I worked at a nursing home in Belleville Ohio when I was in my early twenties. It wasn't anything special, two wings, twenty patients on each wing, one nursing station, two shower rooms and a dinning room down a hall adjacent to the nurses station. I worked third shift which was 11pm to 7am. We did rounds every two hours, changing patients, and then cleaning in the mid time. When there was no laundry, cleaning or rounds to do, we would sit at the nurses station and watch for call lights.
One particular night we noticed something odd. We had a resident down the east wing that we were positive would not last the entire night. Every time we would go down the hall to her room to do rounds or check on her, we could hear what sounded like foot steps on the tiled floor behind us. Of course there would never be anyone there. Other than the two aides on shift which was me and the lady I worked with, there was only one nurse and she was either at the station or down the hall doing treatments and passing meds.
What was more unnerving was that the foot steps seemed to follow us until we reached that room were the patient was dying and then they would stop right outside her door as if who ever was there was waiting in the hallway while we did our rounds. We never felt anything sinister with this presence but it was just spooky none the less.
The same night around 4am we were sitting at the nurses station waiting to do the last rounds of the evening when we would start getting people up and dressed for breakfast. The nurse looked into the black and white, audio-less, TV monitor that looked into the dinning room and saw two shadowy looking people sitting at a table in the dinning room. They appeared to be talking to each other but we couldn't tell who they were because the quality of the camera wasn't that good. Never the less, the nurse told us to go to the dinning room and see who the two people were and to please escort them back to their rooms.
So we got up, walked down to the dinning room and found the table where the two had been sitting, only they were gone now. The chairs had been pulled out away from the table and so we just pushed them back in and returned to the nurses station. We figured that they had gotten up and left when they heard us coming but of course that made no sense because we would have seen them pass us in the hallway and there was no other way out of the dinning room except through the locked kitchen door.
When we returned to the nurses station the nurse asked us why we didn't bring the two patients back with us and we explained that there was no one there.
"I saw them." The nurse told us, a little annoyed. "When you pushed the chairs in the people got up and stood behind you and as soon as you left the dining room they pulled the chairs out and sat back down."
Confused, we returned to the dinning room and found the table, chairs pulled out again, though no patients. No one at all, that we could see that is. We were at a loss. Of course at this point we figured that we were dealing with ghosts. Being the wiccan and self proclaimed medium that I was, I attempted to communicate with the two spirits and tell them that they needed to pass on. This didn't go over well with them because just as I spoke, the lights began to flicker and the chandelier over their table began to rock back and forth extremely fast. That was enough for us, we beat it back to the nurses station and reported back what we had seen.
We continued to monitor the dining room the rest of the night. The two people never moved until 6:20am when the lady down the hall finally passed away and then the guests in the dinning room vanished. The foot steps too were gone, after stopping at her room one final time only this time they followed us inside and to her bed and then all was silent.
As day shift started to come in and get ready to start the day, we were debating whether or not to add our ghostly guests into the morning report or not. We assumed that they were there to escort our dying patient when her time came. Maybe they were there to reap her soul, maybe they were angels, or possibly family members long since passed that had come back to help ease her into her new existence. These questions were never really answered, but the events of that light stayed with us for years to come and we never forgot the night we had too spectral guests relaxing in the dinning room, waiting on a life that was soon to pass.
