Memorial Weekend Road Trip

Over Memorial weekend, Gary and I took a little road trip down to Springfield, Tennessee to visit my good friend Lynn who moved down there for a job. The plan was to leave early Friday morning and make it to Louisville, Kentucky, where we would stay for the night and then make it to Springfield by Saturday early afternoon. We could have made the whole trip in one day, but there was one thing I wanted to do in Louisville on Friday night. I’m a big fan of this show called Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel, and a big fan of Zac Bagans who is one of the ghost adventure-ers on the show (I *heart* him!) Anyway, to make a long story short, the Ghost Adventures team traveled to this place called Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky to do a paranormal investigation. It’s an old state hospital from the early 1900’s, which has been closed since the mid-1980’s but it is still open to the public for tours. I Google mapped the place and realized that we were going to be driving right by it on our way to TN so I figured we could tour the place since we were going to be in the area. Poor Gary always gets caught up in my hair-brained ideas!Anyway, we arrived in Louisville in the late afternoon and we had a couple of hours to settle in to our hotel room and wander around before we had to drive over to this Waverly Hills place for the tour. We stayed in this nice hotel called the Galt House, which was right across from the river. Coincidently, this hotel was hosting this event called “Abby Road on the River”. It was this Beatles Tribute band festival with multiple stages, souvenir booths and Carney food. I think the band members were more into the event then the people attending. It was funny to see all these different bands dressed up like the Beatles, with their black and white matching suits and bowl hair cuts. Some of the bands were soooo into being the Beatles that they spoke as if they actually were Ringo, John, Paul and George.

 After spending some time at the festival, we wandered down to the famous Louisville Slugger baseball bat factory and museum. Unfortunately, by the time we walked to it, it was just closing, but we did get a chance to wander inside real quick to peak into the factory and take some pictures by the giant wooden bat outside the building.

 

Around 7:30pm, we hopped in the car and drove towards Waverly Hills, which is just south of downtown Louisville. Our tour was in the evening because it was sort-of supposed to be more of a ghost tour. We drove this narrow, steep road, to the top of a hill where the Waverly Hills building sat in all it’s creepy glory!

The first part of the tour consisted of us watching some old videos of the hospital when it was still functioning and learning about the history of the building itself. Back in the early 1900’s this hospital was built to house people suffering from tuburculosis and it became the largest TB hospital in the country. They didn’t have antibiotics at the time, so the thought was that lots of fresh air and sunlight would help kill the bacteria. This hospital was built on the top of a large hill in order to get the sick people away from the main city population and in order to have access to as much fresh air and sunlight as possible. Like many state hospitals of the time, it was huge and self-sustaining and housed the patients but also the workers and their families. Once antibiotics were discovered to be able to treat TB, then the hospital pretty much started to go out of business. It did become a hospital for the mentally ill and elderly for several years after, but eventually they shut their doors completely around 1980. Now, it is listed as a national historic building and the owners are in the process of restoring the building to its original condition after years of vandalism and vagrants took its toll on the property.

After the short history lesson, a couple of tour guides took our small group throughout the building.  It was really interesting seeing how huge this place was.  As we wandered throughout the building, our guide would stop us at random places and tell us a little ghost story about something that had happened in that particular spot.  There’s a story about an unwed nurse that got knocked up and then hung herself in front of room 502 and apparently you can sometimes see her wandering the halls in her uniform.  There’s another story about a vagrant and his dog who were living in the building and then later found dead by the elevator.  Sometimes they show up in pictures you take.  As we were going along on the tour, there was this guy with his son taking pictures.  We  couldn’t have been on the tour more then 5 minutes, when this guy was exclaiming to anyone who would listen that he had already captured a spirit on his digital camera.  We quickly nicknamed him “ghost dad” for the rest of the tour. 

Here is ghost dad and his kid thoughly examining a room for any spooks, spectors, or ghosts!

 Another lady swears she could hear footsteps behind her when no one was there.  Now, I totally believe that ghosts exists, but I have to say that unless someone pops up in front of me and I can stick my hand thru their floating body, I’m most likely not going to believe it is a ghost.  However, I did capture a couple of things that seemed a little bit weird to me.  In the below picture you can see several 'bubbles' floating around.  These bubbles didn't show up in any other pictures I took in that same area.  Could ghost dad have been right all along??

