Part 1 :

I’ve explored some terrifying places, but nothing prepared me for the heavy, suffocating dread of Waverly Hills. It looks like a castle, but feels like hll. Thousands of tuberculosis patients came here hoping for a cure, but many left through a “body chute”—a tunnel designed to hide the dad.

 

But the scariest moment wasn’t the tunnel. It was a ball.

We were trying to communicate with a spirit named Timmy on the third floor. I rolled a blue rubber ball down the dark hallway, begging him to play. The ball bounced, settled, and stopped. Silence. Then, out of nowhere, it bounced again.

 

When we walked down to retrieve it, my blood ran cold. The ball hadn’t just moved; it had turned a corner and landed in an empty room. And right next to the ball, scrawled on the rotting wall, was my own name.

PART 2: THE LONG NIGHT AT WAVERLY HILLS

Chapter 1: The Descent into the Body Chute

The sun had long since dipped below the horizon, leaving us isolated on the top of the hill. The massive, gothic structure of Waverly Hills Sanatorium loomed over us, a silhouette of jagged towers and broken windows against the moonless Kentucky sky. It looked less like a hospital and more like a fortress built to keep something in—or perhaps, to keep the world out.

My partner Shane and I stood at the entrance of what was arguably the most notorious feature of the entire property: The Body Chute.

“If I were staying here,” Shane mused, looking into the gaping maw of the tunnel entrance, “I wouldn’t want to be watching them shuttle bodies through the hall all day.”

I nodded, feeling the cold draft emanating from the tunnel. It smelled of wet earth and decay. “That was the point,” I replied, my voice echoing slightly in the concrete archway. “Death was so common here that they built this specific tunnel just to dispose of the dead bodies out of eyesight of the other patients.”

It was a grim logistical solution to a horrifying problem. When the “White Plague” was at its peak, people were dying so frequently that the morale of the living patients would have collapsed if they saw the hearses lining up at the front door. So, they built this chute. It was roughly 500 feet long, leading all the way down the hill to the waiting trains or vehicles below.

“Like, ‘Where’s Pete?’ ‘Oh, down the chute,’” Shane cracked, a smirk playing on his lips.

“They chutted him,” I said, unable to help myself. The humor was a defense mechanism. It was the only thing keeping the terror at bay.

“He done got chutted,” Shane laughed.

We stepped inside. The air temperature dropped immediately. The tunnel was constructed of ribbed concrete, stretching endlessly into the darkness. It was an engineering marvel of its time, but now, in the pitch black of night, it felt like the throat of a monster.

“I think this is the body chute,” I whispered, my flashlight beam cutting through the gloom but failing to find the end of the corridor.

“Well, let’s take a look,” Shane said, marching forward with that infuriating confidence of his.

As we walked deeper, the silence of the woods outside was replaced by the oppressive, heavy silence of the underground. Every footstep scraped loudly against the gritty floor. The walls seemed to close in.

“Oh my God, this is awful,” I muttered, shining my light on the damp ceiling.

“Now, this is the nightmare,” Shane agreed, though he sounded more fascinated than afraid.

“Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I chanted, a mantra of denial. The energy down here was wrong. It felt heavy, like the air itself was trying to push us back out.

“This is like Satan’s cement b*tt hole,” Shane declared, his voice booming.

“Oh my God, dude!” I snapped, though I was laughing nervously. “Holy sh*t.”

We continued our trek. The incline was steep. I tried to imagine the orderlies pushing carts down this ramp, day after day, year after year. Thousands of bodies. Tens of thousands of souls.

“How far does this go?” I asked, looking ahead into the infinite black. “Are we going to h*ll?”

“Let’s find out,” Shane said.

I decided to try an EVP session—Electronic Voice Phenomenon. If there were spirits lingering in this tunnel, maybe they wanted to be heard. “If there’s anybody down here that maybe hated this tunnel…” I started.

“This is a witch hole,” Shane interrupted, looking at the curved walls.

I ignored him. “…Let us know, make your presence known. Preferably, now, and not when we get to the bottom of this tunnel.”

We reached the bottom. The tunnel opened up slightly, and debris littered the floor. My flashlight caught something round and white in the corner.

“It looks like there’s a soccer ball at the bottom,” I said, squinting.

“Oh that’s good,” Shane said sarcastically.

Suddenly, a sound cut through the air. Whoop! Whoop!

