Waverly Hills Sanatorium: Inside America’s Most Haunted Hospital

Snowy Beds And The Body Chute

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I want you to picture something. You're lying in a hospital bed, so I mean your pretend day isn't starting well. It's 1932, so also it's a time of Great Depression, and you might be greatly depressed because, well, you'll see. You're on the fourth floor of a building perched on a hill above Louisville, Kentucky. You can see the Ohio River Valley from your window. Which sounds quaint, except every window is open because your doctors believe freezing air is medicine. There's snow on your blanket. Actual snowflakes just covering you like you're a pine tree. Let's call it Arctic Therapy, which I now trademarked.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Okay. Now you've been here for months, maybe years, and you can't leave because you have tuberculosis. And it's so contagious that the entire building operates like it's its own small town. They grow their own food, butcher their own meat, treat their own water. You have your own zip code. You are, for all practical purposes, living in a quarantine city on American soil.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

And every few days, somebody on your floor just stops coughing, which sounds like a moment of respite, except it is not. It means they're dead. And you know this because you've learned to listen for that silence. The staff smiles at you. They bring you outside for sunshine therapy. They tell you that morale is important, but you never see the bodies leave. They just disappear after, like your last date.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Well, unlike her cab ride home, that's because 500 feet below this building, there's a tunnel. A steep underground passage with a motorized rail cart that carries the dead down the hill and out of sight. So patients like you never have to watch the dead bodies climb. The staff called it the supply tunnel. Everyone else calls it the body shoot, which reminds me of a water slide. And oh my gosh. Yeah, now I can't get that image out of my head. A little disturbing.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Well, at least they had some fun on the way out. This is Waverly Hills Sanatorium. And today we're not just telling you a ghost story, though we kind of are. We totally are. But we're asking a bigger question. Why do we believe the dead can linger like the smell of your ex? What does science actually say about the supernatural that isn't just a big fat denial? And what happens when thousands of people die in one building and they don't all leave? Not really. There's no Ghostbusters in this reality, unfortunately, but what there is, there's ghost hunters, and they're trying to explain the unexplainable. So let's go hunting together.

SPEAKER_03 2:39

Sneaky footsteps in the night. Clues that vanish out of sight. Twists and turns that never fail. Laughs and chills. It's quite the show. Who did it? Tune in to know.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Before we can talk about the ghosts, we need to talk about what made them. And that means talking about tuberculosis. Because the story of Waverly Hills is not a haunted house story. It's a public health disaster that we turned into a haunted house later, and separating that is probably important. So at the beginning of the 20th century, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the United States.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

In most patients, nothing unusual is found. But in Mary's case, the doctor discovered a small shadow on one of her lungs. It might mean very little, but often, it's the only means of discovering early tuberculosis. Because early TB has no obvious symptoms. It is often unsuspected.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

One in four Americans died from it. 25% of all deaths. Not 25% of people who got sick. 25% of everyone who died. Like, period. So, you know, let that sink in like a dead body. And Louisville, Kentucky had one of the highest TB death rates in the entire country.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

And there is a reason for that. Louisville sits in the Ohio River Valley. Now, those of you from Louisville, I don't mean to talk ill, but y'all had a TB problem where a TB problem would have been much easier and less messy to solve.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

The elevation, the stagnant air, swampland along the river. It's gorgeous geography. For tuberculosis bacteria, you had an industrialization, overcrowded housing, or sanitation. Back then, you're basically building a petri dish the size of a city.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Tuberculosis was called the white plague, and that name tells you a whole lot. Like if you got it, yeah, you were probably gonna die. It attacked the lungs primarily. So, you know, you coughed, and then you coughed until you coughed blood, and then your skin went pale, and then you lost weight until you looked skeletal. And because it attacked the lungs, you were essentially slowly drowning in your own body. By some 1900 records, one-third of those affected died within a year, with 80% dying within 10.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

While all of this is happening, tuberculosis is being romanticized in art and literature. The Bronte sisters, Keats, Tropin, Kafka, TB was the poet's disease, man. You don't understand me, man. I'm too deep, type of stuff. But I have to say, if you had the deadly disease, you might as well try to make others jealous. There was this cultural narrative that consumption made you more sensitive, it made you more creative, made you more spiritually attuned to the unknown. It made you more emotional.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Oh, I see what you did there.

