The Real Ghosts Of...
The Real Ghosts Of...
39. The Real Ghosts Of...Waverly Hills Sanatorium: Part 1
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Embark on a chilling journey with Nicole, Damian, and the crew, as we unveil the eerie history of Waverly Hills Sanatorium as we kick off Season 5 with a location from our paranormal bucket list. Once a beacon of hope for tuberculosis patients in the early 1900s, this Louisville, Kentucky institution has since become infamous for its hauntings. Discover tales of the nurse who met a tragic end and the young child who still roams the halls. We'll also explore the notorious "Death Tunnel," a 537-foot passageway that has fueled countless ghostly legends.
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EXCLUSIVE BONUS CONTENT + LIVE HANGOUTS: https://www.patreon.com/ParaPeculiar
MEDIUMSHIP MENTORSHIP WITH NICOLE: https://www.therealghostsof.com/mentorship
LURK: https://www.instagram.com/therealghostsof/
WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/@therealghostsof
Do you have any stories you'd like to share for a Wine & Spirits episode or somewhere you'd like us to investigate? Send us a message and let us know!
Welcome to the Real Ghosts of Podcast, where we explore haunted locations in and around Austin, Texas. We're your hosts Nicole Ricardo and Damien Shelacey.
SPEAKER_04Listen along as we couple in-depth historical research and paranormal investigative techniques with a sixth sense of the unknown.
SPEAKER_05Hello. Hello. Uh welcome into the 2025 edition of the Real Ghost of podcast.
SPEAKER_03We're still here with you.
SPEAKER_05We are. Barely. We're hanging on by a fucking thread, but here we are.
SPEAKER_03We had a wild year.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, 2024 was a dumpster fire, as you probably could tell by the uh the frequency of uploads of episodes.
SPEAKER_03We promise that's changing.
SPEAKER_05Yes.
SPEAKER_03We're gonna get better about it.
SPEAKER_05We're back on our shit. I mean, for for a variety of reasons.
SPEAKER_03Back up on that grind.
SPEAKER_05Um, yeah, 2025. I mean, personally was just kind of a shit show.
SPEAKER_032024. Because now you're looking into the future. You're looking into the future with your media mystic.
SPEAKER_05No, no, 2024. No, 2025 better be good. Otherwise, I'm out of here. Aliens, come get me.
SPEAKER_03Well, we may have experienced them last night.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that was weird. Um, yeah, we had Sarah, Sarah Reeves came over and a bunch of her people, and um, a bunch of our Paracademy Patreon people, and we did a little, you know, we tried to summon some aliens. A little CE5 session.
SPEAKER_03Can we just take a moment to talk about how our poor neighbors probably feel?
SPEAKER_05Oh god.
SPEAKER_03Because we had people out in the backyard doing this, these sessions.
SPEAKER_05Well, listen, you walk around wearing a hat that has conspiracy theorists, so if they don't know by now, like, I don't know what to tell you.
SPEAKER_03I think that's one level. The second level is when they hear in the backyard a group of people loudly proclaiming that they are on a they're on a spaceship, there's a gray, you know.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so anyway, yeah, 2024. Um, we also uh I mean I know we have mentioned it quite a few times on here, but yeah, we also were um putting a lot of effort into our Patreon last year and doing a bunch of live streams and things for them over there last year, and we were doing the parapeculiar podcast, and we were traveling a lot.
SPEAKER_03We were traveling a lot. We did the Kentucky trip, we did several paracons, we did the lectures, we've done libraries, we were all over the place.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, speaking at different paranormal conventions and cons and all of all of those things.
SPEAKER_03So all that to say, if you thought we were gone because of the episodes not coming out, no, we've always been here with you. We're still going.
SPEAKER_05We were not gone, we were just, you know, hanging on by a thread. Hanging on by a thread. Um, but anyway, so yeah, 2025, here we go. And I was actually in my brain, I was debating for a while because I'm I'm a perfectionist, you see. Um I know. It's shocking, shocking to everybody, I know. But um, because I went back and looked back at all the RGO seasons, and they usually have like like 11 or 12 episodes or whatever. So I was like, oh, do I just like keep going until it's 11 episodes and have that be, you know, RGO season four or whatever still, or do we just start over that we're just starting over. So 2025, I mean, the way we've always done it is each year is kind of a season.
SPEAKER_03So yeah, well, there's a lot of things that we are kind of evolving, I guess, about everything we do from RGO to parapeculiar to everything we do in the Patreon. 2025 is gonna be great, and we will we do promise to at least make the attempt to get more episodes out of the RGO podcast for you so you're not waiting for months.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and I mean, I mean, to be really real, the goal is we wanna try to kick things out to an episode a week. Um don't like hold me to that because I don't wanna, you know, I'm not gonna like pull all nighters three nights in a row and you know, to try to like do that like we need to take care of ourselves also. However, um, I mean, just with what we are going into for this first episode series on Waverly Hills Sanatorium, um, we're basically turning it into a whole Waverly month. So we obviously will have the history of the location, we have our investigation portion of the location, we're gonna do our down the rabbit hole uh where we, you know, talk about our weird theories and you know get kind of deeper.
SPEAKER_03Some of the weird little experiences that happen that I don't know that we touch on too much during the episode, right? Like where, as an example, me and Donna uh getting sick at the same time, um, hopefully we get to feature uh our boy Eric's uh haunted blue jeans.
SPEAKER_05Oh my god.
SPEAKER_03His haunted Waverly pants.
SPEAKER_05Uh yeah, and then we also do have a little um episode, it's gonna be kind of a little mini episode, but some bonus stories that our guest researcher for this investigation, um Chelsea Wagner.
SPEAKER_03Shout out Chelsea. Shout out Chelsea. Can I just say really quick, not to interject, but I love Chelsea. She is amazing, and we got to spend some time with her on our trip to Waverly there. And she hung out and she was really just down to ride, so enthusiastic, so creative, so fun, so amazing. Yeah, shout out Chelsea.
SPEAKER_05She also is one of our um OG people to join the Patreon as well. And it's I just love when we've, you know, corrupted our people, and the only times that they've investigated have been with us. So the first time that she ever did an investigation, she actually um flew down, and we let her go on an investigation, RGO, and then this was Waverly Hills.
SPEAKER_03This was literally her second investigation, which is a bucket list for a lot of people in the paranormal world.
SPEAKER_05It's been a bucket list for me.
SPEAKER_03I know people that have been investigating or ghost hunting for years, yeah. And they don't they don't get the opportunity to do that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's one of those places where you know you grow up as a little ghost, ghost investigator, hopeful, dreaming of being able to go here one day. Um, but anyway, so yeah, she did she found um a little compilation of some really neat stories that you know it's not directly related to like the paranormal things or anything we experience, but they were just kind of fun stories.
SPEAKER_03So fun stories. And I think just did another shout out to her. She's so good at being a little historian.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah. And this is again to nobody's surprise, I'm a perfectionist and very type A. Listen, I have very high standards for That's why you hang out with me for research and history. Yeah, this is this is why we have many recorded episodes on Parapeculiar that this is how this all ends by me murdering you. Yeah. Wait for that episode. Or the other way around. It'll be it'll be episode 1000. This is the final episode. Anyway, um, I have very high standards, and Chelsea, yeah, she's a copywriter. Um, she's also very type A, very perfectionist. Um, hats, but she she really dug into it with this, and she was even able to pull up records of like um like patient logs and you know, finding all of these things. So that was really freaking cool. Really cool. But speaking of, you know, the history and the the patient logs and Waverly being such a bucketless place. So obviously, I knew where we were going, okay. Like I I planned this road trip for us because again, Taipei. Um, there's no way I'm letting Dana.
SPEAKER_03You did a great job by the way, on that. We that was a really good itinerary. All the places we stopped. And I think we are gonna do a special RGO episode, even though we didn't investigate there, it was on the trip of the Bellwitch Cave. So look out for some of that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, we definitely want to talk about that. But um, yeah, so I I planned it. I planned the trip. So obviously I knew where we were going, and while first of all, I have a five-minute memory span. So even if I had, you know, watched episodes prior, you know, go shows, whatever, am I gonna remember that shit? Absolutely not. But um, and I also didn't research the history or anything. However, I didn't do a walk of the location, you know, for obvious reasons because you definitely got your steps in if you had a walk of that fucking place. Oh god, well, I mean, we did, but um, yeah, it is massive. So, I mean, that would have been freaking three episodes by itself. Just us walking down the halling a walk.
