This episode was suggested by a listener, Violet, on Instagram. If you'd like to suggest a topic, you can do so on Facebook and Instagram at Morbid Curiosity Podcast, on Twitter, at Morbid Podcast, and on our website, www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com. This episode discusses death by disease, suicide, and elder abuse. If that's not something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip.
Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called Morbid Curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Halle, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast.
I used to love watching ghost hunters. It was one of my favorite shows to watch late at night with all the lights off. The team always explored such interesting locations, locations with either a vast or grim history. I always hoped for a scare, or to see something that would hint at the existence of something supernatural.
Deep down, like Fox Mulder from X-Files, I want to believe. However, like Dana Scully, I require repeatable and significant evidence of something in order to accept it as true. So while I won't weigh in on whether or not ghosts exist, I do believe that history can haunt a place. Waverly Hills Sanatorium, like many other sanatoriums, asylums, and hospitals, has a grim and fascinating history which draws people to it like moths to flame.
Many deaths occurred there, so many humans can't help but be fascinated. The fact that a huge Gothic-style ruin still stands to commemorate that history also attracts us. While there's plentiful documented history about Waverly Hills Sanatorium, there are also hundreds of rumors, legends, and folklores surrounding it. Some of these legends may have been started by trespassing teens who spent nights there on a dare, or the current owners who raise money for renovating the building by giving ghost tours.
Other stories, however, may hold a grain of truth to them. In this episode, I hope to shine a light on the history of Waverly Hills, a grim history which ultimately begins with a disease known as the White Plague. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the White Plague was a new nickname for an ancient disease called consumption. In the early 1900s, the cause of consumption was discovered, a bacterium, and its new name became tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis is a disease of the lungs caused by mycobacterium tuberculosis. Symptoms include weight loss, fatigue, a persistent cough that sometimes brings up blood, and lungs that become full of fluid. It's passed from person to person through repeated exposure to water droplets which are expelled during coughing. The chronic form causes emaciation, which makes it appear that the person is slowly being consumed, which is why during the 1800s it was called consumption.
The bacteria can also infect other parts of the body, such as the bones, kidneys, and joints. While consumptives, the people who suffered from consumption had been associated with art and poetry and viewed with sympathy and compassion. Tuberculosis, as they were called, were feared and stigmatized. This is due to the new science of bacteriology and germ theory.
The public now understood that the sick could pass on their germs and infect others, therefore the sick were feared. As there was no cure, this fear was even further elevated. Tuberculosis was quickly linked with overcrowded in unventilated work and living spaces, conditions that were also associated with poverty. A so-called war on tuberculosis began, with public health departments and volunteers spreading the word about tuberculosis and reporting those who had it.
While the intentions were good in that these reformers wanted to protect the public health, they also brought stigma on those who were living in poverty, specifically immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans. The Tuberculosis Registration Act was particularly bad for creating job and housing discrimination, with anyone infected with tuberculosis being denied work, housing, life insurance, and sometimes even medical care in a regular hospital. Public health officials were granted the right to confine anyone who was deemed a menace to public health. Again, while this seems to be for the good of the many, it was exercised almost exclusively against the poor and immigrants.
Those arrested were placed in public and state tuberculosis facilities. There was no cure, however, there was hope. The new science of bacteriology made physicians believe they could come up with a treatment for tuberculosis. The germ theory of disease had been discovered by Louis Pasteur in 1862 and was accepted by the general public by 1882.
Sir Joseph Lister had created disinfectants that killed microorganisms that caused disease. In 1910, Robert Koch discovered a way to test people for tuberculosis, and it was revealed that far more people had it than previously known. While one anti-tuberculosis drug called tuberculin was created by Koch in 1892, it was found to be ineffective. This setback caused even more fear and stigma against tuberculosis.
Health officials, physicians, and community leaders all became convinced that the only way to protect the population was by isolating people infected with tuberculosis. If they were placed in facilities especially meant for people with tuberculosis, they could receive the treatment they needed and be isolated from the general public. This is when the sanatorium movement began. Early hospitals that specialized in taking care of patients with tuberculosis were usually small.
Often they were converted from residential homes. Some were called houses of rest, and these took in the destitute and terminally ill in urban settings. Early sanatoriums were groups of cottages in isolated locations away from the city. Many times these were located in specific climates that were thought to improve health.
