Waverly Hills Sanatorium: Louisville, Kentucky's Most Haunted

I survived Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky and the ultimate ghost hunting adventure. The trip couldn't have been any better. My group of ten anxious ghost hunters, eagerly arrived at the old Tuberculosis hospital at roughly 9:30 p.m. on August 19, 2007. Waverly Hills Sanatorium is one of the most coveted ghost hunting locations in the United States and has been featured on the Sci Fi channel, and FOX programming. It is rumored that Ghost Hunters will be doing their live investigation on Halloween this year at Waverly Hills. When I say rumored, I mean there is very strong evidence, through a very reliable source that is employed at Waverly Hills Sanatorium. Waverly Hills is home to an estimated sixty-three thousand souls that passed during the TB epidemic in the 1920's. Although not all spirits linger there, many still remain.

When we pulled up to the front gate, security was already waiting for us. It seems that the facility is highly secured with video surveillance. Literally within seconds of pulling our cars up in front of the gate, a young man rushed out to meet us, questioning our presence. Due to a prior scheduling conflict we were able to book an overnight stay and were guaranteed to be the only ghost hunting group in the building for the entire night. Not only that, but the owner-Tina Mattingly was our guide for the overnight stay! It was a real pleasure meeting and working with Tina. She allowed our group to do the entire investigation unsupervised-other than video surveillance. After walking through the "death tunnel" and touring the facility once with Tina, we decided to do was to split up into small groups of two's and three's. Everyone picked a starting floor and worked about an hour on each floor. We barely came in contact with each other all night, due to the sheer size of the facility.

My little group of three ghost hunters started out on the first floor of Waverly Hills. The only entrance to the building is through a "safe room" which is actually a restored laundry room that connects to the first floor. There is only one door leading in and out of the building and is the only access area. The rest of the building is locked down from the outside. The first floor layout is much different than that of the rest of the building. The first floor is home to the electric shock therapy room, the autopsy room, a common room, x-ray room, and the O.R. room. When we first started down the long hallway, the electric shock therapy room was on our right hand side, and on the left-hand side of the hallway is the autopsy room, and morgue drawers. The floor was pitch black, we had no lights except for our flashlights and we decided to use our night vision to guide us. I placed a video camera in the electric shock therapy room, facing a chair that was centered in the room. I was hoping to catch any movement that might occur. After placing the camera, we moved back out into the hallway. We made a sweep of the first floor, spending about 15 minutes in each "hot spot" location. Nothing major happened during the first thirty minutes on the first floor. It was on our way back through the first floor-to pick up the video camera that things got a little crazy.

The long hallway leading to the "safe room" has a motion sensor camera at the end, near the safe room. The camera has a glowing yellow light. As we neared the hallway, it appeared as if the yellow light was moving around in a large circle and then dropped about three feet and began circling again. I used my hand held radio to contact Tina in the safe room. I wanted to be sure that the motion sensor camera was not supposed to be moving. I am not the most technical person in the world, so I wanted to do my very best to debunk what we were seeing. Tina quickly confirmed that the motion sensor cameras do not move, they are stationary. The lights will only come on if something is near it and moving. We were at least fifty feet or more away from the camera and we were standing very still, motionless. Not only that, but the light should turn red if something is near it. The light stayed yellow. It was quite an unusual experience. What happened next was even more shocking. The entire end of the hallway flooded with red light. I immediately grabbed my hand held radio and called Tina down at the safe room to see if there was some sort of explanation for the flood of red light that had filled the entire end of the hallway. She said that there are no windows in that area of the building and it is basically a masonry structure that faces the woods. No brake lights, no other lights of any sort. She did mention that several people have witnessed the same phenomenon in that area of the building. Shortly thereafter we attempted to retrieve the video camera that had been placed in the electric shock therapy room. Upon entering the room, the light was out on the camera. The video camera was completely dead. After recharging the camera, I inspected the video and time recording. The video camera had went dead in less than eighteen minutes, fully charged. It has been said by many paranormal investigators that paranormal activity often drains battery life from any electronic device. It appears that this is what happened to my video camera. The time frame directly correlates to when the paranormal activity occurred.