I froze. “Are you serious?” I spun around, shining my light frantically. “Whoop! Whoop!”

“What is that? The wind?” Shane asked, looking around. “It just went, ‘Whooo!’”

“I don’t know what the f*ck that was,” I stammered, my heart hammering against my ribs. “It was a weird whoop noise.” It hadn’t sounded like wind. It sounded distinct, almost vocal.

Shane, ever the scientist of chaos, proposed an experiment. “What if I go up there,” he pointed back up the steep tunnel, “and you stay down here, and we turn our lights off, and see if we hear anything?”

My jaw dropped. He wanted to leave me. Alone. In the dark. At the bottom of the body chute.

“What if you go f*ck yourself?” I retorted instantly. “How about that?”

Shane just smiled. He knew I wouldn’t back down from a challenge, no matter how terrified I was. “How long am I staying down here?” I asked, defeated.

“A minute,” he said.

“A minute?” That sounded like an eternity.

“Yeah.”

Shane walked back up the tunnel, his footsteps fading. I was alone. I took a deep breath, trying to steady my shaking hands.

“F*ck, alright, lights off in three…” I counted down. “Two, one.”

I clicked my flashlight off.

The darkness was absolute. It was a physical weight, pressing against my eyes. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The silence was deafening, amplified by the rushing blood in my ears.

“Oh God. Oh, no, no, no, no,” I whispered to myself. “I hate this.”

From far away, I heard Shane’s voice, muffled and distant. “This is sort of beautiful.”

“I didn’t even get to do all the things on my bucket list,” I shouted back into the void, half-joking, half-pleading with the universe.

“Shut up,” Shane yelled.

“You shut up!” I screamed. Then, I heard a noise. A high-pitched screeching sound. “(Screeching).”

“Did you hear that?” I yelled, panic rising.

No answer. Just the dark.

“Is it a minute yet?” I called out. “Please tell me it’s been a minute.”

I waited. Time seemed to distort. Had it been ten seconds? Ten minutes?

“Hello?” I yelled.

“Okay, it’s been a minute,” Shane’s voice finally called back.

I fumbled for the switch. The beam of light cut through the dark, and I nearly collapsed with relief. “Awe, awe, get me the f*ck out of here,” I scrambled up the incline, my legs pumping. “I’m leaving, goodbye ghost at the bottom.”

Chapter 2: The Morgue and the Couch

We emerged from the tunnel and made our way back into the main building. The first floor of the Morgue Wing was our next destination. This was the heart of the tragedy. According to Tina Mattingly, the owner, this area also housed the electroshock therapy room.

“The electroshock therapy is on the first floor of what we call the Morgue Wing,” Tina had told us.

It was a barbaric practice by modern standards. “Electroshock is where they performed on the patients that got tuberculosis of the brain,” she had explained.

“Probably didn’t help them, I’m sure,” she added sadly, “but they didn’t know what else to do.”

We entered a room that looked like a small auditorium. There was a stage, peeling paint, and a general sense of abandonment.

“There’s a little theater in here,” Shane noted, shining his light around.

“Yeah, it’s set up because sometimes they put stuff on for Halloween,” I explained. “But this is the room.”

This was the room where they fried people’s brains in a desperate attempt to cure a lung disease. The energy was heavy, stagnant.

“Do you feel strange?” I asked Shane.

“No,” he replied flatly.

I sighed. Of course he didn’t. I walked over to a rotting, dusty couch sitting in the middle of the room. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in fifty years.

“I’m gonna sit down on this couch,” I announced.

“It’s filthy,” Shane observed with a grimace.

“Yeah, well, we’re gonna be sleeping on the ground later, so it doesn’t really matter does it?” I argued.

“I think the ground is cleaner than this couch,” Shane countered.

I sat down anyway. Dust billowed up around me in a cloud. “It’s pretty dusty, yeah,” I admitted, coughing slightly.

I stood up to inspect the damage to my pants. On the cushion, perfectly preserved in the thick layer of grey dust, was the imprint of my rear end.

“Are my butt cheeks now on the…” I gestured to the couch.

Shane shined his light on it and burst out laughing. “Yeah, that’s a perfect butt print!”

“Oh look at that! The two pockets and everything,” I marveled. It was ridiculously detailed.

“That’s Ryan Bergara’s butt,” Shane proclaimed, framing it with his hands like a piece of art. “Someone will come here in a week, and they’ll be like, ‘It’s a gh-gh-ghost butt!’”

