Something Crawling Across My Ceiling

Mecca's job taught her an important lesson about death that someone might already be waiting to greet you on the other side. This happened in Virginia, October twenty twenty one. My name is Edwin. Here's a true scary story. A couple months ago, I got a job at a retirement home, which was not my first choice of places to work. I'm actually a mortuary science student, and a lot of people think funeral homes are creepy. I never really felt that way. Funeral homes don't bother me. What that is is basically funeral services. So my education and degree, when I finish it is gonna be about it all about death and dying and the process of decomposition, and a lot of it is about preserving bodies when you are embolved in a funeral home. That's the kind of thing that I'll be doing and actually have done as a part of my classes. Like I said, I'm still a student and I'm a single mom, so I have to have some kind of income coming in, and I live in a really small town, and the local funeral home didn't have any apprenticeships open, and I had to find something. So there were job openings at the retirement home. So I got the job, and I ended up working one sixteen hour shift a week, and that was on Sunday nights. So I would go in at three o'clock in the afternoon and leave at seven o'clock in the morning, so most of the time that I was there, everyone was asleep. And I made it through the initial training okay, But my first day out on the floor, I realized that what had marketed itself as a retirement home was really more like a nursing home in disguise. When I think of retirement homes, I think of people who are they're retired, they've downsized, they're kind of living their best life. And this was not that. We had residents who were basically total care patients. There were people who couldn't feed themselves, couldn't get out of bed on their own, that kind of thing. So that was kind of surprising, but it was fine, this is short term, it's not going to be forever. I can make this work. After a certain point, after dinner, all the residents go to bed, the lights go off, and the way the building is built, it was remodeled the and I was on the memory care unit so the way they had put the walls up to make the memory care unit, the light switch was not on the unit. The light switch you would have to leave the unit and walk down the hall to turn the lights back on once they were off. So it's a Halloween night and everything had gone pretty everything was normal until it wasn't midnight. It may have been eleven, it may have been one, but it was somewhere around there, and we're sitting there. It's me and a coworker and we're the only two that are back there on that unit. We actually had a resident that he had a lot of trouble sleeping, and he would a lot of times he would just sit up with us at night. Really interesting guy, so he would just sit there and hang out in between rounds, and we had to go and check on everybody, so we were all kind of sitting there. I were really surprised to see this other resident come down the hall. And she was a person who normally she would go to sleep after dinner and she would sleep just straight through till we got her up in the morning. She wasn't the type of person who was up and down very much. So we look up and she's she's standing there, and we were in the living area, had some lamps on and stuff like that. So we look up and she's standing there and it was kind of startling because she was in tears. So we're like, oh, my goodness, may what's wrong? What happened? And she said there's something black on my ceiling. I was like, okay, so it's October, it's cold outside. Spiders sometimes will come in, you know, when it gets cold. And I was like, okay, so was it small like a spider or big like a shadow. And she looks at me and she's breathing heavy, she's got tears pouring down her face, and she says, there's something big and black crawling across my ceiling. And I was kind of joking, you know, to just kind of bring some humor into the moment. And I look over at the other resident who used to be the priest, and oh, like, okay, Joe, you might have to come with us for this one because it's Halloween knight and there's something. And then I very quickly remembered I'm on the memory care unit, because he looked at me and he said, if it's raining, take the second bus. He didn't even remember he had been a priest at that time, and it was such an eerie feeling because it felt like I was very much alone. And of course I wouldn't have asked him to come with me because he's a resident and that wouldn't have been okay, But it was just kind of in the moment like, oh, that's okay, here we go. So we head down this hallway and like I said, the light switch is not on the unit. I can't turn the light on. And if you've ever walked within eighty something year old lady on a walk or they don't move quickly. And it was a pitch black hallway with this glaring red exit sign at the end, and open the door. And the last thing I want to do is look up at the ceiling. But at the same time, I also don't like the thought of something being over my head that I can't see and there's nothing there, and you know, only is there nothing there. There's nothing that I can see that could have been mistaken for something big and black and crawling across the ceiling. She was really upset. So we looked all through the room. We looked