I’m with her. I want to be excited about this news, but a big part of me is just saddened by it. Charles Mattingly has confirmed (http://www.wdrb.com/story/24854652/waverly-hills-the-hotel)that the fourth floor will remain intact, so that is something at least. Still, you can’t blame them for being capitalists.
Charlie and Tina Mattingly, current owners of the infamous Waverly Hills Sanatorium, located at 4400 Paralee Lane, Louisville, Kentucky, announced plans to open a 4-star, 120-room hotel catering to the paranormal connoisseur. But would I book a room?
First, a little history:
Major Thomas H. Hays purchased the property in 1883. He built a modest schoolhouse and hired Miss Lizzie Lee Harris to educate his children. Miss Harris christened the schoolhouse “Waverley School” because of her fondness for Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. Major Hays renamed the entire estate Waverley Hills. When the Board of Tuberculosis purchased the land, they kept the name but changed the spelling to “Waverly.”
Tuberculosis (TB) was known as “The White Plague.” It ran rampant in the early 1900s and prompted the opening of a sanatorium. In its heyday, the 2-story Waverley Hills accommodated…
The Ellis Hotel on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia is a luxury boutique hotel. There is nothing creepy inside, nothing whatsoever that would give a guest any inclination of what happened here on December 7, 1946. In fact, the commemorative plaque is actually hidden away behind a Marta entrance on the side of the hotel. A place where few people would happen upon it, in my opinion.
Winecoff Fire Plaque in Front of The Ellis Hotel
In The WinecoffFire: The Untold Story of America’s Deadliest Hotel Fire, Sam Heys and Allen B. Goodwin call the hotel Atlanta’s Titanic. The Winecoff was built in 1913 and had been boasted about as being fireproof (even though it lacked fire alarms, sprinklers, and fire escapes), just as the Titanic was said to be unsinkable. But on December 7, 1946, a mysterious fire broke out on the fifth floor and claimed 119 lives. Technically, the building was fireproof. The people inside the building, however, of course were not.
Within days of the tragedy, building and fire codes were changed all over the country to prevent something like this from ever happening again. So many things went wrong. In addition to the failures mentioned above, the Winecoff only had one central staircase (which essentially turned into a chimney during the fire). The Atlanta Fire Department only had ladders that reached to the eighth floor (of a fifteen story building).
To date, this is the worst hotel fire in North America.
Before visiting, I thought a place that had seen such tragedy would surely have some lingering effects. I felt nothing here. For the first time in a long time (on a ghost hunt that failed to produce evidence of the other side), I was glad. I told myself that these fire victims were not trapped here re-living that horrible night over and over again. They were finally able to escape the Winecoff. I gave them an internal cheer and paused to reflect upon all of our fleeting lives.
Last May I took a trip for the first time to see Chicago. I previously posted about the art museums, but I was looking back through my journal and having a grand time reflecting on the trip. We took the “L” everywhere, and I was amazed by how close the train came to people’s backyards. Once the train stopped, and if the windows would have opened, I would have been able to reach out and grab food off some guy’s grill (if I was rude like that).
The first afternoon we just meandered around and got our bearings. Wound up walking through Millenium Park and checking out our reflections in Cloud Gate (or what I had previously been calling The Bean). See below shot, it is a sort of Where’s Waldo version of Jamie and Bob in the reflection from Cloud Gate. Anish Kapoor’s sculpture was inspired by liquid mercury and is one of the largest in the world.
Cloud Gate – Chicago
We also enjoyed watching the changing images on Crown Fountain (or what I had previously been calling Face Fountain). The images displayed are of 1,000 Chicago residents.
Crown Fountain – Chicago
We even made it to Chinatown twice. Once for first dinner at 5:00 (where I ate an eggroll the size of my head and watched a lovely scene of two employees snapping a whole table full of fresh peas in the back of the restaurant between waiting on us), and then the following night we made it back for second dinner at 8:00. After first dinner, we found ourselves in some sort of general store where we procured a tea that has probably not been actually approved for sale (based on the reactions I got when I tried to take a picture of the shelves), along with some foot detox pads. Now, I can’t prove it. But all I know is that the day after we used those foot pads I had a terrible migraine in the middle of the Art Institute.