SPEAKER_03Nicole, what do you feel?
SPEAKER_05Um, yeah. Well, at one point, funny story because I don't think we'll include this anywhere in the episode. I was literally walking down the the hall with my eyes closed. Do you remember that? Because I was like just listening back, um, going through all of the audio. And yeah, because you were like, well, I don't know, find somewhere that you know that that you get feelings from, and we'll go in there and we'll start investigating it. So I was literally walking down the hallway with my eyes closed, and and I was like, Don't let me run into something.
SPEAKER_03Well, there you go. And it was wild, and the stuff that we will touch on with that investigation. Um, I mean, some of the most wild experiences that I think you or I collectively have ever had happened at Waverly. So we'll dive into that for sure. Just one more little shout out. Thank you, Chelsea, for being such a friend to us and doing a great job on the history. We appreciate you and love you.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, she killed it, she nailed it.
SPEAKER_03Um Can we talk about that actually though? You the way that we did your well, the way that we utilized your talents.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and let's talk about that because I do think that this is something, and I mean, for anybody who has listened to either one of our podcasts from the very beginning up until now, it's been a journey. Love that you can hear the evolution in, you know, our thinking on things and like philosophies and theories based on the experiences that we're having as we continue to have more and more and more, you know, um, as it should go. But anyway, so yeah, the mediumship, obviously that's you know, something that's very like typical of the RGO episodes. I do we do the history, I do my walk, um, we do the investigation, we kind of talk about it. That's the episode, you know. Um, however, we are going on another paranormal road trip this year. Yeah, we are road tripping to Chicago, which quick shout out. We are uh we have been invited. We are being brought out as guest speakers for Windy City Parafest. We are so excited, which is yeah, that I mean, honestly, that's like a bucket list item for us because like freaking John Tenney is speaking there, who's like somebody we pretty much idolize, you know.
SPEAKER_03Adam Barry will be around there.
SPEAKER_05You know, it's and like I think Heather Moser will be there, our good friend.
SPEAKER_03I mean, everyone's gonna be up there.
SPEAKER_05And they're bringing us out, yeah, and our haunted wares.
SPEAKER_03These two idiots, these two idiots, these two bruvs.
SPEAKER_05These two bruvs. Is that the is that the first bruv on RGO? I think that was the first RGO bruv. So uh shit. So for you to be in the know, we really fucking went down the rabbit hole on Love is Blind and we binged on the biggest. And then we and then we binged um Love is Blind, UK, and you know, instead of saying like bro or like dude, you know, they're like bruv.
SPEAKER_03Bruv.
SPEAKER_05I just really love bruv. It tickles me.
SPEAKER_03So we it cooks your bacon.
SPEAKER_05It cooks my it cooks my bacon. So we've been saying bruv, and now we have like everybody else is saying bruv. Like Rachel was over here like calling us bruv last night. Sarah was saying bruv. Oh my god, Eric's are talking here. Eric said that he he made a shirt and he took a Sharpie and wrote bruv on it.
SPEAKER_03So I'm gonna get B R U V across my fingers.
SPEAKER_05Oh my god. Okay, so anyway, we're we're 80 degree right now. It's the morning, okay? It's 11.
SPEAKER_03It's 1111. It's gray out. It's um it's our kind of weather.
SPEAKER_05It's our kind of weather. I haven't had any coffee yet, although I am trying to cut back on that. We'll see how that goes.
SPEAKER_03We should do we'll do wine and spirits on why that is.
SPEAKER_05Um but yeah, look. Well, that's a good idea, bruv. Hold on, I'm writing it down. Write it down while I just kind of go into the mediumship while I make my note.
SPEAKER_03One thing that we noticed doing these um experiments and having these adventures together is sure, we can put Nicole in a historic place and she can do a what they call a walk and get vibes and feelings, you know, using her mediumship skills, to pick up on pieces of history that are maybe unknown. And while I think that is certainly uh awesome and amazing, um, and it's something that we always will say, Nicole, what's coming to you when we're on these locations? We wanted to amp that up a notch because one of the things that I really was starting to understand was when someone like Nicole, who I know to be very talented at this, okay, but when people hear someone like Nicole on these podcasts doing something like a walk and talking about what their their feelings are, a lot of people are gonna look at that or have the ability to look at that and think, well, she just looked it up on Google. This is all very easy stuff. And a lot of the places we go, unless it's something that's super unknown, it almost does make no sense to do that because it doesn't seem to be adding much in the way of showcasing what it is that Nicole is doing with this stuff that we call mediumship work. So what we noticed is, and I started calling you my little battery because of this, but when we do these experiments in these locations, whether it's Estes method or some of the other visualization stuff that we'll do, we noticed that our your skills come out infinitely better and and in more profound ways. So I think we've started utilizing your skills in a different, more investigative approach, in a as a way to make contact with what it is we're looking for.
SPEAKER_05Well, are we allowed to share the example from you know uh Hill House? Oh, are we allowed to share that? Just to like give them an example of what you're talking about, because like uh and just to clarify, like, yes, if it's a location that I can do a walk of, obviously I'm still gonna do that. Like, we'll always incorporate that. However, like okay, like I'll give a different example, not Hill House. The road trip that we're going on, like we're probably gonna hit like it's gonna be an entire season's worth of content, you know what I'm saying? Like, if we do if we do what I have mapped out right now.
SPEAKER_03I will say before I jump back into what you're saying about the about the experience, but yeah, this year we do plan also to really have on video almost like a vlog. That's what the kids say vlog. Yeah, okay, diary, video diary, doing like little mini vlogs of our trips as well. Of what we're doing, because when I looked through the Waverly stuff, I mean, I've got video of Eric humping a a brick wall at Sun Records because he's loves Sun Records so much. You know, we've got uh you and me and Eric singing Disney songs at the top of our lungs in the car going nuts. Um videos of hotel rooms with gunshots through the glass.
SPEAKER_05And by the way, Disney will be coming along on this road trip as well. I already told Sir Talking Hair to ensure that there is frozen on the playlist.
unknownMan, fuck my life.
SPEAKER_03I would rather get demons. Um anyway, so there's now you can get both. There was an experience, we will touch on it. Not we will not the Hill House one, because we can't talk about that, but there was a different location, which I won't say, which we were in a specific room of this location, and inside that room there is this closet, a very small closet, and we're doing an Estes session, and you and I have this great ability to really get these wildly long, very compelling Estes sessions come through.
SPEAKER_05Which I also just need to note this is something that we talked about before. I it's so funny when I like listen to other people like other shows, other just like investigators, whatever, people who are doing Estes sessions, they'll be like, Oh, I can only do that for like like 10 minutes, and then I'm getting this like crazy migraine, or like, you know, they'll they'll like come out from under the session, they're like, Oh my god, that was so wild, and I'll just like go chill under there for like 30, 45 minutes.
SPEAKER_03Well, for those because Octagon Hall episodes are already out, and that that whole Estes session was was insane. Um, but at this location we were at, you know, Nicole's under, she has the headphones on, and I'm asking questions, and Nicole keeps telling me like what's coming through is closet, closet, closet, right? So I'm like, hey, you want me to go in the closet? Yes, yes. So I'd open the closet door and it was so small, and it's full of these different, just like storage, basically. And Nicole kept saying, go in, go in, go under, go under. And I was like, I'm too, I'm too big, which is which was great for me, by the way. I want to point that out. It was great for me to say, I'm too big to go here.
SPEAKER_05Yes, big. Because I'm using it, Damien. How tall are you?
SPEAKER_03Tell the people on the fucking podcast.
SPEAKER_05Tell the people, Damien. Five's. Yeah, he's we've actually there was one, there is one part in the Waverly, uh, we're doing Estus, and I say, he's small. Oh God.
SPEAKER_03It's the motion in the ocean, baby. Yeah, I'm five six. Um, but I couldn't get in. I kept saying I'm too too short to me, or I'm too big to get in here. And you you kept saying, go in, go under. Anyways, didn't think much of that. Thought it was interesting. Months go by. I'm talking to the owner of this location, and they tell me, and they did not know about this session, by the way, and they're just telling me you know, kind of news of what's been going on with the location, and they said, We think we found out that there's actually a secret basement which is accessible in the closet of this one room, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Uh I was like, Fuck, you know, because we had that wild session where you were basically saying that in in my mind, and I I could be reaching. I don't think I'm reaching there. It just seems too compelling.
