Waverly Hills: Spooktastic (Sort of)
It’s been a helluva week. I toured the Waverly Hills Sanitarium my last night in Louisville. The sanitarium reigns as one of the most haunted places in the world, largely because of their high death rate during the White Plague–Tuberculosis in the 1920s and 1930s. The tour guides said a death occurred in the place almost every hour for years. So many people died that the staff started using a service tunnel to transport the bodies out of the place in order to keep the residents calm. Otherwise there would’ve been a constant stream of hearses. Is it just me, or has nobody written a short story about this place yet? If you haven’t, too late. It’s mine.
The service tunnel, a dark cavern that stretches out about 500 yards, earned the name the “body chute.” I walked it at 10 pm. I’m glad I was with a group of 20 people. Tempting fate, I lagged behind once or twice just to turn and gaze down the dark mouth. Yeah, it’s creepy.
As for the ghosts, I had no paranormal experiences to report except for shadows. In fact, parts of the tour seemed a little silly in that regard. “You’ll see shadow people out of the corner of your eye.” Yes, near dusk in a dank abandoned building you do see lots of wavering shadows on your periphery. Not that I’m going to play the role of the skeptic. It was spooky enough that I don’t plan on spending an entire night there. One other small complaint: For a 2-hour tour, I didn’t appreciate being shown videos about the asylum in a gift store for 30 minutes, then being rushed through. One of the tour guides was even rude enough to threaten that they’d have to skip parts of the building if WE didn’t hurry. In all seriousness, you need a little more than 5 minutes to appreciate the poetry of rusted autopsy tables, morgue cabinets, and busted surgical lamps dangling from the ceiling of an operating room.
Conclusion: If you’re in Louisville, worth it. If you’re going to block out 2 hours, you might as well get your full money’s worth and pay for a 4-hour tour so you don’t have to go on a forced march. Now I leave you with a video by a disturbing little music group I listened to while writing parts of Unknown Female. (Don’t worry, this was before I discovered Dexter and decided to tone down the nihilism and rev up the dark humor.) The Sanitarium visit reminded me of them. Wonder how the ghosts at Waverly would dig these licks:
