Will you look at that beautiful shot? After the Committed in Louisville signing I got to go to one of my absolute bucket list haunted locations for a ghost tour and let me tell you, it was everything I could have imagined and then some.
Welcome to Waverly Hills Sanitorium in Louisville, KY – a sanitary hospital built to house, care for, and quarantine, the poor unfortunate souls that were stricken with tuberculosis back in the day when there was no known cure for it.
Waverly has a shit ton of stories of ghostly happenings attached to it, and surprisingly for how formidable the building is, there’s only one entity that could even be remotely considered malevolent in nature and in my personal opinion? I don’t think it’s malevolent at all – just misunderstood. (Which is why I would probably be the first white bitch to die in the fuckin’ horror movie, but I digress.)
Waverly opened in 1910 specifically to house something like fifty or sixty tuberculosis patients but by the time its run as a tuberculosis hospital ended sometime in 1961, it had expanded to hold hundreds to meet the demand of the area. In fact, Waverly had almost become a city unto itself with a full-time medical and support staff that never left the grounds – the majority of the patients leaving by way of a supply tunnel turned body chute under the hospital. In fact, it had its own post office and zip code for the longest time.
Sadly, due to the virulent nature of the disease that the sanitorium was trying to contain, visitors were not permitted and thus Waverly was a pretty lonely place to be for some of its inhabitants squirreled away from family and the life they knew before until a time that the disease finally wasted them away to nothing.
Some of the ghostly inhabitants include a pair of sisters, innumerable patients, shadow figures, possibly the spirit of a nurse who was found mysteriously hanged on the top floor, and that aforementioned misunderstood shadowy entity known as ‘the creeper!’
Now as for me, I went on the paranormal guided tour on a Saturday night. Did I experience anything?
In fact, I did!
I was standing with the tour guide asking her some questions and her thoughts on certain things and as I was looking past her down the long corridor, I stopped mid-sentence and told her “I just saw movement!” She laughed and said “Yeah, that will happen,” and we carried on our conversation, but what I had seen was a bulky misshapen shadow probably four feet tall and three feet or so wide, lean out of one of the doorways as if a person leaning out while sitting in a wheelchair to have a look up the hall at the big tour group making noise. Like a patient checking out just who was in the hallway making all that racket.
I have to imagine they were a little like this guy we found in a cool little shop called Unorthodox the next day on our way out of town! Other than the spine-tingling tales and a long walk down a very long and dark hallway all by myself while the rest of the tour groups watched the shadows of other curious patients shift around me it was a pretty chill night.
10/10 do recommend taking that tour if you ever find yourself in Louisville for any reason – and with it only being a 3hr plus drive away from my new-found home in Knoxville, TN I guarantee I will find myself there at least one more time before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Goddess willing, anyhow.
So yeah, that was my trip to Louisville, KY this past April in a nutshell. I’ll be back with some cemetery action in Montgomery, AL later on and a spooky good dinner in haunted old Charleston, SC after that!