Final Author’s Note:

The abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium known as Waverly Hills is a non-fictional place in Louisville, Kentucky. The characters used to write this story, however, are fictional.

It is true that at least one nurse committed suicide in the late 1920s. She was pregnant and wasn’t married. She committed suicide by hanging herself in the foyer outside of Room 502. Back then, Room 502 was one of two nurses’ stations that oversaw the mentally ill TB patients. The nurses watched them in eight-hour shifts. It is said that the patients had to walk around the nurse’s body to use the restroom until the next attendant arrived for duty. Another suicide is said to have happened in the early thirties. A nurse either jumped from the window of Room 502, fell from the window ledge outside of Room 502, or jumped from the roof just outside of Room 502.

No one has claimed to see the nurse reenact her suicide at anytime. A young woman can sometimes be seen falling from a third story window, but it isn’t a nurse. A nurse has been seen by many people wandering from Room 502 and across the foyer to a different room on the fifth floor but no one is sure who it is. I tweaked the stories of the nurses to suit my story.

A little girl by the name of “Mary” is seen on the third floor, along with a young boy named “Tim” or “Bobby”. “Mary” likes to play peek-a-boo with visitors to the hospital while the young boy plays with a leather ball in the hallways. There was a swing set on the roof of the building for children while the hospital was open and you can sometimes hear children singing out there at night.

Shadow people are proven to haunt Waverly and they are seen frequently and on every floor. They are exactly what they sound like…shadows, but they’re so dense that they break the moonlight and even set off motion sensors. There are several pictures on the Internet of shadow people and a shadow person was caught on film while they were filming the documentary Spooked on-site at Waverly.