SPEAKER_02 5:58

People literally thought that the Poller of Dying was beautiful, which you know, I mean, I've seen runway models, so I guess not much has changed.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, now that I think of it, they do kind of go for that look. I mean, America's next top model is still kind of a national treasure. Like, don't read the headlines or, you know, watch the documentary, which then spins you into a spiral of watching all of the, you know, viral TikToks that are out there of all the interviews, and then I get, you know, sidebarred thinking about that. Just don't watch it. Or do. Anyway.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Anyways.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Now and then, however, while we glamorize that pale motif, actual patients were hemorrhaging from their lungs and overcrowded charity wards.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

Right, because we're gonna see the exact same pattern play out with all these ghost stories. The mythology and the drunk guy down the street, they tell us one thing. The reality is something else entirely, and the truth is usually somewhere in between, and also a lot more terrifying and drunk than you might think.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Well, in 1906, Louisville established a board of tuberculosis hospital to try to contain the epidemic. They purchased land on a hill in southern Jefferson County that had been owned by a man named Major Thomas H. Hayes. The property already had a name. Hayes had hired a schoolteacher named Lizzie Lee Harris to rent a one-room schoolhouse on the property, and she named it Waverly School after Sir Walter Scott's novels. Hayes liked the name so much he applied it to the whole property. Waverly Hill. W-A-V-E-R-L-E-Y. The board kept the name when they bought it. However, at some point, the second E got dropped, and nobody knows exactly when or why.

Building Waverly Hills For Fresh Air

SPEAKER_02 7:36

Which is fitting because there's a lot of things about this entire story nobody can explain.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

The first sanatorium opened in 1910. It was small, two stories, 40 to 50 patients, open-air pavilions. The idea was that fresh air, sunlight, good nutrition, and rest could fight tuberculosis. That was the best medicine science had to offer. But cases kept climbing, and by 1914, they'd expand it to 130 beds and it still wasn't enough. So in March of 1924, they broke ground on a massive new building designed by local architect D. X Murphy, five stories, with the capacity for over 400 patients. It opened on October 17th, 1926, and it was considered the most advanced tuberculosis sanatorium in the country. The Harvard of sanatorium consumption, some might say. Now, here's what treatment looks like inside Waverly Hills. The baseline was heliotherapy, which is a fancy way of saying they put you in the sun like you're in Miami Beach trying to catch a tan, and patients were wheeled onto rooftop patios and open air porches for extended ultraviolet exposure. Consequently, it was about this time that the first commercial sunscreen was developed. So fresh air was considered so essential that patients slept outside year round. There are actual photographs of patients lying in hospital beds covered in snow in the middle of winter. And this was considered best practice because for those of you who can't see, throw my arms up. There wasn't anything else to be done.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

So let's talk about what a quarantine does to the human brain. Now, I know it's inconceivable for most of us to think of a time where you might have been forced into a room and made to watch the equivalent of Netflix for years. Every person inside Waverly Hills, patients, doctors, nurses, staff, they're cut off from the outside world. You couldn't leave. Your family couldn't visit you freely, which might be great if it was just your mother-in-law we're talking about here. Unaffected children of patients were housed in a separate wing so they wouldn't catch the disease from their own parents. Your kid in the same building as you, and you can't even hold them.

Quarantine Life And Psychological Toll

SPEAKER_01 9:48

I wouldn't be able to fathom that at all. You see some weird shit, jail break, sanatorium break happening right here.

SPEAKER_02 9:55

I mean, you wouldn't have to babysit them, so there's that.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Well, I'm gonna play with them during the day and then go back to my sanatorium bed on the rooftop in the snow at night.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

Yeah, you could do that. Get a good breeze, right, right in the yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Yeah. Oh wow. Okay. Well, Waverly Hills operated as a self-contained community. As we mentioned before, they had their own farm with livestock and vegetable gardens. A actual water treatment plant was there. There was a butcher shop, laundry facilities, a maintenance garage. They had their own post office with their own zip code. This was not a hospital you visited, unfortunately. This was a world you entered, and for most patients, it just consumed you slowly.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

This is a closed loop. There's no escape, no agency. You are entirely dependent on an institution that is trying two things. They're trying to save you and they're trying to experiment on you. Now, when we talk later about why people believe this place is haunted, I think it has to start there. The living were already trapped. Why would the dead be any different? That was a pretty good line, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 10:58

I'm glad that you're so freaking proud of yourself right now.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

Am I so brave?

Brutal Treatments And Ethical Gray Zones

SPEAKER_01 11:03

You're so brave. Who else had to be brave? Yeah. Those were the patients. When fresh air and sunshine didn't work, and it usually didn't, doctors escalated to more aggressive treatments. So are you ready for it? Now if you're squeamish, look away or you know, plug your ears a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Or your nose.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Or yeah, definitely, because if you're a visual person, oh you're smelling this too. Artificial pneumonothorax. I think that's what it is.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Artificial pneumonothorax, which meant purposefully collapsing a diseased lung by injecting air or inserting balloons into the chest cavity. Well, with that theory was that a collapsed lung would rest, allowing the tissue to heal. Now, some patients did survive this. However, as you might guess, many, many didn't. And if that failed, there were even less attractive options. There was thoracoplasty, which is where surgeons removed several ribs from the patient's chest to permanently shrink the cavity around the infected lung. Now, this was a major surgery, and it came with a high fatality rate. And it was performed on patients who were already weakened by years of disease. And for patients whose TB had spread to the brain, kidneys, or bones, there was essentially nothing. You just wait it, you deteriorate it, and eventually you died.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

