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Imagine
yourself choking. Not being able to get air in to your lungs because your throat
is closing up inside from something unseen, congesting and constricting the
tissues like invisible hands. Your chest feels like it’s ready to explode and
your lungs feel like they are on fire. Finally, able to cough, clumps of bright
red blood spew from your mouth as the inner walls of your lungs have started to
disintegrate. The buzzing and dizziness that you feel in your head is from the
constant fever you keep and made worse by the lack of oxygen going to your
brain. Capillaries explode in your eyes due to the violent coughing spells and
leave your eyes spotted with broken capillaries or a violent crimson red. Your
skin has now turned a ghastly pasty white color because your body has stopped
producing enough red blood cells to keep the pigment in your skin.
In
1900, Louisville, Kentucky had the highest tuberculosis death rate in
the country. This was due to the fact Louisville is such a low valley
area and before development, was basically all swampland and perfect
breeding ground for the Tuberculosis bacteria. As with many other towns
and cities across the country, hospitals were needed to care for the
sick. In 1910, a wooden, two-story hospital with 40 beds opened on one
of the highest elevated hills in southern Jefferson County to try and
contain this ravaging disease. |
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Officials
soon found that this small hospital was simply too small, as they were soon
housing more than 130 cases of tuberculosis. Louisville needed a much larger
facility and money began to be raised for its construction. Land was donated and
$11 million was used to started construction on the new hospital in 1924.
The
hospital, known as Waverly Hills, was opened in 1926 and was considered to be
the most advanced tuberculosis hospital in the country. If a patient had any
chance of surviving the disease, Waverly Hills was the place to come for
treatment. Of course, treatment in those days was primitive at best, meaning
that many simply came here to die. In those days, it was believed that the best
cure for tuberculosis was plenty of nutritional food, plenty of rest and plenty
of fresh air. Many patients came to Waverly and were actually cured and became
well enough to once again enter society. For those not as fortunate, Waverly was
the last place they ever saw. Records have been lost, but it is estimated that
tens of thousands died at Waverly. At the height of the tuberculosis epidemic,
it is reported that one patient an hour died.
The
doctors and nurses volunteered their lives to try and find a cure for
this disease. Many of them lived and died there with the patients. A
number of different experiments were attempted in search for a cure.
Some of these experiments may sound barbaric, or even pointless, by
today’s standards, but others are now common practice. The lungs were
exposed to ultraviolet light to try and stop the spread of the bacteria.
This was done in early versions of “sun rooms”, using artificial
light to mimic the effects of sunlight. Patients were also placed on the
roof or on the open porches on the upper floor to take in air and
sunlight. Keeping in mind that fresh air was thought to be a cure for
the disease; the patients would often to be placed in front of the open
windows in both summer and winter. Photographs exist that show many of
the dying literally covered in snow but still placed outside in hopes
that their lungs would expand in the clean, country air. |
Many
of the treatments were much harsher -- and much bloodier. Balloons were
surgically implanted into the lungs and then filled with air to try and expand
them more, often with disastrous results. Hydrotherapy often caused pneumonia.
But some experiments were useful and these procedures are still used today.
Pneumothorax was a procedure that consisted of deflating the infected area of
the lung for a period of time and then letting it heal. Thoracoplasty was a very
invasive surgical procedure where the chest of the patient was opened and then
cords of muscle and up to seven ribs were removed. The opening was then closed
up with the idea that the lungs would then be free to expand further and allow
more oxygen into the lungs. This bloody procedure was only attempted as a last
resort because fewer than 5% of the patients ever survived it.
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(Left) A staged display of the Pneumothorax procedure --
without all of the blood (Right) Patients making the best of life at Waverly Hills |
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In
many cases, entire families came to live at Waverly Hills. Some were cured but
many others left the hospital through what was called the “body chute”. This
was a tunnel that led from the hospital to the railroad tracks at the bottom of
the hill. It consisted of a motorized rail and cable system where the bodies
were placed and lowered down on one side of the tunnel and steps led up and down
on the other. A small steam plant on the property heated the tunnel, as well as
the hospital and provided warmth for the maintenance workers that lived off the
property. This was their entrance and exit for work. The tunnel was totally
enclosed from the Morgue wing of the hospital. The purpose of this was so that
the patients couldn’t see how many bodies were leaving the hospital. It was
believed this would negatively affect their morale as the doctors discovered
early on that the mental health of the patients was just as important as their
physical health.
