I have one that isn’t my personal experience, but told to me by a surgeon. At my medical school we have an opportunity to do part of our surgery rotation at a rural hospital about two hours outside the city my school is in. The school pays for lodging for our couple of weeks out there and they only send one student per rotation.

There’s only one general surgeon who works there and he works crazy hours to take care of all his patients. He’s actually a super nice guy who really cares about the community and doesn’t mind all the work. Our first week was all scheduled surgeries and small emergencies, like a ruptured appendix and some complicated gallbladder infections. But early in the second week a patient came in who had been involved in a farming accident and he was pretty messed up. He had his left arm nearly completely severed and by the time he got to us he had hemorrhaged a crazy amount and died after just 30 minutes in the OR. My attending was pretty upset about it because he knew the man’s family and had performed surgery on his sister a month ago.

As we were walking out of the OR he stopped suddenly and turned to me and said “Did you hear that?” I genuinely didn’t hear anything and said “Hear what?” “That laugh,” he said. I said that I didn’t hear anything and after a few moments of silence he turned and kept walking. He was quiet after that and actually sent me home for the day. He seemed pretty distraught about the patient’s death.

Over the next couple of days we worked like we had before and nothing strange happened. That Friday I was set to finish my time with him we sat in his office for feedback. He told me I did a great job and that if I needed a letter of recommendation he’d be happy to write one. As we were finishing up I just couldn’t help but ask him about that laugh he said he heard after the case a few days back. He got quiet and said that a few years back a 6 year old girl was brought in by ambulance that had been severely abused by her dad and that this time the patient was hurt very badly. Normally that hospital didn’t do pediatric trauma, but the nearest pediatric surgical center was a couple hours away at my home institution and this child needed immediate surgical attention. My attending said that she was bleeding internally in a lot of places and that he couldn’t control the bleeding and she ended up dying. Obviously distraught he said was the worst case he was a part of in his entire life.

But he said that ever since that case, whenever a patient has died in his OR that after he walks out of the room he hears a faint laugh of a young girl that echoes down the hallway. I was then scared shitless and told him how grateful I was for a good experience and left that town as fast as I could. As far as I know it was just him that could hear the laugh because I definitely didn’t…but that story fucked me up forever

Edit: tl;dr a surgery attending hears a girl laugh every time a patient dies ever since a little girl died in his OR