What Happened at the Morgue at Waverly Hills

The Morgue Tables

Last June, my husband Mike and I did an overnight stay at Waverly Hills Sanitarium, which, according to the Ghost Hunters T.A.P.S group, is believed to be one of the most haunted places in the world. More than 65,000 people died there. So many, in fact, that they built a death chute to transport the bodies down to  hearses so that patients wouldn't constantly see bodies being taken away.

The death chute was one of the sights we'd get to explore. But first, we arrived at Waverly Hills at midnight and were taken on a brief tour of the 5-story building and roof so that we'd know our way around, and know the hot spots for paranormal activity. Most of us had brought cameras. A few people had more advanced equipment. We had a digital recorder that we were hoping was good enough to record EVPs.

Our tour guide lead us through the building, telling stories about ghost sightings in the morgue, the nurses' station on the 5th floor, the hallway near an old elevator shaft, and the electroshock therapy room.

Mike and I listened eagerly and started scoping out where we wanted to go first. There were a lot of people on our tour and we wanted to break away so that we could do voice recordings without having a lot of human interference. Mike wanted to start in the morgue. The guide finished up his spiel and told people to keep their flashlights off, that our eyes would grow accustomed to the dark, but we'd never see anything if we kept shining flashlights all night. And he told us not to jump out at people or pretend this was a haunted house. We'd come to go ghost-hunting, not act like children.

He finished talking and my husband and I raced down the stairs back to the morgue. It was immediately creepy walking around that old, dark abandoned building on our own. I wondered what we were thinking? Did we really want to see ghosts??

My husband began speaking into his voice recorder. "This is Mike. We're entering the morgue. If there are any spirits with us, let us know."

Then he began screaming. And screaming. And running down the hallway. If you listen to the recording, you can hear my footsteps running behind him as he screams.

"I saw feet! There were feet!"

Pounding footsteps.

 "What?"

"There were feet sticking out of the morgue table!"

We ran and ran, flashlights blaring our approach as loud as Mike's continued screaming. Other people came to see what all the fuss was about. You can hear that on the recorder, too. Along with another far-off voice saying, "It's me, you idiots. It was me."

Some joker had decided to scare his friend by laying inside the morgue table with his boots sticking out - which is exactly what we'd been told not to do. But Mike and I got there first. Scared the crap out of us, though it's fun now to listen to the tape. But in the moment, we were pretty freaked, and only 30 minutes into a long night of wandering in the dark looking for more things to scare us. Thankfully, nothing scared us as much as that.