Who ya gonna call?

This superstructure creates an ominous presence that is felt all across southwest Louisville. It bullies the skyline with a glare that dates back to the early 1920’s. I however am not perturbed by this building in which more than 7000 people met their demise. Waverly Sanatorium operated in the 1900’s when tuberculosis was rampant in Louisville especially in the areas of Pleasure Ridge Park and Valley Station.  This is mainly because Louisville’s founders didn’t think building a city on a floodplain riddled with the ingredients to host epidemic sized diseases was a bad idea. I look up the hill from my house at this brick behemoth and speculate about the lives lost in this hospital. This structure has even kept a few of my friends from even coming to my house because they are afraid of my house having a paranormal infestation of tuberculosis patients. I for one do not believe in human spirits walking the earth, but I do believe in demons that may tempt or live inside people. Instead of thinking of paranormal oddities I look towards the bleak sight of the sunrooms located towards the top of the sanatorium and envision that during the hospitals operations there was little known about medical science/care. The sunrooms were an area where patients were kept outside every day, any season, to get fresh air treatments; this was thought to heal the ailments of the body. I can see the patients in the winter literally freezing to death in there hospital beds. Right above the sun room gargoyles on the roof accentuate the menacing look of this building. The gargoyles are defined as protectors against evil spirits and this was another step taken to heal the patients inside. There are three houses down the hill from Waverly Hills Sanatorium that share the same early 1900’s architecture. I had never assumed they had a correlation to the historic building until I talked to my neighbor and he informed me that they were actually the doctor’s houses from when the hospital was open.  I have always wondered if the inhabitants of the houses were aware they were living in a place that’s had once been the homes of some of the most disturbed doctors the world had seen since the dark ages. The doctors that worked in the hospital preformed bloody and barbaric procedures on their patients, such as removing their ribs, with no idea whether it would cure the “white death”. Another peculiarity I think about as I look at this landmark is the two apparent suicides that occurred in room 502 of the hospital only 3 years apart brings the notion that is was once a place inhabited by demons (A head nurse hung herself and a nurse also jumped to her death).   A lot of time has passed since then and development around the sanatorium has all but masked its existence. This development has actually gone so far as to build an apartment complex over the underground passageway that was once known as the body chute and renovations on one level of the sanatorium are taking place to make a historical site hotel. I’m not really in favor of these developments, I think you take a piece of history and change it and the historical value will be lost. I recently walked outside to find a couple from Arizona videoing this building from my side yard.  I asked them what they were doing and they explained to me that they were on a tour visiting haunted sites around America and Waverly is one of the places that spurred them to leave there desert home. It flabbergasts me that people travel thousands of miles to take in the same sight that I get to experience every day. Yet looking up at the superstructure I cannot see the haunting of the horrors that this building once harbored. Through the trees I see a building that has found peace in its place and has moved far from its dark past.  (Any information that wasn’t self gathered was found at https://www.prairieghosts.com/waverly_tb.html)