Waverly Hills Sanatorium wasn't exactly a place Lorraine wanted to go. It was believed to be one of the most haunted places in the world, and even if that wasn't the case, many people had suffered and died there and that in itself made it somewhere she didn't want to be. At one point the place had been a functioning tuberculosis hospital, and since there was no cure at the time, the suffering there had been unimaginable. She could only imagine what residual things had been left behind, even if they weren't the believed to be the ghosts and other entities of the reported sightings.
She knew the stories, of course. Pretty much everyone did. The body chute that led from the hospital to nearby railroad tracks where a motorized rail and cable system would lift the bodies onto trains that would take them away. Made necessary by the fact that none of the treatments, be they the pleasant variety such as fresh air, sunshine, rest and good food or the torturous ones such as inserting balloons into patients' lungs and manually filling them with air to help with breathing or removing ribs and muscle tissue to give damaged lungs more room were effective at all and the death toll was just too large to deal with on site. The very idea itself was enough to scare many people and start rumors and stories of its own.
There were tales of footsteps, doors swinging shut, the smell of freshly baked bread from a kitchen in such disrepair that it would be impossible to bake, let alone the fact that no one was there to be doing the baking. There was talk of moving shadows, mysterious footprints appearing in puddles of water and even people heading for the roof and suddenly feeling the desire to jump.
Some claimed there was a ghost of an elderly woman bleeding from her hands and feet and moaning as she roamed the hospital, a reminder of the suffering that had been endured there. And, of course, there was little Timmy or Bobby or Mary. The ghost of a six or seven-year-old boy or girl, trapped in the hospital, unable to move on because they had died so young with so much left undone with their life. Visitors often brought balls for the child ghost to play with, claiming to see them moving on their own.
Doppelgängers were also reported. Spirits that can mimic the appearance, voice and movements of those it encounters. People claimed to have seen doubles of themselves or others, identical in every way to those it was mimicking except for the black holes where the eyes should be.
And then there was room 502. Every haunted place had a special room that was thought to be worse than the rest. Cursed or evil or just one of the main places to avoid. This particular room was the location of two deaths of what had been seen as perfectly healthy people rather than those in the hospital because of the disease it was there to attempt to treat.
Local legend said that the head nurse of Room 502 was found hanging from a light fixture in the room in 1928, an apparent suicide triggered by an unwanted pregnancy. Nearly four years later another nurse who worked in the same room jumped off the roof – or out the window - to her death. Something or someone in that room was said to have caused these things to happen.
Then there was the legend that the whole place was haunted by something called The Creeper. A dark and terrifying entity that crawled along the walls and floors of the place. Some believed it was some kind of demonic force or inhuman entity, others thought it was a human spirit that was twisted by the torture and trauma of a tubercular death. Whatever it was was said to fill those who encountered it with a feeling of dread and doom.
After the Sanatorium was closed, it reopened in as a geriatric hospital. It was closed in under allegations of patient abuse; strange experiments on the unwilling, shock treatments for non-existent conditions and the like. The property was purchased again, by someone new, with plans to erect the world's tallest statue of Jesus and a religious center. The statue, which would have been based on the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro but twenty feet taller. When plans for that fell through, due to lack of funding, the purchaser of the land tried to have the building condemned. There were also failed plans to make the place a prison. It was eventually bought by a couple with plans to completely restore the hospital and currently held haunted tours and such.
Those tours and investigations weren't things Lorraine had ever found herself wanting to do. In fact, she preferred to stay far away from such places if she could help it. Her curiosity didn't draw her toward them as many might think because she had experienced enough things of a dark nature that she knew that curiosity did indeed kill the cat and information did not bring it back.
But, she didn't often get what she wanted and so when the call came for their help, she knew they were going to accept. It was what they did, after all. Despite the many skeptics and nonbelievers who thought they were frauds and liars, there were still those who genuinely needed their help and accepted that there were things in existence that weren't considered 'normal' by any standards. Or were at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt to find out what was truly going on around them.
This particular case involved a girl who was apparently being held inside the building against her will, possessed by a malevolent entity. Police had investigated and had died for their efforts. No one else could help. Or maybe no one else was willing to try. It was a lot to ask someone to go into such a place. It was even more to ask when people had gone in for that particular reason and had died as a result. But, again, that was what they did. Things that other people couldn't.
So, she merely asked for all the details she could get before agreeing that she and her husband would indeed help with this investigation to the best of their ability. She didn't have to ask Ed for his agreement, knowing she would have it even as she gave it. Once she had everything she needed to at least walk into the situation as prepared as she could be, she made arrangements for a flight and hotel before meeting her husband's curious gaze.
"What do you think about Waverly Hills?"