One time, TikToker Tina Cooks (@chambersandcharm) experienced a very scary home health visit. Part of her job is to visit patients who are on oxygen in their homes to make sure everything is safe and up to date.
She typically loves doing home visits and has only ever had one bad experience in 10 years. She visited an older man named Mr. Smith, who lived in Interlachen, Florida. It was a small town in the middle of nowhere with a lot of dirt roads.
At the time, there were four people on her team. They conducted visits in the bigger cities, and she would go to the countryside. She didn’t mind this arrangement at all.
She called Mr. Smith when she was about five minutes away to give him a heads-up; it was something they did with all their patients. Mr. Smith sounded odd over the phone.
“When I called to tell him I was almost there, he told me that he needed me to park on the road, that I couldn’t pull in his driveway because I might get stuck,” said Tina.
He lived on a long, dirt road, so she parked next to the road and walked up the driveway, which led to a dilapidated, single-wide trailer. It looked creepy, but she brushed it off because she was used to country folk and trailers.
“If I had a patient tell me now that I needed to park on the road and not pull into their yard, I probably wouldn’t visit them,” said Tina.
“I probably would reschedule and have somebody go with me. But at the time, I didn’t know. I was brand-new to this.”
Mr. Smith was standing on his rotted porch, waiting for her. He didn’t have a shirt on, so she could see that he had a huge hernia on his belly button.
He was a scary sight. Tina started getting really nervous, but she tried to choke down her fear and introduced herself. He simply stood and stared at her without saying a word.
He walked inside, and she followed behind him. He reached around her to close the door. She had a bad feeling, and once she was inside the house, the feeling intensified.
The entire ceiling appeared to be one huge cobweb. There was no furniture, just boxes. The ceiling must have contained holes because the boxes were wet and moldy.
She asked him to leave the front door open for safety purposes, but it was really so she could make a break for it if necessary.
He refused to because he didn’t want mosquitoes getting inside. Tina genuinely felt like she was about to meet a tragic fate. He then pointed to where his oxygen equipment was, and she had to walk down a dark hallway that appeared to lead to certain death. He didn’t want to lead the way and walked behind her.
“In the bedroom, which was where the oxygen concentrator was, there was a filthy mattress on the floor, and there’s a person lying in that bed,” Tina recalled.
“A man, an old man. At first, I thought he was dead, but then he coughed, so at least I knew he was alive. And he was wearing the oxygen.”
That was the patient, Mr. Smith, and the guy with the hernia, who was the patient’s brother, was also Mr. Smith. The hernia guy shut the bedroom door behind them, effectively trapping Tina.
Tina took off running, whipped open the door, and sprinted down the driveway to her car. She peeled out of there and called her husband from the road to tell him that she had nearly lost her life.
“I was almost just attacked; I just know it in my soul,” stated Tina. “There was something dark in that house. There was something dark in that man.”
Afterward, she notified her supervisor of the incident, described what she had observed in the home, and filed a report.
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By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
