad wiring always under
repair. But in that weird strobe, the
figure was back, right ahead, but facing away from me.
The thing that made every hair on my body stand up was the

(37:05):
sense it could see me, like it was studying me over its
shoulder, even though it's head never turned.
The way the posture shifted, head still, but the angle of its
neck straining like a puppet on strings.
Then it started moving and I realized its feet were facing
completely the wrong way, anklestwisted around so the toes

(37:25):
pointed backwards, but it moved fluidly, not stumbling.
Not Hanford at all. It walked, or maybe glided, I
still don't know, toward me, butwith its back to me and yet
somehow unmistakably aware of me.
As it approached, the air grew colder until my breath fogged,
which shouldn't have happened, given the building's heating.

(37:48):
I froze, my jaw clenched so hardmy teeth ached.
Then, without warning, it broke into a run, darting at me,
making no noise except the slap of bare skin on concrete my body
chose for me. Adrenaline took over and I
scrambled backward, nearly tripping.
I checked every door, frantic. Most were locked.

(38:09):
I stumbled into the cleaning cupboard, barreled in, and
managed to slam and lock the flimsy door behind me.
That figure reached the door in seconds.
The sound it made, pounding was physical, animal, not a person's
fist. A heavy, rhythmic slamming, so
powerful the hinges rattled in Fine, dusty plaster drifted from
the ceiling. Moldy mop water stank in the

(38:32):
room, but I pressed myself into the corner and hid.
I could hear my own heartbeat, loud and desperate.
Then the pounding stopped. Stillness returned, except for a
faint scraping sound outside, like someone running a hand
along the metal siding. The instinct, not rational, just
animal, told me the figure was now at the window behind me,

(38:55):
staring in. I couldn't make myself look at
first. My mind screamed don't turn
around, don't look at it, but I couldn't stop myself forever.
When I finally forced myself to look, no one was there.
The glass was frosted from the cold, but there were handprints,
Huge, deep, almost like they'd been scorched black into the

(39:16):
pane. I waited.
I sat and listened for hours. Every noise magnified, every
Creek felt like the prelude to another attack.
But nothing came. Eventually, faint Gray light
came through the window, and people started to arrive.
I left the room, hands shaking, refusing to look at the window
again. Nothing else was out of place

(39:37):
except those prints, though by the time I could bring someone
back, the frost had melted and there was nothing but a smear.
When Priya came in, it was as ifnothing happened.
She walked in, surprised I wasn't at the front desk, asked
if everything went OK. I didn't tell her about what
happened, but something nagged at me when she said she hadn't

(39:58):
come back since her call last night.
No one else had keys. Nobody else was scheduled.
I searched for hospital records that might explain it.
Nobody reported a missing person.
Nobody supposedly entered or left the building.
I've told myself it was exhaustion.
Maybe old wiring made the lightsflicker and my half asleep mind

(40:18):
cooked up shapes out of shadows.Maybe a vagrant with a
deformity? Or a prank that went wrong.
Even now, writing this, I try toexplain it away, repeating those
reasons like a prayer. But in my bones I can still feel
that cold, the deep sense that something watched and understood
and wanted inside. I never worked a night shift

(40:40):
alone again after that. Sometimes, in the quiet of early
morning, I still hear those backwards footsteps.
I'm retired now, but whatever itwas, I'm not sure the doors of
the morgue shut tightly enough behind it.
Story #7 I want to preface this by saying that I've always been
a rational person. Working at a hospital for eight

(41:00):
years will do that. Exposure to the worst of life
can make you see concrete facts.Not out of the world stories,
but seven months ago. I still can't explain it.
The hospital I worked in wasn't anything special.
A2 story building that always seemed under lit and drafty,
even by government building standards.
I mostly handled supply runs andodd maintenance tasks.

(41:23):
During the night shift, which iswhen the weirdness started.
There was a room on the 1st floor not far from the morgue.
Everyone knew about it, even if nobody ever talked about it.
Old paperwork listed it as storage room 17, but as long as
I'd been there, it was always locked.
Not just locked, padlocked with the kind of chunky antique lock

(41:44):
people only use when they're actively trying to keep
something out or in The cleaningstaff always joked about the
witch's room. I used to laugh it off.
Hospitals are full of odd traditions and morbid humor.
One night I was called to check on some equipment in the morgue.
It was just after three in the morning, and the hallways were

