Hospitals feel different after dark.

As a nurse, I’ve spent enough night shifts in quiet hallways to know that healthcare workers have some of the creepiest stories. Strange figures standing in patient rooms. Patients seeing people no one else can see. Rooms that develop reputations among staff. And those stories that get passed from nurse to nurse because nobody has ever quite figured out what happened.

Welcome to Healthcare Haunts, a new recurring series on The Haunted Line where we dig into paranormal stories from hospitals, long-term care homes, hospices and the people who work inside them.

For our first three stories, we're heading to Reddit.

An elderly patient sees a hooded man dressed in black emerging from her hospital bathroom and threatening to take her soul. Weeks later, a completely different patient in the same room reports seeing him too.

A cardiac patient begins seeing her husband standing at the foot of her hospital bed. The problem? He's been dead for ten years. Three days later, something happens that leaves her nurse thinking about those visits for years.

And then there's Room 512, where patients report a human-shaped shadow standing in the corner, equipment seems to have a mind of its own, and even staff unfamiliar with the room notice that something about it feels wrong.

These stories were originally shared by healthcare workers on Reddit and have been paraphrased for narration. They are personal accounts and have not been independently verified.

If you work in healthcare and have a story of your own, I want to hear it. Nurses, PSWs, CNAs, doctors, paramedics, respiratory therapists, hospice workers, housekeeping, porters and anyone else who's experienced something they still can't explain, send your story to The Haunted Line. Your experience could be featured in a future Healthcare Haunts episode.

Sources & Original Stories

The Man in Black
Reddit user: u/Unhappy-Wrangler-727
r/nursing
“Does anyone else have creepy work stories? Please share.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/1x0e9ox/does_anyone_else_have_creepy_work_stories_please/

The Woman Who Saw Her Dead Husband
Reddit user: u/angiebeany
r/Ghosts
“Nurse experience of a ghostly visit to a patient”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/14wq3sa/

Room 512
Reddit user: u/The_Crazed_Josh
r/Ghosts
“Paranormal experience at the hospital hospital I work for”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/16cek7a/

Stories have been paraphrased from the original Reddit posts and attributed to the users who shared them.

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What happens when your hand begins to write words you never consciously chose?

In Episode 5 of The Haunted Line, we explore the strange history of automatic writing, a practice that became deeply intertwined with the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement.

Long before the familiar Ouija board, Spiritualists were experimenting with writing planchettes, small devices fitted with pencils that supposedly allowed spirits to leave messages on paper. By the late 1800s, mediums were claiming they didn't need the device at all. They could simply pick up a pencil, surrender control of their hand, and let the dead write through them.

We look at Anglican clergyman and Spiritualist William Stainton Moses, whose automatic writings were attributed to spirit communicators including one called "Imperator," and whose messages were eventually published as Spirit Teachings.

Then we meet Pearl Curran and Patience Worth, one of the strangest cases in the history of spirit communication. Beginning with a Ouija board in 1913, Curran produced an extraordinary body of novels, poetry, plays and other writings attributed to a mysterious personality named Patience Worth.

But were spirits really guiding their hands?

Or could automatic writing reveal something equally strange about the human mind?

From Victorian séances and spirit writing to unconscious movement and the ideomotor effect, we're asking the question at the heart of automatic writing:

Who's really holding the pen?

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Sources & Further Reading

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Planchette: The Great Ill-Famed Land of the Marvellous
https://fisherdigitus.library.utoronto.ca/exhibits/show/psychical-research-collection/planchette

Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia
William Stainton Moses
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/william-stainton-moses/

Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
The Experiences of W. Stainton Moses
https://iapsop.com/archive/materials/spr_proceedings/spr_proceedings_v9_1893-4.pdf

Smithsonian Magazine
Patience Worth: Author From the Great Beyond
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/patience-worth-author-from-the-great-beyond-54333749/

U.S. National Library of Medicine / PubMed
"Words of Healing": The Literature of Automatic Writing as Treatment and Prescription in the Victorian Age
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34176814/

🎧 The Haunted Line explores the history, hauntings and folklore that refuse to die.

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You know the history of the Ouija board. Now it's time for the stories people swear really happened.

In this first bonus episode of The Haunted Line, we're stepping away from the history books and into five unsettling Ouija board encounters, from a bizarre case of "Ouija mania" that ended with police breaking down the door to unexplained footsteps, a message that haunted a science journalist for nearly three decades, the disturbing legend of Zozo, and a Ouija board prediction that allegedly came true years later.

Some of these stories are documented in historical records. Others have been preserved in folklore archives or told firsthand by the people who experienced them. And some remain impossible to verify.

Are they evidence that something can actually communicate through a Ouija board?

The ideomotor effect?

Coincidence?

Or something we still don't understand?

You decide.

And if you've ever had a frightening or unexplained experience with a Ouija board, I want to hear it. Your story could be featured in a future bonus episode of The Haunted Line.