Because
of the procedures and experiments that were performed at Waverly Hills and other
hospitals around the country, tuberculosis was declining worldwide by the late
1930’s. It wasn’t until 1943 though that a young graduate student at Rutgers
University by the name of Albert Schatz discovered Streptomycin, the first real
medicine against the disease. By the mid 1950’s, tuberculosis had been largely
eradicated because of this antibiotic. In 1961, Waverly Hills Sanatorium was
closed because there was no longer a need for a tuberculosis facility. The
buildings were reopened in 1962 as Woodhaven Geriatrics Sanitarium.
There
have been many tales of patient mistreatment and unusual experiments that have
filtered down from the hill over the years. Some have been proven false, while
others unfortunately have turned out to be true. Electroshock therapy was widely
used, although it was considered to be a very effective treatment in those days.
Even today, it has been used with great results but now, as it was then, tragic
losses sometimes occurred. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, a time of budget
cuts for facilities of this type, there were many well documented cases of
horrible conditions and unusual treatments at mental institutions all across the
country. Apparently Woodhaven was no different because the state of Kentucky
closed it down in 1982 due to patient abuse. The buildings, contents and land
were auctioned off and the doors were locked for good.
The
building and land changed hands several times over the next 18 years. The second
owner of the property wanted to tear all the buildings down to construct the
world’s largest statue of Jesus Christ. He succeeded in demolishing all of the
buildings except for the main hospital and was only stopped by an injunction
because the building is on the National Historic Register’s “endangered”
list. He then decided that if he couldn’t legally tear it down then he would
do everything in his power to get it condemned. He let vandals come into the
building and tear it up. After breaking windows, porcelain sinks, toilets and
doors, they began spraying graffiti on every available wall. The owner then dug
around the foundation, in some places as deep as 30 feet, to try and make the
foundation crack. If this happened, then he believed he could get the building
condemned and would be able to legally tear it down. Fortunately, the structure
refused to give way and his efforts failed. The area where his extensive digging
took place can still currently be seen.
By
2001, this once regal and majestic hospital had been ravaged by time, the
elements and vandals and was a shell of its former self. Waverly Hills had now
become every town’s “haunted house”. Vagrants took to living here and kids
broke in for the rush of finding a “ghost” or just to get high. It started
to get the reputation of being haunted and rumors had it that satanic rituals
were taking place within its walls. There were tales of a little girl running up
and down the third floor solarium playing hide and seek with trespassers, of a
little boy playing with his leather ball, of rooms lighting up as if there was
still power to the building, doors slamming, disembodied voices, a hearse
driving up and dropping off coffins and an old woman running from the front door
with her wrists bleeding screaming “help me, somebody save me!” The years
went by and the owner decided to sell the property to the new owners, who took
possession in 2001.
In
that same year, the Louisville Ghost Hunters Society was asked to come to
Waverly Hills to find the “hot spots” for Triage Entertainment, who were
producing a segment of Fox Television’s “Worlds Scariest Places”. LGHS
Vice President Jay Gravatte, founder Keith Age and several other members arrived
in the early evening. Jay would be featured on the show as the Waverly
“historian” and his task would be to guide the girls through the building.
Keith
Age:
It
had been several years since I had actually been inside the old hospital and
once we entered, we started to see the extent of the damage that time and
vandals had done to this building. Eighteen years of trash, dust and dirt had
collected in the hallways from where the windows had been broken out. Debris and
trash was two to three feet deep in some places. The floor was like walking over
hills.
We
decided to explore the morgue wing first. As we descended down this almost
totally pitch black hallway, my electromagnetic field meter started clicking and
within moments was jumping up the scale. One of the main pieces of equipment
that is used in ghost detection is an electro-magnetic field meter, or EMF
meter. It is believed that ghosts are a form of energy and that when they
present they disrupt the natural electro-magnetic fields in their vicinity. EMF
meters detect these disturbances, and while it is not solid proof of the
presence of a ghost, it is a good indicator. The meter should not have gone off
in the building unless something magnetic was encountered as there had been no
electricity provided to the top of the hill since the middle 1980’s. The poles
had been knocked down at that time and the wires all removed. Strangely, the
meter continued to react to something though -- and whatever it was, it was
moving.