All right, so transitioning from that highbrow commentary, when does experimental treatment become torture? These patients had no alternatives. There's no PPO, there's no HMO. It was bad or worse. You're sick, you're trapped, and the person with the scalpel and really stern jawline, they're the law. No power for the patients. Mr. Hippocratus has left the building. And I'm not saying all the doctors were malicious. Most of them were desperate. But if I've learned anything about doctors, it's that they're very inquisitive. People do things that hit that itch and they convince themselves afterwards it was the right thing to do. Just kind of like a toddler. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And yes, I just compared a doctor to a toddler, and I'm not taking that back.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

I actually think I agree with you. All right. The next part is really disturbing if you haven't already found yourself disturbed. Because as death rates climbed, staff faced a morale problem. Patients who watched their neighbors die lost hope. And the prevailing medical philosophy held that positive morale was essential to recovery. So, hospital administrators needed a way to remove bodies without the living patients seeing it happen. So the solution was an existing underground supply tunnel. It ran about 500 feet from the bottom floor of the main building down the steep hillside to a set of railroad tracks at the base. The tunnel had a motorized rail and cable system originally used to transport supplies up the hill. They morbidly repurposed it. Bodies were placed on the rail cart and sent down the tunnel like it was Indiana Jones 2, out of sight, where they were loaded onto trains for burial or cremation. Patients on upper floors never saw a thing, and they called this the body shoot.

Making Death Invisible At Scale

SPEAKER_02 14:05

So they made death invisible. The entire system was designed so that dying could happen on this grand industrial scale and nobody would have to acknowledge it. This giant ghost elephant in the room. And now, decades later, that same tunnel, it's the number one attraction for people paying money to walk through the building at night looking for ghosts. The body sheet was built so the living wouldn't have to see death. Now, thousands of people, they line up and walk through it hoping death resurfaces. I think that saying something about humans in general, we're fascinated by death because they say it is our way to practice for the day it comes for us.

Room 502 And A Century Of Fear

SPEAKER_01 14:46

And I do believe that. Now, according to Dr. J. Frank Stewart, a former assistant medical director at the hospital, the highest number of deaths at Waverly Hills in a single year was 152. By 1955, that number had dropped to 42. Based on filed death certificates dating back to 1911, the estimated total is approximately 6,000 deaths. You'll see numbers online claiming 60,000, even 120,000, and those are wildly exaggerated. But 6,000 people dying in a single building is a staggering number. I don't think I need that inflate it in the least bit to be absolutely horrified by a body shoot that went up and down that many times. But now we have to address room 502 because it's the most famous legend attached to Waverly Hills. Room 502 was on the fifth floor near the nurse's station. The legend says that in 1928, a nurse named Mary Hillenberg was found hanging in the room. The story goes that she was pregnant, unmarried, possibly impregnated by a Mary doctor on staff, and that she killed herself out of shame. Now, some versions say the doctor performed a botched abortion and staged her death as a suicide, which is real light stuff, y'all.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

Yeah, very horrific.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Then, in 1932, a second nurse fell or jumped from the roof patio next to room 502. Now, some versions say she was pushed. Visitors today report overwhelming dread, shadow figures, and a disembodied voice screaming, Well, I'm not gonna scream it for sake of my scream as high. Get out when they enter the room.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

Some debunked this whole thing, obviously, but the thing is, even without documentation, the legend has persisted for nearly a century. It's been retold so many times in with such red-faced conviction that it's become a legend. This is Legion. And that's worth examining. Not whether Mary Hillenberg's ghost is real, but why we need her story to be real. Is ghost hunting like a religion? You can't always see it, but you know it's there in your hearts of haunted hearts. What does it do for us to believe that a woman's suffering was so profound it broke through the wall between life and death? It's kind of darkly romantic to envision a world where the dead don't truly leave us. Is it like TB? We glamorize the morbid, the death, the dead. Is it that feeling at night when we're dozing off to sleep and we see those shadows lurking in the corners? The feeling of our skin crawling with goosebumps, all for reasons we just don't understand. Is it why we make sure we tuck our feet inside the covers just to make sure those hands can't grab us and take us to a whole nother world?

Antibiotics, Closure, Then Elder Abuse

SPEAKER_01 17:29

That shit's real. Now let's talk the aftermath. In October of 1943, a PhD student at Rutgers University named Albert Schatz discovered streptomycin. Randomized trials between 1946 and 1948 confirmed it as an effective antibiotic against tuberculosis. The drug didn't reach Waverly Hills patients until 1949, but once it did, the patient population started dropping steadily. By 1960, the census was down to just under 300. Waverly Hills closed as a tuberculosis sanatorium in June of 1961. The building reopened in 1962 as Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a nursing home for elderly patients with dementia, mobility limitations, and severe mental disabilities. And if you haven't guessed it by now, this is where the story gets darker. Woodhaven was chronically understaffed and overcrowded. And reports of patient neglect and abuse became routine. Electroshock therapy was used widely. The state of Kentucky shut it down in 1982.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