Sources & Further Reading

El Cerrito Historical Society
When El Cerrito Went "Insane": The Ouija-Mania Incident of 1920
https://www.elcerritohistoricalsociety.org/ouija-mania

KQED
Jon Brooks, This Science Editor Has a Real Ghost Story and It's Still Freaking Him Out
https://www.kqed.org/news/11930135/did-i-actually-contact-a-dead-person-a-science-editor-in-search-of-his-mothers-ghost-2

KQED
Can We Really Speak to the Dead? Even for a Skeptic, Hope Creeps In
https://www.kqed.org/news/11930176/did-i-actually-contact-a-dead-person-a-science-editor-in-search-of-his-mothers-ghost

USC Digital Folklore Archives
Ouija Board Experience and collected Ouija board folklore
https://folklore.usc.edu/tag/ouija-board/

Coast to Coast AM
Ouija Board & Zozo Phenomena, featuring Ouija historian Robert Murch and Darren Evans
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2014-10-04-show/

Reddit, r/Paranormal
Freaky Ouija Board Story
https://www.reddit.com/r/Paranormal/comments/rn9kok/

A Note on the Stories

This episode includes a combination of documented historical events, personal testimony, folklore, and unverified first-person accounts. Paranormal claims discussed in this episode have not necessarily been independently verified and are presented as the experiences and beliefs of the people who reported them.

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The Ouija board might be one of the most feared objects in paranormal history, but it didn’t begin as something sinister.

In this episode of The Haunted Line, we uncover the strange history of the Ouija board, from its roots in the Victorian Spiritualist movement to the businessmen who patented the first commercial talking board in 1891.

We explore the mysterious story behind the name “Ouija,” Helen Peters and the unusual patent office demonstration, William Fuld’s connection to the board and his tragic death, and the bizarre case of Patience Worth, a supposed spirit who communicated through a Ouija board and went on to dictate entire novels.

We’ll also look at the science behind why the planchette moves, including the ideomotor effect, and how The Exorcist helped transform the Ouija board from a popular parlor game into something associated with demons, possession and the occult.

And then there are the rules.

Why are you supposed to always say goodbye? What does it mean if the planchette moves in a figure eight? Why do people warn against using a Ouija board alone, using one in a cemetery, or burning one when you’re finished with it?

Some of these warnings have roots in Spiritualist traditions. Others appear to be folklore that developed over generations.

So what is a Ouija board really?

A toy? A psychological phenomenon? A tool for spirit communication?

Or something we still don’t completely understand?

🎧 Listen to The Haunted Line wherever you get your podcasts.

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What if you took a photograph and, when it was developed, someone appeared behind you who had been dead for years?

In the 1860s, that question became more than a ghost story.

As Spiritualism swept through the Victorian era, photographer William H. Mumler claimed his camera could capture something the human eye couldn't see: the dead.

Soon, grieving families were lining up at his studio, hoping for one last photograph with someone they had lost. His eerie images showed translucent figures standing behind the living, including one of the most famous spirit photographs ever taken, an image of Mary Todd Lincoln with what appeared to be the ghost of Abraham Lincoln standing behind her.

But were Mumler's photographs evidence of the afterlife, or carefully constructed illusions?

In this episode of The Haunted Line, we explore the strange history of Victorian spirit photography, Mumler's sensational fraud trial, the photographic techniques that could create a convincing ghost, and why unexplained figures continue to appear in photographs more than 160 years later.

Because cameras have changed.

Our fascination with photographing the dead hasn't.

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What really happened inside a Victorian séance?

In the 19th century, Spiritualism swept across North America and Europe. Families gathered in darkened parlours, joined hands around tables, and waited for signs from the dead. Mysterious knocks answered questions. Tables moved seemingly on their own. Mediums claimed to deliver messages from the spirit world.

Following the rise of the Fox Sisters and modern Spiritualism, séances became one of the Victorian era's most fascinating and controversial ways of attempting to communicate with the dead.

In Episode 2 of The Haunted Line, we step inside a Victorian séance to explore what actually happened during these gatherings, the role of mediums, the methods used to contact spirits, and the strange paranormal phenomena people claimed to witness.

We'll explore spirit rappings, table-turning, automatic writing, spirit trumpets, apparitions, and some of the methods skeptics believed mediums used to deceive their audiences.

But Victorian séances weren't simply spooky entertainment. In an era marked by disease, war, high mortality, and profound grief, Spiritualism offered something many people desperately wanted: the possibility that death wasn't the end.

Were Victorian séances elaborate performances built around grief and illusion?

Or did some mediums genuinely make contact with something on the other side?

Join us as we step into the darkened séance rooms of the Victorian era and explore the strange history of Spiritualism, spirit communication, and the paranormal.

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In 1848, strange knocking sounds began inside a small farmhouse in Hydesville, New York.

Two young sisters, Maggie and Kate Fox, claimed the mysterious sounds were coming from a spirit... and that they had discovered a way to communicate with the dead.

What began as unexplained rappings inside their family home quickly became a sensation. The Fox Sisters were thrust into the public eye, séances spread across America, and a new religious movement known as Spiritualism began to take shape.

But decades later, the story took a dramatic turn.

Was it genuine spirit communication? An elaborate hoax? Or something more complicated than either explanation?

In the very first episode of The Haunting Line, we go back to where modern Spiritualism began and unravel the strange, controversial story of the Fox Sisters—and the legacy they left behind.

Because whether you believe them or not, the way we communicate with the dead was never quite the same again.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

• Smithsonian Magazine — The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism
• HISTORY — How a Hoax by Two Sisters Helped Spark the Spiritualism Craze
• Barbara Weisberg — Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
• Ann Braude — Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
• Nancy Rubin Stuart — The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox

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Love haunted history, folklore, and things that go bump in the night? Follow the show and leave a rating or review—it helps more people find us.

🎙️ The Haunting Line
Where History, Hauntings, and Folklore Meet.