We
followed the signal to a small room. A cinder block wall partitioned off half
the room. This wall was built so that you could see through to the adjoining
room. On the far side of it, we could see a lot of graffiti on the walls and by
the door there was a box with light bulb sockets with some writing on it. As I
got to the center of the room, the meter spiked to the top of the scale and
squealed to a pitch that I had never heard it make before. The meter pegged all
the way over and it made an audible noise like glass breaking and the needle
froze at the highest position. It stopped squealing and actually started to get
warm in my hand. The meter then got so hot that solder actually melted on the
circuit board and started to drip out of the meter.
I
pulled the battery out to try and stop it from doing even more damage and
that’s when we noticed it was getting colder in the room. This was a hot
summer’s evening and more than 80 degrees and very humid outside. Naturally,
this part of the building would be cooler since there was hardly any light
coming in and the thick concrete walls and marble floor would diffuse the heat
from outside but not as cool as it started to become. The temperature now
dropped from 74 to 52 degrees. The chill soon faded and we left the building to
get another meter and to consult the floor plans that we had for the place. I
was a little surprised to discover that the chamber had been Woodhaven’s
electroshock therapy room.
After
going back into the building, we returned to the room and examined it more
closely. The room that had been used as the observation area had a bathroom
leading off from the back of it and also had a narrow entrance to the room next
door. But the most interesting aspect of the room was the electrical panel with
light bulb sockets on it. This panel had once been used to show how much current
was being sent to the patient.
There
was no further activity with the meters or unusual temperature changes and so we
continued down the hall. As we walked, we noticed that the far end wall looked
as if it was getting closer to us. Puzzled, we stared and tried to figure out
how this could be happening. There was no denying it though -- it was getting
closer. Then, we began to hear sounds like scratching and scraping. It came
closer and when it was no more than 20 feet away, we realized what was
happening. No one had been down this part of the corridor in years and we had
just disturbed a huge colony of bats. It looked just like a dark wall as it came
down the passageway toward us! I was in the lead and ducked down, as did the
person in front of me. Others ducked into a side room until the bats passed and
luckily, no one was injured or hurt, including the bats.
At
the end of the hall, we came to a room on our left that had a thick metal door,
the kind that you often see on freezers. Upon entering the room, we saw that it
was approximately 15 feet deep, 15 feet wide and 20 feet from floor to ceiling.
There were 8 poles that were connected to the ceiling from the floor and from
these poles were four more that were connected to the walls crossways. There was
a drain on the right side of the floor. We later learned that this was what was
called “the draining room.” During the heyday of the tuberculosis hospital,
people were dying so quickly that bodies had to be hurriedly removed from the
hill to make room for other victims. The problem was that the people of
Jefferson County did not want the infected bodies coming down carrying disease.
There was no cemetery at Waverly, so the bodies couldn’t be buried. The
officials were forced to authorize the best remedy they could. The last stop for
the dead inside of the hospital would be the “draining room”. The corpses
would be hung from the poles in the room and then slit from sternum to groin so
that all of their bodily fluids would drain out. Once this was completed, the
bodies were taken down, placed on the gurney and then transported down the body
chute. Later on, as tuberculosis became less threatening in the 1930’s, the
room was used as a smokehouse to cure the meat that was raised and slaughtered
on the grounds.
From
here, we went upstairs to the cafeteria and kitchen. One of the “legends” of
Waverly tells of a man that can be seen walking around in a white coat here and
smell of food cooking that comes wafting from the kitchen. What we found
wasn’t spirits but still pretty shocking. The second floor of this wing was so
damaged by vandals and the elements that it was utterly devastated. The ceiling
was collapsing in some areas of the hall and had fallen down in other areas. The
doors to the kitchen had been knocked down and were lying in the hallway. These
doors provided walkways over puddles of water, mud and debris. The murky pools
had been formed by the leaking roof. The kitchen was in shambles and it looked
as if a bomb had exploded in here. There was only one gigantic oven left. Tables
that had been built into the walls were broken and all of the windows had been
shattered. Some of the window casings were so deteriorated that they were
falling out of their frames. The ceiling was simply no longer there. It had
become just a mess of wires, pipes and rotted tile panels.
