by Aaron Mahnke
And this, of course, was at the root of the New England vampire panic, which spanned the century between the 1790s and 1890s. It was built on the unusual belief that families and communities plagued by this wasting disease were actually victims of dark forces, feeding on them from the grave. Stop and think about that for a moment: tuberculosis was such a devastating disease that supernatural folklore was a natural lens to view it through.
Thankfully, as the twentieth century picked up steam, so too did modern medical science. There were new ideas about what caused the sickness to spread, and with them came possible new solutions for those infected. For the first time, people had ways of fighting back.
At the ground level, the spread of the disease needed to be stopped, so patients were isolated in places like Waverly Hills Sanatorium. No matter the person’s age or place in life, once they were diagnosed with the disease, they were removed from society. Families were often pulled apart, with a parent or child taken away from the rest of their loved ones and kept in isolation.
It was also believed that fresh air and sunlight could be effective against the disease. After all, that’s why Waverly Hills—and so many other sanatoriums like it—was built on an elevated site. Because of this, patients would be left to sit for hours inside open-air sunrooms. Admittedly, this sounds great if the weather is 75° and breezy, but this practice was maintained even in the dead of winter.
The Waverly Hills physicians weren’t content to let the fresh air of the Kentucky hillside do all the work for them, though. Patients who didn’t recover fast enough were often at the mercy of new, experimental techniques that were born out of noble intentions but carried horrible prices. And almost all of them began with the lungs.
One of the ideas wasn’t actually new. Developed in 1891 by a French surgeon, the technique known as plombage thoracoplasty was a surgical attempt to intentionally collapse a lung with the hopes that it would force the body to heal faster. To do this, surgeons would cut away a piece of a rib, deflate the lung, and then fill the space with…well, stuff. While lead bullets were the original filler, time led to other materials, such as animal fat, pieces of bone, wax, silk, and even plastic balls.
Another object often inserted into the lungs of patients at Waverly Hills was a balloon. In this technique, known as balloon dilation, surgeons would open up a patient’s chest and place inflatable bags into the infected areas. It was meant to relieve the pain and pressure associated with breathing, but often it came with complications.
Instead, another practice was implemented to get rid of the tight-chested feeling that tuberculosis created. Surgeons at the hospital would literally remove the muscles and ribs that protected the infected lung. In theory, this gave the patient a bit more room to breathe, but it was a horribly destructive procedure, and it was used only as a last resort.
No matter what treatments were employed, though, there was always one common element underlying almost every aspect of life inside Waverly Hills: death. Whether it was brought on solely by the disease itself or as a result of complications from the various treatments used, death was in the cards for a good percentage of the patients.
As always, the march of modern medicine rarely misses a beat. In 1943, while patients were being locked away inside the walls of Waverly Hills and experiencing the worst of experimental procedures, something miraculous happened. An antibacterial treatment was discovered with the potential to cure a number of bacterial infections. And one of those was tuberculosis.
As a result, the number of new TB cases began to dwindle year after year. By 1961, the total population of sick patients had dropped so low that it simply didn’t make sense to house them in a massive facility like Waverly Hills, and so the patients were moved and the doors closed.
Like a lot of very large buildings, the facility experienced a second life. Waverly Hills became Woodhaven Geriatric Center, but that closed two decades later. Since then, the property has bounced around from owner to owner like a sort of real estate version of a hot potato.
But if the stories are true, the building is far from empty.
ACTIVE RESIDENTS
The past is like a shadow, following us wherever we go, and that was no less true for John Louis Griggs. He was a fifty-two-year-old ex-con who had been released in January 1954 from the Kentucky State Reformatory in nearby La Grange, and Waverly Hills was his chance at a fresh start. He’d found religion in prison, he said, and he wanted to leave the past behind him.
He had worked there for weeks as an orderly when the darkness caught up with him. Another orderly, a man named Edwin Bareis, apparently took offense at the former convict’s presence. On the afternoon of March 1, Bareis approached Griggs with the smell of alcohol on his breath and threatened to kill the ex-con with a knife.
Griggs, to his credit, shrugged it off. He told Bareis that he was a new man and just wanted to live a good life. And even though Bareis slapped him to provoke a fight, Griggs ignored it. Instead, he went to his quarters to take a nap—and that’s when Bareis made his move.
Sometime shortly before 7:00 p.m., Bareis and an accomplice entered Griggs’s room and began to beat the sleeping man. Something snapped inside of Griggs, who jumped from his bed and fought back. He tossed Bareis into the hallway like a rag doll, and when the younger man got back up, Griggs leveled him with a punch to the jaw.
Rather than walk away, though, Griggs reportedly stomped on Bareis as he lay on the floor. Then he stood on the man’s chest and began to jump up and down, sometimes landing on his ribs, other times landing on his face. When he was finished, a pool of blood covered the hallway floor, and Bareis was dead.
