The Ambulance Ghost

Jadewik's interpretation of the ghost of a waving nurse as described in the story.

During the month of January 2011 a few of my friends came to town to visit me. While they visited, we chatted about a topic that’s fairly common as far as it concerns me– ghosts. It turns out that my friends weren’t without their own stories.

My friend B. worked, at one time, as an emergency medical technician (EMT) for an ambulance service for a Phoenix-Metro Area hospital. (I’m leaving out the hospital’s name because this isn’t a commonly known story and I’m not sure if the hospital would like this story to be directly associated with their facility.)

B. said he had a co-worker at the time who claimed to have the ability to see ghosts. The co-worker was fairly trustworthy, but B. remains a skeptic so he didn’t really think anything about it at the time. The co-worker would occasionally share stories with him about some of her experiences. One of the stories was about the ghost of a friendly nurse who stood by the entrance to the hospital and waved at people who entered and exited the hospital. Though the co-worker attempted to point out the ghostly nurse to B., he never did see her ghostly visage. Though, one particular story she told B. did have an impact on him.

Upon arriving at work one day, B. and his sensitive co-worker hadn’t been assigned their usual ambulance that day. B. noticed his co-worker was especially upset when she saw which ambulance they’d been assigned and he asked her what was the matter.

“Oh, I hate this ambulance,” she said.

“Why,” queried B.

The co-worker proceeded to explain that there was a creepy ghost of a man who possibly died on the ambulance while in transit to the hospital. “He sits in the captain’s chair and he just stares at me while I’m working on patients,” she explained.

Until then, B. had noticed once or twice that, when they’d been assigned this particular ambulance, his co-worker wouldn’t sit in the captain’s chair as she normally did. After hearing the story and seeing her avoid that chair, he understood her trepidation. Still, B. couldn’t see the ghosts his co-worker claimed to see so he shrugged it off.

Their shift started off fairly typical– except for the co-worker avoiding the captain’s chair. B. was driving and he had the air-conditioning turned up to compensate for the hot Arizona climate. At one point in their shift, B. suddenly got chills. At first he thought it was the air-conditioning, so he turned it down, but the hairs on the back of his neck were still standing on end. He couldn’t figure out what was causing shivers to run down his spine, but after about a minute had passed the chills suddenly went away. B. didn’t think anything of it either. For a while, anyway…

As their shift came to a close, they dropped the ambulance off at the hospital. They were getting out of the ambulance when B.’s co-worker suddenly asked if he had felt strange at any point during their drive. “Not really strange,” he said, “but there was this one point for about a minute where I had chills.” The co-worker nodded and said she thought that might be the case.

“Well,” she said, “there was one point during the drive where I saw the ghost…”

“Yeah?”

“Uh huh. He was staring at me from the Captain’s Chair like he always does, but then he got up. He went through you and sat down in the front passenger seat where he stared at you for about a minute. Then he just disappeared.”

Even with his co-worker’s convincing story, B. still swears it was just the air-conditioning. But, he concedes, it is a great story… if you believe in ghosts.