So now you have a building with two distinct chapters of institutional suffering. Decades of tuberculosis death followed by decades of horrible elder abuse. And then it just sits empty. People start breaking in because, of course, developments take over, paint peels, ceilings collapse, graffiti covers the walls, and people start coming, not to mourn, but to hunt, to find, perhaps to be cursed forever.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

After years of abandonment and a revolving door of owners with failed plans, including proposals for a prison, apartments, and an enormous Christ statue, the property was purchased by Charlie and Tina Mattenley in 2001. They began restoration and opened Waverly Hills for historical tours, overnight paranormal investigations, and during Halloween, a haunted house attraction. The building has since been featured on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, BuzzSpeed Unsolved, and dozens of other paranormal programs. I vote Ghost Hunters, though, I just watched it before we record it. And I'm in love all over again with taps.

How Brains Manufacture Ghost Encounters

SPEAKER_02 19:40

I have no idea who that is. But let's just say he's amazing. They are amazing. And this is where I do want to shift gears, Catherine. Because Waverly Hills is the perfect case study for a question that, well, we both wrestle with innocently. We're not debunkers, we're not die-hard skeptics. We are, maybe somewhat reluctantly, believers. But we're believers who want to understand why we believe. So instead of just telling you the ghost stories, we're gonna do something different. We're gonna lay out the science, both sides of it, and let you sit with the discomfort of not knowing what watches you in the night. Let's talk about the science of belief, because there is a psychology, and our brains are working against us every single time we walk into a dark building. The first concept is called periodolia, and that's the brain's tendency to find meaningful patterns and random stimuli. How many times do I like to say this? Our brains like order for things to make sense, and if we can't make it make sense, we just make things up. You see a face in the grain of a wooden door, you hear your name whispered in white noise, your brain is a pattern recognition machine, and that would rather find a false positive than miss any kind of real threat. Evolutionarily, it's better to think there's a saber-toothed tiger in the bushes and be wrong than to think there's nothing and end up a delicious human omelette.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Hmm, okay. Well, there's also confirmation bias. If you walk into Waverly Hills expecting to experience something paranormal, you're trying to interpret ambiguous stimuli as evidence. You know, a draft becomes a cold spot, a settling beam becomes a footstep, a shadow cast by your own flashlight becomes a shadow figure in a doorway. Now, this isn't stupidity, it's quite honestly how human perception works.

Infrasound And Carbon Monoxide Explanations

SPEAKER_02 21:33

Then there's terror management theory, and this is developed by psychologist Sheldon Solomon and all his colleagues. The basic premise is that human beings are unique among animals in our awareness of our own mortality. We're not flies. We know we're gonna die. And that knowledge creates a constant, very low level existential anxiety. And if you've ever found yourself in the middle of a grocery store with a gallon of milk in hand, pondering your existence. And that one time in middle school you got pants in front of those girls. Well, you know existential crises. To manage that anxiety, we do construct belief systems that give us a sense of symbolic immortality. Religion, legacy, art. This is why people pay to have a bench named after them. And for some of us, this means ghosts, believing that the consciousness survives death. And from a psychological standpoint, this is one of the most effective buffers against death anxiety that exists. There isn't a dark void in nothingness. We don't just cease to exist. There's another world out there and maybe Betelgeuse is for hire.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

And this brings us to Infrasound. This is the one that has always been on the top of my brain since I first read about it. In 1998, a British engineer named Vic Tandy was working late in a laboratory at Coventry University that had a reputation for being haunted. So he felt intense anxiety, cold sweats, and then saw a gray figure in his peripheral vision that vanished when he turned to look at it. Classic Ghost Encounter. Now the next day, Tandy noticed his fencing sword vibrating in a vice even though nothing was touching it. As an engineer, he investigated. He discovered that a newly installed extractor fan was emitting a sound frequency at 18.98 Hertz. That's infrasound, below the threshold of human hearing. And 18.98 Hz is almost exactly the resonant frequency of the human eyeball, as established by NASA. His eyes were literally vibrating, creating peripheral visual distortions. The same frequency produces feelings of dread, chills, and the sensation of a presence. He publishes findings in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

SPEAKER_02 23:43

What would Tandy do but go on a ghost hunt? Of course. So he's going on a ghost hunting frequency finding journey. He hit all the old haunts, literally, locations all across the UK. He found elevated infrasound levels in cellars beneath Coventry's Taurus Information Center and Mary King's Close in Edinburgh. Now these were where infrasound readings were 200 times higher in reportedly haunted areas than in areas with no ghost reports. In 2003, researchers laced concert music with infrasound below 20 Hertz, which is kind of devious. 22% of the audience reported unusual experiences, including chills and sorrow and fear, without even consciously hearing anything different or taking that tab from the diet-eyed gentleman in the van.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Now, apply this to Waverly Hills. You have a massive decaying building from the early 1900s with structural damage, open shafts, wind tunnels created by broken windows, and aging mechanical systems. It is an infrasound factory. Every draft moving through that building could be generating frequencies that make visitors feel dread or see shadows and sense presences that just quite simply aren't there. And not because the building is haunted, because the building is vibrating at the exact frequency that makes human beings feel like it is.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