Somehow, the darkness that Griggs had tried so hard to run away from had managed to catch back up with him. Maybe it was just a classic case of old habits dying hard, or perhaps the shadows of Waverly Hills held some sway over him. If the stories are true, those shadows still roam the halls today.
There are almost as many stories about unusual experiences inside the walls of Waverly Hills as there are hallways and half-open doors. Some have come down to us over the years from teenagers and adventure seekers who have stepped inside looking for a thrill, while others come from individuals who have been taken by surprise. Either way, they’ve become part of the common folklore surrounding the building itself.
Visitors to Waverly Hills have reported things that might sound at home inside any other supposedly haunted location. Doors that seem to swing shut on their own. The echo of voices from distant parts of the hospital. The sound of children on the playground, screaming with laughter…or something else.
Others have seen figures throughout the facility. One common sighting is a man in a white lab coat, often referred to as the Doctor. He’s been seen in the dining hall, and is sometimes accompanied by the smell of freshly baked bread or other food. And as with many other abandoned hospitals, there are tales of a ghostly child who wanders from room to room.
The visions have been more disturbing than sounds and smells, though. Many visitors claim to have witnessed the spirit of an elderly woman walking the halls. Her wrists are said to be chained together, with blood dripping from her hands. And she calls out to them, begging for help.
But the most frightening visions, by far, have been the ones with the least amount of detail. Many visitors have seen what can only be described as shadow people, dark clouds that move like humans across open doorways and around the corners at the end of the hall. These shadowy figures almost seem to crawl, sometimes on the walls, sometimes on the ceiling. And while they might not have distinguishable features, they always leave witnesses with an overwhelming feeling of dread and fear.
However spread out across the facility these sightings might be, it’s still a lot to take in. Which is why one room in particular is such a powerful location. Because it’s there that so many of these elements all seem to come togethe
r. Countless stories paint it as the central hot spot at Waverly Hills, and it’s hard to argue. From shadowy figures and visions of a dead woman to otherworldly voices and cries of anguish, Room 502 has it all.
There may be a good reason why. Legend says that a nurse took her own life in that very same room way back in 1928. There are a variety of stories about the reasons behind her death, ranging from hopelessness over an unwanted pregnancy to murder at the hands of one of the doctors. Whatever the cause might have been, her story came to an end right there, in Room 502.
Even the staff, it seems, could not escape the darkness of Waverly Hills.
THE DARKNESS BENEATH
Today we’ve pushed tuberculosis into the corner, along with other infectious diseases, but it’s not gone, and we would be foolish to assume so. In fact, TB is still an active killer in places like sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Asia. And thanks to nearly a century of exposure to antibiotics, the TB bacterium has started to mutate, becoming even harder to treat.
To most, though, tuberculosis is a distant memory, something much of the Western world never really stops to consider, let alone fear. And yet its effects have altered history. For example, some people have made the case that without tuberculosis, we most likely wouldn’t have the darkness of Edgar Allan Poe, whose mother and wife were both taken from him by the disease. It was his pain that fueled his art.
Heck, without an outbreak of tuberculosis in Exeter, Rhode Island, back in the 1890s, we might not even have Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Tragedy has always inspired people to rise above the shadows and aim for something higher. Maybe that’s the silver lining beneath the dark cloud of TB.
But it also took countless lives.
At Waverly Hills alone, some people have proposed that the total number of deaths exceeded sixty thousand, but there are no records to back up that claim. We do know that hundreds died each year; some from the treatments they voluntarily underwent, and others from the illness itself. People suffering from the illness were taken up to the heights of the Kentucky countryside, and then…they just withered away.
One more detail. There’s a large tunnel that runs from the foot of the hill to the facility up top. When it was constructed in 1926, the tunnel’s original purpose was to serve as a ventilation shaft for the boilers down below. There was even a small track system installed to allow for supplies to be transported up the shaft, rather than forcing delivery people to make the trek on foot.
Hospital staff also found the tunnel to be useful, though, especially in the winter, when the snow was deep and the winds were cold and piercing. The warm, steady climb up the cement tunnel was the perfect alternative to hiking a small mountain in the snow each day. One side even had stairs. Honestly, it was practically built for pedestrian traffic.
But as the years wore on and the death toll ticked higher and higher, the hospital staff found another use for that underground passageway. You see, along with fresh air and sunlight, the physicians at Waverly Hills believed their patients needed hope and positive attitudes to truly heal. The last thing a patient needed to see from their window was the corpse of a friend being carried away.
So the ventilation tunnel took on new life as a highway for the dead. Rather than carry the corpses of TB victims out the front or back door, where the still-living might happen to see them, each new corpse was wrapped up and taken deep beneath the facility. Then it was placed on a cart and lowered secretly to the bottom of the hill. As a result, that old ventilation shaft took on a less optimistic name: the “Body Chute.”