However, medical opinion was not sure what climate was the healthiest, just that some climates were better for some patients. These cottage-style sanatoriums had two goals, isolating patients and maximizing their exposure to pure air and sunlight. In the mid-1800s, a German physician, Herman Bremmer, came up with a new treatment he felt could cure tuberculosis. He hypothesized that if tuberculosis patients lived at higher altitudes, the diminished atmospheric pressure would strengthen their hearts, purify their lungs, and cure the disease, or at least stop its progression.
In 1859, Bremmer built the first sanatorium near Gorberstorf in what is now known as psilecia in Germany. The alpine setting and a diet rich in milk, raw meats, and wine were the most important parts of his treatment. Patients were also required to take moderate exercise and undergo ice cold baths and body rubs. Bremmer called it a sanatorium using the Latin word sanare, which means to heal.
Sanatorium, therefore, roughly translates to healing place. He also chose this name to differentiate his facility from sanitariums, which were luxury resort spas. Sanitarium derives from the Latin word sanitas, which means healthy, and sanitarium translates to healthy place. Dr.
Peter Detweiler, a patient of Bremmers, modified his regime and started his own sanatorium outside Frankfurt in 1876. He prescribed outdoor rest rather than exercise. He called it the fresh air treatment. It was this modified regime that was adopted by most American sanatoriums, once these facilities caught on in the 1880s.
Sanatoriums soon began to spring up all over Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In the United States, founding sanatoriums became a way for philanthropists, political leaders, physicians, and religious groups to promote their progressive thinking, public spirit, and civic responsibility. While there were many private sanatoriums that cared for paying patients using the fresh air treatment, public and state sanatoriums, where most of the state's sanctioned patients were sent, were not much different than asylums or prisons. Sometimes the state sanatorium was either right next to or shared facilities with a prison or asylum.
The fresh air model of sanatorium was preferable, but still placed its patients and staff in isolation away from the rest of society. Visitors were discouraged, and life was so regimented that many patients felt a loss of personal freedom, and that they had been abandoned by their family and friends. Waverly Hills Sanatorium was one of these private facilities, and while it began as a smaller facility, it soon grew into a massive institution. The land where Waverly Hills Sanatorium was built in what is now Jefferson County, Kentucky, was purchased by Thomas H.
Hayes in 1883. The area around it was mostly swampland, but the spot he chose was a large raised hill with trees surrounding it. The view from the top was quite picturesque. On the hill, Hayes built a one-roomed schoolhouse for his children and hired a teacher named Lizzie Lee Harris.
Harris really enjoyed the Waverly series of books by Walter Scott, so named the school Waverly School. Hayes liked how peaceful the name sounded, so named the whole property Waverly Hill. In 1906, the newly established Kentucky Board of Tuberculosis Hospitals purchased the land from Hayes, but kept the name. Construction of the original sanatorium began in 1908.
It was a two-story woodframe building with a hipped roof and half timbering. It included an administration building and two open-air pavilions, one for male patients and one for female patients. The facility could accommodate between 40 and 50 patients comfortably. It was completed and opened for business on July 26, 1910.
On August 31, 1912, due to the growing number of tuberculosis patients and the unwillingness of regular hospitals to treat or house them, all the tuberculosis patients from the Louisville City Hospital were moved to temporary quarters intense on the grounds of Waverly Hill Sanatorium. There they would stay until the completion of the hospital for advanced cases. In December of 1912, the building for advanced cases at Waverly Hills opened with room for another 40 patients. In 1914, a children's pavilion or sunshine camp was added with room for 56 children.
The total capacity was now 130 patients. However, this still wasn't enough room. The constant need for more beds and repairs to the building led to a massive renovation beginning in March of 1924. Designed by local architect DX Murphy, Waverly Hills Sanatorium grew into a massive five-story Gothic-style building made of concrete and brick with enough room to house over 400 patients.
It opened its doors on October 17, 1926. The facility grew into its own small, self-contained city. There was a post office, a water treatment facility, maintenance garage, laundry, butchery, and a farm which grew fruits and vegetables and raised animals for meat. It's important to remember that segregation was in effect during much of the time period that Waverly Hills functioned as a sanatorium.