And we haven't even gotten to good old super deadly carbon monoxide. Old buildings with decaying structures and very poor ventilation can produce low-level carbon monoxide exposure, which doesn't kill you, but it does cause hallucinations, confusions, feelings of dread, and the sensation, the very fun sensation of being watched. One of the most famous debunked hauntings in history was caused by a faulty furnace producing carbon monoxide in the family's home. Alright, let's talk about the believers and their evidence. So we've laid out the arm-folded skeptics case, those very boring people. Paridolia, confirmation bias, terror management theory, infrasound, carbon monoxide. Look, those are all real. They're all documented, all capable of producing paranormal experiences. But here's where it gets fun and complicated because science doesn't explain everything. And here is where we separate the believers from the believers.

Near-Death Studies And Reincarnation Data

SPEAKER_01 26:08

The believers? Sorry, believers. Now, Dr. Sam Parnia is an associate professor of medicine at NYU Lingone Health and has spent over two decades studying what happens to human consciousness at the point of death. His aware studies, which is awareness during resuscitation, are the largest prospective scientific investigations of near-death experiences ever conducted. The Aware 2 study involves over 25 hospitals and studied thousands of cardiac arrest patients. The findings. Approximately 40% of cardiac arrest survivors who could be interviewed describe some perception of awareness during the period when they were clinically dead. This is some Julia Roberts flatliner stuff right here. Yes. 20% reported what Parnia calls recalled experiences of death, which included heightened consciousness, a sense of moral evaluation of their entire life, and perception of events happening around them. In the original aware study, one case was validated and timed. A patient accurately described events that occurred during their cardiac arrest, during a period when their brain should not have been producing conscious experience. Parnia's team has also captured brainwave signatures, specifically gamma wave activity associated with heightened consciousness in patients who were actively dying.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

Now, Parnia is so careful about his language, he might as well be sitting next to his mom. He doesn't call these near-death experiences, he calls them recalled experiences of death. And he's not claiming proof of an afterlife. Even though I think that's what he believes what he's saying is that consciousness may not shut off the way we assume it does when our heart stops. Brain cells don't die instantly, they deteriorate over hours. And during that window, something is happening that we cannot yet fully explain.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Then there's the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS. This is a research division within the School of Medicine that has been operating since 1967. Now, this is where I think it gets creepy because there isn't anything scarier than when kids start saying some off-the-wall shit. For over 50 years, they have been collecting and investigating cases of said children, typically between ages two and six, who spontaneously reported detailed memories of previous lives. Their database contains over 2,500 cases. And here's the numbers that frighten. Approximately 70% of their investigated cases have been solved, meaning the child's statements were matched to an actual deceased individual, often somebody entirely unknown to the child's family. And in some cases, children have birthmarks that correspond to wounds on the deceased person, verified by actual medical records. Carl Sagan, who is not exactly a believer, wrote that the phenomenon deserves some serious investigation.

SPEAKER_02 29:26

Full stop. That model has ghastly shaped gaps. There are documented phenomenon that does not fully account for this. And the intellectual response to that has to have some humility from all these rim-shaped glasses types.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

Exactly. And humility is uncomfortable. It's much easier to pick a side. Either ghosts are real and Waverly Hills is full of them, or ghosts aren't real and anyone who's ever reported an experience there is suffering from infrasound exposure and overactive imagination. Hmm. The harder position is the one that sits right in the middle. We can't know for certain. And that in itself is a bit scary.

Ostention And Rituals Of Belief

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Let's get real deep. There's one more concept I want to introduce because I think it's the key to understanding why Waverly Hills matters beyond just the ghost stories. Those folky people, they use the term ostention to describe the act of entering a legend and performing in it. And that sounds super confusing. But that means when you walk into Waverly Hills with an EMF detector and night vision camera and maybe a couple of kind bars, you're not passively experiencing a place. You are enacting a Blair Witch type ritual. You are participating in a cultural performance of absolute belief. Now, rituals matter. They're how human beings process things that are way too big and too complicated for our ordinary language. Death, suffering, the unknown. Waverly Hills gives people a controlled space to confront mortality. You walk into the building, you feel the dread, you maybe see something you can't explain, and then you walk out. You survived the encounter with death, and that matters to the human psyche, whether the ghosts are real or the ghosts are not.

