[TRUE] Night Shift In a Care Home

The house that I worked in was pretty big; there were two living rooms, a large kitchen, a games room, a study, and five bedrooms. There was also a huge garden with a summer house/activity room that leads to acres of fields and woodland. I had been working there for about three weeks and primarily worked the “waking night” shift. This shift ran from 10 pm until 8 am and it was my duty to make sure all of the residents were settled for the night and to get the cleaning done before the day staff came in to take over. I would usually get all of my jobs done for around 1 am and spend the rest of the night listening out for anyone that woke up; I would watch TV, read my university course books or sometimes just play games on my phone once I was finished, the residents usually slept all night.

On one particular night, a young man named James (not the actual name for legal reasons) was particularly restless. He was not very big, but he had a lot of strength behind him when he got into one of his bad moods and the slightest thing could set him off; he once threw a member of staff through a patio door because she had forgotten to put cold water in his tea before he drank it. He could not form full sentences and would communicate with fairly simple words put together in a way that he understood. For example; he would say something like “James make breakfast” when he was ready to make breakfast or “James go outside” if he wanted to go outside and play. He was generally well behaved and could be quite funny when he wanted to be, but was well known for his temper. At around 11 pm, James got up and came downstairs to make a drink. I stood in the doorway and watched to make sure he didn’t break anything or hurt himself and he went back upstairs without any real bother. I sat on the top step and kept an eye on his door for maybe 15 minutes or so to make sure he didn’t wake any of the other residents. Once he had settled I went back to my cleaning.

The room beneath James’ bedroom was a communal living room with board games, a TV, sofas, books, and stuff like that. I was in there dusting and mopping the floor when I heard something heavy drop onto the floor in the room above. I knew James was prone to temper tantrums if he got frustrated, so I went upstairs and knocked on his door. As I reached for the key to open it myself, he opened the door and looked at me. He seemed perfectly calm and his eyes looked almost half shut like he had been asleep. I asked if he was okay and he said yes and put his thumb up; this was something he did when he was in a good mood and not stressed out, so I left him to it and told him to be careful, thinking that he had knocked something over. An hour or so passed and by now I was in the kitchen cleaning the sink. I heard another bang above me, again like something had been dropped. This time I realized that the room above the kitchen was currently empty. The house was set up to house 5 residents but there were only currently 4 and the room above me was the spare, empty room. I immediately went to check it out but the room was empty. I stood there for a while and, as far as I could tell, everyone was asleep.

Due to the nature of their conditions/behaviors, each resident has an alarm fitted to their door that is activated at night so if anyone leaves their room, a small receiver box that the night staff carries around makes a noise and a light blinks for a few seconds to indicate which door had been opened (numbered 1-5). The alarm had not gone off so I knew that the noise was not from any of the residents. I got back to my cleaning and didn’t hear anything else for the rest of the night.

The following night, I got to work just before 10 and as I entered the hallway I could tell that something was wrong. James was at the bottom of the stairs covering his ears and humming loudly and three members of staff were with him. After a few minutes he was escorted to the sitting room and the house manager gave me a rundown of what had been going on. For the last four hours, James had been quite agitated and kept repeating the phrase “Sarah, little girl” when asked what was wrong. This was something we had never experienced with him before and the general conclusion was that he had seen something on TV or in a movie that stuck in his head and made him repeat this phrase. Once James had settled in bed, the night staff left and the other member of staff that was sleeping in went up to the staff bedroom. I got on with my tasks and, as usual, finished around 1 am. Soon after this, I went upstairs to do a quick check on all of the residents but as I got on to the first-floor landing I noticed the light had been turned off. There were two small corridors leading to the bedrooms on the left and right-hand sides of the staircase, James’ room was on the left and the light switch was just outside his room. I turned the corner to flick the switch and there, in the darkness in complete silence was James. He stood in the corner completely naked with his eyes as wide as he could possibly hold them. I’m a big guy; 6ft 3 and weigh about 220 lbs but at that moment, I was really creeped out. I spoke calmly to James and asked what was going on and for a while, he said nothing at all. Then, as I turned the light back on, he let out an ear-piercing scream and started slapping himself around the face. The sleep-in staff woke up at this point and helped me to calm the situation and get James back into bed before reassuring the other residents that everything was fine.