We shared a laugh, but the levity was short-lived. We were still standing in a room of torture. I decided to try to provoke a reaction from any spirits present.

“A lot of you are probably very unhappy here because it seems like a room where they were doing a lot of medical things that maybe you didn’t enjoy,” I called out to the empty room.

I paused. Silence.

“If you’re here, we’re gonna be real quiet right now. Maybe make some noise, okay, here we go!”

We stood frozen for ten seconds. The building groaned, but there was no specific response. No screams, no electricity crackling.

“Shockingly, I’m not really hearing anything,” I deadpanned.

“This is the biggest upset,” Shane mocked. “I did not see this coming.”

We moved deeper into the morgue itself. This area was reportedly a hub of high death activity. “Supposedly, this is one of the more active rooms in this whole joint,” I told Shane as we entered the cold, tiled room.

“You feel any strange feelings right now?” I asked.

“I’m cold,” Shane admitted, shivering slightly. Then he chuckled. “Yeah, it’s a morgue.”

“I’d feel stranger if there were actual dead bodies in here right now,” he added.

I walked over to the rusted metal tables in the center of the room. They were cold to the touch, industrial and cruel. “These are accurate autopsy tables from the time, these are real,” I said, running my hand hover the edge.

“Yeah, I see that,” Shane said softly.

The reality of the place was sobering. Thousands of people had been drained of fluids right here on these tables.

Chapter 3: The Shaft

We climbed the stairs to the third floor, our flashlights cutting through the gloom. The air felt thinner up here, more charged. We were approaching the elevator shaft, the site of one of Waverly’s most tragic legends.

“Moving to the third floor,” I narrated for the camera, “a homeless man and his dog supposedly fell down the elevator shaft when the building was vacant.”

Tina had told us the story vividly. She had seen the ghost herself. “I saw a very tall man, tall, thin, long hair,” she had described. When she turned her light on him, he vanished. Then, she saw a dog. “It looked like a small white German Shepherd… all of a sudden, I didn’t see it disappear… it just wasn’t there anymore.”

 

We stood before the gaping hole of the elevator shaft. It was dark, smelling of rust and old grease.

“It’s also speculated that the man did not accidentally fall down the shaft, but that he was pushed,” I told Shane.

“But I mean, at least he went out with his best friend, I suppose,” Shane shrugged.

“They pushed the dog too?” he asked, suddenly realizing the implication.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, I didn’t even think about that,” I said, horrified.

“Maybe he was holding the dog on the…” I trailed off. “You know what, we’re not gonna think of the logistics of it.”

“Even if I’m holdin’ a dog, and someone pushes me, I’m gonna let go of the leash,” Shane argued, miming the action. “I’m not gonna be like, ‘Yeah, you’re coming with me.’”

“Coward, taking your dog–” I started.

Suddenly, Shane reached his hand into the dark opening of the elevator shaft.

“Shut up, what are you doing?” I snapped. “This is the worst thing you could possibly do.”

“Put your hand in there further,” he goaded me.

I hesitated. “It’s pretty far, I don’t want him to grab my hand,” I said, staring into the black abyss. “What if he grabs my hand and takes the Zoom?” I held up our audio recorder.

“Well, then we have proof of a ghost,” Shane reasoned logically.

“No, it’s just gonna be you saying, ‘You dropped it, oh, you dropped it,’” I countered.

“Put your hand all the way in there,” Shane insisted. “There you go.”

I extended my arm into the shaft. The air inside was freezing. “I don’t like that,” I whimpered.

“(Screams) What if I drop the Zoom?” I pulled my hand back fast.

“You didn’t drop it,” Shane laughed.

I composed myself. I needed to focus. “Okay, to the man in the elevator. If you were pushed down this elevator, make a noise. If you fell down this elevator, make a noise.”

I leaned in closer, straining to hear.

(SCREAMS)

I jumped back, flailing, my heart nearly stopping.

“What the f*ck is wrong with you?” Shane yelled, startled by my sudden movement.

“It was just… okay, it felt like someone doing this,” I made a blowing motion near my neck. “(Blowing).”

“You’ve got a thing man,” Shane shook his head.

“I swear! This is why I didn’t wanna do it because I knew you weren’t gonna believe me, this is bullsh*t!” I shouted. I felt it. It was distinct. A cold, sharp puff of air right on my skin.

