Link of the Week

For alot of us, the scariest thing we'll see this Halloween will be our checkbook balance or the stack of bills on the desk.  Some of us might have visited one of the many haunted houses where you paid ten or more bucks to walk through a special effects filled house, hotel, morgue, or forest.  Personally, the scariest thing I saw this Halloween was the wad of losing tickets in my purse after my visit to opening day at Churchill Downs.

One of the scarieest places that I know, besides my office, is the old Waverly Hills Sanatorium.  Today, it's empty but still scary.  It was built in the 1920s, when Louisville had the highest tuberculosis death rate in the country.  Waverly Hills was the most advanced TB hospital in the U.S.. While some patients survived, the majority died at Waverly; during the peak of the TB epidemic, the death rate was one per hour.  In order to keep the patients from freaking out from seeing the constant stream of hearses hauling off the bodies, a tunnel was built from the hospital to the railroad tracks down on Dixie Highway. The tunnel is commonly referred to as the "body chute."  Dead bodies were placed in the tunnel and were mechanically lowered.  This tunnel was also where the hospital workers entered and exited.  As a kid, we heard stories of the huge blocks of wax that they used to grease the tunnels to make the bodies slide down the hill. 

In between handing out candy to the kids, or scaring the neighborhood children, please check out this site that tells about the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, http://www.prairieghosts.com/waverly_tb.html.  You can read about the primative treatments for TB used at Waverly.  It's a miracle anyone survived TB at all.  You can also read about the many freaky ghost sightings at Waverly, and about some fo the wild paranormal things that happen there. 

I've been to Waverly Hills a few times in the 70's.  From 1961 until its closing in 1982, Waverly Hills was a nursing home.  I went there with one of the bravest people I know, my Mother, and some of her friends from church. They would visit an old man named Dan Granville once a month.  The only thing I really remember about the place was that all of the walls were dark hard wood.  Very spooky.

Waverly Hills was even featured a couple of years ago on Fox Network's "World's Scariest Places", which you can read about on the site.