The Sweeper on the Night Shift

• 4 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

My mother was a nurse and did nights at a hospital for twenty-two years, and this is the only story she ever told me about it.

She did not tell it as a ghost story. She told it as something that happened.

The third floor

The third floor corridor was long and had a bend in the middle, so from the nurses' station you could see about half of it.

Between two and four in the morning it was completely empty, and it was cleaned at that hour by a sweeper who came round with a wide brush and did the whole floor.

My mother never learned his name. He was an old man, thin, and he did the corridor the same way every night: the far end first, then round the bend, then the near stretch past the station, and he never spoke to anybody and nobody spoke to him.

This went on for years.

The night she said good morning

One night in her ninth year she was at the station at about three and he came round the bend, sweeping, and for no particular reason she looked up and said good morning.

He stopped.

He looked at her for what she said was a very long time, and he did not look angry or frightened, and she said afterwards that the only word for his expression was surprised.

Then he went back to sweeping and finished the corridor and went round the corner at the end.

The roster

The next day she happened to be looking at the cleaning roster for another reason, and she noticed that nobody was rostered for the third floor between two and four.

The third floor was cleaned at six, by the day team, before the wards woke up.

She asked the supervisor about the old man with the wide brush.

The supervisor said there was no old man. There were four cleaners on nights and all four were women and all four worked the ground and first floors.

What my mother did

She did not tell anybody else.

She kept working nights on that floor for another thirteen years, and she saw him perhaps forty more times, and she never spoke to him again.

And she said, when she told me, that this was not because she was frightened of him.

"He was doing his job," she said. "Every night, the same way, in an empty corridor, and he had been doing it a long time. I had no business interrupting him."

The part I asked about

I asked her whether she was ever afraid.

She said only once, and it was not one of the forty times.

It was the first time, the night she said good morning, and it was not while he was looking at her.

It was afterwards, when she thought about his face properly.

"He was surprised," she said. "Which means it had been a long time since anybody had."