SPEAKER_05One of the things that we've talked about, you know, we were kind of talking about this last night, actually, when Sarah was over here and um Rachel and a bunch of her, you know, um our little experiment. Uh like the people who are working with her, whatever, mediums and training. Um, that everybody has their like different specialties, you know, and things that they're like just naturally really good at and good at picking up on. And for me, so fucking weird, but like, I don't know. I'm just really like good at seeing structural things of buildings. Like it happened when we were at Moonshines, actually. There was this one area, it's right behind the the main, the bar in the main entranceway. And I was like, there used to be a stairway here, you know.
SPEAKER_03Golly, hold on. This happened at Galvez.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it happened at Galvez too. Yeah, you'll see it because it's a it's just something that always pops out to me. I don't know why. But yeah, we were able to go.
SPEAKER_03I can't even uh wrap my head around when you got that. I was like, oh boy, hot dog. Because you thought it you were like two rooms.
SPEAKER_05Did we ever do an episode about that? Uh I don't remember.
SPEAKER_03I don't think we did. Anyway, we got some cool shit from that investigation, but yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um we see five-minute memory spans. Yeah, but anyway, yeah, I don't know. It's just a weird thing that like I always pick up on structural things. Like, yeah, the the staircase I kept insisting, like, no, there was a staircase right here at Moonshine. Then we were able to go back. We went to the History Center and we're able to find original maps of that building, and there was. There was a staircase. I don't so I don't know. It's weird, it's I mean, a pretty mundane, like generally useless thing to pick up on. But like, if you want to know what the original layout of your house was, I can probably tell you.
SPEAKER_03What did you do with your lab, Nicole? Well, let me tell you, I am picking up on areas of a building that used to be there that are no longer there. Yeah. Yeah, that's with no purpose anymore.
SPEAKER_01Stupid, but no, but it is profound.
SPEAKER_03It's profound. So when you did that and some of these other things we mentioned, it's funny you said the structural thing because it did make me go right back to the Galvez and you saying that about the room, which we confirmed, and you know, which was kind of wild. So boy, we went off on a tangent there.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so anyway, um, oh yeah, well, because we were talking about the mediumship stuff and how we're gonna be mostly like tapping into the Estes sessions.
SPEAKER_03Well, in different ways that we go about the Estes sessions, as an example, we're gonna be incorporating this fancy device that we have over here, this Casina Mind place, which we used last night with the group uh to great success. And again, shout out Sarah for bringing over people that have never met us before. And we're go-I mean, I I literally I'm leading this CE5 session talking about my weird theories, and you're over here.
SPEAKER_05We're cool paranormal investigators.
SPEAKER_03Well, or unhinged. Yeah, unhinged. So shout out to Sarah for bringing a bunch of new people that were probably sitting there like, what the fuck can I get myself into? I don't want to be a medium anymore. Yeah, and we're talking about fucking plasmoids and so we want to utilize Nicole's sort of skills in a better way that do a few things. One, they really show you, the listen the listener, a more profound um example uh of that. But two, it also, in my opinion, and you can obviously touch on this, but that's how someone like you will be more in a constant development of these skills because you're using them in this way that I feel is less surface level. But you're the listener, let us know. If you'd rather have Nicole going through and talking about the history and whatever, versus some of these weird things we're gonna do to try to use her is this sort of paravattery.
SPEAKER_05Well, I mean, they're gonna get both. It's just gonna depend on the location. If I know where we're going.
SPEAKER_03Right, 'cause like a Waverly it wouldn't make sense. Yeah. Now, if there's a place that is very not known. Very not known, very not known. Um, yeah, we'll still do Yeah, I'll do a walk. Your OG walk.
SPEAKER_05Um, so anyway, that's what's going on there. And speaking of mediumship stuff, uh, if you Would like to learn all of these weird things that we're talking about. Uh uh, one of the twenty twenty-five updates is I will now be officially doing mediumship mentoring.
SPEAKER_02So right through our Patreon, huh?
SPEAKER_05Um yeah, so we are doing more of it in our Patreon. We're gonna be doing um well, we have a monthly, it's called Ask the Oracle, which is basically a mediumship development, you know, quite a bit.
SPEAKER_03Which is really radical, by the way, because uh when you do the Ask the Oracle or any of these mediumship development classes, you're given your thing on it, and uh like a virus, I sit next, I stick right next to you. Typically that gives this great ability I will have questions that will go deep and then you'll be able to go deep on some of the stuff. So if you want to not just learn this stuff from Nicole, but really go deep in it to understand that world.
SPEAKER_05And we also I'm I'm a big fan of you know hands-on development. So when was it? Was it last month? We literally we took a field trip for one of the classes, and we all went to the Driscoll, actually. Yeah, um, and we walked around the Driscoll, had you know, everybody kind of go to the hotspots, write down their impressions, whatever, and we had Monica with us, Monica Ballard. Shout out to Monica. Um, she is a tour guide for Austin Ghost Tours as well. But wrote the book on the book. And she also literally wrote the book on the hauntings of the Driscoll, and she was so incredibly kind that. Um But she was so incredibly kind, she came with us as well and hung out, and so she was able to be there to like validate and share the history and all of these things that everybody was picking up on.
SPEAKER_03Which got out Kat, by the way, who showed up. She's one of our Patreons. She crushed it. And I remember leaving that night and looking at it, giving her a hug and saying, Hey Kat, it has been amazing for Nicole and I to see you develop like this.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and that was literally the very first uh the first time that I met her, she came to uh the medium chip boot camp that I did. Um so act now. So anyway, um yeah, join our Patreon if you want to get things like that, and obviously, you know, you get all the other stuff, like all of our investigations.
SPEAKER_03Well, if you want to see random videos in the corner of pajamas looking at flies that are in the house because we've done that.
SPEAKER_05Oh my god. Yeah, that was something that happened last time. You get the real inside peek into our lives. Um the real lives of, the real ghosts of. Um fuck. But anyway, uh yeah, so there's that. So you can go join our Patreon for more of that. Or if you are like me and you're just like, dude, can you just fucking like tell me exactly what I need to do? Um, I am doing one-on-one mediumship mentoring now as well. So uh you can just send me a DM, reach out to me about that, and we can uh talk about that. So there's my quick plug for this episode. This episode is brought to you by me.
SPEAKER_03Um call me now.
SPEAKER_05Oh, those Ms. Cleo commercials. Um yes, sadly I am not Miss Cleo. I apologize for that. But um, yes, if you would like to learn um how to further tap into your abilities, let me know. And I can uh help you do that. So anyway, there's a lot of talking. I don't even know what we're at now, but um, I think those are all of the like updates and housekeeping and things. Is there anything else?
SPEAKER_03I don't believe so. Just really pay attention in 2025 if you are a listener, if you like this podcast, or if you like parapeculiar, or if you like both. You're gonna see a lot of cool stuff this year. We now have more of an ability, even which we'll touch on on a different episode of one of our podcasts at some point, of why that is, but we now have the ability to really be more connected to this than we were in the past couple of years.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, coming into Parapeculiar 100th episode, ES Pizza.
SPEAKER_03ES Pizza.
SPEAKER_05Uh so if you want some hot gosp, make sure you tune into that one. Um, but anyway, okay, so there's all of I think the thing. So um now let's actually get into Waverly. So uh the Waverly history that you are about to hear, um, you'll kind of hear us mention this in the beginning of the recording, but we did it a little backwards. So we actually did our investigation of Waverly, and we did not sit down to hear the history until the next day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um which actually I guess that's not backwards because typically I don't know the history, but usually we do the history like when we're at the location to get that in real time, like, oh, okay, and then we kind of know where to focus our efforts. But um, we were there with it, it was a pretty large group of uh other people. Like everybody was kind of doing their own thing and investigating. Oh my god, I have to sneeze so bad. I hope it doesn't. I hope it doesn't have it. No, it's no, it's okay, okay. I'm willing it away. But anyway, there were stop. There were there were a bunch of people. So we did try to record it at one point while we were there, but there was just Oh, there would have been no way. Yeah, there was a bunch of shit going on in the background.
SPEAKER_03But of ghost hunters.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so ghost hunters kicking indoors looking for ghosts.
SPEAKER_03They were kicking them in with their lasers.
SPEAKER_05But god damn it. But anyway. So yeah, we recorded the history. It was the next day.
