I work in a nursing home, death makes the lights flicker.

I have worked in Shady Acres for fifteen plus years now, seen all manner of things that have made me regret this field every once in a blue moon. I can't explain how painful it is to bond with a resident and lose them. My first real introduction to dementia was a sweet old woman named Rose. She came to Shady Acres due to her family being worried she wouldn't fare well in her home after a nasty fall, she had been living alone for some time and reluctantly agreed to be admitted. She had such a fiery spirit under that graceful southern charm, she'd clean her room instead of letting the janitors do it, she'd iron her clothes with an iron she'd somehow found. More than once she snuck outside to try and tend the flowerbeds cause in her words:
"Ain't no type of way to treat daylilies, gotta talk to 'em when you water them honey."
All of the staff grew to love her, as did many of the patients. They love having something remind them of their younger years, how intent and driven it makes them when they catch wind of being able to do something other than watch TV. It's what makes it sad, seeing how badly they want to be useful and active.
Months passed enjoying her antics, looking forward to what she would get into. Comfort came in this routine. There came a day Rose wasn't up early at the crack of dawn. She was normally first in line for breakfast. I went to see her with a little succulent plant I had bought for her as a gift and found her staring out the window from her chair, quiet and still like a painting. When I called her name she looked at me like a stranger. I know in retrospect she woke up and was likely confused and scared and disoriented, and I was no more comforting being a six foot behemoth in black scrubs in her doorway. She screamed and threw her pillows, pictures, the remote, anything she could grab came flying at me. It was only when she hit me in the nose with a hardback copy of Robinson Crusoe and I dropped that little potted plant that it let go of her. Initially I wasn't very pleased but it subsided into this acceptance of reality, she didn't mean to do it. I tried reassuring her through her crying and trying to wipe the blood off of my face that it was okay and there wasn't any hard feelings. She asked me and God for forgiveness as the other staff came to de-escalate the situation and clean up, claimed she didn't have "any idea of what took a hold of her to do such a thing."
Ms. Rose, despite her nature, slipped further and further as the weeks turned to months. She had shown up a tender yet fierce southern bell, her last months left her delirious at any given time, a listless shell of a once proud soul. She wouldn't talk, hardly would eat, seldom got out of bed unless it was to tinker with something her failing mind came up with. Winter came much the same that year, it wilted the daylilies outside into brown husks, stealing the vibrant orange color that once made them so pretty. I get teary when I see any orange flowers now, they remind me of Ms. Rose.
What began the stranger and more horrific side of things was during a freak snowstorm I had the misfortune of standing watch during. I had already made my rounds to take vitals for the night, this left me listening to random whirs and clicks of medical machines, hearing muffled gossip sessions from the nurses at the second desk down the hall, and a rerun of Friends from somewhere that same direction. Average slow night in a nursing home.
Towards three in the morning I noticed a change in the environment around me. It had grown really quiet, it had grown cold, even sitting under a vent blasting warm air and bundled in a jacket from home. I got up to talk to the other nurses and found them with the same issue. We looked over the equipment and found it all still in order, all systems still operated, no alarms went off, but it felt like static had soaked into the air, like the room was stuffed full of cotton and no noise could come through unless you were right there at whatever it was that made it. Shady Acres felt disconnected from the outside, as stepping through the door came with howling wind and almost warmer air despite snow falling to the ground. Back inside it was that same uneasy silence, same static, the notion something unnatural was underfoot. Then it began. Lights flickered one by one starting at the emergency doors down the hall, as if some power sucking snake was easing its way through the wiring. I felt such a sense of dread I froze on the spot, like some small worm before a gigantic bird, and that snake went over me, jumping from the overheads to the side panel emergency lights. Casual and deliberate.
Straight into the light over Ms. Rose's room.
Every ounce of concern for her came crashing through that fear, and I must have been a blur to the passing eye as fast I was moving to get to that room. The lights wouldn't turn on, so all I had was my phone light. The darkness seemed to swallow it up despite the room being no bigger than one in a college dorm. Each step felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, every breath full of ice cold air, and the hairs on my neck and arms stood stiff like something was behind me, under me, next to and around me. When I reached her bed she looked at peace, full of color, healthy and unbothered by how the room felt. She opened her dark brown eyes with the softest and sweetest look of contentment I've ever seen and placed her hand on mine, warm as a cup of coffee.
"Tend them flowers honey, I got a ride to catch tonight."
No sooner had she said that did my phone go out. The pressure rolled like a wave, then dissipated, taking the swallowing darkness, static, cold, and Ms. Rose. I felt the warmth leave her in seconds, and when the power inevitably returned to her room a lifeless body was all that remained. A wilted flower.
I had to go outside the building. I swallowed hard to dislodge the lump of grief in my chest, fought to keep my tears inside. The alarms were going off now. In one night we had six of our elderly population pass away, all peacefully and of nothing more than old age.
The next morning I avoided her room. Couldn't go back inside of it just yet, needed to process and grieve. I held together just fine until I reached my desk. She had one of the nurses put that succulent in a styrofoam cup from the dining hall, she'd treated that cup with as much care as she could muster. There it was on my desk. I cried hard in the break room, bawled my eyes out I'm ashamed to admit. She was the first of many I grew attached to before I learned it best not to.
