A trip to Waverly Hills should be near the top of every ghost hunter’s bucket list. Emerging suddenly from the darkness, this sinister figure frightens even the most seasoned investigators.Ī veritable paranormal playroom, spirit activity seems to happen every day at Waverly Hills Sanatorium, as if the ghosts need to be noticed. Most disturbing is the Creeper: an inhuman, dark entity, spider-like and faceless, that crawls along the graffiti covered walls and deteriorating ceilings with movements almost too quick for the human eye. The spirit of a suicidal nurse, a vagrant and his dog, and a little lad named Jimmy make their presences known on a regular basis. Visitors often report glimpses of ghostly doctors and nurses in the building as well, and phantom children still play with balls left for them by the living. Visitors hear their labored coughs echoing through the long corridors and glimpse their pale, sunken faces lurking in the shadows. Some of the spirits reported at Waverly Hills Sanatorium are what one might expect at such a facility: tortured souls who lived out their last attenuated days isolated from the world until disease squeezed the life out of them. But over the last several years historians and researchers have concluded that a facility with 400-500 beds operating for 35 years (plus the 16 years the smaller facility operated) could not have generated a death toll higher than 8,000 or so, and a figure in the 5,500 – 6,500 range is most likely. Some accounts claim that at the height of the epidemic patients died at the rate of one an hour, putting the total death toll as high as 63,000. The number of people who died at Waverly Hills is a topic of dispute. Pipes dangle haphazardly from the ceilings of some rooms, while ivy invades through broken windows in others peeling paint flakes off in sheets, bits of plaster and glass linger in corners. The patient rooms that line the vacant halls of the building are now in various states of decay, although current owners Charlie and Tina Mattingly have made great strides in cleaning up after years of neglect. Woodhaven was closed by the state in 1980 due to overcrowding and allegations of abuse. In 1962, the building reopened as Woodhaven Medical Services, a geriatric facility. It was closed down and quarantined, then renovated. The building served as a tuberculosis hospital until 1961, by which time antibiotic treatment had virtually wiped out the disease. Murphy of Louisville teamed to design Waverly Hills so that the back of the bat wing-shaped, red brick building faced southwest to catch the prevailing breeze and afford maximum exposure to the sun, allowing fresh air and sunshine to consistently flow through the corridors and into the solarium and patient rooms. The massive, gothic style sanatorium you see today opened in 1926, could accommodate over 400 patients, and was considered one of the most modern and well equipped facilities of the time, with two beds to a room and each bed equipped with phone, radio, bell signal, and electric light.Īt the time, fresh air and sunshine were the primary weapons in the war against tuberculosis. As TB raged through the area over the next decade, the little clinic filled with more than 140 patients, making it obvious a much larger facility was required to keep up with demand. The location was specifically chosen for its isolation from populated areas and its elevation high on a hill above Louisville, Kentucky. Waverly Hills Sanatorium was originally a modest two-story frame building that opened for business on July 26, 1910, and could accommodate 40 tuberculosis patients. Though the pathogen was identified in the late 19 th century, it took another 50 years until an effective treatment was devised, but the understanding that the disease was contagious gave rise to the sanatorium movement in an effort to isolate, comfort, and perhaps cure the stricken. Tuberculosis, the “White Plague,” has been stalking mankind since ancient times, but the rise of cities and their poor sanitary conditions allowed the highly contagious and usually fatal lung disease to sweep across Europe in the 17 th century and the United States in the 19 th.
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