SPEAKER_03Um, we were staying at the beautiful Let me just paint this picture because when you hear this audio of wonderful Chelsea going through the history. You might not envision the only nice hotel that we'd stayed at on the trip, by the way.
SPEAKER_05The only nice hotel that the only hotel, which just to paint this picture for you further, the only hotel that we've paid more than like, I think, sixty dollars a night for. Okay. So it was literally my goal was like, what hotel is the cheapest hotel that we can stay at that looks like we uh have a good likelihood of making it out alive. Oh boy.
SPEAKER_03So join our Patreon page. Uh to paint this picture when you're hearing Chelsea.
SPEAKER_05The the steel bot.
SPEAKER_03The steel bot. So we're beautiful. We're in this room that uh was gonna be shared by uh two of our near and dear family members, Eric, Eric and Wayne. And it's a small little sort of room, but as Chelsea's recording this history, we're all in there together. And if you can imagine a disheveled group, probably uncut unkempt, unshowered. We've had experiences, we've been on the road.
SPEAKER_05We just are coming off of this overnight investigation as well. I think we were there until like like four.
SPEAKER_03It was so late. It was so late. And then so we were had a couple hours of sleep. We've lost our minds at this point sitting in this room as Chelsea reads this history.
SPEAKER_05At one point, I literally fell asleep.
SPEAKER_03During Chelsea reading the history. Yeah, I think. I hope we hear your snoring.
SPEAKER_05I no, my snoring is not in it.
SPEAKER_03Because that way we can listen back and be like, what was that?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, yeah. My snoring. Um, so that's that's where we were at when this occurred. But anyway, so um, yeah, so let's let's take a listen. It is uh it is in depth, it's very detailed. Um shout out to Chelsea, and here is the uh history for Waverly Hills. And we're finally sitting down to hear the history from our guest historian on this episode Drumroll. Chelsea! Chelsea! Uh she's one of our wonderful Patreon members and one of my friends and clients, and we love her so much, and she's a copywriter, and she's also a type A, just like me. So I'm very excited to hear everything you dug up on Waverly.
SPEAKER_02I didn't forget to mention her impeccable taste in Hower.
SPEAKER_05That yes, please, please discuss because that cannot be neglected.
SPEAKER_04Well, she has impeccable taste in Hower.
SPEAKER_05Thank you.
SPEAKER_04Very welcome.
SPEAKER_00That's actually how Damien has remembered me for two years is Red Hat girl. Chelsea with a red hat.
SPEAKER_05Chelsea with a red hat. Well, here she is in the flesh. In the flesh with some wonderful history for us on Waverly Hills.
SPEAKER_00I'd like to say it's delightful, but it's actually kind of tragic at times, but it is going to be engaging, so you know.
SPEAKER_05I'm sure your your portrayal of it, your writing of it will be delightful. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate that. Well, so Louisville, Kentucky, the home of Mohammed Ali, the Louisville slugger, the Kentucky Derby, excellent bourbons, and of course, rumored to be one of the most haunted locations in North America, and I think we've confirmed that now in the last 24 or so hours, Waverly Hills Sanatorium. So now, although it stands five stories tall today, with beautiful brick walls spanning two wings attached to a central administrative section, it wasn't always that expansive. When the hospital was originally constructed in 1910, it was a simple two-story wooden building with a capacity for just 40 patients. So the city of Louisville determined that a sanatorium was desperately needed to combat its tuberculosis outbreak because it was a major hotspot for the epidemic due to its warm climate and humid suburbs as a result of it being located in the Ohio River basin. Tuberculosis are often referred to as the shortened TB, which is how I'm predominantly going to be referring to it because, once again, we don't have time for all those syllables. That was the second deadliest, or is the second deadliest, infectious disease in recorded history, falling only behind the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University. TB is a bacterial infection that commonly sets up CAMP in the lungs, but it can also spread and establish dominance in other human body organs as well. Patients with TB experience symptoms like persistent cough, this sometimes includes blood or mucus, general chest pain and painful breathing or coughing, fever, chills, night sweats, tiredness and fatigue, and loss of appetite and weight loss. Now those last two symptoms are important and they led to some interesting legend throughout history because the people who had TB would often appear very gaunt and pale. And as if that wasn't terrifying enough by itself, the spread of TB was sometimes followed by rumors that people who were who had succumbed to the illness were thought to come back from the dead as vampires and feed on their loved ones who lived in the same room because or in the same home. Because if you think back to that time, we didn't know what germ theory was, right? And so people didn't know how an illness would transfer from one person to the next. And so when they would have a family member die of tuberculosis, and after they had died, one of their family members started to display the same symptoms. I mean, obviously the only logical explanation was that the late family member rose from the grave at night possessed by an evil spirit that willed them to feed on the blood of their still-living relatives, inspired, um, we think, by Brahm Stoker's Dracula novel that was published in 1897. Uh so survivors was were so concerned about this prospect that they would even exhume the body of a suspected vampire and perform a ritual to put the body and soul to rest once and for all. And so obviously, you're going to ask me next, what sort of rituals did they think? Chelsea.
SPEAKER_04Chelsea, pray tell. Pray tell. Pray tell.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for picking that up, because I literally deliriously couldn't spit it out.
SPEAKER_05I seem there.
SPEAKER_00What what rituals did they perform? So, likely inspired by some of the traveling healers that were visiting the Northeast United States from Eastern Europe and Germany, that area, rituals would vary from relatively tame practices such as simply turning the body over, because obviously uh a corpse on its stomach couldn't crawl through six feet of dirt, uh, just like one on its back could. Right. So turning it over, that's obviously logic. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Could it do push-ups?
SPEAKER_00But apparently not. Apparently not. You never know that answer. Yeah, as far as we know, it worked. Um so they could in other rituals would also remove uh the heart and the liver of a suspected vampire and burn the offending organs. And that would apparently do the trick. There was another case, and this is really fascinating too that I want to dig into a little deeper. Um, the tale of the Jewett City vampires near Griswald, Connecticut, where archaeologists discovered 29 skeletons with residual signs of TB that had been rearranged into a skull and crossbones pattern. Each skeleton was rearranged into a skull and crossbones pattern and then re-buried.
SPEAKER_05I mean, honestly, that's kind of fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, I I want to see pictures. There's pictures on the interwebs, but um I did not include one in my paper. But we will look that up and share it with the parahouse.
SPEAKER_05And then we'll uh we'll post on Instagram.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. Um, because that's fascinating.
SPEAKER_05Umember that, because I won't.
SPEAKER_00I I will remember, don't you worry. I will I. Um so all of these rituals obviously were very effective methods of halting the spread of TB uh in their respective communities, and they all lived happily ever after. JK, no, it obviously wasn't that simple, unfortunately. So the development of an active TB infection wasn't a total death sentence. It didn't automatically mean your life was at an end, but the outlook wasn't great. It was referred to as the white plague due to the paleness of the skin of the infected, and it claimed 114 lives out of every 100,000 people in 1920. Now compare that to about 20 per 100,000 today. It was a big problem back in the day when they didn't have the proper means to resolve um the infection. And so Louisville's answer to this high prevalence of TB in the area was to div to build the Waverly Hills sanatorium. And to be admitted into Waverly wasn't exactly like going to hospice, although we know of a lot of tragic um stories, and and a lot of people didn't make it out alive. Um, however, it was known as one of the cutting-edge facilities for the treatment of tuberculosis, and a lot of those treatments were experimental in nature, but it was widely renowned as a place to be trusted for the care of people with TB. Now, that is different from the geriatric facility that uh was housed in Waverly Hills later after TB had seen a tremendous downturn in the number of. Yeah, that that is a different story. And we don't go into that in a whole lot of detail here because um it wasn't open as the geriatric facility for terribly long, I think not even ten years, uh maybe seven, um, before it was closed down by the state. Uh, but when it was Waverly Hills Sanatorium, um, it was well respected. Uh so it wasn't just the ability to focus on new treatment methods and things like that that was what made Waverly Hills important, but it also served as a way to quarantine people who had TB to prevent the spread broadly to many other people, um, particularly in hospitals. You know, it a sanatorium is a place that is dedicated to a specific illness or a specific type of illness to contain it away from the general population or others who are ill at normal hospitals to keep them uh safe from those kinds of high transmission diseases. Uh so it's very isolated, even to the extent that it there was productive farming on the ground. So there were hundreds of acres uh of land around the building that we know of as Waverly Hills Sanatorium. Uh much of that is a golf course now. But it used to be almost drove into. Yes. Um very it's sneaky getting back to the Waverly Hills campus today. Um and yeah, you do feel like you're about to go golf around a nine or eighteen holes. Um, but anyhow, so there used to be farming, and one of the cool things about that would was that patients who were on the mend and ready to be reconditioned to fitting back into normal life, um, they would go through a sort of occupational therapy, so to speak, and learn skills that would set them up for success when they re-entered um society again. Uh so they would they would help to manage the farm and they would learn skills like sewing and things like that. Uh, so they would be well equipped to get a job after having been in the sanatorium for what was typically a very long stay, actually an average of 373 days. So the average length of stay was longer than a year at Waverly Hills Sanatorium. TV was no joke.
