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
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