in the closet, we looked in the bathroom and there was just nothing, and she said she wanted to move, she wanted to change rooms. She didn't like being down there at the end of the hallway. And we're like, you know, it's the middle of the night. There's nothing that we can do. If you can just try to get some rest and then we'll tell day shift and maybe they can help you in the morning, maybe find you a different room or something like that. So she agreed and she laid back down and we went on back out to the living area and we had some time before the next round. So there was a friend of mine who I was pretty sure would be up at that time, and I sent him a message. I was like, Okay, this is really creepy because nothing's happened before, and it's Halloween night and now this really spooky thing has happened. And so he comes back with he's like, I hate to ask, and this might sound bad, but is she okay? She is she sick? Is you know? And he's like, the reason I ask is because maybe it's death and it's just come in to find her. So by that time it was time for our next round, and she was on the hallway closest to us, and we checked on everybody. They were fine. Checked on her and she had gotten back to sleep, so she was okay. Nothing was strange in the room. We go down the other hallway and everybody was fine on that hallway. But then we get to the last room on that second hallway and it belonged to a guy who he had not been feeling well recently. He'd had some medical issues come up, so he had been in the bed and he was one of those we had to help him for meal times and that kind of thing. So we go in to check and I noticed when I went in, his top two dresser drawers were open, which was a little weird because everyone that I had worked with up to that point was really good about when they came in. They would kind of straighten up, and they would clean up after themselves and leave the room a little better than they found it. And I thought maybe he had had some family there earlier. Maybe dayshift was just going to hurry and had a lot going on. So I closed the drawers and we went on to the next thing, and nothing happened. In between rounds, we go to do rounds again. First hallways fine, second hallways fine. Get to the last room on that second hallway, the same room, same guy. We go in, and those two dresser drawers are open again. Now I know that there's nobody else on the unit besides me and my coworker, and I was still fairly new, so she hadn't gone anywhere without me. I was there with her because I was learning. None of the other residents could have gone in the door's lock. You have to have a key to you know, the person on the inside can come out, but you have to have a key to get inside. So no one else had been in the room, and the dresser drawers were open again, and I'm just kind of sitting there like, Okay, it's Halloween. I've got black things curling on the ceiling, I've got drawers, and if I make it through tonight, I had never coming back in this place. We ended up. That was I think that was the last round that we had to do before we started getting everybody up for the day. And the lights came back on and everything else from there was pretty normal, And so I left and went home and went to sleep because I just worked a sixteen hour shift overnight, so I slept a pretty good while On Monday, when I woke up. Not long after I woke up on Monday, I get a text and it was one of those group texts that it was from work and they had sent to all the the employees, and it said just wanted to let everyone know that George passed away. And that was the same guy whose dresser drawers had had been open on I got kills all over and my first thought was it got him. Whatever that black thing was crawling around, it got him. I still don't think I necessarily believe that it was death itself, but there are so many stories of people who when they're close to dying, they will reach out their hand or they'll speak to someone that no one else can see, and it being Halloween night and they say the veil is thin on Halloween. Maybe we were just close enough to who or whatever that was that was coming to greet him. Maybe we were able to see or feel something that we wouldn't have on at some other time. And I did text the director. I'm like, you know, I don't think this is the right thing for me, and I'm sorry, but you know, I just I can't come back. I don't think it was like my friend said, it could have been death. I don't see it as being like a reaper situation, but I do think it was something that came because you know, George was so close to the end, and all the stories that you hear about people who they see somebody or they reach out to somebody right at the point when they die, I think that it just knew it was time, and it came to be with them at the end. I've had to spend time in a funeral home preparing bodies for funerals and viewings and that sort of thing, and I never got a creepy feeling from that. I never had the same feeling in a funeral home that I had that night at the retirement home. If you have a true Scary story you want to share, just send a message. The recording is simple and no special equipment is required. Visit true scarystory dot com for a chance to be featured on the show. To get ad free episodes, click the premium link on our website. Links are in the description of this episode. Until next time, Thank you very much for listening.