A group of Ohio nursing home residents got a jump on deer hunting season, and this year, staff members were their prey.
In now-viral social media posts, residents at the Continental Manor Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Blanchester, OH, can be seen in three different videos shooting Nerf guns at nursing home workers dressed as deer and prancing around their very own “forest” inside the facility.
The videos, which were posted just days after Thanksgiving, have garnered more than 37 million views in total, and shared hundreds of thousands of times across the social media site.
“You can tell by the untrollable laughter that staff and residents were having a ball. I don’t know who had more fun, but everybody had a blast with it,” said Lisa Beach, activity director of the 59-bed skilled nursing facility.
The deer hunting idea came about after a co-worker showed an example of a similar indoor activity, explained Lisa Beach, activity director of the 59-bed skilled nursing facility. She later decided they should use their own Christmas trees before decorating them for the holiday and turn the dining room into a forest.
“We got antlers and dressed up like deer,” Beach told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News Wednesday. “We set the residents up to shoot at the deer lurking in the trees.”
The staff later posted the fun activity on its Facebook page “never dreaming that it would go viral.” Beach, who also owns a photography and video company, said she is always capturing residents and posting it online for their families to see.
“We were just doing what we always do and for some reason it just struck a chord with people and went viral,” Beach said.
Residents have since been bragging about the online video going viral, according to Beach.
“The residents are so excited. They’re saying that they’re famous so I made little movie star signs with their names in it and put it in their rooms. They’re just so excited tha people around the world are sharing the video.”