The
cafeteria hadn’t fared well either. A huge mural that had once graced the
walls had been splashed with paint. The ceiling was caving in and in the middle
of the floor was a huge radiator that had been ripped out of its moorings and
left there. But it was after our initial inspection that we heard several
footsteps around us, the sound of a door closing and the smell of fresh baked
bread in the air. There was no logical explanation for these things. They simply
happened and several of us were there to witness them.
We
soon abandoned the area for the front entrance with only one further
incident. It would not be until our film was developed that I discovered
that something very unusual had happened at that moment. As we had
walked back down the hallways, we passed a stairwell and my EMF meter
suddenly went off. Several photos were taken and one of them shows what
appears to be a light bulb at the landing of the stairs. There were no
light bulbs left in Waverly at that time, no glass on the windows to
reflect anything and had been no electrical service to the hill in more
than 18 years. I simply couldn’t explain what turned out in the
photograph -- any more than I could explain the other incidents that
involved electricity and lights. There had long been stories of lights
being seen in the windows at night and one time, a security guard
actually reported what seemed to be a television playing in one of the
rooms on the third floor. From the ground, he could see what appeared to
be the distinct flicker of a television in a dark room. Going upstairs
to investigate though, he found no lights or televisions of any kind. |
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After
this incident with the stairwell, we climbed to every floor in the building but
encountered nothing else strange until we got to the fourth floor. The EMF
meters again began to pick up unusual readings and we also recorded a number of
temperature drops. This also faded away but we found other anomalies on the
fifth floor of the hospital.
The
fifth floor of Waverly consists of two nurses stations, a pantry (#501), linen
room (#503), medicine room (#504) and two medium sized rooms on both sides of
the nurse’s stations (#506 & #502). Room 502 has tales and rumors all its
very own and is the place that every local curiosity-seeker has heard about and
wants to explore. This is where (the legends say) people have jumped to their
deaths, other have seen images moving in the windows and disembodied voices have
been heard telling people to “get out”.
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There
is much in the way of speculation about this area but what is known is
that mentally insane tuberculosis patients were housed on the fifth
floor in these two rooms. Nurse’s stations 502 and 506 looked over
these two rooms in 18 hour shifts. The patients had to go to a half door
at these stations to get their food and medicine or to use the restroom,
which was adjacent to the nurse’s station. In 1928, the head nurse in
room 502 was found dead in this room. She had hanged herself from the
light fixture in an apparent fit of depression. According to further
research, she was 29 years-old at the time, unmarried and pregnant. It
is unknown just how long she may have been left hanging in this room
before her body was finally discovered. Her death was ruled a suicide by
the county coroner’s office. And this was not the final tragedy to
occur here… |
In
1932, another nurse who worked in room 502 jumped from the balcony of the roof
that leads from the room and was killed when she struck the ground several
stories below. We have yet to find any records that indicate why she did this
act. There are also no records, despite what the legends say, that anyone other
than the above mentioned nurse was ever pushed or jumped from the roof of
Waverly Hills.
When
we got to the fifth floor that night, we were accompanied by one of the owners.
We went into room 502 and almost immediately, the EMF meter reacted to something
here. Even stranger, the temperature suddenly rose around us from 86 to 98
degrees. It continued to climb so high that we actually backed out of the room.
The owner wanted to see what was happening and as they walked into the room, the
meter continued to react but the temperature dropped suddenly down to 68
degrees. This lasted for just a few moments and then stopped. We searched the
room to try and find anything that would have caused this to occur but could
find nothing artificial or natural to explain it.
After
inspecting the rest of the rooms on the roof, we went back downstairs to talk
with the director from Triage and to explain where the “hotspots” in the
place were located. Jay would be the one who would then deal with the
participants in the show.
Jay
Gravatte:
My
job on that night was simple -- take five girls through Waverly Hills for the
Fox’s “reality” series. My main duty was to explain to them some of the
history and paranormal activity surrounding the abandoned hospital. Everything
we encountered was to be recorded and broadcast as an episode of the show but
what occurred that night was anything but simple.
It
began on an unusually hot July day, as I arrived at Waverly Hills. I was
introduced to the director of the show and he explained how he
"wanted" me to do my tour and history lesson. I explained very early
on that I did not want to be involved with a show that was going to be rigged. I
was then informed that nothing was to be 'spooked up' whatsoever. At close to
8:00 p.m. I was finally introduced to the young ladies I was to play guide to.
Before we had even entered the old hospital, the girls felt apprehensive. All
they could see was this hulk of a building as it sat there like a conquered and
battered ruin.