“It’s also very breezy here, so yeah, if you felt a breeze,” Shane pointed out calmly. “It’s highly likely that it was–”

I cut him off, turning back to the shaft. “If that was you please don’t do that again.”

“We’d like some confirmation that it was you. Please do it again,” Shane countered immediately.

“No, don’t listen to him,” I begged the spirit. “Oh God, I hated that. Let’s get the f*ck away from this elevator shaft.”

Chapter 4: The Shadow People

We moved up to the fourth floor. This was where the “Shadow People” were most frequently seen.

“Visitors often claim they hear the sound of children’s laughter. Slamming doors are said to be a common occurrence,” I whispered to the camera.

The fourth floor felt more oppressive than the others. There was a sense of being watched from the corners. “Some insist faces have appeared in windows to rooms that are unoccupied, and in photos where nobody was standing,” I noted.

We stopped near the old nurse’s station. This was where Tina had captured a terrifying photo. “A place where owner, Tina Mattingly, came across evidence of a full bodied apparition,” I explained.

She had told us the story. She was with a friend who was snapping photos. Suddenly, the friend went crazy, shouting “Oh my God!” When they looked at the photo, there was a figure.

“She said she saw her standing right here,” I pointed to a spot in the hallway. “God that’d be scary.”

I pulled up the photo on my phone to show Shane. It was grainy, a photo of a camera screen, but the shape was undeniable.

“It’s kind of grainy because I took a picture of her camera… but that does look like a full bodied apparition,” I said.

“That doesn’t give you the chills?” I asked Shane.

“Well, I mean…” he trailed off, clearly unimpressed.

I shook my head. Nothing convinced him. But the night wasn’t over. We had one more stop. The third floor again. But this time, we were looking for someone specific.

Chapter 5: Timmy and the Blue Ball

We returned to the third floor hallway. It was long, dark, and utterly silent. This was the domain of Timmy.

“On the third floor, there are reports of a little boy named Timmy, who likes to play with a blue rubber ball,” I explained.

I held the small, blue ball in my hand. It was a simple toy, but in this context, it felt like a conjuring device.

“Alright Timmy, my name is Ryan, this is my pal Shane,” I called out.

“Hi Tim,” Shane said casually.

“I hear you like balls,” I said. Then I froze. “No, wait, wait.”

Shane burst out laughing. “Can we do a retake on that one?”

“That had to be intentional,” he accused me.

“I swear to God, I’m not doing this on purpose,” I pleaded, my face heating up.

“I mean, this is a bit, right,” Shane insisted.

“No, it’s not a f*ckin’ bit, I’m sorry,” I said, trying to regain composure. I looked down the dark hall. “I’m gonna bounce my ball.”

I wound up and threw the ball. It soared through the air, hitting the linoleum floor with a loud thwack.

“See, it’s a bouncy ball. You like that? I like it. Wanna play?” I asked into the darkness.

“Oh f*ck,” I laughed nervously. I sounded ridiculous.

“You wanna play?” Shane mocked my tone. “You sound threatening. ‘You wanna play? Let’s f*ckin’ play!’”

“Timmy, I’m very scared,” I admitted honestly. “But if you could throw this ball back, I won’t be as scared.”

“Oh my God, that’s the biggest lie I’ve ever heard,” Shane deadpanned.

I ignored him. I needed to focus. “Alright Timmy, I’m throwing the ball down.”

I threw it hard. It bounced down the corridor, the echoes fading as it rolled to a stop in the darkness.

“You ready? Alright. (Bouncing).”

“Oh my God. Dude that’s like–” I started to speak, but Shane cut me off.

“Shh.”

We listened. The ball had stopped. The silence returned.

Then, unmistakably: Bounce. Bounce.

“Oh, thank God, I think we’re good,” I whispered, relieved that nothing had jumped out at me, but confused by the sound.

“I think it bounced a few extra times though,” Shane whispered back, his voice low.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“Do you think it bounced?” Shane asked.

“I thought it bounced a couple extra times, but I thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me,” I said, my skin crawling.

“It sounded like it stopped, and then it bounced a little more,” Shane confirmed.

We stood there in the dark. A ball doesn’t stop and then start bouncing again on its own. Physics doesn’t work that way.

“(Bouncing),” I mimicked the sound I heard in my head. “Oh my God.”

