Post by derangedfaery on Jun 9, 2006 11:44:00 GMT -5
Waverly Hills Sanitorium as seen on "Scariest Places On Earth"
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.
These graphic descriptions can only provide the modern reader with a hint of what millions suffered from in the early history of America -- the dreaded and deadly “white death” known as tuberculosis. The plague swept through the country for centuries, claiming entire families and sometimes entire towns. It was a terrifying and very contagious disease for which there was no cure.
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.
The Old Waverly Hills Hospital
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.
Patients take in the sunlight on the open porches outside of the rooms.
(U of L Archives)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.
(Left) A staged display of the Pneumothorax procedure -- without all of the blood
(Right) Patients making the best of life at Waverly Hills
(U of L Archive Photos)
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.
The strange photo with what appears to be a light bulb over the landing
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.
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.
These graphic descriptions can only provide the modern reader with a hint of what millions suffered from in the early history of America -- the dreaded and deadly “white death” known as tuberculosis. The plague swept through the country for centuries, claiming entire families and sometimes entire towns. It was a terrifying and very contagious disease for which there was no cure.
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.
The Old Waverly Hills Hospital
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.
Patients take in the sunlight on the open porches outside of the rooms.
(U of L Archives)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.
(Left) A staged display of the Pneumothorax procedure -- without all of the blood
(Right) Patients making the best of life at Waverly Hills
(U of L Archive Photos)
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.
The strange photo with what appears to be a light bulb over the landing
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.