The last place we went on our tour was the “body chute”. Basically, so many people were dying from TB, that they needed a fast and discrete way to get the bodies out of the hospital and to an awaiting hearse.  So, they created this underground tunnel that ran from the base of the building all the way to the bottom of the hill where the main road was.  As you can see in the picture, on the left side were stairs and on the right side was a smooth slab, which at the time had some kind of winch to easily move the gurneys.  They also used this tunnel to bring supplies up to the hospital, since back in the day it was difficult to maneuver a vehicle up the narrow, winding road to the hospital.

After our ghost tour, we headed back to downtown Louisville where we enjoyed some more Beatles tribute band music for the evening.  I think the lead singer needed more cowbell tho...

The next day, we got up and drove the remaining 3 hours to Lynn’s house in Springfield, TN.  When we arrived, Lynn and her friend Gentry were out getting breakfast and her friend Sarah was just getting ready to jump in the shower. Sarah quickly let us in and we worked on hauling all of our bags into the spare bedroom of Lynn’s house where we would be staying for the weekend.  When we stepped through her front door, we were happily greeted by Lynn’s two large golden retrievers, Josie and Abby.  Instantly, they excitedly bolted out the front door, across the front yard and down the road together as if they were connected by an ox yolk.  I dropped what I was carrying and ran down the road after the two dogs.  All I could think of was that we had been at Lynn’s for approximately 10 seconds, which was apparently enough time for me to lose her animals.  Luckily, we had the Tennessee heat and their fatness on our side, because they only made it a little ways down the road before both of them were pooped out and panting like they were going to stroke out on me.  I grabbed one and Gary got the other one and we led them by the collar back to her house.  Just as we got them safely back in the house, Lynn and Gentry got home to greet us.  I’m glad Lynn didn’t see that ruckus, because the first thing out of her mouth was, “Did the dogs get out when you came into the house?”. Newp, nothin to see here folks!

After we settled in a bit, we decided to drive to this small, quaint town called Franklin to tour the shops.  It kind of reminded me of Saugatuck.  There was a traditional downtown area with bars, restaurant and expensive boutiques.  The only difference from Saugatuck was that Franklin was being taken over by the lovely and charming cicada.  Now, I’ve seen cicadas in Michigan before; however, I have never experienced a swarm of cicadas quite like this.  It seriously felt like we were experiencing one of the plagues of the Apocalypse.  They were everywhere: in the trees, hitting your windshield, popping under your tires as we drove down the street and getting caught in your hair and clothes as you walked down the sidewalk.  These things were so loud, we practically had to yell at each other to be heard over their chirping.  After several near-death cicada encounters, us girls could not take it anymore, so we all ducked into a bar to have a snack and a couple of drinks to sooth our nerves.  On our way out of town, we stopped by this small historic park which was the site of one of the civil war battles.  It wasn’t much to look at, other then a big, empty field, but there were a few interesting buildings on the property that dated back to civil war times as well.

 

The next day, we drove to the Kingston Springs area just outside of Nashville to do some ziplining thru the foothills of the Appalachian mountains!  The 5 of us were paired in a group with a family consisting of two college kids, a mom and a grandma.  All nine of us were directed thru the zipline course by one of their guides. The mechanics of it was pretty simple: everyone wore a helmet and a harness.  When it was your turn to go, you clipped your harness onto the cable and pushed off the platform.  When you landed on the other side, you simply unclipped your harness and yelled back a special word to the waiting zippers (our word was ‘dweezel’).  However, in actuality, it was a little more complicated then that.  On our first run, there wasn’t much of a leeway to drag your feet in order to stop.  So, if you missed the short landing strip, you were stopped by a bumper on the zipline.  It didn’t seem too bad, until you realize that the bumper is only stopping your clip and your body is still moving forward at what seems to be 100 MPH.  We didn’t get the full effect of the bumper stop until 98 lb grandma came flying down the zipline.  Her body literally lurched forward in her harness like one of those crash test dummies they use in vehicle testing.  Luckily, she was a spunky, little thing and she took it like a champ!  On the other hand, her daughter (the mom) was very spunky but not so little.  When this woman landed, it looked like a wrecking ball being drug thru 2 feet of loose dirt.  Then there was Lynn. 

On our first zip, Lynn made it to the other side, but only to lose her footing and zip halfway back on the cable and dangle helplessly in midair.  Fortunately, each landing area is provided with a long, bamboo pole in which to ‘fish’ the danglers back to the landing spot.  After our traumatic first zip, we pretty much had the hang of it and zipped thru the rest of the lines no problem, except for the poor mom who kept repeating her signature wrecking ball landing.  We had a ton of fun zipping thru the trees and enjoyed our final day in Tennessee!