“Do you think it’s like–” I began.

“Shh. I don’t know if that means ghost, but…” Shane was actually considering it.

“Let’s walk down and find the ball,” I suggested, my curiosity finally overriding my terror.

“That’s the most serious I’ve ever seen you,” Shane laughed nervously. “‘Let’s walk down there and find the ball.’”

We began the long walk down the dark hallway. “Alright Timmy, we’re coming to get the ball,” I announced.

I swept my flashlight beam across the floor. “I don’t know where it went,” I muttered.

We kept walking. Past the point where it should have stopped. Past the debris.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I whispered.

“Do you want the flashlight right now?” Shane asked, sensing my panic. Then his beam hit something. “Oh, there it is.”

My heart stopped.

“No way,” I gasped. “(Laughing) Oh no!”

“Oh no, no, no, no!” I backed away.

“Ryan, the ball bounced,” Shane said, his voice dropping an octave.

“No, the ball stopped here,” I pointed to the middle of the hallway, about twenty feet back. “How the f*ck is that possible?”

“The ball stopped right here,” Shane agreed, pointing to the same spot.

The ball was not in the hallway. It was inside a room. A room to the left of the hallway. It had to have turned a 90-degree angle to get there.

“How is that possible? Oh no!” I panicked.

“They know. Ryan they know,” Shane whispered ominously.

“Shut up dude, you know this is f*ckin’ weird. Shut up,” I snapped.

“The ball came right into this hallway,” Shane pointed out. “I don’t know what the odds are Timmy that my ball would land right next to my name down there that we didn’t know existed.”

I looked at the wall next to the ball. Scrawled in graffiti was the name RYAN.

“I’m gonna roll the ball one more time Timmy,” I said, determined to debunk this. Maybe the floor was slanted. Maybe there was a draft. “(Bouncing).”

“We’re coming over Timmy. Where did this thing go?” I called out as we walked down the hall again to check the second throw.

“I think it’s–” Shane started.

“Oh, it’s right there in the middle,” I said, shining my light on the ball. It was sitting perfectly still in the center of the hallway.

“Oh perfect,” Shane said.

“Now, that’s a good throw Ryan,” he complimented me.

“I mean, that’s exactly how I threw it last time,” I insisted.

“No, it wasn’t exactly,” Shane argued, ever the skeptic.

“Yes it was!” I shouted.

“No,” he said simply.

“It’s like directly in the middle of the floor,” I pointed out.

“So, you think because it’s in the middle now it was moved before?” Shane asked.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think,” I said firmly.

“I don’t know,” Shane shrugged.

“You don’t think it’s odd it stopped in the middle, and then before it went into the room by my name?” I asked, incredulous.

Shane just laughed. “(Laughing).”

I looked back at the empty hallway. The darkness seemed to press in closer. I didn’t know if it was Timmy, the wind, or just dumb luck. But standing there in the cold silence of Waverly Hills, looking at a ball that had seemingly moved on its own to acknowledge my presence, I felt a certainty I couldn’t explain.

We weren’t alone. And whoever was here… they wanted to play.

PART 3: THE ECHOES OF THE DAMNED

Chapter 6: The Geometry of Fear

The silence that followed the second bounce of the ball was heavy, thick enough to choke on. My flashlight beam remained fixed on that small, blue sphere sitting innocently in the center of the hallway. It was just a piece of rubber, a child’s toy, but in the context of Waverly Hills Sanatorium at two in the morning, it felt like a smoking gun.

Shane stood beside me, his arms crossed, his face illuminated by the harsh backscatter of his own light. He was looking at the ball, then at the room to our left, then back at the ball. I could see the gears turning in his head. He was a man of logic, a man who believed in wind drafts, uneven floorboards, and the chaotic nature of physics. He did not believe in Timmy.

“I mean, that’s exactly how I threw it last time,” I said, breaking the silence. My voice sounded thin, wavering in the vast, empty corridor. I was trying to convince myself as much as I was trying to convince him.

Shane shook his head, a small, dismissive smile playing on his lips. “No, it wasn’t exactly,” he countered. His tone was casual, maddeningly so.

“Yes it was!” I insisted, my volume rising. “I stood in the exact same spot. I used the exact same force.”

“No,” Shane said simply, refusing to engage with my panic.

I pointed a shaking finger at the floor. “It’s like directly in the middle of the floor.”

