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| Waverly Hills Sanatorium |
Last Saturday, the 9th of July, I investigated
Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky with my friend Robin. Waverly Hills is an old tuberculosis hospital and was later a geriatrics center and is said to be one of the most haunted places in America.
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| Gargoyle seen from rooftop (5th floor) |
We arrived at Waverly just minutes before midnight which is when the investigation/tour began. Running behind as usual, I'm loading mini DV into my recorder and loading film in an old film camera while Robin stands behind me and already is having exciting things happen. She had gotten her phone out and was viewing through the small phone screen and could see these lights whizzing around us but these lights could not be seen with our naked eyes! Excited, but late we had no time to record our findings and ran up to the door to join others and begin our tour.
We entered into what was called the "safe room" to be briefed and split into smaller groups. They allow 40 people on a tour and then split them into smaller groups for each of the 5 floors. The volunteers gave us all the juicy tidbits, experiences and the rules for the place and we were off! The investigation was to last 8 hours. I have to admit, I wondered what kind of people I'd see there at the tour. I envisioned men in their 40's still living at home with their mother, freaky gothic like kids, ghost hunting fanatics, etc and was pleasantly surprised to see mostly ordinary people like us... haha.
Our guide Tiffany took our group up to the 5th floor where she told us what all had happened there and when and also told us of some other people's experiences as well as her own. This was the floor for the infamous room 502 where a nurse had supposedly hung herself. Apparently, it was shrouded in secrecy and there may have been some wrong doing there as she was pregnant. My smaller group got to investigate this floor first. There were 6 of us. the rest was split into the other floors. We all had the floor for about an hour. They told us of many shadow people and that the best way to get these shots are with your flash off and then manipulate your pictures in a photo program later to see if anything shows up.
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| Robin at Room 502 |
I took a lot of photos and Robin got out her video camera right away and I also used my phone to record audio. We tried our best to imitate Ghost Hunters (snicker, snort) and we laughed most of the time. It was a beautiful night and the warm breeze was blowing on the top floor nicely. The sanatorium is run down and the windows are missing out of most of it. They are using tour money to restore the magnificent old building... a huge undertaking. It didn't take long for us to get bored since we were not having much going on. Robin did experience her battery being drained almost completely within a very short time, something she says has not happened in the past. Admittedly, I have not gone through most of our recordings very closely so there may be something I haven't found yet.
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| Boo! just me |
There was a nice couple there a few years older than us who had some fancy equipment and also two guys, which I thought to be rather "stoner" types but were friendly enough. It didn't take long to figure out we wanted to hang kinda close to the married couple. They had a "spirit box" and that really intrigued me. A spirit box is a contraption that uses am/fm radio to communicate with spirits. I am skeptical, but it was pretty neat and creepy and added to the ambience of the evening. It sounds like those machines that people who have their voice box removed and talk through a device... creepy. This spirit box went crazy at different times of the investigation. Sometimes, where you would think it would be talking up a storm it would do nothing. It really was mostly gibberish from what we heard of it.
After we sat talking for a while it was finally time to go down to the 4th floor which was exciting because the couple had told us they had been here before and had caught "evidence" and had experiences on the 4th floor. So after walking around and snapping pictures, listening intently and asking questions we did have a few things I am going to report, so here it is and no I'm not crazy well, at least not enough to be in a rubber room...yet.
My friend Robin had found a coveted chair and I am standing behind her with my body open to this room and I remember not feeling comfortable with my body facing that way. I didn't say anything to her at that time, I just moved my body closer to her and stood more to her left leaving her more exposed to the door (what a friend, huh? haha) It was mostly an unconscious thing but I distinctly remember feeling a little uneasy. I am recording audio with my phone at this time (
hear it here) and begin to speak when all of a sudden I feel a sensation on my upper right thigh. Just below where your pocket is. I asked her and you can hear me ask her on the audio if she touched me. It was slight, but definitely felt it. It kinda felt like my skin crawling only in just this one small spot. So there is my experience #1.
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| Room next to chair where I felt other worldly touch |
We also had an experience together on another floor and I want to say it was the 3rd, but I was losing track of where we were and what time it was. We were tired so we had found some chairs at the end of a hallway and decided to just do some audio to try to get evp's. We had our flash lights off and our eyes had adjusted quite a bit to the dark. We must've both been looking out at the same direction because we both saw three large windows get the light blocked out of them. We investigated to make sure it wasn't another investigator and it wasn't. In fact others had reported the same thing happened to them. Experience #2.
