The Night Ward - Horror Stories

The Night Ward - Horror Stories

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I used to work security at a mid sized hospital
in northern Argentina. In Salta. The night shift wasn't glamorous,
twelve hours of walking the same hallways, checking doors, and
drinking terrible coffee from the vending machine. For the most part,
hospitals are less busy at night, fewer visitors, fewer staff.

(00:22):
But the silence makes you notice everything. The hum of
the fluorescent lights, the creak of old floors, the faint
buzz of machines through the walls. And in that silence
the hospital fell wrong. The ward I hated patrolling most
was the old pediatric wing. It had been shut down

(00:42):
years ago, budget cuts, they said, but the rooms were
still there, empty cribs, faded cartoon murals on the walls,
peeling paint. We were supposed to check it once per
shift to make sure no one had broken in the
first time I wore that hallway alone, I swore I
heard children laughing, very faint, almost like it was coming

(01:06):
from behind the closed doors. When I stopped, the laughter stopped.
When I started walking again, I heard tiny footsteps running
behind me. I wrote it off as nerves. The place
had that effect on people. One night, around three am,
the cameras on that floor glitched out, just static. The

(01:29):
supervisor asked me to go check in person. I took
the elevator up, and when the doors opened, the whole
corridor was dark. That was strange. Maintenance always left one
or two lights on. I started walking with my flashlight.
As soon as I passed the second door, I noticed
one of the cribs inside wasn't empty. The blanket was

(01:52):
pulled up like someone was lying under it. I stepped inside,
trying to convince myself maybe housekeeping and stored supplies there.
But when I pulled the blanket back, there was nothing,
just the indentation of a small body that should have
been there. That's when I heard it, A child's voice

(02:14):
right behind me, whispering, don't wake them up. I spun
around empty room. I left fast. When I checked the
cameras the next morning, the supervisor showed me something. The
footage was back online, but the static had frozen into
a single frame. In the frame, the hallway was filled

(02:35):
with children, maybe a dozen, all pale in hospital gowns,
staring straight at the lens. The IT guys brushed it
off as corrupted data, but I couldn't get those faces
out of my head. After that, I started dreading the
pediatric checks. Sometimes i'd hear toys rolling across the floor

(02:55):
in empty rooms. Once I heard crying, real crying, the
kind that makes your chest heighten. It was coming from
a locked room. When I finally got the key and
opened it, the sound stopped. The air inside smelled like
medicine and rust. The worst night came near the end

(03:16):
of my contract. I was walking the wing when I
noticed one of the doors was half open. That was unusual.
Housekeeping always left them shut. I pushed it open, and
inside the crib was occupied again, but this time there
was something there. A little girl, maybe six, sitting cross

(03:38):
legged on the mattress. She was impossibly pale, with dark
bruises around her eyes, wearing a faded gown. Her hair
was stringy, like it had been wet for too long.
She looked up at me and said, they don't like
your ear. I couldn't move. I just stood there, frozen.

(04:00):
Then she tilted her head, almost curious, and whispered, you
should leave before they find you. The light flickered, and
suddenly the crib was empty again. I got out of
that wing as fast as I could. The next morning,
I told one of the older nurses what happened. She
didn't laugh, she just nodded slowly and said that's why

(04:25):
they closed pediatrics, too many incidents. I pressed her for more,
but all she'd say was that several children had died
there after a power out of year's back machines failed.
Back up generators didn't kick in, and the staff couldn't
save them. No one talked about it openly, but every

(04:46):
one knew. I quit two weeks later. I still worked security,
but never in hospitals. Still, sometimes at night, when everything
is quiet, I swear I can hear those footste behind me, small, quick, playful,
like they followed me out