“So, you think because it’s in the middle now it was moved before?” Shane asked. He was playing devil’s advocate, trying to dismantle the supernatural implication piece by piece.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think,” I said firmly. I looked at him, searching for a crack in his armor. “You don’t think it’s odd it stopped in the middle, and then before it went into the room by my name?”

Shane laughed. It wasn’t a nervous laugh like mine; it was a genuine chuckle of amusement. “(Laughing),” he exhaled, shaking his head.

“I don’t know what the odds are Timmy that my ball would land right next to my name down there that we didn’t know existed,” Shane admitted, finally throwing me a bone. He walked over to the side room where the ball had originally landed—or rather, where it had been placed.

We peered into that room again. It was a small, decaying space, perhaps a storage closet or a small treatment room. The walls were peeling, layers of lead paint curling away like dead skin. And there, etched into the grime and the plaster, was that graffiti.

RYAN.

It wasn’t fresh. It looked old, weathered by decades of neglect. But the placement was precise. The ball hadn’t just rolled into the room; it had stopped inches from those letters.

“They know,” Shane whispered, leaning in close to the wall. “Ryan, they know.”

“Shut up, dude,” I snapped, stepping back into the hallway. “You know this is f*ckin’ weird. Shut up.”

“The ball came right into this hallway,” Shane continued, reconstructing the event. “It stopped. We heard it stop. Then, it bounced again. And it took a hard left turn.”

“Physics doesn’t do that, Shane,” I argued. “Inertia doesn’t take left turns after a full stop.”

“Maybe the floor is slanted,” Shane suggested, stomping his boot on the linoleum. “Maybe there’s a dip right here.”

We spent the next twenty minutes testing the floor. We rolled the ball gently. We threw it hard. We dropped it from waist height. Every single time, without fail, the ball rolled straight or veered slightly to the right, following the natural slope of the settling building. Not once—not a single time—did it hook left into that room.

“I’m gonna roll the ball one more time, Timmy,” I announced to the darkness, desperation creeping into my voice. “(Bouncing).”

The ball clattered away, rolling true and straight, stopping dead center in the hallway.

“We’re coming over, Timmy. Where did this thing go?” I asked, walking down to retrieve it.

“I think it’s–” Shane started, shining his light ahead.

“Oh, it’s right there in the middle,” I said. “See? It stays in the middle.”

“Oh perfect,” Shane mocked. “Now, that’s a good throw, Ryan.”

I picked up the ball. It felt cold in my hand. “This proves it,” I said, turning to face the camera. “The first time, something intervened. Something guided this ball.”

“Or,” Shane interrupted, “you just suck at throwing balls.”

I glared at him. “I hate you.”

“I hate you too,” he grinned. “But admit it, you’re a little spooked.”

“A little?” I laughed hysterically. “I’m terrified. This building is playing games with us. And it knows my name.”

We left the ball there in the hallway, a peace offering—or perhaps a surrender—to the entity known as Timmy. As we walked away, I couldn’t help but look back over my shoulder, half-expecting to see a small, pale hand reaching out from the shadows to pick it up.

Chapter 7: The Witching Hour

The adrenaline of the ball incident began to fade, replaced by a deep, bone-weary exhaustion. We had been exploring Waverly Hills for hours. We had braved the Body Chute, survived the Morgue, and communicated with the other side on the third floor. Now, the reality of our situation was setting in.

We weren’t leaving.

“I guess this is where we’re fuckin’ sleeping ’cause we’re idiots,” I muttered, referencing the plan we had made earlier in the day.

“How are you feeling?” Shane asked, noticing my posture slumping.

“Are you nervous?” he pressed.

“Yeah, I’m a little nervous,” I admitted. “I got that familiar knot that’s usually in my stomach when I go to these places”.

We made our way to the “Base Camp” we had established earlier. It was a large room on the fourth floor, chosen for its relatively intact roof and central location. But “intact” was a relative term at Waverly Hills. The windows were gone, leaving open sores in the brickwork where the night wind whistled through. The floor was covered in a layer of grit, dust, and probably asbestos.

“I’ve seen this one on several shows before, and always thought there’s no way in hell I’m gonna go there,” I said, dropping my heavy gear bag onto the floor with a thud.

“And here you are,” Shane said, spreading out his sleeping bag. “Living the dream.”

“This isn’t a dream,” I replied, kicking a piece of debris away from my sleeping area. “This is a nightmare. Look at this place.”