To be fair, I had worked myself up into a whirlwind tizzy of excitement over in the contemporary section. By the time we worked our way over to the Arms and Armor exhibit I was losing my vision. We sought refuge in the café and I wolfed down a cheese plate. We took a break and returned after dinner. The museum was open until 8:00 and there is something really magical about being in an art museum at night. We had a much better time after the crowds had thinned out.
I loved exploring on foot and taking in all of the Art Deco Architecture. We even went on a walking tour, but it was not Bob’s thing. At one point, he abandoned me to go to a McDonald’s and buy a coffee. Maybe we got on the wrong tour. He thought we were going to be learning about the massive steel skyscrapers. Come to think of it, so did I.
We took the water taxi from the Field Museum to Navy Pier. This was a great view of the city! We concluded that the best thing about Navy Pier was the fantastic hot dog we procured that came on a poppy seed bun and contained a pepper, tomato, onion, and a pickle spear. What a marvelous creation. Another thing we learned about ourselves was that we are New York pizza people. Sorry, Chicago. You just did it a little too much for our taste.
After our visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art we found ourselves wondering through The Drake. We were adopted by the bellman, and taken up the elevator to see some show piece rooms. He said to us: “And this, this is the Princess Di Suite. All of the windows look out to face Lake Michigan. Can’t you just hear Christopher Walken’s Sailing?” It was truly a precious moment when the bellman made that comment. Let me tell you something else. Princess Di had quite a view from this room. Lake Michigan looks just like the ocean.
I saw a corpse of a rat under the “L” in Greek town. He was just lying in the middle of the street, big as a Yorkie.
While strolling through the North River Galleries, a gallery girl kept asking me “Are you trying to build your collection?”
“No,” I answered. “I’m just educating myself.”
“So you can start a collection,” she insisted, nodding her head vigorously and winking at Bob.
I sighed and gave in to her. “Yeah alright, tell me about the Dali illustrations.”
As always, you can find our travels indexed inside our “Play” Journal, by Stealth Journals. A sample page is pictured below:
Chicago: Indexed inside Play, by Stealth Journals.
Last month, Bob and I had the chance to investigate The Myrtles Plantation on a private overnight stay (this was complete chance, as it was a Sunday night just after the New Year’s holiday). We were booked in the General Bradford Suite for the night, and had the run of the upstairs as well for the entire night. I was surprised to see that the entire house was covered in Haint Blue paint!
The first thing we did after we checked into the room was take the Mel Meter out for a walk around to see if we could get any hits or changes in temperature. Right off the bat, Bob watched the Mel Meter jump to a 6.8 when he held the device against the door leading into our room off the front porch. When we completed our circle of the property, we checked the meter against the door once more. No changes occurred. Also during our walk around the property, my phone went from 60% to completely shutting down. When we got back to the room, I was able to plug the phone in and power it back up. It was immediately at 61% power!
Porch views – day and night shots:
The stay included a tour of the house, and some of the ghost stories are told during this tour. I have read a lot of criticism about these stories, but I am going to reserve comment on all of that for now. I will share our personal experiences for what they are worth.
We spent some time investigating the upper floor, in particular, this creepy blue doll room that I was drawn to. But nothing happened. Not one blip on a meter, not one strange noise, not even a weird feeling to speak of.
Bob speculated that maybe these highfalutin aristocratic ghosts might not be impressed with my requests to “turn on the flashlight.” He makes an interesting point. Asylums and prisons seemed to be filled to the ceiling with entities anxious to make contact. But here, well, we were in someone else’s home. Maybe there were different rules. We cooled it with the ghost hunter schtick and returned to the General Bradford Suite.