SPEAKER_03Was that really mainly for the fact of the containing the quarantining? Like that way you would stay so long, or is it just because it was such a difficult thing to address when you had it?
SPEAKER_00It was a very difficult thing to address when you had it. Um and we'll get into some of the uh the uh methods that they use to try and treat it later, but um but yeah, it you would be sick with TB for a very long time. Some people would be s like act actively sick with it for a period of years. And generally in those cases, the outlook was not great. Um but yeah, so that that contributed to uh the average stay being that long. Um and it wasn't people would be on the mend. I I didn't see anything that was specific about how long somebody would stay at TB after they were given a clean bill of health. Um, but I think generally as they started to improve, it was still a long-term improvement process, um, which is how they ended up having the opportunity to gain these skills while they were there.
SPEAKER_05Medical treatment in school all in one.
SPEAKER_00Yay, sounds great, doesn't it? But wait, there's more. So even though Waverly Hills was often thought to be the last living destination for patients suffering from tuberculosis, the hospital was well known for groundbreaking and cutting-edge treatments. But if we think back to that time, scientific advancement is never linear, and so groundbreaking in this instance doesn't necessarily mean safe and effective. Such treatments are often thought harsh and brutal by today's standards, but if you think back to that time, we didn't have the wealth of medical knowledge that we do today, and a lot of that knowledge we have is because of some of the experimental work that was done very early on.
SPEAKER_05Because we perhaps fucked around and found out.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, that is an eloquent way to say experimented on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Exactly. Um yeah, I mean, yeah, it is. Um so it's hard to blame the doctors of that time, though, because they they didn't have any answers. They didn't have anything that was like a surefire way, and they couldn't just let people die, right? So they had to just try anything that they could think of that might possibly help the patient in some way, shape, or form. Uh, some of the most common treatments were fresh air, which is why there are so many open pavilions at at Waverly Hills, as we noticed. Rust, lots of rust, and a diet of highly nutritious foods. So a lot of the produce that was farmed at Waverly was, you know, fresh, freshly uh grown produce that was um used actually at the hospital. Uh so it was mutually beneficial there. Um some of the more experimental treatments though included lobectomies and pneumonoctomies. I have to know what that is.
SPEAKER_05Pneumonectomies.
SPEAKER_00Pneumonectomies. Say that five times fast. Pneumonectomies. Pneumonectomies. There we go. It's close. That's good enough. Um so that is where parts or sometimes the entirety of a lung, whichever lung is infected with TB, if it's only one, is just completely removed uh surgically. Um there was also heliotherapy, which which is sun treatment, effectively. And I read some interesting things about this, and I think all of this, the the more chaotic forms or descriptions of heliotherapy, I think were just rumors more than anything, who of people who wanted it to be creepier than it was. I read things online where people were saying heliotherapy consisted of actually opening up the lung cavity and exposing the lungs to uh sunlight because that was supposed to kill the bacteria. I think heliotherapy was literally just putting people out in the sun. I think that's all that it was.
SPEAKER_02So there was no cutting open and like exposing the innards of a person to sunlight.
SPEAKER_00Could not rule it out from the research that I that I did.
SPEAKER_05Um They were trying to kill the vampires, Damien. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's how you're sure how we do it, I think. Yeah, yeah. According to Hollywood legend.
SPEAKER_00That would make sense. Makes sense to me. That'd do it. But they thought that sunlight killed the bacteria that caused TB, so e even if the more creepy uh descriptions of heliotherapy aren't true, it's just sticking people out in the sunlight, kills off the TB. It's great. Um there was also thoracoplasty, uh, or the surgical removal of several rib bones, which would then collapse that lung, uh, and that's said to basically relieve the muscles in that area that are very inflamed from having that infection, um, and apparently collapsing the lung was supposed to help with that. That one feels like a non-intuitive solution, but how do you collapse a guy's lung?
SPEAKER_05I mean, that's I obviously have never like had that happen, but I mean my best friend Angela dealt with a collapse lung and it sounded absolutely horrific. And apparently, like in the hospital, they were saying that like the amount of pain dealing with a collapse lung is like one of the most painful things that you could ever experience. I I can't even it sounds horrific.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I hope hope to all that is good in the world that I never have to experience that. But yeah, it that was a a method of treatment and not something that was done by accident. Um I'm good. Um no so another way you're excused. Goodbye. Damien out. No, just kidding. He's still here. Um with you. So another way that they would try to bring relief to um the area of the lungs would be artificial pneumothorax, which is the infusion of air into the layers surrounding the lung, which would collapse the infected area of the lung. So maybe not the entire lung, um, but just the specific area that was infected uh with TB. Uh and then there was always this this one was interesting to me. This would probably be where I would start personally, um, but this is uh postural rest, and this is where a patient would lie on the affected side to constrict the movement of that damaged lung, which would force it to not work as hard. So sounds like it would probably be a little painful, but it would force the the lung not to work as hard, which would in theory force it to rest and and be able to recuperate more from having uh the disease. Um personally I I would rather start trying that instead of uh having rib bones taken out, but you know, they probably weren't given given many options at you know, you can have this option.
SPEAKER_02You can lay on your side or hear me out, hear me out. Yeah, we're gonna crack open those ribs and go that way.
SPEAKER_00And hey, while we're at it, while we're at it, we're gonna shine some UV lights in there. That's right, and then then no more TB. You're you're good. You'll have a collapsed lung, but don't worry, the TB is on its way out. So, so it but this was all that they knew how to do, because we didn't have antibacterials at the time, or at least we didn't have an antibacterial that was suitable and effective for eliminating TB. That didn't come until later in the 40s, yeah, the mid-40s, I think. Um, but that's in the extended version, which I will The extended edition. Extended edition, I will share uh THS. Just like the Titanic. Wow.
SPEAKER_01Great reference. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh I'm old. Moving on. While the more extreme treatments were not uncommon, the medical medical community generally agreed that the very best methods of recovery were fresh air and good old-fashioned RR. Fresh air was considered so important that patients would be required to sit outside for periods of hours in the open air pavilions at all times of the year, even in frigid January temperatures, when it would get down into the single digits at times. They'd be bundled up in blankets in a relatively futile attempt to keep them warm. But that fresh air was so important, they thought that, you know, we're just we're gonna sit them out there and just make sure they don't freeze, because that fresh air is gonna cure their TV. Um, so with all of this, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think about why Waverly Hills could have earned its reputation as one of the most haunted buildings in the world. So if we consider that a common cause of many types of hauntings is tragedy, despair, and sorrow, there was certainly no shortage of such events and emotions during the time this building was a sanatorium. And later, as we mentioned earlier, when it was reopened as a reputedly poorly managed geriatric center. So the rumored total death toll at Waverly Hills, and I think this is actually published on the Waverly Hills website, is 60,000 total deaths. And let's consider it was only open for 35 years at a tuberculosis sanitarium. So yeah, so so so I did some math because like Nicole said, I'm type A. Math was a math, and mathing and math and y'all. Um that would be 1,714 deaths per year for every year during the 35 years that Waverly had a capacity for over 400 patients. So this was by the starting by the time that um it was the big five-story brick building that we all got to explore. Um, and before that there was only a capacity for 40. So I I didn't even include that in the potential uh uh calculations to make the 60,000 number map add up. And so while it had a capacity for over 400 patients, that would literally be four to five deaths per day, every single day of the year.
SPEAKER_03Which would probably not make it this sort of renowned center that it was if it was just like, hey, come on, like imagine the brochure, if you will. It's like you got TV, come on over here to Waverly Hills, you'll be dead very soon.