The first floor investigation turned out to be more than we could have imagined. With the sudden rush of excitement we eagerly moved our way up to the second floor. The second floor is mostly patient rooms. Lots of activity is known to occur on the second floor as well. We spent about an hour on the second floor with our digital voice recorder and digital cameras. We did not use our flashlights on this floor. Once we had made it through the first floor, our night vision had much improved and we were able to maneuver around fairly easy. The second floor did appear to have some "shadow" activity. Not everyone in my group saw these shadowy figures. There was one area in particular where I saw this phenomenon. It was at the end of a long hallway that leads to a dead end stairwell. I saw what appeared to be a three dimensional black figure disappear down a stairway, that has no exit. This was probably the most significant occurrence on the second floor for me. One other strange occurrence was the disappearance of a small plastic ball. On our first pass through the building we noticed a small pink ball in one of the hallways, near a ladder that was laying in the hallway. On our second pass through, the ball was gone. As I said before-the other groups were up on levels three, four and five. No one else had been through the second floor until we came through. The only access would have put someone else running into us in order to get there by a central staircase. We did verify with the other groups that no one else had been through the second floor. The ball showed up later on the fifth floor...

I can't say that I had any personal experiences on floor three, four, or five. Floor three, an area where children are often seen in the building felt strangely comfortable. I felt very at ease on this floor. I could have stayed on the third floor all night, but we had work to do. The fourth floor is also patient rooms and other investigators have had many experiences on the fourth floor-including a full body apparition of a female in white in room 474. Unfortunately, I did not encounter this lingering spirit. I did take several digital photos on these floors and one photo in particular still has me baffled. I remember being on the fifth floor, near the roof top and there was a blue and white soccer ball in on of the rooms, right in front of a doorway. I thought it was strange for the ball to be in this particular location so I snapped a picture. After analyzing the photo about a week later...I noticed what looked like two little girls in the room just beyond the doorway where the ball was sitting. It appears as if the little girls are actually looking at the ball or the flash of my camera. I am stunned and amazed that I almost missed such an awesome paranormal experience.

The night ended on a rather terrifying note. With only about two hours left to investigate our groups decide to re-group and split up into different formations to see if it would draw any other activity. There is a theory that some people tend to draw out more paranormal activity. My friend and I started back through the first floor and we actually ran into another group of people. We went ahead and investigated the first floor together because the other groups did not have any activity on the first floor. What happened next, no one could quite explain and one person in the group refuses to go back to Waverly Hills.

We started down the long hallway on floor one, near the electric shock therapy room. As we moved forward we noticed two black shadow figures standing at the end of the hallway. Their presence was so shocking that we stood there for nearly fifteen minutes without moving. We waited, watching carefully to see what they would do next. There we were, all five of us, huddled together in this large hallway. One guy in our group stepped forward and all hell broke loose. He screamed, he cried as a sudden force of an unknown origin hit us like a wall of panic. I felt it rush through me. It was the strangest feeling I have ever encountered. I literally felt this wave physically pass through me. The guy in the front of our group freaked out. That is the only word I can think of to use. He was in a state of panic. It took us several minutes to get him calmed down enough to continue through the building. What he saw was one of the shadow figures rushing towards him, its face directly in front of his face, in an attack position. He was absolutely terrified. Another fifteen minutes passed as we made our way up to another floor and this same guy that was "attacked" asked us if he had somehow run into something. He said his head hurt terribly and he had an awful headache. We pulled out our flashlights and shined it on his face. To our own amazement, he had four deep scratches on his forehead that ran vertically down his face with two scratches on each side. The pain he was feeling was due to the paranormal attack. We still cannot quite explain what happened. What we do know is that we were all together, locked arm in arm and we all saw the shadow figures standing guard at the end of the hallway. We know that the ceilings are high overhead and no one could have bumped into anything to cause those vertical scratches.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium is rightly named one of the most haunted places in the United States. I can say that from my own personal experiences at Waverly Hills. I may not be able to explain the phenomenon that occurred the night of our investigation but I can honestly say that we did try to debunk what happened to us and so far, I have no explanation. All I can say for sure, is that something very frightening and unexplained did happen to us. I survived Waverly Hills and I will be booking another overnight stay next year.