Floor By Floor Hauntings And Entities

SPEAKER_01 31:12

And it's worth noting that the sanatorium itself functioned as a kind of ritual space for death during its operating years. Patients entered knowing that they might not leave. The body shoot ritualized the removal of the dead. The entire experience was separating the living from the dying. Waverly Hills has always been a place where humans sat down and talked to death. The only thing that's changed is how they negotiated that final act. Now, we've done the history and we've done the science. Now we walk the building. Because here's the thing about Waverly Hills. Grant Wilson from Ghost Hunters once called it a department store for the paranormal. Each floor is something different. And once you actually walked it, that's not hyperbole.

SPEAKER_02 31:57

A department store implies you can leave with what you came in with. I'm not sure that's how Waverly Hills works. Maybe it takes everything.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Well, we're gonna start where the dead started, which was the body chute. 500 feet of cold concrete sloping down through the hill, originally as a supply tunnel, repurposed into the most efficient corpse delivery system in early 20th century medicine. Like a water slide that runs out of water, which is a highly morbid accurate way of looking at it. Today, it's the first place most paranormal tours take you, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Visitors describe the sound of slamming doors at the bottom of the tunnel when no one is down there. Knocks, moans, footsteps coming up behind them in a stretch of a hallway with no one in it. People have reported strange lights appearing in total darkness. Sometimes a small white orb like you've ventured on UFO territory or something. And sometimes it's a brief flash that illuminates the walls and is gone before your eyes can really adjust to what it saw.

SPEAKER_02 33:01

And then there's the locking. Tina Maddenley, who owns the building, has confirmed on record that multiple people have been locked inside the body chute over the years. Nope. Hers in her included. No! The doors at either end are not the kind that swing shut on their own. Trust us, somebody or something has to do it. Maybe they're angry. Maybe it's kids messing around. I do trend to the former.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Listen, think about that. Whatever is down there is not just lingering, it's interacting. It's making decisions about who gets in and who gets out. It's like hot or not, but for the paranormal. Do you think our listeners remember hot or not.com?

SPEAKER_02 33:41

Depends on how old you are.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

I was read it like a nine at one point. I was excited about over 30.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

You put your picture on that? I did. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Of course I did!

SPEAKER_02 33:49

I know, of course you did. Of course.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

I was very young.

SPEAKER_02 33:52

Original influencing.

SPEAKER_01 33:54

I digress. Now, you enter the building proper through the first floor. Administrative offices, reception, the old cafeteria, the kitchen. This is where staff who didn't have to touch the dying spent most of their day eating cafeteria food and definitely smoking like a chimney. It's also where the most domestic haunting in the building takes place. Visitors regularly report the smell of fresh bread baking. Yeasty, warm, unmistakable, which smells great. Except there is no functioning kitchen anymore. The ovens are in ruins, the pipes are dry, and yet people walking past the cafeteria stop and ask each other if someone is baking. The answer is always no. At least not baking in their world.

SPEAKER_02 34:37

There's a figure that goes with this smell. He's a man in a white coat, not a doctor's coat. No, some people call him the chef. He's been drifting through what used to be the kitchen, sometimes seen in a doorway, sometimes just at the edge of someone's flashlight. He doesn't menace anyone. He just kind of seems to be working. The bread isn't going to make itself in the knight's kitchen.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

The first floor ghost isn't tortured. He's just busy. Whatever happened to him here, his afterlife answer is to just keep doing his job. And there's quite a freaking horror in that, I might say. I hope he enjoyed the job when he was still walking among us.

SPEAKER_02 35:13

I was a baker once and it was fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Would you like to be stuck doing it over and over?

SPEAKER_02 35:18

I mean, if I had to do a job over and over, it wouldn't be the worst one.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

Touche. No.

SPEAKER_02 35:22

Escort service, that was the worst.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Oh my gosh, Deuce Bigelow over here. Where's the money from that?

SPEAKER_02 35:28

They didn't get paid much. That's a problem.

SPEAKER_01 35:30

Wah. All right. The second floor is where ghost hunters captured what their team classified as a class A EVP, the goldstander in paranormal recording. Meaning a clear, unambiguous voice on the tape that nobody on the investigation made. The voice was a woman. The word was get out. And since I'm a nerd, I know what a class A EVP is. So thank you very, very much for that.

SPEAKER_02 35:57

Thank you, ghost hunters.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

I've been watching it for many years. Now, cold spots are the consistent report on the second floor. Investigators feel a draft, look for a window, and then find none. The 2004 Mid-South Paranormal Convention, and yes, that is a thing, had four separate investigators feel the same cold sensation in the cafeteria area within minutes of each other. One of them looked toward the hallway and saw a blonde woman in a hospital gown holding something over her mouth, walking past an open doorway. They went to follow. There was nothing in the hallway but the smell of lingering perfume.