I shined my light around the room. Shadows danced on the walls, elongating and twisting into grotesque shapes. “It looks like one of the Conjuring films,” I observed. “I got a little spoiler for ya, everything in the building is gonna look like this”.

“Man, oh my God,” Shane sighed, sitting down on his sleeping bag and looking entirely too comfortable.

“There’s not one part of you that’s like, ‘Awe man, I’m really in for it now?’” I asked him, genuinely baffled by his lack of fear.

“I mean, I don’t–” he started, then paused. He looked toward the doorway.

“What?” I froze. “What is it?”

“What in the fuck is that?” Shane pointed his light at a shape in the corner of the room.

I scrambled backward, my heart hammering. I swung my light toward where he was pointing. A dark, jagged silhouette loomed against the wall.

“It’s just a big metal thing,” Shane said, realizing it at the same time I did. “That’s not a ghost, that’s metal”.

“Jesus Christ, dude,” I exhaled, clutching my chest. “You can’t do that to me. My heart can’t take it.”

“There’s a good chance tonight is the night you see me die on camera,” I said, only half-joking.

We settled in. The plan was simple: try to sleep. But in a place where 63,000 people supposedly died, “sleep” was a loose concept. The building was alive. It groaned as the temperature dropped. The wind howled through the elevator shafts, creating a sound that mimicked human moans.

“I think we should let ’em know that we’re entering… or sleeping, rather,” I said. “Just give ’em a quick, ‘Hey ghouls! The boys are here’”.

“Hey ghouls, keep it down, we’re trying to nap,” Shane called out into the darkness.

I lay down on the hard floor. The ground was cold, sucking the heat right out of my body. “We’re gonna be sleeping on the ground… it doesn’t really matter does it?” I remembered telling Shane earlier. Now, feeling the concrete against my back, I regretted not bringing a thicker mat.

“Comfortable?” Shane asked from the darkness.

“No,” I grumbled. “It’s filthy.”

“I think the ground is cleaner than this couch,” Shane reminded me, referencing the butt-print incident in the morgue.

“Shut up about the couch,” I said, closing my eyes.

Chapter 8: The Longest Night

Closing my eyes was a mistake. Without my vision, my hearing went into overdrive. Every rustle of the wind sounded like footsteps. Every drip of water sounded like a whisper.

Scritch. Scritch.

My eyes snapped open. “Did you hear that?” I whispered.

“Hear what?” Shane mumbled, already half-asleep.

“It sounded like… scratching,” I said. “Like nails on a wall.”

“It’s a rat, Ryan,” Shane said, rolling over. “Or a raccoon. We’re in the woods.”

“It sounded like it was inside the room,” I insisted.

I sat up, scanning the room with my flashlight. The beam cut through the dust motes floating in the air. Nothing. Just empty, rotting space.

“I’m surprised you’re conscious right now,” Shane said, his voice groggy.

“I’m keeping it together for now,” I replied tight-lipped. “But barely.”

I lay back down, but sleep was impossible. My mind kept drifting back to the stories. The homeless man and his dog in the elevator shaft. The nurse who hanged herself in Room 502. The Shadow People.

“You know,” I whispered, staring up at the cracked ceiling. “Most importantly, it would keep the patients quarantined far away from crowded areas”.

“What are you talking about?” Shane asked.

“The location,” I said. “They built this place on a hill to isolate them. To keep the death away from the city. We are so far from help right now.”

“We have a car, Ryan,” Shane said. “We can leave whenever we want.”

“Can we?” I asked. “What if the car doesn’t start? What if the tunnel collapses?”

“You’re spiraling,” Shane said. “Go to sleep.”

Time passed in an agonizing crawl. 3:00 AM came and went. The “Witching Hour.”

Suddenly, a loud BANG echoed through the hallway outside our room.

I sat bolt upright. “That was a door,” I hissed. “That was a slamming door.”

“It’s the wind,” Shane sighed, not even opening his eyes. “Slamming doors are said to be a common occurrence”. “Because there are no window panes and the wind creates a vacuum.”

“There is no wind right now!” I argued. “It’s dead silent outside.”

“Go check it out then,” Shane challenged me.

“I’m not going out there alone,” I said.

“Then go to sleep.”

“You are useless as a ghost hunter,” I told him.

“And you are hallucinating,” he retorted.