The following years I started watching the lights in every room, didn't matter how big or small, I focused on them every once in a while. In my mind I figured if I could be there when they started then I could "sound the alarm" and have whatever nurses were on hand be vigilant. They saw what I was looking for a few times, they knew I wasn't crazy, but we were never there for the start. We could only be there for the slow crawl to the room it was headed for when it passed by us. Didn't matter if we beat it to the room we figured out it was moving towards, screamed at it, wore crucifixes and prayed it away, it would arrive nonetheless and do the same thing it did with Ms. Rose. Pressure, cold, lights out. Didn't make a difference. We locked every door once to stop it, we found the handle bent clean off of it and the internals of the lock tore open.
So much as a flicker of light would send the staff on hand for that night into a frenzy. We knew it was impending death, and we as humans couldn't stop it from happening. It took a few more residents after that, same way as usual. We had one year where nothing happened, and we had months of relative ease and no losses due to the Lights. Most of the other staff waived it off as superstition and bad wiring suffering from even worse insulation, a lot of folks got comfortable again and put it behind them. The next time the Lights came, it was the last day I worked there.
Mr. Callahan had been a resident for a little longer than Ms. Rose, we remembered his room a lot easier as the Power room instead of 222, as the main breaker box was quite literally outside his room. He was a hardened old farmer, served in the Second World War and Korea, the kind of man you imagine when you read about the old school days of the United States, he's that guy. He had little family left over and they were unable to care for him, so they put him in Shady Acres. He was a lot like Ms. Rose in how hard-headed and steel-willed he was. He'd go for walks in the morning around the property, said it helped his heart. We knew what helped his heart were the nitroglycerin pills he took and the meds that made his body accept the donated heart he'd gotten years ago, but we weren't going to discourage an inactive lifestyle, weren't gonna have him sit in his room and wait for the Lights.
A bad thunderstorm hit around June, emergency generators kicked in to restore power, the nursing home looked like red hell in some areas. I heard an alarm go off behind me, one of the first in ages. It was Mr. Callahan's, and his heart was racing and beating erratically, SCA. I tore across my desk and met other nurses rushing to his bed. One of them had grabbed a defibrillator and had began administering paced shocks to get his heart back into proper rhythm.
Those that weren't assisting with Mr. Callahan were checking on other patients and making calls to the hospital to arrange a transfer. I was watching the emergency lights. They all were flashing. Each and every one of them. It was moving with the heart monitor's beeps, and when they administered the defibrillator or lightning struck they all would light up with burning intensity, like a welding arc. Cold began to spread, the room grew thick and uncomfortable, and much like the emergency lights the pressure that formed would buck and writhe each surge of electricity. We all grew desperate, our orders and demands to each other full of fear, Mr. Callahan was no more better than when we began. It was choking our efforts off, making us sloppy, waiting for us to get too tired and too uncomfortable in the cold. It was mid June, it was hot and humid outside, yet you could see your breath inside the room. So I had an idea, a last attempt to stop the lights.
I bolted out of the room and towards the west side of the nursing home, it was empty and I figured I wouldn't be challenged if I went that way, but it seemed whatever was there to claim Mr. Callahan knew my intent. Once I crossed the double doors I found thick darkness, like a wall of nothingness. I'd been here for a decade and some change, I didn't need lights to find the AED, so I kept my frantic pace. I traveled maybe ten feet before I heard the doors slam shut, then the horrific sound of tables and wheelchairs being thrown aside, something new that this entity could do. Computer screens flashed alive, machines strained and groaned with the surge of power the Lights brought with it and I could almost feel something barely missing the back of my scrubs collar but I kept going. I cut a sharp corner at the watch desk area and listened to a stack of medical supplies and papers fly off a counter and down the hall, thank god for these nonslip shoes. The AED hung on the wall just ahead and I tore that machine out of it's box with sheer ape-grip strength.
Rushing back into the east side, I could see the nurses in the Power room tending to him, and to the left I could see the breaker box. I began to turn the AED on and take out the pads in preparation as I got closer. Five steps shy I felt it grab me. I've never felt such pain in my senses, never felt my joints pop and throb in agony, my whole body seemed to lock up. It finally had caught me, and it was showing me what it felt like to oppose it. Nurses rushed to help me but were thrown back through the air, doors began to open and slam, the lights seemed to tremble off and on, the cold doubled into bone chilling freeze. I couldn't get to my knees without being slammed with agony. It had me held down, it was going to put the one thing that would threaten its ritual out of commission long enough to finish the old man off. I forced numb fingers to close around the pads, made dead arms work my shirt up enough to expose my stomach, and gave all my strength to pinning the pads against me with one arm while the other reached for the button. I saw lightning flash, and I hammered my finger against the shock button.
Then there was nothing.
I spiraled in the void for what felt like years. I figured I had died. The sudden painful burn of smelling salts snapped me back into consciousness, I was laid against the wall, a machine hooked to my arms. Everyone looked exhausted, some looked terrified, and some were asleep in the floor, drenched in sweat. Mr. Callahan's heart monitor beat steady and strong, a soothing noise to end a nightmarish night.
The next day I put in my two week's notice, I had seen enough. The residents were understandably shaken but most believed that the wind from the thunderstorm had caused a freak accident, a few of them soon requested to be moved themselves. That would be the last night I spent watching and running from the Lights.


Source.