SPEAKER_02 36:33

Hmm. I hope it was a good one. Reoccurring witnesses' reports in the same location with the same details, told independently by people who have never met. And this is a kind of hard proof that shows that there is something there. And it's forever, it seems, and it's walking the hallways. The infrasound theory we walked through earlier explains the dread. Guess what? It doesn't explain why two strangers describe the same blonde woman in the same gown walking about like it's a Sunday afternoon.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Now, the third floor belongs to a child, and his name, depending on who you ask, is Timmy or Timothy. He died at Waverly Hill sometime in the 1930s, most often described as being around six or seven years old, most commonly attributed to tubercular and meningitis, which is a cruel diagnosis for any age and an obscene one for a child. Visitors leave him toys, balls mostly, small ones, the kind a kid would actually want to play with. They place the ball on the floor at the end of the corridor, sit down and wait, and the ball rolls. And I would like to mention this has become what investigators do, due in part to season two, episode 14 of taps, where they did the ball with Timmy. And now everybody does the ball with Timmy. So if it's not working when you're investigating, pick a new toy. He might be over it.

SPEAKER_02 37:56

And by the way, everybody, this is uh advertisement for taps.

SPEAKER_01 38:00

Ghost hunters, the OGs, they're the best. Now, the ball moves. Let's get back to that. That ball moves not from a draft, not down a slope. People have leveled the floor with their phones to confirm this. The ball rolls, sometimes a few feet, sometimes the entire length of the hallway, sometimes back toward the person who placed it. Investigators ask Timmy questions out loud and get knocks in response. Hide and seek behavior. Children's laughter has been recorded multiple times in audio that nobody can account for.

SPEAKER_02 38:30

You know what, Timmy has to be the scariest because anything ghost-related in kids is always the scariest.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:37

Have you ever had a kid do like the exorcist voice? Yes. Yeah. And you pretend you're not scared, but you kind of are, and you're just staring down at this cute three-year-old. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

No, when you hear them in that exorcist voice, somehow you automatically also picture them staring at the end of the hallway in the middle of the night, staring at you, and then start like running at you like they're an animal.

SPEAKER_02 38:55

Oh, you don't even picture that though. They just do that. That's just true. Yeah, that's true. I'm gonna teach them to run, then we'll see how you feel about it.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Well, now I'm freaked out for um this evening's sleep. Carry on.

SPEAKER_02 39:04

Let's talk about Timmy because Timmy could be screaming, he could be terrifying. He spent his entire short life in a place built around concealing death from the dying. And somehow, what he is in death is a child who just wants to play. I don't know what that says about the soul's persistence after death, but it kind of says something in a very, very creepy Woody Allen type of way.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Now we move on to the fourth floor. And this is where every professional paranormal investigator on the planet eventually agrees the building is at its most active. It's also where it stops being friendly. No more Timmy playing with the ball. Doors slam, objects are thrown, visitors have been physically struck by hands that aren't there. The respected paranormal author Troy Taylor, who would describe himself as constitutionally skeptical, was on the fourth floor in 2002 when he saw a male figure cross a doorway in front of him. He demanded that the lights be turned on. The room had one entrance and one exit, and there was nobody in it. Taylor, who had been to hundreds of allegedly haunted locations and had never seen anything, came out of Waverly Hills declaring on record that he had finally seen a ghost, and he had seen it on the fourth floor.

SPEAKER_02 40:20

There's a man named John on the fourth floor. Amy Bruni and Adam Berry from Kindred Spirits made contact with him during their investigation. The history they uncovered. It's completely metal. You ready?

SPEAKER_01 40:32

Ready.

SPEAKER_02 40:33

You've been warned. While John was a patient at Waverly Hills, his wife was murdered by the man she was having an affair with. Oof. John was too sick to leave the building, which meant his children became wards of the state. And he died inside these walls with all of this happening on the outside, and he couldn't even reach out. They captured his shape on an SLS camera. They communicated with him. He was not initially happy to be visited. I can imagine he's not in a good place emotionally.

SPEAKER_01 41:00

Nah, and then there is the creeper.

SPEAKER_02 41:02

There is a creeper. Now, I did say Timmy was the scariest thing to me, but I may have spoken too soon.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

You did. The creeper is consistently described by people who have never spoken to each other across multiple decades in multiple investigations as the same thing. A solid black shadow figure, roughly seven feet tall with no discernible face. It does not walk, it crawls along the floor, along the walls, across the ceiling, and it moves with the speed that witnesses describe as wrong. Faster than a human can move, faster than the eye can comfortably follow, and it has been photographed. It has been caught on thermal imaging, and the descriptions match.

SPEAKER_02 41:43

Most ghosts at Waverly Hills are former patients, their former staff, their former occupants of a building doing what they did when they were still alive. The creeper is not that. The creeper is, in the words of the people who have encountered it, not human at all. Not a former human, not a remnant of a human. Whatever the creeper is, the consistent report is that it was never one of us. And that is a different category of question entirely. The question of what else is in that building besides the dead.

SPEAKER_01 42:15

Well, we've got to move to the fifth floor. And the fifth floor is small. Only two patient rooms, two nurses' stations, and a few closets, and, of course, the open-air patios where they did the children's son therapy. It is also, by every metric, the saddest floor in the building. Now we've already talked about Mary Hillenberg in room 502. The woman with bleeding wrists running down the corridor is reported in the same area. Some visitors believe she's Mary. Some believe she's the second nurse, you know, the one who fell from the roof patio in 1932, but some believe she's the third figure entirely. A patient whose name nobody recorded. What people consistently report is a full-body apparition, female, hospital gown, wrists open, running, screaming, and vanishing when approached.