SPEAKER_05Well, but here's the thing though, and this is okay because you know, we love playing devil's advocate.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_05Um, when I went to the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, that originally was run by, you know, Dr. air quotes, Dr. Norman Baker, who wasn't actually a doctor, but he would claimed that he had the cure for cancer and whatever else. Um, but people died there all the time. But he specifically had uh the layout built so that way the bodies could be remor removed without other people seeing it. So whenever people would go there and they would pass away, they and other patients would like ask about it, and they would the staff was instructed to like make up excuses, basically like, oh, they got better and they went home, you know.
SPEAKER_03But I think to Chelsea's point, I think in this instance the map is so flawed that it's an impossibility. And it makes me wonder why that would be on the Waverly Hills. Because I've seen that over 60,000, and nobody really contested it. As a matter of fact, when we were there, you could hear lots of people running around talking about that and talking about how it was an abdominal bunch of people and running around and had all these problems. You have to wonder why that even they would have that history on their website.
SPEAKER_05Well, I mean, the reality is like even the the very first RGO investigation in Blockhouse Creek, just in the research that we did for that, I literally found documentation that the the historical marker at the front of Blockhouse Creek is literally wrong.
SPEAKER_00Well, and I also read that uh histori local historians in the area marketed at closer to six to eight thousand, which is still high. That's still a lot of things.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's not at all sixty to eight.
SPEAKER_03No, it's like ten percent of that large number, and I just it's it's interesting to me because we do this history piece it's so flawed specifically in the types of places that we cover on this podcast.
SPEAKER_05Well, I think in in the paranormal specifically, I think it's a very big issue. Yes.
SPEAKER_03Huge issue.
SPEAKER_00I do want to point out too that that 60,000 uh deaths figure first made its appearance after uh Tina and Charlie Mattingley. They're the owners of of Waverly Hill. I I I think his name is Charlie, is the the name of the guy who owns it. They they purchased the property back in tr the early 2000s, and their goal was to renovate it. Charlie's dad was a janitor at at Waverly Hills. I'll look that up and if I'm wrong on that, we'll correct it and make sure that's in the notes. Um, but and so it held a special place in his heart for that reason, and they were set on um trying to refurbish it. And uh they actually purchased the property, I want to say for $250,000. No, I I I shit you not. And there's actually more to be announced or to be uh released in the extended version. But there were there at one point in time somebody had bought the property wanting to turn it into um, so you know the the big Jesus Christ uh statue down in Brazil. Yeah. Somebody wanted to build one bigger than that on the top of Waverly Hills on that fifth floor uh pavilion area. Uh so somebody had purchased the property with the intent of building that, and I think they they tried to do a fundraiser for that um nationwide, and they collected all of $3,000, and I think they needed like $500,000 in order for that project to even kick off. Um so that obviously fell through. And I think that Tina and Charlie bought it from him, if I remember right. But it changed time hands uh a few times between the late 70s and when Tina and Charlie bought it in uh 2006 or 7, I think it was. Um but anyway, the figure of 60,000 deaths started floating around around that time because before Tina and Charlie bought it, it was just this old decrepit run-down place that teenagers would love to break into. They could go to the bottom of the death shoes.
SPEAKER_04You can see the graffiti.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And so um they broke in because it was this big cr uh creepy, decrepit old building um that was spooky. And so that was how uh it was positioned um when Tina and Charlie bought it because that was it it helped get attention on the location so that they could sell tickets and drum up interest and get people um to contribute, basically, financially, so that they could start renovating the building. And so I I believe that's I think that it's just a part to try and get people, huh?
SPEAKER_03It's disgusting. It's a disgusting thing to do, right? To like a completely alter history and stuff to regard.
SPEAKER_00Yeah that they did.
SPEAKER_026,000 six is a big job.
SPEAKER_00Yes. But let's see. Going back to the math, so if you think about um that six to eight thousand number that local historians believe is more accurate, and by the way, that correlates more closely with the recorded deaths that we have in the area. Unfortunately, there was a flood at one point in time at Waverly that wiped out a lot of the paper records that they had. Um, I think that was sometime in the 40s, maybe. Um, and so a lot of those records were lost, but there were still documents at local state um wherever you keep those documents filed. Uh so six to eight thousand, that's still around 200 deaths per year. So that's still a fucking lot. That's still a lot of deaths in a year. That's almost one per day. The vast majority of them. So I told you, Nicole, when I first started researching this, they have a list of uh documented death certificates on the Waverly Hills Sanatorium Historical Society website. Uh, they've got a Google Sheets doc of it, and they have a list of who what was their name, what was their sex, what was their uh date of birth, date of death, and what did they die from. So the vast majority of them out there say they died of pulmonary tuberculosis, uh, but there were a handful that I found that were cardiac arrest, or um, I think a very sad one was uh a newborn had passed away um at Waverly Hills. So there were some some occasions where it wasn't TB related, but the vast majority of them were tuberculosis. Um and yeah, still 200 deaths a year. That's that's still an incredibly high mortality rate when you think about it, they they have a capacity for 400 patients, and the average stay of a patient is 373, so that's still insane to me to think about. Half almost, it's like exactly. So if that number was intentionally inflated, it's unnecessary, and to your point, it's it's not if not the case. If that's the case.
SPEAKER_03I say that because I see this rampant in, as you say, the they call it the paranormal community specifically. And it is. I I think to sell tickets to a place. I do have to ask, I mean, we we have all this TV stuff with with Waverly Hills, and I I guess there was a point where there was the geriatric center or whatever. Was there ever anything else? Was there anything else more to that?
SPEAKER_00Or is that all th those were the only two active institutions that were that had a history at at uh Waverly. The others were just let's buy this property and try to repurpose it for something, and there's one thing that somebody was gonna try and do with it, and I can't remember. I want to say they wanted to convert it into a hotel or something. And then that fell that fell through. Um and I don't remember I couldn't find actually details on why that specific initiative fell through. I think just because it would have required so much of an overhaul on that building to turn it around into something that would be able to uh operate as a functioning hotel. So um, so yeah, there were different plans that that folks had tried to bring about for Waverly, but here we are today. It is a well-known haunted location, and you can rent it out for paranormal investigations and blah blah blah. I think every Halloween they do still soup it up like a uh like a haunted house. We saw the the haunted house structures in there. Um got some feelings on that, but I'm gonna I'm gonna withhold those for now.
SPEAKER_04I've got feelings on it. I won't I think no, I think it's kind of ridiculous.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's unnecessary, right?
SPEAKER_03It's just uh it's if you want to make a haunted attraction, which I'm very pro that, I love those, but don't take this big old historic building, this beautiful thing that has this rich in history, and then do that to it. That's just my small rant.
SPEAKER_00No, and I I I I agree. I agree with that. Um so moving, if we if we think back to we talked about the death chute, right? The death tunnel, the the body chute. Um, that body chute was originally constructed as a means to deliver coal and other um other types of supplies from the highway directly up to uh the facility. That was what it was originally for. However, as the mortality rate started to increase, um it was repurposed to accommodate uh being able to move bodies of the deceased out of the building in a way that other patients couldn't see it because it was it was harming morale. Like if you think you're you're in here for this disease and people all around you are dying of that disease, and if you see, you know, there goes, you know, Sarah, who is my card playing buddy, and now she's not gonna be playing cards with me anymore, um, that's pretty sad, right? And we all know uh that attitude and and like that you gotta hope matters so much when it comes to uh recovering from something. And so it was repurposed as the body shoot for that reason so that the deceased could be respectfully removed down to the highway where the uh the uh oh help me out, Nicole. The body remover cars, the hearse, the body remover car. That thing.
SPEAKER_03That is a uh just trademark that term. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That was literally the the words in my brain, and I was like, no, I need the actual words, please. Um yes, the hearse.
SPEAKER_03Well, it's funny that you mentioned the it was uh initially used uh to bring supplies up because we walked that whole thing last night and we saw the railing, didn't we? Where it would have been I was what did I say, like a I can't remember what I call it.
SPEAKER_05Well it looked like it would have been some sort of track or something. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Which you know, you put the things in yeah, I mean you can just throw a body in there and get it down and you're good to go if need be. Little Timmy's going out.