As
we stood in front of the main entrance, I told them of an apparition that had
often been seen in that location: a woman running out of the front door, her
hands and legs in chains, spectral blood dripping from her wrist and ankles,
crying and pleading for help, only to then dissipate into thin air. I led their
eyes to a third story window, where a young girl of about seven or eight years
old has been seen, and peering out from the windows. This set the mood for the
night to come….
Finally
we entered the building and I swung open the old main doors and led the girls
inside. We spent several moments looking around the lobby where we stood. The
girls, the three people from the production company, and I then entered a room
directly adjacent to the main entrance. When the Sanatorium operated here, it
was the medical director's office, but now it became the girls “safe room”.
Chairs, food, and water were set up if the girls needed a break while filming or
needed a place to retreat to if things became too much for them to bear. After
unloading their sleeping bags, flashlights and other equipment, I proceeded to
take them down the medical wing on the first floor. This meant a trip through
the so-called “death wing” in which the morgue and autopsy room were
located. I was then asked by the director to pull out one of the old trays from
the freezer unit, in the autopsy bay. Unbeknownst to me, it had been rigged with
a cable, to pull back in on itself. At that point, it didn't though. We then
traveled down the hall and out the sliding door at the end to the body chute,
the converted coal tunnel that was used to transport dead patients from the
hospital to the crematorium located down the hill.
As
we proceeded into and down the 485 foot tunnel, one of the girls finally
succumbed to the eeriness of her surroundings. She was ready to give up. After a
quick pep talk from the others, she decided to weather it out for awhile longer.
We then reentered the hospital and headed up toward the second floor dining
area. Keep in mind again that it was a hot July day with no wind whipping around
us what so ever. I began telling the girls about "Ralph", a ghostly
maintenance man who has been seen wearing a white, buttoned-down shirt and white
pants. The girls and I begin walking down the corridor and as I am talking, one
of them starts to see a red glow beginning to illuminate the entire end of the
hallway.
Of
course, the girls began screaming and proceeded to nearly run myself and the
film crew down. I managed to calm them down and re-tell them about Ralph. At
this point, you have to understand that Waverly is in horrible shape. As we are
standing there discussing Ralph, a piece of the ceiling swings down and nearly
decapitates a cameraman from Triage! Once again, the building was filled with
the sound of screaming young women.
Finally,
after escorting them back to the "safe room" for a break, I took them
on an extremely brief tour of the third, fourth, and fifth floors. I explained
about all of the legends associated with Waverly, from the apparition of the
little girl on the third floor to the nurse that was hung in room 502 up on the
fifth floor. I was then instructed to take them back down the medical wing on
the first floor, and as we rounded the corner near Occupational therapy, which
is adjacent to the morgue, one of the old heavy wooden doors slammed shut right
in my face! At this point, I jumped back, I'll admit it. It takes a lot to
unnerve me, but this did the trick. These doors are thick, and rusted on the
hinges, and nearly immovable. Suddenly, something comes bouncing down the
hallway at us, and old time bottle cap from a soda, it turns out. This made the
girls finally break down and scramble back down the hallway to their safe room.
Two of them could no longer deal with everything that was happening.
At
this point, I'd been there for over five hours, which equals around seven
minutes in television time. By this point, it was nearly 1:00 in the morning and
the director decided that I was to leave the girls in the building “by
themselves“, so to speak. That was fine with me and I gathered my equipment,
along with the town girls who chose to leave. We said our goodbyes and walked
right out the front door. Unfortunately, the crew caught me saying "I am so
glad to be out of there" and it ended up in the show. Of course, I was -- I
wanted to go home and take aspirin for the headache that had been brought on by
the sounds of screaming -- but not for the reasons that it appeared in the final
cut of the program. I walked away from this experience a little wiser on how the
media interprets the paranormal when they are only looking for ratings.
I
would later ask the girls what had occurred after my departure? This was months
before I would see the final aired episode and they told me of noises that had
followed them in the building, doors slamming, being touched and even observing
things move on their own. This stuck a chord, because during the times that the
investigative team of the Louisville Ghost Hunters Society has spent exploring
Waverly Hills, we have had this type of activity happen with great frequency.
