
And they didn’t, that was until a breakthrough came in the 1940s, which would serve both as a ray of hope and the end of days for Waverly Hills.

Nevertheless, it was hugely demoralizing, spreading fear and panic among a populace that was increasingly more aware that the medical professionals had no idea what they were doing. It got to the point where death was so commonplace that bodies were sometimes carried out right in front of other patients, although mostly they tried to do this through a secret tunnel and away from witnesses. Death was an everyday occurrence here, with bodies piling up and shipped out on a daily basis, and to be sent to Waverly Hills was a one-way ticket, a veritable death sentence. Some other treatments were a bit more ominous and often nearly as deadly as the disease itself, such as and pneumectomy, a procedure in which infected parts of the lung and sometimes the entire lung were surgically removed, and thoracoplasty, which was the removal of several rib bones from the chest wall to collapse a lung. Open air, sunshine, heat lamps, a hodgepodge of various medications, and hope and prayer were the most common ways, but these unfortunately didn’t work. Treatments were typically everything doctors could throw at the wall to see what stuck.
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In those days there was very little known on how to treat tuberculosis, or much about it at all other than its lethal effects. At the time it was considered to be one of the largest and most advanced tuberculosis sanatoriums in the country, if not the world, yet despite the well-equipped facilities and the placid scenery of peaceful forests and scenic views from atop the hill, this was most certainly a place of darkness. Over the years many expansions were built, including a hospital for advanced cases and a children’s pavilion, vast open-air areas, and there was a new building built practically every year. Their only link to those they had left behind were occasional visit days that were strictly controlled, limited, and overseen, so they were basically all on their own. The idea was to be completely self-reliant and isolated, and indeed everyone who came here, including doctors, nurses, and staff were required to cut off all links to the outside world, say goodbye to those they knew, and remain within this place permanently, making it almost like leaving Earth behind on a one-way voyage to some far away world.
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Waverly Hills had its own fields and livestock, vegetable fields, water treatment facility, and even its own radio station, post office and zip code. The facility rapidly expanded to become more or less its own self-contained city. Since Louisville was experiencing a surge in cases that swamped its other facilities, Waverly Hills was constructed to pick up the slack, and in its day it was considered a true marvel. In those days this was a scary, incurable disease that was largely seen as akin to a death sentence, made even more panic-inducing in that very little was known about the disease or how it spread, and so patients were typically locked away from the rest of the world in sanatoriums. Opened in 1910 on land that once held a schoolhouse, the sanatorium was designed to deal with the rising epidemic of tuberculosis that was plaguing the region at the time. Perched upon a hilltop in southwestern Louisville/Jefferson County, Kentucky, is the former Waverly Hills Sanatorium, a looming, monolithic building that looks like something out of a dark gothic fairy tale, and in many ways, it sort of is. state of Kentucky, which has accrued a reputation as being one of the most haunted places there is. Among these one of the more well-known and indeed infamous is a sanitorium tucked away within the U.S. After all, these are places well-versed in suffering, pain, and death, their walls saturated in it over their usually very grim histories, making them wellsprings of stories of ghosts and the unexplained. Among all of the haunted places filled with stories of the supernatural, some of the more popular and indeed most incredibly haunted of these are the many old, abandoned sanitariums and sanatoriums out there.
