The Waiting Patient (Halloween 2025) (Patreon)

They say there’s a room in St. Mary’s Hospital that no one stays in for long.

The nurses don’t like to talk about it, but if you work there long enough, you’ll hear the name whispered at the end of a shift, half-joking, half-afraid.

Room 313.

It used to belong to a woman named Elise Moreno.

Years ago, she was in a terrible car accident. She lived, but the crash took her arms and legs.

They said she took it with grace, never screamed, never cursed her fate. She only asked one question, over and over:

“Has he called?”

“Did he ask for me?”

Her husband never came. Not once.

She waited every evening, eyes fixed on the door, smiling whenever footsteps passed. The nurses lied at first, told her he was on his way, caught in traffic, working late. Eventually, they just stopped answering.

Then, one morning, she was gone.

No alarms, no signs of pain. Her heart had simply stopped sometime during the night.

Some say it wasn’t her injuries that killed her, it was the waiting.

That she died of heartbreak, her body finally following where her hope had gone.

They sealed the room for a while after that, but hospitals don’t have space for ghosts. Eventually, new paint, new bed, new patient.

That’s when the stories began.

Patients started complaining about a heaviness in the room, not in their bodies, but in the air. Like someone invisible was leaning over them. The bedsheets would tighten, as if another weight had settled beside them.

At first it felt comforting, almost human, a warmth pressed gently against the ribs.

Then it grew heavier. Harder to breathe.

One woman described it before she was moved to another room:

“It felt like someone climbed onto the bed. Not to hurt me, just to lie there.

Like she didn’t want to be alone.”

Sometimes, when the lights flickered, patients said they could see the outline of another body on the mattress, faint as an old photograph. They heard slow, uneven breathing, and then a whisper...

“Don’t go yet… he’ll come soon.”

A nurse once stayed behind to prove it was all in their heads. She lay on the bed for a few minutes, joking with the others over the intercom. Then the line went silent. When they found her, she was sitting on the floor, pale as chalk. She kept saying,

“She thought I was him. She thought I came back.”

Now, Room 313 stays locked. But some nights, when the corridors are quiet and the machines hum low, a light flickers on behind that door.

The faint creak of a mattress. The slow sigh of someone turning over.

And if you listen hard enough, you can hear her voice...

soft, trembling, heartbreakingly hopeful:

“Darling? Is that you?”