(42:05):
the color of weak tea in the dimhallway lights.
I grabbed my tool kit and made my way down, shivering a bit
like always when I passed that locked room beside the morgue,
except this time the door was slightly ajar.
It's hard to describe the feeling I got, like when you
step off a curb you didn't see, except it lasted for two whole
minutes. My head told me to let it go,

(42:27):
report it to security and move on.
But there was this itch at the back of my mind, a nagging
curiosity. Maybe it was just because I
finally had an opportunity to solve the building's one dumb
little mystery. I pushed the door open.
Cold air whooshed out and touched my skin in that
immediate, unpleasant way that makes all your arm hair stand

(42:47):
straight up. I flicked the lights on.
The bulbs overhead clicked painfully alive, casting
everything a greenish hue inside.
The room looked like it hadn't been touched in decades.
A scattering of dust covered everything, thick enough that I
could trace my initials in it. There was an old hospital bed
jammed into the far corner, withwhat looked like rusty chains

(43:09):
attached at each corner. On the floor was a pile of what
I thought was rags, or maybe some type of old equipment, but
the longer I stared, the more itseemed to unspool in all
directions, like a tangled heap of black plastic wrap.
Or maybe hair. There was a smell to the room
too. Something acrid, coppery, sour.

(43:30):
It felt heavy in my nose and throat.
I was about to step out, my curiosity fully killed, when the
door swung shut behind me. Not like it was caught in a
draft or the hinges were shot, but fast and deliberate.
I ran back and grabbed at the handle.
Nothing. It was locked tight and the
padlock was dangling from the inside, which made no sense at

(43:53):
all. Looking for something to wedge
the lock open, I stumbled backward.
My boot caught on the black heapand I went down hard.
Dust puffed up around me as something wet squelched beneath
my hand, my flashlight rolling onto its side.
Through stretch shadows across the walls, I saw in the brief
spinning beam the chains from the bed clattering up against

(44:15):
the rails. My leg got snagged, then both,
and in one horrible movement thechains clamped around my ankles.
I tried to kick away, but the chains just pulled tighter.
For several long seconds I just lay there, my mind trying and
failing to make sense of what was happening.
All I could hear was my own pulse thumping loud in my ears.

(44:39):
I pulled and twisted, swearing through gritted teeth.
The bed was ancient, but didn't budget.
The cold metal pressed into my skin, and every time I jerked,
the bed frame scraped out this horrible screeching sound that
bounced off the walls and made my teeth ache.
That's when I looked up. There were scratch marks all
over the ceiling. Tight, parallel grooves burn

(45:00):
against the yellow plaster. Some of them looked old, scabbed
over with whatever pass for dustthere, but right above me they
were sharp, almost fresh, the white plaster scattered around
them like snow. They were far from any wall, and
I swear no ladder or tool could get you up there.
Then something splattered onto my cheek, hot, sticky, and

(45:24):
unmistakable, the red color impossible to ignore even in the
weird green light. Another drip hit my forehead,
followed by another. I remember my body moving like
it was underwater, writhing, twisting, but the chains refused
to let up. The bed grown beneath me, cold
and rough, the smell of blood now everywhere, with every bone

(45:46):
in my body. I screamed, not sure if it
echoed outside the room, becausemy own panic drowned everything
out. I don't remember how I got out.
The next thing I recall, I was being shaken awake by two of my
colleagues, faces tight with concern, eyes wide.
They told me I've been missing for over a day, that the door
had been locked from the outsidethe whole time, and that nobody

(46:09):
could figure out how I got inside.
There was dust all over my uniform, deep red stains matted
in with the Gray. My wrist bore purple bruises
like I'd struggled with cuffs, but the nurse who checked me
found nothing actually broken. I tried to explain, but every
time I tried to piece together those missing hours after the
blood fell, my memory cut out just a blank.

(46:32):
Worse, every time I pass that end of the hallway I get a
taste. The taste of cold, metal and
rust. Sometimes in my dreams I see the
ceiling above my bed scratched up and close.
My colleagues mostly just joke about it.
Some think I had a stress induced breakdown, others
whisper about chemical leaks, orthat maybe I sleepwalked and
hallucinated the whole thing fora while.

(46:54):
I believe them. Still, late at night, I can
almost feel the chains again, heavy and cold, and sometimes I
wake up certain that I'll taste blood in the back of my throat.
Maybe there's a logical explanation, maybe the door
wasn't really locked, or maybe Ilost time and made everything
up. But if you ever find yourself
pulled by curiosity toward a room nobody uses, especially 1,

(47:17):
chained and left to rot beside amorgue, trust your instincts and
stay away. I still work at the hospital,
but I never go near that hallwayever again.