The real story of Waverly Hills isn’t one of haunted hallways and paranormal investigation. It’s a tale of suffering, death, isolation, and hopelessness. And that’s what makes it a place of darkness more than anything else. Yes, over the years the facility has played host to countless sightings and unexplainable events. I get it; it’s attractive in a dark and gloomy sort of way.
But in the end, whether or not we believe those stories takes a backseat to a much larger truth: we, as human beings, are very good at creating darkness.
And then we have to find a way to live with it.
THEY HAD BEEN searching for it for nearly fifteen years. So when they uncovered a set of steps on November 2, 1922, you can imagine how elated they must have felt. Word was sent to the man who had financed the entire project, and by November 26, the entire team found themselves standing in front of a sealed tomb door.
Today, most of the world knows what they found. As archaeologist Howard Carter led his team inside, they stepped into the three-thousand-year-old tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen. It was the discovery of a lifetime, and it was everything they’d hoped for.
Things didn’t go so well after that, though. Lord Carnarvon, the man who had paid for all fifteen years of digging and searching, died less than two months later from an infected mosquito bite. It’s said that at the very same moment he took his last breath, all the lights in Cairo mysteriously went out. At the same time, his faithful dog howled mournfully, staggered on its feet, and then fell over dead.
And while Carter himself seems to have escaped the wave of death that followed the opening of the tomb, others weren’t so lucky. George Jay Gould, another investor, visited the tomb shortly after it was opened, and died just two months later. Carter’s secretary, Richard Bethell, died young a few years later himself. One other archaeologist on the project, Hugh Evelyn-White, is said to have committed suicide after leaving a message. “I have succumbed to a curse,” he wrote with his own blood.
Whether the stories are rooted in fact or fiction, one thing is clear: people are convinced that their past can haunt them. That whether we like it or not, sometimes the things we’ve done follow us through life, waiting for that moment when they can take revenge. And as one story shows, it doesn’t matter how far you run, or how high you build your walls.
Our past, like a dark and twisted shadow, has a way of following us wherever we go.
A SHOOTING STAR
They grew up near each other and didn’t even know it. It was only for a couple of years, from 1850 to 1852, but later in life it would become one of those happy memories they pulled out at social gatherings to get a laugh. And that’s fine; Sallie was going to need all the happy memories she could get.
She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, back in 1839. Hers was a large family, with Sallie being the fifth-born, and another after her, and for a while there, I think, that was a challenge for her parents, Sarah and Leonard. Finally, though, around the time of Sallie’s eighth birthday, her father’s carpentry business began to take off. They eventually bought a house over on Court Street.
In 1852, with business booming and the money pouring in, Sallie’s parents purchased a six-acre estate in a different part of town. I have a feeling they all exhaled a collective sigh of relief. They’d made it. They were climbing the ladder to join the well-to-do and influential. Things were looking up.
New Haven in the mid-1800s was a fantastic place to grow up if you loved education. Yale University, known then as Yale College, was the centerpiece of the city, with a network of other schools surrounding it. Students in New Haven couldn’t help but learn from the best minds, soaking in modern sciences and ideas.
There was more, though. As the 1850s faded into the 1860s, other movements were spreading. Spiritualism had extended beyond its birthplace in upstate New York and was transforming the way many people viewed the natural world. In the South, rebellious tremors were shaking the structure of America, due to a growing interest in banning slavery. I’d be putting it far too lightly to say that 1860 was a year of change.
In 1861, everything fell apart. Under Confederate orders, General Beauregard attacked the Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and effectively set a match to the dry and flammable mountain of tension between both sides. The American Civil War began that day, and the world was
never the same.
A little over a year later, though, in September 1862, Sallie walked down the aisle on her wedding day. The man who would become her husband was the very same boy she’d lived near during those two years on Court Street. Even though her family had moved out of the neighborhood, they hadn’t left the same social circles, which most likely led to this joyful moment.
William was born in June 1837. His father, Oliver, was a clothing manufacturer with a knack for improving the machines that did the work, and that ingenuity paid off. Business was profitable and brisk, and as Sallie’s parents were climbing that social ladder, they were doing so right alongside William’s family.
There’s a good chance they knew each other for most of their childhood, too. We know that while she studied at the Young Ladies’ Collegiate Institute, Sallie took classes with William’s sister Annie. And both families attended the First Baptist Church of New Haven. They might have stopped being neighbors in 1852, but they were never really far apart.
If the families were to compare balance sheets, William’s parents were vastly more wealthy than Sallie’s, but that didn’t matter. The couple was in love, and Sallie more than held her own in their relationship. She had a brilliant mind, having excelled in subjects like literature and music, and she spoke fluent French. Which was a good thing; she was going to need every advantage she could get, because life was about to climb to a whole new level very soon.
You see, a few years before the young couple’s wedding, William’s father had acquired another business through some, well, shall we say aggressive methods. The result was his complete ownership and control of what he called the New Haven Arms Company. If the name of the business isn’t a big enough clue, it’s important to point out that they made a very specific type of item: firearms.