Besides sleeping in a real life haunted mansion, all alone, without a living soul in sight and no snacks to speak of, the night passed uneventfully, or so I thought. Bob would report otherwise.
My first strange experience was being awakened around 5:00 a.m. to the sound of clothing rustling near the bed (specifically – rustling skirts), followed by heavy boot steps approaching the room to the door via the front porch. I then heard what sounded like about four wild cats just losing their minds, howling like they were facing death itself out there, while at the same time maintaining a constant run away from whatever was on the porch. By this time I was realizing just how cold the room was. It was down to around 55 degrees but the heat was still running. The front parlor was down to the mid-sixties. The heat was just fine at 72 degrees when we arrived and the time we went to bed. People hear weird stuff when they think they are awake, but really dreaming. Old wooden houses get cold and old heaters break. But why in my almost 33 years on this planet can I not recall a dream where I have had auditory hallucinations? Do I only hallucinate while sleeping in haunted mansions, or was something really going on FOR REAL? Who can say. The mind is a powerful thing (especially mine – I just inserted that to check and see if you are still reading this post, Bob).
Seeing that I was awake also, (and freezing), Bob let me in on what happened to him earlier during the night while I was sleeping peacefully. Bob drifted off around 11:30 p.m. and was awakened by a howling wind. He heard the large shutters banging against the house. He felt the room get noticeably colder by the second, so he reached over to the bedside table and switched the Mel Meter on. He watched the temperature drop 6 degrees right before his eyes. He eventually fell back to sleep, but left the meter on. When he next awoke, he looked at the meter and saw that there had been a 6.8 spike some time in the night. RIGHT BY HIS HEAD.
I noticed a large and very fresh scratch on his head (the right side, closest to the table where the meter was kept) and asked him about it. Neither one of us could figure out how he could make a scratch like that in his sleep. I guess it’s possible I did it somehow, although usually my nails are kept proper ghost hunter style (read: bitten to the quick).
An entry from my journal on the morning of our departure: “When I woke up this morning, I felt really sad. All these places we’ve gone to, I’ve never really felt my own death, but it was very much on my mind this morning, and I was concerned about losing Bob. Wonder if I was being an empath to one of the widows – Mary Catherine or Sara Woodruff? We’re both feeling better as we get further and further away from The Myrtles.”
In East Bethany, New York, there is a former poor farm by the name of Rolling Hills Asylum. This is the place that started it all as far as the inspiration for Haunted Asylums, Prisons, and Sanatoriums. I thought I would share some of my old photos here.
In Beth Dolgner’s Georgia Sprits and Specters, Oatland Island in Savannah, Georgia is mentioned as a haunted hospital. Today, the facility functions as a wildlife center, and there are no current public ghost hunts advertised.
The main building (pictured below) dates from 1927 when it was used as a retirement home for The Brotherhood of Railroad Conductors.
In the 1940s, there was a syphilis crisis and the building was occupied by those suffering from the disease. The patients included children. Ms. Dolgner’s chapter also mentions Oatland being a “development laboratory” for the government agency that preceded the CDC. Shannon Scott created a fantastic film, an excerpt of which can be viewed on his site: http://shannonscotttours.webs.com/apps/videos/videos/show/16961191
Bob and I began our own personal Oatland exploration by exploring the grounds behind the main building.
View from the dock:
I thought I stepped into a scene of the old TV series Lost, when I stumbled upon this boat:
There is a mysterious building in front of the main building that is off-limits (which means I was dying to access it).
Bob was trying to teach me how to use my new camera, and captured some of Oatland’s current residents.
To ring in the new year in proper Jamie Davis fashion, Bob and I took off for Louisiana to investigate the famous Myrtles Plantation for our haunted hotel book. But first, I had to see New Orleans.
