Creepy Stories From Psych Ward Workers

We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We'll call her Jane. On Jane's first night at our facility, staff performing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out, Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.
 

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room, she would walk to every wall and touch them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours, she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. One night, Jane's pace was frantic. Our night staff observed the entire interaction, and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When one staff member went to check on Jane, she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong, and Jane replied, "What makes you think you are speaking to Jane?"

I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients' medications, and being a 5'2" girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.  

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me "Miss Jones" or "ma'am."  

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.  

This escalated to the point of him calling her "Mom" and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn't be his mom because that would hurt his real mother's feelings, and that she already had that job covered.  

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.  

I was working an overnight shift on an Alzheimer's ward at a nursing home. It was about 2:30 am, and I was making my rounds, peeking into the rooms to make sure the patients were where they should be.  

I went into one room, and this 83-year-old woman was sitting straight up in her bed, staring at the wall. I slowly walked into the room and calmly asked her if she wanted to lie back down. She turned her head slowly, looked me right in the eye, and said "They're coming for you, dear." Then she started laughing - I'm talking full-on hysterical, insane cackling. I almost pissed myself right there. She finally calmed down, and I got her to lie back down. When she was just about to go back to sleep, she looked at me again and said "I'm going to miss you when they take you," and went right back to sleep.

When I first started working in the hospital, I was sitting with this sweet little old woman. I had sat with her, talking about her family and such for six hours. Towards the end of my shift (9 pm) they decided she didn't need to have a heart monitor, so they transferred her to a different unit.  

Once we got to the new room, she started acting differently - just generally angry, I would say. Then all of a sudden, she tried to jump out of the bed (a big no-no at hospitals), so I immediately got up to stop her. She started screaming bloody murder about how her house was on fire, and her family was inside and she needed to get them out. I tried to calm her down, but to no avail.  

She started yelling at me about how I'm going to rot in the flames of Hell because God told her so, and how I was responsible for her family's death. Staring deep into my eyes, she told me all about how I will burn in eternal flames, and that I am filled with evil. I thought, "Okay, at least she isn't worried about her family or trying to get out of bed."  

But then she started screaming at the top of her lungs in what I can only describe as Latin or maybe even gibberish. She then ripped out her dentures, threw them at me, and pulled all of the skin on her face back into this long, stretched-out, creepy smile. She let out a blood-curdling scream while her eyes rolled back into her head like some sort of possession scene in a movie. Just as she let up my relief came into the room. I wished her luck and booked it out of there.  

I work in an ER, and due to my country and state's poor mental health system, we see acute psychotic episodes daily. Over time, you get desensitized to it, but there is still one that turns my stomach.

A guy was found in a burning abandoned building. He wasn't hurt, but was acting so strange the paramedics brought him in. He was homeless, had no ID, did not know his name, and had zero drugs in his system. Looking into his eyes, you could tell he wasn't seeing the same thing I was.  

So I'm trying to get his name or anything out of him, and he keeps telling me he was a pilot for the Air Force and flew experimental airplanes, because he could withstand the G-force and his blood was naturally thin. The blood tests that measure this actually were fairly higher than normal, but not elevated to the point he was on medication for it. So he was right on that account.  

I was at the desk telling a coworker about the stuff this guy was saying, when a resident overheard me. He was former Air Force as well, and looked like he had seen a ghost. As soon as I mentioned the name of the base, this doctor freaked out. He said that that city/base has no roads in or out and a lot of top secret testing goes down there. He said that you don't know about it unless you've been there. He told me not to talk about it or make a big deal.