SPEAKER_00Hold that thought. I'm holding it. Um so yeah, it it was it was used as a discrete method for that. Um so whether the resident haunting Oh, did I take out okay, yeah. Whether the uh resident hauntings at Waverly are former patients, hospital staff, or entities simply attracted to the residual negative emotions, there's certainly reason to believe that something otherworldly is afoot in the crumbling halls of this dramatic old centaurium, which has attracted both teenage trespassers during the 80s and 90s, as I mentioned. Uh actually I was telling some guys that I work with that I was doing this, uh, and one of them was much older, grew up in the Louisville area, and he was like, Oh yeah, I've been there. I said, Oh, you took a tour? He said, Well, kind of, and he admitted to uh being one of those who went to the end of that death chute where it had been buried with dirt, but like all they had to do was unbury the door to the death chute or the the death tunnel and walk up. Can you imagine being 14 years old and going down there?
SPEAKER_05That's absolutely what I would have been doing.
SPEAKER_03Oh, it's funny 100%. All the accounts I've read about people that have done that at Waverly Hills, broken in, party, this and that, not found one that says anything about haunting.
SPEAKER_02All of them say it's creepy, it's cool, it's decrepit, they had a lot of fun, drink a bunch of beer, nothing. I just find it interesting. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Hmm, yeah. I hadn't I haven't dug into a lot of the counts from that standpoint yet. One my next I wanna because I'm never done researching a topic, even when I've done the writing and done I'm I'm still always gonna go back. I want to look up in like Reddit Paranormal communities or something like that and and see what I can find there as well. Because I think there's probably s and that's hit or miss, right? Some there's you can you can go in and I just want to talk to the owners now and be like, hey, what is going on?
SPEAKER_03This is a huge discrepancy in a lot of this stuff. Where did you get your information? Because this is showing this, and that would be probably the the the best source, but they probably don't like that very much.
SPEAKER_00Uh no, probably not. Yeah. Uh but but if you wanna if you want to champion that, Damien, uh you you go right ahead. I'm your champion. And hope that they never listen to this podcast. Uh so uh lots of different people have been attracted to this location over the years, right? Um and since since Tina and Charlie Mattingley purchased it in 2001, apparently, I I did have that written down. Um opened its doors to the public for tours and investigations. The intent is for proceeds from ticket sales and so forth to go towards the restoration of the building. I find that kind of interesting because they've now owned it for about 20 years plus, and uh it's I mean, they have nice bathrooms. I'll give them that. They are nice bathrooms. They do have nice bathrooms. Which is like you're time traveling at that point.
SPEAKER_04You're in this decrepit hallway and you open a bathroom and it looks like a nice hotel.
SPEAKER_00Like, nicer than the hotel we stayed at last night. Yes. Um, but I digress. I do that a lot. Waverly Hills even hosted the 2007 Extreme Metal and Metal Core Music Festival, Sounds of the Underground. But sadly that probably won't happen again because too many of the neighbors complained.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, they're competing on their golf course.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, on the golf course and and that that other street that we drove down accidentally that was Which you can see signs that are like, do not come, do not they probably have so much the bullshit they have to deal with because of the you know people going to Waverly Hills to deal with that, yeah. Alright, y'all want to talk some hauntings?
SPEAKER_03Do you I would I want to ask one real quick though, like for history of Waverly, in your research, did it ever come up this thing that everyone says about Waverly Hills? And I heard it a bunch last night and we were there from other people. Was it at ever any time uh psychiatric?
SPEAKER_00Yes, so floor four was thought to be where uh was it four or five? I think it was actually five. I think floor five was where uh people they would still generally be people with tuberculosis, but they would be people with tuberculosis who also had mental conditions where their behavior and their activity would disturb some of the other patients and so. They would be moved to the fifth floor. Gosh, you like the problem floor. Alright. Which is why the fifth floor is reportedly one of the more haunted areas of uh of the building. Interesting. And we have some more details on that here in a moment. Um so a huge variety of different things that are seen at Waverly, which is just fascinating. Uh things like shadow figures, full-bodied apparitions, moving objects, orbs of light, uh intense cold spots, doors opening and slamming closed, including locked doors by the way. Uh disembodied screams, EVPs, batteries draining and electronics behaving strangely, people being touched or even pushed, and even symptoms like headaches and nausea in certain rooms. So were you all marking off your bingo sheets of what you experienced yesterday? Yeah, exactly. And that's just uh that's why I've been so excited to read this after we've gone through and investigated because I'm like, yes, we experience these things. We'll get to that later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so one of the most popular stories is that of a little boy named Timmy. Little boy named Timmy. Those who have seen him say he appears to be about six or seven years old, and Timmy likes to play ball, especially if that ball is the color blue. Supposedly, if you roll the ball on the third floor, Timmy will roll it back to you and not due to any tilt on the floor. I'll just roll it back to you. I've not seen a video of this happening, but that is the way the story goes. There are also reports of a screaming lady and a shy lady, both of whom are full or partial apparitions. The screaming lady is elderly, and if you catch a glimpse of her and she sees you see her, she'll supposedly run away screaming and terrified. And rumors say that she uh that her hands and legs are bound to chains and very bloody, so it's supposed that she was a mental patient from the fifth floor in life. That one just doesn't feel that one feels like a made-up one to me. It just does. But I saw it in multiple sources, so here we are.
SPEAKER_03It's worth noting. This is not to take away from experiences or stories that are true or not true. Almost every haunted place has a checklist of stories. A little boy or a little gal that has a favorite ball, it's typically a favorite color. As an example, at a certain place in Mineral Wells, that ball is red. And if you throw it this way, it will come back. This is almost at every haunted location. There's always a suicide, like a hanging, there's always this, uh, that. I mean, it's interesting to me that we have the same sort of phenomenon that we can't really verify. So that's kind of wild.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so down the stairs in Brooklyn.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Dress cool. Cough, cough. Um, the uh the shy woman doesn't like to be seen. She's most often often noticed peeking around doors and hallway corners, and generally only observed later in photographs. So I look forward to going through our uh evidence in much more detail later to see if uh if we're able to see her on quote unquote film. Um might have seen her eyes. Might have. I don't think I don't think that was the shy lady though. I think that one was someone something different. Um what's probably the scariest story that I could find about Waverly is what's called the Creeper, which is known to crawl around on all fours, even climbing along the walls and along the ceiling. And when the creeper is near, people often feel a deep sense of dread and inexplicable terror. It's said to exude a very dark and violent presence. It's possible that it's not even a normal entity. Reports have suggested it could be a grim or it could even be demonic. So, uh, if so wish for a visit from the creeper only if you dare. I'm done. Yeah, no, I think it's wild. That's why I wish that I could have read this while we were still there last night, because I would have told you, like, it's I think it's most often seen in the the body shoot, too. So I feel like we would have made another step back.
SPEAKER_05It's created by us.
SPEAKER_03Right, because if you think about what on all four legs is, that's an it's a it's an unnatural way to move and walk, so it becomes creepy, so it's interesting how we didn't see that guy last night. I kind of hope I wish we did.
SPEAKER_00I know. See, I knew that you would.
SPEAKER_03I knew that put him on a leash and walk him around and all fours.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Alright, creeper, let's go forward.
SPEAKER_02That's a good creeper.
SPEAKER_00It's a good creeper. Good creeper. So the creeper may be the scariest story that Waverly has to offer, but one of the most well-known and arguably the most tragic story is the story of the nurse in room 502. Now, while there appear to be no records documenting this story, rumors suggest that a nurse named Mary Hillenberg had an affair with a married doctor at Waverly in the 1930s. This affair led to an unintended pregnancy, and when Mary confronted her lover, he had wanted nothing to do with it, or her any longer. She was supposedly so distraught that she conducted an abortion on herself first, and then afterward, after a very traumatic abortion, she hung herself from an exposed pipe in room 502. And supposedly she was discovered later by a maintenance man named Mr. Thornberry. And side note, I did find a an obituary record in the local courier journal for a Mr. Thornberry who was a maintenance man at Waverly. So that was just an interesting tidbit that I found. Um while that's the most common version of the story.
SPEAKER_03I guess not.