After that night I had four days off; my shift pattern was seven days on, two days off followed by eight days on and four days off and I was relieved that this incident had happened just as my time off began. I got back to work the following week and was told that the situation with James talking about the little girl had got a lot worse. He would spend hours staring out of the window that overlooked the garden saying “Little girl, where are you little girl?” and no one knew where he had heard the phrase. That night, around 3 am, the alarm went off to say that the door to room 5, the spare room, had been opened. Now, this instantly seemed a bit weird as the door to the spare room is always kept locked because it was being used for storage at the time. I went up to investigate and found James standing in the room,  in the dark. He didn’t seem to notice me entering and was just stood there whispering “where are you?” over and over again. I gently touched his shoulder and said something like “come on, mate, let’s get you back to bed. It’s late”. James turned around and started heading back to his room and for a second I was relieved. But then, as I locked the door to the spare room he screamed out; “OH NO!” and started pummelling the door with both fists. As he did this, the alarm went off to indicate that the front door had been opened. The only people with a key to the front door were myself (as the night wake staff) and the house manager. The door has four locks on it; two that require a key and two that require electronic ID cards. It was now 3:25 am and the manager never came in before 8 am, so I presumed there must have been some kind of mistake and continued to defuse the situation with James. He finally calmed down and went back into his room so I went downstairs to check the front door. To my surprise, it was wide open. I shut it immediately and started checking every room in the house in case someone had got in. I then checked on each of the residents to make sure they were all still in the house. Everything was fine.

The next night, everything was calm until around 2 am when one of the other residents, Connor, got up and said that someone was tapping on his window. I guessed that he must have just been dreaming as his window was on the third floor of the house and was at least 25 feet from the ground. I went back up to his room with him to reassure him and checked his window. Sure enough, it was shut and the security lock that prevents it from opening wide enough for someone to fit through was still sealed. As he got back in bed I heard footsteps on the stairs outside of his room. He froze for a second and looked at me with an expression of pure panic on his face. I opened the door to see who it was but no one was there. He was clearly scared by this and said “Is he back?”. My blood ran cold and I asked “is who back? What do you mean?”. Connor looked over my shoulder and then sank down into his bed, pulling the duvet up to his mouth. I turned around to see what he was looking at but there was still no one there. “Tell him to go away,” Connor said in a hushed, scared voice. I tried to reassure him that there was no one there and left his bedside lamp on before leaving the room.

I went downstairs and sat outside on the patio with a cup of coffee. It was the middle of January and around -2 outside but I felt like I had to get out of the house for a while. After about 40 minutes I went back inside and washed my cup in the sink, dried it, and put it back in the cupboard. Beneath the cupboard was a locked, secure drawer where all of the sharp knives are kept until needed. The drawer was open slightly. This was, obviously, a major issue as none of the residents were allowed access to the knife drawer without supervision. I counted the knives and realized that there was one missing so I woke the sleep-in staff, told her the situation and we began a search. Nearly two hours later, we still hadn’t found this missing knife so decided to just keep our guard up and make sure none of the residents were hiding it. Two hours later, at 5:30 am, the alarm sounded. It was the door to the spare room again. I went up to check it out and found that the door was locked. How could the alarm have been activated by the door opening if the door was still locked? I went inside and turned the light on. To this day, I still have no explanation for what I found and I often think about this incident. The bed had been pushed from its usual place and was against the wall and the wardrobe doors were open. There were screws and nails all over the floor but nothing was broken. But the most disturbing part? In the middle of the room, there was a children’s doll, a gold bracelet, and the missing knife from the kitchen. The doll was an old-style baby doll, my guess was that it was made in the ’50s from the style of clothes and the overall look of the doll. The bracelet was simple but old looking. I left everything as it was and reported it to the manager as soon as she arrived. No one ever claimed that the bracelet belonged to them and it was taken to a charity shop soon after along with the doll.

After the doll and bracelet were removed from the house, James seemed to calm down and never mentioned a little girl or stood around in the dark again. I still don’t have an explanation for everything that happened and sometimes think that it was just a combination of strange behavior from a young autistic guy and the fact that the house was old. But on the other hand, a lot of stuff happened that I can’t explain logically. My only regret now is that the doll and bracelet are gone and can’t be examined or identified. Maybe it was paranormal? Who knows? But now I work day shifts and do not plan on working night shifts again anytime soon!