Many private sanatoriums refused to take African-American patients, so state sanatoriums, which were segregated, took on almost all African-American patients, and were often very crowded. Tuberculosis was found three times more amongst African-American populations who were trapped by Jim Crow laws, which forced them to live in close quarters with very little financial and medical recourse. Waverly Hills built an extension for African-American patients in 1931 and likely hired and trained African-American nurses to tend to the patients. However, when the sanatorium closed down and pieces of the land were sold off, this building was demolished.
Unfortunately, little remains of this history, a fate suffered by many African-American historical sites. Waverly Hills was a popular choice for sanatorium treatment. People tried to come to Waverly Hills from all over the United States because it was known for its cutting-edge facilities and treatments. There was a waiting list for patients, and eventually it became a requirement for patients to be residents of Jefferson County in order to get in.
I want to get into what life was like at Waverly Hills, what treatments the patients underwent, what procedures were followed when they died, and what became of the sanatorium after antibiotics were discovered. But first, let's pause for a word from our sponsors. Our regular sponsor is audible.com. Audible can provide you with interesting and engaging audiobooks.
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And now, back to the podcast. Waverly Hills Sanatorium was a huge facility, and was therefore broken up into sections that were used for different purposes. The layout, which I'm about to describe, comes from the 1924 blueprints that were drafted by DX Murphy, the architect who designed the building. The ground floor functioned much like a regular hospital, with a radiography section, complete with a dark room for developing radiographs or x-rays.
As a pharmacy, a dentist's office, a waiting room, a laboratory for processing patient samples, a records office, and a nurse and staff living quarters and break rooms. There was also a morgue, a cold storage room, and an autopsy suite. As Waverly Hills was a tuberculosis hospital, some patient deaths were expected, and by state law, 17% of the patients that died were required to be autopsied. This procedure gave information about the progression of their disease, and what other complications they might have been having.
For example, if a surgery was performed, the physicians would want to know if something went wrong with the surgery, or if the disease killed the patient. The absence of a morgue and an autopsy suite is not out of the ordinary for a facility like this. There were also several tunnels beneath the building. There was a laundry tunnel which went from the main building to a smaller laundry facility.
On the blueprints, there was another tunnel labeled New Tunnel, which went from the first or ground floor in the refractory section or northern section of the building. It extended down toward the bottom of the hill, letting out near the water treatment facility. I'll talk more about that in a moment. The first floor housed many patients in single rooms.
There were communal bathrooms, a large recreation room, dining rooms for patients and staff, a bakery, kitchens, and an assembly room. Nurse and orderly stations were on either end of the floor, as were janitorial and utility rooms. There was also a sun porch and sun corridor, both of which were open air and caught the sun all day long. This is where patients would take their fresh air rest.
The second floor was very similar to the first, except it included several minor operating rooms, an eye and ear exam room, a patient chart room, linen rooms, and a room for medical apparatus storage. The third floor was very similar to the second floor, except it included several private rooms on the westernmost end of the building, which had their own bathrooms. The fourth floor was much smaller than the lower floors. It seems to be where the more advanced cases were treated, as patients were kept in wards instead of individual rooms.
There were two wards with 14 beds each, a plaster room, toilets, and a utility room, with a stairwell leading up to the fifth floor. This utility room is the now infamous room of 502. Again, I'll get to that in a moment. The fifth floor was merely one room with windows on every side.
This was known as the Solarium, or Penthouse, and Heliotherapy, or sunlight therapy, was done there. During this treatment, the patient was exposed to as much sunlight as possible. Heliotherapy was only one of the many treatments that were used. The others followed the fresh air theory, and involved open-air rest in a bed out in the sun corridors, which lined the southwest face of the building on every floor.
Heat lamps on the chest, positive talk therapy, crafts, and light exercise outdoors were also prescribed. It was thought that the pleasant scenery also aided morale, as did the nutritious diet provided by the facility. There were some more invasive treatments, such as surgeries, which were experimental at the time. Physicians and patients were willing to try anything to relieve the symptoms of tuberculosis.
Even surgeries, they weren't sure had any effect. One of these was called artificial pneumothorax, in which one of the lungs was purposefully collapsed in an attempt to contain the tuberculosis. However, this likely caused other complications, such as respiratory failure and infections. While there isn't specific information about the social aspects of treatment at Waverly Hills, a diary from a Sanatorium in the Giant Mountains in Celesia, Germany, reveals that there was indeed a social aspect of treatment.
