Waverly Hills has long been one of my favorite haunted places here in my hometown of Louisville, KY. I have been there for the past 4 years in a row on various tours, the last one being an 8 hour overnight stay.
Waverly is being rebuilt with plans to turn it into a ghostly bed n' breakfast in the future and therein lies the problem. Please don't get me wrong - I love Waverly and want to see it preserved. I don't want to see it wind up as just a big pile of rubble.
But as cleanup proceeds, some of the charm is being lost. The ivy has been ripped off the walls. Most of the rubble has been swept up. There are hundreds of new windows. As the years have passed, Waverly seems less like a spooky haunted hospital and more like the hotel it is destined to be. Particularly disturbing (to me) were the changes to the fifth floor, one of the scariest floors of the whole building. No, it wasn't the windows or the new floor/roof or the absence of rubble. What bothered me was that with the exception of room 502, there were televisions in every room I went into. Not very scary to shuffle into a dark, haunted room with your flashlight and see a very modern and very unscary television set.
The whole atmosphere has changed. Not scary in the least, just peaceful like any graveyard would be. You might say that familiarity breeds contempt but I can assure you that as I walked through the basement tunnel on the way to the main building, my heart pounded every bit as hard as it had on previous years. But once I arrived, I waited in vain for the Waverly of years past to show itself.
The king is dead - long live the king. Goodbye Waverly Hills, hello Waverly Hills Hotel. I won't be going back and that makes me very sad indeed.