SPEAKER_02 43:03

Remember the ghost hunters who recorded a class A EVP in room 502? That woman was saying, get out. Their thermal cameras drop 40 degrees in the room during the same investigation in seconds with no draft. There is also an elderly woman who wanders the fifth floor searching for her children. That ghost is almost certainly an artifact of Woodhaven area. The dying of one institution is seemingly just mingling around with this second bout of horribleness.

SPEAKER_01 43:30

And from room 502, you walk through the patio doors and onto the roof. Now, this is the part of the tour that is possibly the most heart-wrenching. The roof is where they brought the children for sun therapy, heliotherapy, you know, wheeled out in their beds, in their gowns, into the open air, supposedly to be healed by the same Kentucky sky that had infected them in the first place. There are old photographs of nurses with rows of children on the roof, all of them tucked under blankets, all of them smiling for the camera, almost none of them surviving. Visitors today report children's voices on the roof, singing, laughing. The specific song most people often recognize is Ring Around the Rosie.

SPEAKER_02 44:11

Which, depending on which folklores you trust, is either a nursery rhyme about the plague or a nursery rhyme that has nothing to do with the plague that everyone has decided is also about the plague. Either way, on a rooftop where children were dying of a respiratory disease, that's the song their ghosts are singing.

SPEAKER_01 44:30

They were brought up there to be saved, and they weren't saved. And the part of them that's left up there is doing the only thing children do, which is play. That is a sound I think would make me do that old timey girl fainting thing if I ever actually heard it.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

So that's us taking inventory of all this completely petrifying phenomenon. The smell of bread on the first floor, the blonde woman on the second, Timmy on the third, the gosh damn creeper on the fourth, Mary, the running nurse, the woman searching for her children on the fifth, the singing on the roof, ring around the rows, the footsteps and the locked doors and the body chute. And underneath all of it, the shadow people, the doppelgangers, the homeless man and his dog who died on the property after the building was already abandoned, the labored coughing that investigators record echoing through hallways that have been empty for a half century.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Professional paranormal investigators who have spent overnight investigations at Waverly Hills consistently rank it among the most active locations they've ever investigated. The building has been featured on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Kindred Spirits, who, by the way, have people who used to be with Ghost Hunters, Destination Fear, and dozens of other paranormal programs. Not all the evidence is compelling, but not all of it is easily dismissed either.

SPEAKER_02 45:53

So let's leave it there. Waverly Hills is a building where 6,000 people died in agony from a disease that was literally eating them from the inside, where nurses may or may not have killed themselves, where elderly patients were later abused and neglected, where the architecture itself was built around concealing death from the dying. If any building on earth has a right to be haunted, it's this one. Whether it actually is, that depends on question science hasn't finished answering yet. And as far as Catherine and I are concerned, hell yes, it's haunted.

Final Takeaways And Listener Callouts

SPEAKER_01 46:29

Yeah, I agree. Alright, mugshotters. We know you're dying to get out of here. So if this episode got under your skin, don't just disappear into the night like a body down to shoot. Hit follow on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen. Leave us a five-star rating. And if you got 30 seconds, drop a written review. We will see it. We will feel it. And unlike the patients at Waverly Hills, we will actually be discharged with good news. Find us on Instagram and TikTok at Mugshot Mysteries Podcasts. But as always, before we go, Gabriel, what have we learned today?

SPEAKER_02 47:06

We have learned that ghosts are scary. We have learned that there are skeptics and there are believers. But whatever side you fall on, you're gonna have to rely on some sort of faith that you're right. We have learned that regardless of your beliefs about what happens at Waverly Place, it has a history that would make the devil blush. And finally, as far as Catherine and I am concerned, like the moon landing, when talking about the paranormal, there are those who are skeptics and there are those who are right.

SPEAKER_01 47:36

Us.

SPEAKER_02 47:36

Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_03 47:46

Sneaky footsteps in the night. Clues that vanish out of sight. Grab your hat and magnifying glass. We'll talk this case and have a blast. Mug shot mysteries. We're on the trail. Twists and turns that never fail. Laughs and chills. It's quite the show. Who did it? Tune in to know. A stolen gem, a secret note. A shady figure in a trench coat. The clock is ticking, the plot gets thick. We'll crack this puzzle quick as a click. Mug shot mysteries, we're on the trail. Twists and turns that never fail. Laughs and chills, it's quite the show. Who did it? Tune in to know. Follow the breadcrumbs through the hay. Every clues and peace in this crazy maze. Fun and thrills wrapped in crime. People love it every single time. Twists and turns that never fail. Laughs and chills it's quite the show. Tune in to know.