SPEAKER_00No, no, so that that was that was the guy who supposedly found her. Um it just seemed like otherwise a i I think he was in his 70s, so it it was um it just appeared to be old age in his case. Um and if if that were true, like I I searched through newspapers.com and stuff like that to see if there was an article, but but the the thinking is that Waverly covered it up. Whatever, whatever it is that supposedly happened, supposedly there are no I God, I need to stop saying supposedly that's like the sixth time. Allegedly. Allegedly. Um so i i it's thought that there are no records of any of that happening because it was covered up by the hospital. Uh so another p version of that story and of of Mary specifically, um also is supposed to be a cover-up. Uh so a team of investigators, including a medium, pieced together a version suggesting that the doctor and a crew of an orderly and two members of the trustee board actually murdered her, setting it up to appear to be a suicide. So, in this version, the doctor may have even performed and botched an abortion on Mary in the operating room on the fourth floor. Um, but that's not the one that was the most compelling to me. The most compelling version that I was able to find um is based on the context of an interview I heard from I think it was a T F I L. I don't remember what it stands, but it was this group of investigators that I found on uh on YouTube that did a very long um investigation of Waverly, and their tour guide had a very interesting side story to tell about this particular scenario. Uh so he's going through the tour guide and sharing his version of events based on interactions that he had had with multiple investigators who had been there, and a different medium walked up to him after he told this different version of the story and said, That that's exactly what I have picked up on every time I've been in this room. Um, and I've investigated here like three, four, or five times, I forget how many, how many times, but it had been multiple, and she received the same information every time. And so in this version of the story, Mary was just doing her rounds in the middle of the night. She was actually uh an older sister, and her younger sister had died of tuberculosis. So when she got older, it became her mission in life to be a nurse for tuberculosis patients. Uh, she was up on the fifth floor, and at this time, um, I think there was a children's ward of some kind on the fifth floor as well. There's actually a pretty cool picture of a children's play set that's in the open air of the fifth floor where the kids would play. Um, but she was the nurse on duty for the children's part of the ward on floor five, and she was just doing her round in the middle of the night when another employee of Waverly, um, whether he was a doctor or whether he was uh an orderly a maintenance person, we don't know, but he attacked her. And she tried to fight him, but he had a large size advantage against her, overruled her or over overtook her, he raped her, and he killed her. And tragically, she was a virgin before this incident. Her story to this medium is that the hospital covered up her death and that her truth was lost to time. So investigators and mediums alike have repeatedly received messages from Mary asking to share the truth of what happened to her. So there you have it, folks. Eerie and unsettling tales of Waverly Hills Sanatorium. So now, whether you believe in the paranormal or not, if you don't, you're listening to a weird podcast, and I can't believe you've made it this long, uh, but it's hard to deny that the chilling atmosphere permeates the old walls of the Waverly Hills Sanatorium. From the tragic stories of the patients and staff to the unexplained phenomena reported by countless visitors, Waverly Hills stands as a haunting reminder of our past and a testament to the enduring power of fear and sorrow. But don't just take my word for it. If you're brave enough, grab whatever tools you prefer, or better yet, use the fewer tools the better, as we found. Um, pack a flashlight and uh head down to Louisville. Book a tour, join an investigation. There are some public investigations where you can go check it out and see what you can find. So just remember that uh if you don't feel like you're alone, there's a good chance that you're not it.
SPEAKER_05There it is.
SPEAKER_03Can I just say that Chelsea has a really good radio voice? Yes. Or a reading voice. A good voice in general.
SPEAKER_05Yes, she has a beautiful voice. Very, very nice to listen to.
SPEAKER_03She did such a good job on this history because Waverly, for being as well known as it is, and the history sort of being out there, it is still like most of these places, like most of history really, really can get convoluted.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and I mean it's it's a beast. I think it's uh it's interesting because uh the the places that I have found where the history, getting the actual history is the hardest, are the ones that are either, you know, obscure, nobody's ever heard of it, there's literally nothing on it, you know, um, which is why those investigations are really tough to find. But then actually the really, the really well-known, more historical places, because as we even found in literally in the very first episode uh investigation series of RGO, like I was able to find documentation that the literal historical marker in the front of Blockhouse Creek actually was wrong. So a lot of these places, you know, things get very convoluted over time. It's a game of telephone, essentially, and then nobody knows what's true or what's not, and then somebody says something, and then that starts being retold as factual information.
SPEAKER_03Interestingly enough, oftentimes becomes phenomena.
SPEAKER_05Anyways, that's a different Yeah, that's a different rabbit hole rabbit hole. That's a down the that's a different down the rabbit hole episode. Um, but anyway, so there was the the history of Waverly Hill. So moving into our next episodes, we are going to get into the actual investigation. Um which is wild. It was I've I know we talked about Octagon Hall and we had some really cool experiences there, but I personally, for me, with the experience that we had, that all of us had, what we witnessed there, um but also the Estes session that we did in the what was once the OR.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um as I was going back and re-listening to that, it literally sounds like there is like somebody's trying to communicate with us, like how I'm having a back and forth conversation with you. After we die.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I'm having a back and forth conversation with you that is really wild, and then it leads us out to the outside room, and then that's when you know, so we'll get there.
SPEAKER_05Um yeah, it was I where I was going with that is yeah, I I know you like to use the word profound. I think for me personally, this was probably the most profound uh experience that I've had thus far investigating.
SPEAKER_03So speaking of profound, I just want to put this one because I don't know how much we'll talk about this on the actual episode. But as you had mentioned earlier, there were other people there doing their own investigations. And we were I think it was in the OR room, and there was a bunch of dudes we didn't know or anything, and they're in there and they were mock doing a surgery in the OR room to get some sort of response from whatever it is they're looking for. They're hunting ghosts, right? So you and I could not stop laughing our dicks off because we're sitting there listening to these people do this thing. They're like, can you come?
SPEAKER_05Okay, don't don't say what it said because I actually I have the clip and I I think that's what I'm gonna open the investigation of.
SPEAKER_03And you say it you're like it's like oh my god.
SPEAKER_05All right, so yeah, I have that clip I sliced it up.
SPEAKER_02What I just put in is a little teaser for the code.
SPEAKER_05Well, there was a the ghost had a message for them. Okay. They had a very clear message.
SPEAKER_03We'll go into it later. Yeah, it was really good. Um so yeah, that was the history of the next episode. We're gonna dive, and there is going to be a lot to cover because not just what we're talking about here, but there is a moment where I'm getting bird dive-bombed by freaking shadow things. We had the number, and which uh according to the scratches, you got scratched.
SPEAKER_05You're just like pulling all of the cats out of the bag. You're supposed to make you're supposed to make it sound messy, so people wanna like listen to the next episode, Damien.
SPEAKER_03Oh, let me do it my best way. We'll do it. Tune in next week as we dive into our investigation of Waverly Hills, and it's fucking wild.
SPEAKER_05No, now do it in Daddy Bagan's.
SPEAKER_03And Daddy Bags. Tune in next week as we dive into our experiences at Waverly Hills Sanatorium. Okay.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, but you didn't you didn't do like, you know, the juicy cliffhanger, though. Juicy Cliffhanger.
SPEAKER_03Tune in next week to get juicy.
SPEAKER_05Oh my god, you're doing so bad right now.
SPEAKER_03Doing so bad. And we're not gonna edit this out because it's the people deserve to hear this stuff.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. It it would probably be like where we had one of the most profound experiences of the city.
SPEAKER_03Experiences is is Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05There you go. Alright, so anyway, Damien, you know, let some of the cats out of the bag, but um I'll play the actual stuff and we'll talk about it. And anyway, I don't know. I I think it might end up getting split into two parts as it is. It's yeah, there's a there's a lot of clips.
SPEAKER_03Um but anyway, alright, so there's the history of Waverly Hills and It's worth noting if you don't just want to hear us talk about it, if you want to be about it, that entire video, like the the video footage of us in Waverly going through it, it's all on our Patreon.
SPEAKER_05Yep. The entire raw, we literally live stream all of our investigations into our Patreon. So if you uh want something to have on in the background as you are cooking and eating dinner, doing doing your meal prep, you know, your weekly meal prep, um, there you go. You it's on our Patreon, which is patreon.com backslash peripheculier.
SPEAKER_03Home to all things, parapecular and real ghosts of.
SPEAKER_05Mm-hmm. That was better.
SPEAKER_03Good job. Good job, thanks.
SPEAKER_05All right. See you in the next episode.
SPEAKER_04Goodbye.
SPEAKER_05Okay, bye.
SPEAKER_04If you enjoy following along our investigations, consider joining our Patreon. You can find that at patreon.com backslash para peculiar.
SPEAKER_05And a huge shout out to Dr. Angela Glestro, who composed all of our original music for The Real Ghosts of. If you are interested in getting any music for your own show, film, whatever, you can find her on Instagram and check her out there at Angela Glestro.