Experience #3 (maybe), I'm more on the fence with only because I am rather skeptical. I just find it hard to get my mind wrapped around this. We were sitting back in those chairs and heard a baby cry. So loudly in fact that we thought someone was playing a trick. It took a minute and I asked her if she heard that and she said yes, it sounded like a cat, and I said no I thought it sounded like a baby. It wasn't no time and we heard it again, the exact same cry. This time she said "you're right that was a baby cry". We immediately got up to see what was going on. We found our way to the married couple and Robin asked them "ok, who's got the Baby App?" The woman said she thought it was us. They heard it too. We found the two guys and they had not heard it. They had been out on the balcony. I am still reluctant to count this as a 100% experience because I question those two guys. Robin and the lady both agreed they thought the two guys were too stupid to fool us all like that. Good point... haha. Who knows. Of course I didn't have my audio going at that moment :(
Experience #4 happened and we didn't even know it until the tour was over. We had been exploring the 3rd or 4th floor, can't remember and smelled something dead. I looked around for a dead mouse or bird or something and never found anything but we just went on and didn't question it. Later we found out that there has been an apparition that has appeared with a foul dead animal smell with it. We didn't see any apparition, but did smell the funk.
One place that was supposed to be scary and most talked about was on the 1st floor, it had the "Death Tunnel or Body Chute" on it. As you guessed, it was used to move the dead down the hill to a waiting hearse. During the height of TB, people died everyday and this was a convenient way to move them. Nothing happened here for me to report other than bats flying by my head. One was so close it blew my hair as it flew by! I'm not afraid of ghosts, but now if a bat got caught in my hair, that would freak me out.
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| Death Tunnel or Body Chute - see how dark! |
Also on the first floor is (was) a gift shop that is supposedly very active. Nothing for us. Plus the morgue, where a lot of people would put themselves on the slabs and have someone push them in. It made this horrible screeeech sound. No thank you. I only want to encounter being on a cold slab once and I better be dead when it happens. Not tempting fate in this case! Robin didn't either.
So we complained about not seeing any shadow people or hearing anything that we felt was real but really all in all we had quite a few unexplainable things happen to us. Towards the end, many had left and they let us have run of the place. It was becoming daylight and we found another small group and asked if they had encountered anything and they were actually recording stuff right then. It was told to us that if you had a flashlight, unscrewed it a bit and laid it on the floor and asked questions, that the ghost would turn it off and on in according to their response. They claimed they were communicating with a ghost and I think her name was Mary. I actually got this on my mini DV recorder. As soon as I figure out how to post it I will.
I found this picture I took with my flash on in the stairway, can't remember where, but I didn't see anything until I saw it on the computer. Looks like a green orb. I do have a few pictures that have circles on them, but I don't know if they are dust or orbs. The green orb seems to glow a bit.
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| Green orb middle left of picture - untouched photo |
This was taken outside of the building in the morning as we were leaving. Funny how light transforms everything. It just looks like a cool old building now, not the spooky haunted hospital it was hours before. It was fun and has me itching for more experiences perhaps a day trip with my ghost hunting friend. My husband didn't want to have anything to do with it. In fact he's not even asked me what if anything happened. Oh well, it'll just be mine and hers thing :)
My son had an experience a few mornings after I was back. He came running into my room and asked why I had just blew in his ear to wake him up. I was still in bed. He seemed very awake and alert so who knows? I do feel strange feelings sometimes in his room. I did in fact worry about bringing anything (as in spirits) home with me, but I have yet to experience anything since I've been back home except for Asher's story.
One more thing, I asked the tour guide Tiffany if she ever had anything follow her home and she said she occasionally did but the one that sticks out in my mind was the "creepy crawler" as she called it. Apparently when it was a TB hospital they let the patients roam around no matter their condition and there were strange experiments to try to cure them and one spirit that has been reported is this creepy crawler. He was someone who could not walk so he crawled around. I don't know if he had legs or not. But now that might freak me out if I saw that. I'm not afraid of spirits because I know they were just people at one time but something about that creeps me out.
She also told us of a "doppelganger" which is a tangible double of another person usually evil, that is present. We didn't encounter that either but I don't really want to encounter something evil so I wasn't bothered by that! All in all, we had fun and Robin has even said she wants to go back. Maybe, but I'd like to see something else if I'm going to spend the money.
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| Fearless Ghost Hunters - haha |
So I hope you've enjoyed my ghost tour! I'll be back with more of the video when I can. See ya soon!
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