Troy
Taylor:
One
of the first questions that people ask me when they learn what I write about for
a living is whether or not searching for real ghosts ever scares me. For a very
long time, I assured them that I was never frightened during these outings to
haunted places and for the most part this was true. My reply would have to
change though after I experienced Waverly Hills for the first time.
I
first heard about the old hospital from Keith about the time that he and the
Louisville Ghost Hunter’s Society first got access to it. In fact, the meter
that had been destroyed in the former electroshock therapy room had been
purchased from my company and when I heard about what had happened to it, I
asked Keith to return it to me. I then sent the meter to my distributor, who has
been in business for more than a decade and is an expert on electromagnetic
field meters, and asked him to look it over. He had never seen anything like the
damage that had been done to the meter before -- and he had no explanation for
what could have caused it.
The
first time that I visited the hospital was in September 2002. I was in town for
the first Mid-South Paranormal Convention and one of the places that I asked
Keith to show me in Louisville was Waverly Hills. I was already interested in
the history of the place and had heard about the investigations that had been
conducted there. I was anxious to see it and so Keith arranged a tour. It was
literally a dark and stormy night when we arrived at the hospital and it had
been raining all day. I was looking forward to seeing the place, no matter what
the weather, and not because I was convinced that I would meet one of the former
patients face to face -- it was simply to experience the place for myself. By
this time, I had traveled all over the country and had been to hundreds of
places that were alleged to be haunted. I had felt just this same way before
exploring all of them, so Waverly Hills was no different. To me, it was just an
old, spooky building with a fascinating history. The fact that it was alleged to
be haunted simply added to the experience. I have long since abandoned the idea
of going in expecting too much. This is likely why I was so surprised by what
actually happened that night.
After
meeting with the owners, Keith and I went inside and started our exploration of
the building. Once we were away from the activity going on downstairs, the
surroundings fell silent. The only thing that I heard in the dark building was
the sound of our own footsteps, our hushed voices and the drip of rain as it
slipped through the cracks in the roof and splashed down onto the floor. Keith
led me through the place and pointed out the various rooms, the treatment areas,
the kitchen, the morgue and on and on. We climbed the stairs to the top floor
and I saw legendary room 502, as well as the lights of Louisville as they
reflected off the low and ominous-looking clouds that gathered above the city.
During
our excursion, I mentioned to Keith that there had been one floor that we had
missed -- the fourth. He explained that this was the only floor in the building
whose entrance was kept locked and he had waited to save it for last. I
remembered then some of the stories that had been passed on to me about this
floor. Many regarded it as the most active -- and the most frightening -- area
of the former hospital.
The
most unusual experience that I had heard about was when Keith was in one of the
rooms here. He had been walking along the corridor of the fourth floor with an
EMF detector and was followed by two members of his group with a video camera.
He started to picking up readings with the meter and he was led onto one of the
former treatment rooms. The intensity of the magnetic energy in the room
continued to increase and the strongest readings seemed to be in the southeast
corner of the room. Keith was standing in the corner, looking at the changes on
the meter scale, when an empty plastic soda bottle came seemingly out of nowhere
and struck him in the back. As he turned to see what had happened, an overhead
fluorescent light fixture suddenly came loose from the ceiling with a loud
crack. With one end of it still anchored to the ceiling, the other end swung
loose and hit Keith in the side of the head. The long burned-out bulb that
remained in the fixture shattered when it collided with Keith and showered him
with glass. Before he even had time to react, he heard the sound of a brick
scrape across the concrete floor. The noise came from the opposite corner of the
room and when he looked over, he saw the brick moving across the floor towards
him. With a lurch, it shot directly at him and as he scrambled to get out of the
line of fire, it hit him in the small of the back. Needless to say, he quickly
retreated from the room. The other investigators had not seen where the brick or
the soda bottle had come from, but they had clearly heard the brick move and had
seen both objects strike Keith. This is still regarded as one of the most
chilling events to occur in the building.
It
would not be the only time that Keith would see an object move in the building
though. I was present on one other occasion, along with a tour attendee and
authors Alan Brown and Dave Goodwin. In September 2003, I returned to Louisville
for another conference and that night, we took a group tour of the old hospital.
As we were climbing the stairs and going past the fourth floor landing, the
group of us at the front of the line clearly saw the heavy metal door open up a
few inches and then slam shut under its own power. Keith was just a few feet
away from it at the time and he jumped in surprise. No one had been near the
door and at the time, the floor was still locked so there was no way that anyone
could have gotten on it to manipulate the door.
