On a wooded hill outside Louisville, Kentucky, there is a tunnel five hundred feet long that was built for one purpose, moving the dead where the living could not see them.
Waverly Hills Sanatorium opened in 1910 and grew into a massive five story brick hospital by 1926, built to fight the white plague, tuberculosis. There was no cure. Patients were wheeled onto open air porches in the dead of winter, and surgeons tried collapsing lungs and removing ribs in the hope that something would work. Thousands never left. The staff feared that a steady parade of hearses would break the spirit of those still fighting, so the bodies went down the chute, a long concrete tunnel to the railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill.
The hospital closed in 1961. The stories never did. Visitors report a little boy who rolls a ball back to them across empty floors. They report a figure in white near Room 502, where a nurse is said to have died in 1928. They report doors slamming on the fourth floor, shadow shapes crossing the hallways, and the smell of fresh bread from a kitchen that has been cold for sixty years.
I have walked through places like this. Some buildings are just old. Others feel like they are holding their breath.
Could it be that a place soaked in that much suffering, that much hope and that much fear, records it somehow, and plays it back for those who are listening.
Restless spirits, or the mind filling a dark building with what it expects to find?
What do you think about this? In 1615 a Spanish pearl ship is said to have sailed into an inland sea that then dried up. In 1870 a Los Angeles paper reported its hull found in the desert near the Salton Sea. Every searcher since has lost it to the sand. Mirage, or a galleon in the dunes?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
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