Waverly Hills Sanatorium

The view from the roof

Last night Meric and I went on a tour of one of the most haunted places in America: Waverly Hills Sanatorium. It is a massive building located in Louisville. Apparently Louisville was on of the hardest hit area by the tuberculosis epidemic. In 1910, a two-story building was built to accommodate  40-50 patients. That was quickly over filled and so in 1924 they started building the massive structure that stands today. Finished in 1926, Waverly Hills opened its doors to over 400 patients. Even though it was considered the best TB hospital of its time, thousands of patients died there before a cure was discovered. Once TB was no longer an epidemic and the cure was found, they turned Waverly Hills Sanatorium into a nursing home. The nursing home was closed in 1982 due to budget cuts and the building was left to vandals and trespassers until 2001. The current owners are doing renovations and trying to restore the building. They run a haunted house in it for Halloween but they also do historic haunted tours and over night experiences. Meric and I did a historic haunted tour.

The tour started with a 30 minute video of different clips about Waverly Hills Sanatorium. One of the clips was from the 1930s and the others were different clips from TV specials like Ghost Hunters. If you go to their website you can watch the clips. (http://www.therealwaverlyhills.com/waverly_videos/) I thought the videos were interesting and a good way to get you psyched up for the tour.

Once we entered the sanatorium our first stop was the "body chute". The body chute is a 500 ft tunnel that slopes down. There are stairs on one side and a ramp on the other. When the sanatorium was open the ramp portion was actually a conveyor belt used to bring in supplies. There were so many people dying from TB everyday and the doctors thought it would be best for morale if the bodies were removed from the hospital out of sight of the other patients. So when patients died at the sanatorium they were take out of the hospital down the tunnel and out the back door. The tunnel was very long and very dark. Can you imagine what it was like to work in the tunnel? Long and depressing with lots of dead bodies.

Down we go into the "body chute"

We were then lead through the hospital and told some of the history and some of the ghost stories and sightings. There were stories of ghost children, a boy in particular that likes to play ball. Stories of a homeless man and his dog that were found dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft and sightings of their ghosts. One room in particular is said to be haunted, room 502. The 5th floor was where they kept the mentally ill patients. I don't know why they say room 502 is haunted though because the ghost story didn't take place in the room and has nothing to do with the insane patients, plus 502 was actually a linen closet/storage area. The story is that of a nurse who worked at the hospital and apparently hung herself outside of the room. The story goes that she was pregnant, unmarried and just diagnosed with TB. Of course there is always speculation as to whether she hung herself or was murdered but sightings of her on the 5th floor are common.

the haunted linen closet

The tour was very interesting and entertaining. I like a good ghost story and love old buildings with history. Maybe next summer we will take a tour when it is more light outside so that we can see the rooms and inside better. The only disappointing thing was they didn't show us the morgue. That would have been cool to see.