Nightfall ✓

Chapter 8

• chapter eight •

"I-I don't understand," I said dumbly, staring at it. "There's no one in the house. There's no one who could've written it."

"Something is very, very wrong." She sat down on the couch, her face buried in her hands. "It's connected to the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Hazel, it has to be. I'm scared now."

"Me, too," I admitted.

She sat for some more time, and then started walking towards a door. "Come here."

The door led to her room. She entered very slowly, as if she expected to find someone waiting to ambush her, or maybe another mysterious and chilling message on the walls. The room had a brown faux fur carpet and everything brown and white. All the wooden stuff was a rich walnut brown, and anything which wasn't brown was white, including her bedsheet and her walls and curtains. There was a huge piano against the wall, next to her bed. 

I couldn't take the deafening silence anymore, so to distract her, I said, "Hey, you never told me that you play the piano."

"Yeah." She picked up her laptop and sat on the bed, and started typing.

"What are you doing?"

"Researching." She patted the space next to her. "Come here. Take a look at this."

I sat next to her and looked at the screen. She had opened a page about the sanatorium which displayed nothing special, just the same history:

The Waverly Hills Sanatorium is a closed sanatorium located in southwestern Louisville/Jefferson County, Kentucky. It opened in 1910 as a two-story hospital to accommodate 40 to 50 tuberculosis patients. In the early 1900s, Jefferson County was ravaged by an outbreak of tuberculosis (the "White Plague") which prompted the construction of a new hospital. The hospital closed in 1961, due to the antibiotic drug streptomycin that lowered the need for such a hospital.
Waverly Hills has been popularized on the television show Ghost Hunters as being one of the "most haunted" hospitals in the eastern United States.
Due to constant need for repairs on the wooden structures, need for a more durable structure, as well as need for more beds so that people would not be turned away due to lack of space, construction of a five-story building that could hold more than 400 patients began in March 1924. The new building opened on October 17, 1926, but after the introduction of streptomycin in 1943, the number of tuberculosis cases gradually lowered. The remaining patients were sent to Hazelwood Sanatorium in Louisville. Waverly Hills closed in June 1961.
The building was reopened in 1962 as Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a nursing home, primarily treating aging patients with various stages of dementia and mobility limits, as well as the severely mentally handicapped. Woodhaven was closed by the state in 1982 allegedly due to patient neglect, as is sometimes common in these environments of under-staffed and overcrowded institutions.
Rumors later inaccurately termed Woodhaven as an insane asylum, leading to many urban legends.

"Hm..." I looked at her.

"Maybe William and Mary were insane. Maybe that's why Mary hung herself."

"That doesn't explain how William fits into this. And I don't think so. Her body was found in 1928, remember? Woodhaven opened in 1962. So she must've been a nurse for tuberculosis patients, not the mentally handicapped."

Ash typed something else, her fingers moving so fast that they were a blur: legends related to waverly hills sanatorium.

Lots of links came up. She clicked on one. It was an article about a tunnel.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium is located at the top of a hill and for ease of getting supplies into the building, a tunnel was built which lead to train tracks. During the Tuberculosis outbreak though, this tunnel was used to transport the bodies of dead patients out of the hospital. (Oh my God! Ash cried.) It sounds terrible that any hospital would even consider this but with the amounts of tuberculosis-related deaths, increasing patients were originally able to see and watch dead bodies leave the hospital. This lead to high levels of depression and anxiety which in turn made the death rates increase. So in a bid to help patients' mental health, the hospital decided to transport bodies whereby patients were unable to see them.
This tunnel became known as the Waverly Hills body chute, or, more commonly, the 'Death Tunnel'. The tunnel is said to be haunted, with reports telling of shadows, voices and noises coming from the tunnel. There are many photos taken in the tunnel itself which show both unexplained shadows and spirit orbs.