Day 1
I went straight to the Garden District. I wanted to walk around and take in all the historic homes on foot. We had a completely random and fantastic lunch at Magazine Po-boy Shop. Muffaletta salad and Fried Shrimp Po-boys – tastes like happy. Café Au Lait purchased at a shop across from Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 so I could keep up the pace while strolling through one of the many cities of the dead. My phone went from 68% to being completely drained and turning off the instant I crossed through the entrance gates, by the way.
Once we began to get closer to our car, I reflected back on our walk through the Garden District. I told Bob it was like a snake wrapped up in baby’s clothes, hiding in a bassinet. That was my initial gut statement of the place. I thought it was beautiful, but I felt something lurking underneath, something that did not feel at all welcoming to me.
Even while shopping on Magazine Street, and going in and out of antique stores and galleries, and even sampling some gourmet chocolates (wedding cake truffle?), something was off.
By the time we walked into the Cole Pratt Gallery, and I laid my eyes upon an abstract painting by Mike Williams, I had been completely infected by the atmosphere. At first glance, the painting appeared to be a New Orleans swamp, with ruins of an old plantation rising out of it. We could make out the image of a waterfall, and a woman raising her hands up in the air. Bob saw all of that in the painting too. Then it got a little eerie. I began seeing some other images in the painting. A grim reaper holding a scythe. The devil himself. I should have kept that one to myself, or at least not said it within the range of the gallery owner. She immediately took a step back and gave me the eye. I recovered by smiling and quickly saying: “Look, there’s a kitty.”
Luckily, the New Orleans Museum of Art was open late that night, and we got to see some more art, this time without someone trying to sell us something (I’m not saying anything about Cole Pratt, that place was lovely. I’m just saying it gets exhausting interacting while shopping in general).
Day 2
New Orleans is the only town I have ever been to where I’ve seen a vampire, a werewolf, and a zombie all on the same day.
The day began with us setting out from The Dauphine Orleans over to Decatur Street for some of Café du Monde’s famous coffee and beignets. It was probably about 8:30 a.m., and the French Quarter was still asleep. I loved exploring the city in the morning when it felt as though it was our own. It started getting crowded again though, once we made our way to the Café. We got our goods to go and set up shop on a bench right in front of the Mighty Mississippi. This is where the vampire comes in. There was (an assumingly) innocent man who was also relaxing on a bench near ours. Out of nowhere, the smallest and shortest vampire I have ever seen walked up in broad daylight out of nowhere and lured this man off the bench. The vampire was white as a sheet as you would expect, but he had also dyed his hair yellow and it was cropped very much in the style of a young Mr. Mathers. He appeared to me to be of Asian descent, and he wore a very smart and expensive looking 3/4 length black velvet coat. The innocent man followed a few feet behind the vampire, as he walked in his hypnotic state to his destiny.
Royal Street is a real riot. I saw some Picasso’s, Miro’s, a Dali, and some Chagall’s, plus an assortment of mysterious long lost family heirlooms. I also saw a real life transformer, a wedding parade, and a werewolf playing the violin. Sadly, I was not quick enough to capture the werewolf.
I was forewarned by a man trying to sell us a bus tour. He told me “Be careful out there. This city is the murder capital of the world. People look the same out here, but they’re not.” Within a few short hours, we met the zombie when fate crossed our paths upon exiting one of the galleries. I thought he was cursing and following some other tourist in front of us, but I think he was stuck on us the whole entire time. He was having a heated debate with someone we could not see. We dipped down a side street beside the Cathedral to avoid him. He followed just the same, but passed us by. He got about 50 yards ahead of us, when he suddenly turned around and locked eyes with me. His warning? “You staring, you’re next.” It was time to check in for the night. The Bourbon Orleans awaited us this time, and we were craving a quiet night in.
The next day would take us to St. Francisville, to the Myrtles Plantation, where we would be the only guests for the night. I could not know it at the time, but things were about to get even weirder.
As always, our travels are indexed inside our “Play” Journal, by Stealth Journals. A sample entry page is pictured below:
Postcard from Waverly Hills Sanatorium 
Jamie Davis Writes 