Halloween at Waverly Hills

Bwwwwaaahaaahaaa. Halloween is coming so I thought I'd post some of my ghost stories. First up is a repost of my visit to Waverly Hills Sanitorium with a tour group. It was originally posted to the Ghost Discuss group.

Cue Spooky Music...........

October 29, 2001

Hi, Ghosters,

My daughter Courtenay, her (now ex-) boyfriend Mark and I took a tour of Waverly Hills Sanitorium here in Louisville on Saturday. The tour was sponsored by the Louisville Ghost Hunters Society (proceeds going to charity), and it was really worth it.

Some of you may have seen it featured on the Fox program "World's Scariest Places" last Tuesday. Believe me, it's just as spooky as it looked on television.

The sanitarium was built in the 1920s, and was the largest tuberculosis sanitarium in KY. At the time it was built, tuberculosis was a virtual death sentence. Once you entered it was almost certain that you would never leave alive. Doctors and nurses were confined to the premises as well, since tuberculosis was highly contagious.

The nurses worked long, grueling shifts, and as a result, at least 2 suicides occurred on the infamous fifth floor. The tour guide told us that one nurse hanged herself from a pipe running across the ceiling in a little room just off the main ward (the ward for the mentally unstable patients). She hanged herself at the beginning of her shift, so the poor patients got to watch her body swinging from the rope for 18 hours until it was time for the next nurse to come on duty. The patients were locked into the ward, so they could do nothing but watch.
A few years later, another nurse threw herself from a fifth floor window.

In addition, the place is supposed to be haunted by a little girl named Mary, who is seen running up and down the corridors wearing a white nightgown, and a little boy who plays with an old leather ball.

There is also the infamous "body chute", which is a long underground tunnel where deceased patients were taken to be shipped to a morgue off the premises. As most of the patients were dying themselves they felt that it would be too depressing for them to see the bodies of other patients being taken away from the hospital. So a very long tunnel connecting to the nearest railroad line was built, and they were placed in the tunnel and sent away secretly. At one time the death rate was about 1 per hour, so it was in use constantly.

The tour guide also gave some grisly details as to how they were first embalmed, which I won't go into here.

My impressions of the place:

If it's not haunted, it should be! The place is really a magnificient ruin. It has 480 rooms, all of it crumbling away. There's not one window left in the place, and it has been heavily defaced by the idiots who used it as a party place. (No longer true. The building is slowly being renovated. And my daughter tells me that some of the graffiti was put there deliberately as promotion for a party held there.) The walls (institutional green) are covered with graffiti, the plumbing fixtures ripped out, walls and ceilings crumbling, and the roof is also starting to go.

The wind was blowing strongly while we were there, so the eerie whistling of the wind through the open windows and doors was appropriately spooky.

In the first floor room where the tour guide began his lecture, I was standing towards the back of the group when I felt someone take hold of my arm just above my left elbow. It was if someone standing behind me and to my right had reached over and put their arm around me. Now, this room was already freezing cold but this spot on my arm was even colder! It wasn't at all frightening, though, just as if someone were saying"hi, I'm here". It continued to hold onto me all through the tour of the first floor, but when we reached the main corridor of the second floor it abruptly let go.

The third and fifth floors are supposed to be the "most" haunted, but strangely enough the fourth floor was the one which affected me the most. I felt intensely nauseous the whole time we were on that floor and I was starting to get dizzy. The moment we went back down to the third floor those feelings left. I was also smelling alcohol very strongly on the third and fourth floors (but Courtenay says someone in the tour group was drunk!).

On the fifth floor, in the operating room the tour guide was telling us about the types of (really gruesome) surgery which took place there, when somebody said "look there". An EMF meter someone was carrying started beeping like mad, and as we watched the door slowly closed itself. Now, as I said before the wind was blowing very hard, and if it was the wind, I think it would have slammed the door hard. It closed the door very slooooowly. A couple of minutes later the door started to open again and of course we were all going "oooooh". It swung open to reveal one of the other tour guides trying to catch up with group. He saw a group of stunned looking faces staring at him and kept saying "What? What?", while we were all roaring with laughter.

My daughter took her digital camera with her, and we got some stunning pictures. Courtenay and I officially don't believe in orbs, but we got some pictures with 20 or 30 diamond shaped orbs. If Zubrovka is reading this I would really like to know if this is common with digital cameras?I know it must be light refraction of some sort, but would like to know how this happens. Courtenay also got one picture that shows what I think is a little boy, but she thinks is a shadow on the building. (Courtenay told me later that her digital camera shut itself down 12 times while we were there!)

Well, you guys, sorry for the long post, but would really like to knowwhat you think!