Nursing homes have always creeped me out. My first experience in one was in maybe the 4th grade as a Cub Scout. Our den mother took us to a nearby nursing home to sell raffle tickets or something. I remember old women sitting in a lobby like they were waiting for us. Waiting to take us to the other side with them.
As an adult, I know that’s irrational, but the places still make me uneasy. Maybe it’s the long, quiet hallways that smell like antiseptic and old skin. Or the way time seems suspended in those places — everything slowed, muffled, and just a little off. But mostly, I think it’s the sense that you’re standing at the threshold of something.
That something is death.
You feel it, don’t you? Even if no one says it out loud. In every whispered phone call, every nurse’s glance, every unoccupied wheelchair parked beside a doorway like it’s waiting. A place like that exists between the world of the living and whatever comes next. It’s a waiting room, not just for patients, but for the people who love them.
When I started writing The Dead of the Day, I kept coming back to that feeling. That the nursing home in the story — Golden Arms — shouldn’t just be a setting. It needed to feel like a character. Like a liminal place. It should be a house full of bodies in slow decline, each one haunted by what’s been lost … and what’s coming.
Golden Arms nursing home had to be a place where the veil between life and death is so thin, sometimes it tears.
Here’s a small excerpt showing when Denise, a resident and the mentor to Brett, takes him to the home’s common room for a soda:
They were in the doorway of the large space that served as the facility’s common room. A couple of small groups of stooped old people sat at tables playing cards or checkers. A few watched a soap opera on a large television. Two women sat in a corner knitting. The room was mostly quiet.
“If your mother ever ends up in a place like this,” Denise said quietly, “memories of her children will be the most precious thing she has. Make sure she has a lot of them.”
Denise shuffled forward while Brett Hoffmann stood still in the doorway for a long moment before following.
The floor in here was gray tile. Carpet was too hard to clean when so many residents were incontinent or prone to tearing their paper-thin skin and bleeding profusely. It was easier to move the walker over the tile floor and Denise picked out a battered old sofa, white with a large red floral print, and made for that. When she got there, she positioned herself and dropped into a sitting position, the walker in front of her.
In the real world, there are countless stories of strange things happening in elder care facilities. Patients speaking to people no one else can see. Buzzers going off in empty rooms. Lights flickering. Voices in the night. Maybe it’s imagination. Maybe it’s coincidence. Or maybe it’s something more. Maybe when your body is fading and your mind is loosening its grip, you start to drift toward whatever’s next.
And sometimes you don’t go alone.
The Dead of the Day doesn’t offer easy answers. It leans hard into that feeling of unease. It makes you examine the idea that a soul might not move on the way we expect. It says that guilt might anchor you and sins might rot you from the inside out if you can’t remember how to repent.
In the novella, you’ll find that nursing homes might not just house the dying — but the dead, too.
The story follows Brett Hoffmann, a man who’s already carrying too much grief. He’s called to claim a grandfather he thought was long gone. What Brett finds at Golden Arms isn’t just an old man with dementia. He finds a spiritual infection. Something that’s seeped through generations, waiting for a chance to rise.
If you’ve ever lost someone to Alzheimer’s …
If you’ve ever watched someone you love become a stranger …
If you’ve ever wondered where the soul goes when the mind is gone …
This story might hit close to home.
The Dead of the Day e-book is available for pre-order now at Amazon. The paperback link will be ready very soon. It’s horror, yes — but it’s also about family, faith, and the fears we can’t quite explain.
Question for you:
Have you ever experienced something eerie in a nursing home or hospital? Ever felt like you weren’t alone, even when no one was there?
Share your story in the comments.
Steven E. Wedel 
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