A
year earlier though, when I entered the fourth floor for the first time,
I got the distinct feeling that something strange was in the air. I make
absolutely no claims of any psychic ability whatsoever but there was
just something about this floor of the hospital that felt different than
any of the others. What had been nothing more than just an old
ramshackle and broken down building suddenly seemed different. I can’t
really put into words what felt so strange about it but it almost seemed
to be a tangible “presence” that I had not encountered anywhere else
in the place. And right away, eerie things started to happen. |
|
We
had entered the floor in what I believe was the center of the building. Behind
us was a wing that I was told was not safe to enter. Sections of the floor had
fallen in and this area was off-limits to tours and visitors. The strange thing
about it was that both Keith and I clearly heard the sounds of doors slamming
from this part of the building. I can assure the reader that it was not the wind
either. The wind was not strong enough that night to have moved those heavy
doors and this clearly sounded as though someone was closing them very hard.
When I questioned Keith about who else could be up there with us, he explained
me about the floors. I investigated on my own and determined that he was correct
--- there was no one walking around on that part of the fourth floor.
As
we started down the hallway, Keith told me about some of the other experiences
that had been experienced by investigators on this floor. The experiences
involved the strange shapes that had been seen. The sightings had started the
previous October when, on consecutive nights, investigators were able to see
what looked like human shadows moving up and down the fourth floor hallway. One
of the shadows in particular actually appeared to look around corners at them
and all of the shapes passed back and forth across the doorways. Keith added
that sightings like this had occurred at other times as well and happened most
often when no flashlights were used in the corridor.
I
switched off my flashlight and we walked down the corridor using only the dim,
ambient light from outside. The hallway runs through the center of the building
and on either side of it are former patient rooms. Beyond the rooms is the
“porch” area that opens to the outside. It was here where the patients were
placed to take in the fresh air. There was no glass ever placed in the huge
outer windows, which has left the interior of the floor open to the elements
ever since. On this night, the windows also illuminated the corridor, thanks to
the low-hanging clouds that glowed with the lights of Louisville. We walked down
through the dark and murky corridor and I began to see shadows that flickered
back and forth. I was sure that this was trick of the eye though, likely caused
by the lights or the wind moving something outside and so I urged Keith on for a
closer look. It was where the corridor angled to the right that I got a look at
something that was definitely not a trick of the eye!
So
that the reader can understand what I saw, I have to explain that the hallway
ahead of us continued straight for a short distance and then turned sharply to
the right. In the early 1900’s, most institutions of this type were designed
in this manner. It was what was dubbed the “bat-wing” design, which meant
that there was a main center in each building and then the wings extended right
and left, then angled again so that they ran slightly backward like a bird, or
bat’s, wings. Directly at the angle ahead of us was a doorway that led into a
treatment room. I only noticed the doorway in the darkness because the dim light
from the windows beyond it had caused it to glow slightly. This made it
impossible to miss since it was straight ahead of us.
We
took a few more steps and then, without warning, the clear and distinct
silhouette of a man crossed the lighted doorway, passed into the hall and then
vanished into a room on the other side of the corridor! The sighting only lasted
a few seconds but I knew what I had seen. And for some reason, it shocked and
startled me so badly that I let out a yell and grabbed a hold of Keith’s
jacket. I am not sure why it affected me in that way but perhaps it was the
setting, the man’s sudden appearance, my own anxiety --- or likely all of
these things. Regardless, after my yell, I demanded that Keith turn on the light
and that he help me to examine the room the man had vanished into. After my
initial fright, I became convinced that someone else was on the floor with us.
Keith assured me we were the only ones there but he did help me search for the
intruder. There was no one there though, he was right, whoever the figure had
been, he had utterly and completely vanished.
As
of this writing, I was not the first person to have seen this mysterious figure
on the fourth floor and it’s unlikely that I will be the last. However, for
me, this put Waverly Hills into a unique category for there are not many places
that I will firmly state are genuinely haunted. Before I can do that, I have to
have my own unexplainable experience and hopefully, it will be something that
goes beyond a mere “bump in the night” or spooky photograph. In this case,
it was much more than that because I actually saw a ghost. In all of my years of
paranormal research, I can count the times that I have seen ghosts on just two
fingers and one of them was at Waverly Hills. In this case, seeing really was
believing.
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