Waverly Hills Sanatorium

OPS Home Page Team Members Cases OPS Central In The Media Friends of OPS Equipment Alabama Folklore Favorite Links Guestbook OOPS - Bloopers OPS Free Forum Join OPS

Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Louisville Kentucky

August 13th-14th,2007

If you are the least interested in the paranormal, I am sure by now you have all heard the stories, watched the television shows, read the countless articles online, maybe even watched a movie or two dealing with the infamous Waverly Hills. This is the place that most paranormal investigators would agree is in their top locations they would like to visit.

The OPS Team arrived at Waverly around 7:00pm on August 12th hoping to take some pictures and look at the structure while there was still some daylight left. We were allowed in, took our pictures and were asked to come to the old laundry room which is now a gift shop to sign waiver forms and to wait until 8:00pm for our investigation to begin.

We entered the building through a hallway that connects to the stairs leading to the first floor from the gift shop. We walked up two flights of stairs to the second floor where we set up our monitoring station and a central base for the team. I will say that the trek down the stairs through the gift shop and up the other two flights of stairs with all of our equipment and coolers needed due to the August heat in Kentucky was a burden at the least. Where are the elevators and why are they not working?

The OPS Team members were accompanied by a couple of guest we had invited for the trip. We totaled ten in number of bodies present for the investigation. At about 8:15pm, four team members set up four infrared stationary cameras on three different floors, one team member took a guest with him and begun doing initial readings while the other team members and guest went on a tour provided by the staff at Waverly.

At 10:00pm the team and guests met back at the monitoring station for a quick meeting, divided up into three teams and split up to start our investigation. One team went to the fifth floor, one team went to the third floor and the last team went to the first floor. We set it up this way to keep each team from hearing the team above them, providing a floor between, without anyone present, thus trying to prevent contaminating any audio evidence we might capture.

We all carried two way radios with ear buds to keep in touch with each team which also allowed us the ability to monitor when each team need to rotate to a different floor. We were allowed full access to the Death Tunnel/Body Chute. This passage extends for almost five hundred feet at an angle not friendly to most when it is time to turn around at the bottom and walk back up. Again, where are the elevators or at the least one of those mining carts on a track?

We only had access to the old TB Hospital for eight hours to conduct our investigation which meant we had to be on the move constantly to cover the massive structure with all its rooms and corridors. Every team spent an extensive amount of time on the fifth floor concentrating on rooms 502 and 506. The fourth floor also consumed much of our time along with the Tunnel.

With the amount of doorways, hallways, windows, windows without glass and light finding its way in from the surrounding street lights and security lights, it becomes apparently clear why there are so many sightings of what people consider to be shadow people. Walking down the hallways you do seem to see shadows at every door, you then add in the people that accompany you with their lights shining from different angles, it makes for some amazing dark to light figures.

We noticed that there are no feelings of creepiness, fear, heaviness: no spookiness associated with Waverly Hills, at least not for any of us. We recorded hours of video and audio, and swept the building with EMF meters and temperature gauges. Each team was also outfitted with a night vision camcorder equipped with an extra infrared illuminator attached for our walkthroughs.

The first floor is home to the morgue of the old hospital. It still contains the body drawers and the old autopsy/embalming table, which we learned was not the original table, we are not sure if the body drawers are original. The first floor also doubles as a haunted house during the month of October; signs of the event are evident on the walls covered with the ghostly graffiti and the scary props that are visible throughout.

During the investigation, one of the guests we invited decided to break protocol and go off with a staff member from Waverly. While this may not be a big deal at some places, it made a huge impact here. He not only left his team, he also left us not knowing his whereabouts.

During the early morning hours, two different teams heard different sounds coming from different floors at different times. One team heard talking from the floor below, it seemed to come from our monitoring room. The other team heard what they thought was voices from a different area at a different time from the first team. We can not say definitively that what we heard or captured on audio was anything other than the two unaccounted people roaming freely on the floors of Waverly. What we might have considered as a paranormal experience, is nothing more now than a voice or two that contaminated the investigation at that time.

Prior investigations are also evident throughout the location. On every floor you will find balls and toys groups have brought to try and entice the children to come out and play. The number 502 is painted somewhere on every floor and different ghostly terms are abundant on the walls. We encountered bats, birds and a raccoon looking for a meal, it was an exciting trip, but an uneventful one as far as evidence our experiences.

Now whether Waverly Hills is haunted or not, that is not for The OPS Team to verbally commit to. Did we find anything out of the normal at Waverly Hills? We have reviewed all of our evidence and have been unable to find anything conclusive to support a haunt on the night we investigated. We do have a couple of pictures that we have questioned, but nothing that probably cannot be explained by digital pixilation.

We wish that we had more to share with you guys at this time but we are just not able to substantiate any of the claims that have become the standard on a visit to Waverly. With each group of individuals that visit, either the hype will continue to grow the myth or the dead silence of the old brick structure will further tarnish man’s quest for answers. Waverly Hills was constructed to further science and help those that were in need and dying of a once deadly disease. Now one hundred years later man still is in search of answers within these mighty walls.

**If you would like to read more about Waverly Hill Sanatorium and its history, we have provided you with a link for you to go check out. http://therealwaverlyhills.com/

Video's from our trip below

Light Reflection Video

Visitor in the stairway

OPS Team Members

Ablove is the OPS Team and a few guests we took to Waverly. Below is the back of Waverly Hills.

Above is one of the many hallways lined with rooms on both sides. Below you see Lance taking a break in one of the body drawers located in the Morgue.

Above is the passage known as the death tunnel. Below you see OPS investigator Kevin in one of the many hallways.

Above is a photo outside room 502 where a nurse supposedly hung herself. Below you see Mark and Dewey making their way down the approximately 500ft long Death Tunnel.

Above is a look into one of the large rooms on the 5th floor. Below is a look down the solarium porchway. Could we have caught something standing behind the last piller?

Above you see Dewey and Lance walking down one of the solarium porchways, investigating the rooms. Below you see one of the many gargoyle statues used for the haunted house they have every year.