Patients started clubs, or teams, amongst their wardmates, or those they often took their rest with. These clubs had names, and sometimes even a social hierarchy, with captains, secretaries, and club notes taken when meetings occurred. Much of the focus was on gossip, and there were even mentions of dating amongst patients, though how physical these relationships were is not known. The isolation from family and friends was too much for some patients.
While physicians usually prescribed a 6-12 month stay, many patients left after 4-6 weeks. Sometimes their families tried desperately to get them back into the Sanatorium, but many times it was impossible, as the waiting list was so long. Other patients, once their symptoms were cured, found it hard to leave, and had trouble integrating themselves back into society. This was partially due to continued stigma, and partially because they had grown accustomed to the quiet isolation of the Sanatorium, and referred it to their old life.
These patients usually took jobs at the Sanatorium. Children were also treated at Waverly Hills. They were housed in separate locations from adult patients, and some of their treatment involved play in the sunshine. There are photographs of a rooftop swing set where the children had their sunshine treatment at Waverly Hills.
Child patients often had a higher chance of survival, as their cases tended to be caught much earlier than adults. Morale was very important, as the physicians and nurses knew that there was no hope for many of the patients, and they wanted them to be as happy as possible while they were at the facility. High spirits were also thought to aid in the healing process, so events were organized every so often for entertainment. This is also the reason that deaths were somewhat hidden from healthier patients.
The number of deaths and dying patients at Sanatoriums set them apart from other institutions. At first, they were just places where people were sent to die without hope of a cure. This was especially true for state sanatoriums, where those with more advanced tuberculosis were often sent, as private sanatoriums often refused advanced cases. Middle-class institutions like Waverly Hills were somewhere between state sanatoriums and high-class resort-like sanatoriums, as they had a mix of patients from different social classes and stages of the disease.
Many sources state that over 60,000 people died at Waverly Hills while it was in operation. I was unable to determine where this number comes from. However, in his 1991 autobiography, Sunrise Sunset, former medical director of Waverly Hills, Dr. J.
Frank W. Stewart, stated that during the worst year in terms of mortality, Waverly Hills lost 152 people. This was in either 1946 or 47 when six soldiers were returning from World War II. Stewart specifically said that the worst weekend was one in which four people died.
Based on his numbers, it seems fewer than 150 people would have died on average per year. Using 152 as an overestimate of average deaths per year, for the 35 years Waverly Hills operated at a capacity of 400 patients, we can estimate that around 5,320 people died at Waverly Hills during that time. That's still a very high number of deaths. Deaths that could have been avoided today, thanks to antibiotics.
If 60,000 people had died at Waverly Hills over its 35 years of operation, around 1,771 would have died each year. That's a full turnover of 400 patients four times a year. The records just don't support that much death. After a patient died, the bodies of the deceased were sometimes autopsied, as I mentioned earlier.
It's possible some were also embalmed before leaving the facility. The rest were removed from the facility outside the view of the other patients in order to avoid bringing down morale. As the patients were usually positioned near windows, the only way to do this was through the tunnel system. The first antibiotic drug struck to mycen was created in 1943.
By 1949, antibiotics became widely available for treating tuberculosis. The number of cases dwindled, and soon there was no need for such a huge facility. The doors of Waverly Hills Sanatorium closed in June of 1961, with all remaining patients being transferred to Hazelwood Sanatorium in Louisville. The next stage in the building's life was also tragic, although in a very different way.
After some renovation, the facility became known as Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a care facility for aging patients with dementia and mobility issues. Eventually, people with mental disabilities were also sent there. The facility was understaffed and overcrowded. Patients were neglected, lived in filth, and didn't receive the care they needed.
Many deaths resulted from accidents that could have been prevented. After an inquiry and investigation by the state of Kentucky, the facility was shut down in 1982. After that, the site was mostly abandoned. It was purchased with ideas of turning it into a prison, but the surrounding inhabitants protested this idea heavily.
There were thoughts of turning it into apartments, but too many renovations were needed, and it would cost too much for the developers. At one point, the site was bought with the idea of turning it into a worship center, with a massive statue of Jesus on top, similar to the one in Rio de Janeiro. But when hardly anyone contributed to the project, it fell through, just like all the others. While the building lay abandoned, it became the haunt of local teens and urban explorers.
Windows were broken, graffiti was spread across the building, inside and out, and rumors began to circulate about the place being haunted. This is when many of the ghost stories and urban legends about Waverly Hills seemed to originate, specifically those about room 502, shadow people, and the bodyshoot. In 2001, the building and what land hadn't been sold off by the state was sold to Charles and Tina Mattingly. They wanted to restore the site and preserve its history.
In order to raise funds for doing so, they began to offer a series of paranormal tours of the abandoned building, based on these local legends. While they do offer historical tours as well, the ghost tours are incredibly popular, and in no time at all, Waverly Hills Sanatorium became known as one of the most haunted locations in America. The decrepit state of the building, its vast expanses of hallways, its hospital facilities, and its history all add to its ambiance of unease, and the feeling of not quite being alone while inside. There are several specific characters that have allegedly been seen by multiple visitors and staff.
They have also been named by the tour guides. One is the spirit of a young boy called Timmy, another is a young woman called Mary. The second and third floors allegedly host hundreds of shadow people, dark shadows in the rough shape of a human that move around the building, blocking light as they pass the many windows. On the fourth floor, one room has captured people's imagination, so much so that a whole story developed around it.
Room 502, which was a utility room, is now known as the site of a supposed suicide. There are two versions of the story, both featuring a nurse who was so saddened and frustrated by the hopeless state of her patience that she took her own life. In one story, she hung herself. In the other, she jumped from a fourth floor window.
A later addition to this story was that she was pregnant out of wedlock. The dates of this alleged event vary depending on who was telling the story. The years 1926, 1928, and the 1940s have all been mentioned by different sources. This story originates in the mid-1990s, however, and grew in notoriety after a popular metal band, Incursion 502, stole the room numbers of room 502 one night and stuck them to their guitar speaker tower.
Afterwards, they said they were haunted by an angry spirit. The band's name, which they had before they stole the numbers, comes from the telephone area code of North Central Kentucky, 502, which is where all the members of the band came from. 502 is one of the original 86 area codes created by the telephone company AT&T in 1947. Waverly Hill Sanatorium is also in area code 502.
While a tragic event involving a nurse could have happened, there's no concrete evidence that it ever did. There was a patient turned to laboratory technician who attempted to take her own life through bloodletting in 1945 or 46, but was saved by a blood transfusion. This information was recorded by Dr. Stewart, who relates several other accidents and occurrences during his time there, but none of these have become local legends.
As the so-called bodyshoot, as I said before, there was a tunnel system beneath the sanatorium. The tunnel, which is referred to as the new tunnel on the 1924 blueprints, went from the ground floor of the facility to the bottom of the hill on the northwest side. One side of the tunnel was a walkway with steps, and the other side hosted a rail car like a mechanical system for transporting supplies to and from the facility. A small train station sat at the exit, ready to deposit or remove supplies.
The tunnel was also used by employees and staff to walk up the hill during the winter months as it was heated. It is true that deceased patients were transported down the hill using this system during part of the time the building function as a sanatorium, but that was not its only function. The name bodyshoot is also not correct because the bodies were not thrown down the steep decline. They were carefully carried on rail cars and moved onto trains or perhaps awaiting hearse if the person was local.
The name bodyshoot comes from local teens and urban explorers who found the tunnel without knowing much about the facility. There's another rumor that the ground floor contained a so-called draining room, a place where the deceased patients were strung up so they could be drained of blood. This room is a complete fabrication, but the rumor may stem from the presence of the autopsy suite. It is possible some bodies would have been embalmed on site, as embalming gained popularity in the 1920s and 30s as a way to slow decay so more people could attend the funeral.
This would require replacing blood with formaldehyde, but would not involve stringing up the body of the deceased. While the legends of ghosts haunting Waverly Hills seemed to be invented, its history as a place of death and disease was not. Many people did die there due to tuberculosis, however many others were saved from its grasp. Early cases stood a good chance of recovery at Waverly Hills Sanatorium, and many past employees and patients looked back on their time there fondly, but it's the sadness and tragedy that lingers in the public memory, and a Gothic-style building that lies abandoned upon a hill in full view of the surrounding area is sure to draw the curiosity of many, and the creativity of others, which is why Waverly Hills Sanatorium sparks our morbid curiosity.
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