I lay there, listening. Was that footsteps? A light, shuffling sound, like slippered feet on tile. Shuffle. Shuffle.

“Shane,” I whispered.

No answer. He was asleep. He was actually asleep in the most haunted asylum in America.

I was alone.

I grabbed my camera and turned it on myself. The red rec light blinked in the darkness.

“Okay,” I whispered to the lens. “It’s roughly 3:30 AM. Shane is asleep. I… I can’t sleep. I keep hearing movement in the hallway. It sounds like pacing. Like someone walking back and forth, guarding the door.”

I turned the camera toward the doorway. The black rectangle of the door frame stood like a portal to another dimension.

“If there is anyone out there,” I whispered, my voice trembling. “I mean you no harm. I’m just observing.”

A sudden draft swept through the room, chilling the sweat on my forehead. It wasn’t a breeze; it was a cold spot. It moved over me, heavy and suffocating.

“I feel awful right now,” I whispered. “It feels like… pressure. Like someone is standing right over me.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please go away. Please go away.”

I must have passed out from sheer exhaustion, because the next thing I knew, gray light was filtering through the dirty windows.

Chapter 9: Morning Light

I woke up with a stiff neck and a back that felt like it had been beaten with a bag of rocks. The room was illuminated by the pale, sickly light of dawn.

Shane was already up, packing his sleeping bag.

“Morning, sunshine,” he said, looking irritatingly refreshed.

“I hate you,” I groaned, sitting up. “Did you sleep?”

“Like a baby,” he said. “Quiet night.”

“Quiet?” I stared at him. “You didn’t hear the banging? The shuffling? The cold spot?”

“I heard you whimpering in your sleep a few times,” Shane noted. “But other than that, no. No ghosts.”

I stood up, brushing the dust off my clothes. “I swear, this place comes alive when you stop paying attention.”

We packed our gear and began the long walk out of the building. The daylight stripped away some of the horror, but Waverly Hills still looked menacing. The peeling paint looked like diseased skin. The rusted railings looked like bones.

“The look of this building is so imposing,” I said, looking back at it one last time.

“It kind of looks like Hogwarts,” Shane joked.

“It looks like a prison,” I corrected him.

As we walked down the main driveway, leaving the “plague of all plagues” behind us, I reflected on the night.

“So,” Shane said, adjusting his camera bag. “Did we answer the question? Are ghosts real?”.

I thought about the Body Chute, the darkness that felt conscious. I thought about the breath on my neck by the elevator shaft. I thought about Timmy and the blue ball that defied physics to land next to my name.

“I think…” I paused. “I think we walked into a place that has seen too much death to be empty.”

“That’s a very poetic ‘maybe’,” Shane said.

“What about the ball, Shane?” I asked him. “Explain the ball.”

“Wind,” he said. “Uneven floor. Coincidence.”

“And my name on the wall?”

“Graffiti exists, Ryan. People write names.”

“It was my name. Next to the ball.”

“Your name is Ryan. It’s a common name. If it said ‘Bergara’, I’d be worried.”

I shook my head. He would never admit it. “You’re in denial.”

“And you’re seeing things,” he countered.

“I think we made contact,” I said firmly. “I think Timmy wanted to play. And I think the patients here… they’re still here. They were quarantined in life, and they’re quarantined in death.”

“Well,” Shane said, unlocking the car door. “As long as they don’t follow us home.”

I froze, hand on the door handle. “Don’t say that.”

“Too late,” Shane grinned. “Hey ghouls! Road trip!”

“Get in the car,” I muttered, diving into the safety of the passenger seat.

As we drove away, the massive brick structure of Waverly Hills disappeared into the trees. It sat there on its hill, silent and waiting. Waiting for the next group of idiots to come and ask if ghosts are real.

I looked at the footage on my camera. The clip of the ball bouncing. The look of genuine confusion on Shane’s face, even if he wouldn’t admit it now.

“It’s been debated how many died within its walls,” I said, recording my final voiceover. “Tina Mattingly claimed the number is in the tens of thousands. Regardless of the number, the weight of that death is palpable.”

“The spirits of the countless who died here are said to now haunt this facility,” I continued. “Making Waverly Hills Sanatorium potentially one of the most haunted places in the world”.

“And?” Shane asked from the driver’s seat. “Final verdict?”

I looked at the scratch on my arm I didn’t remember getting. I looked at the dark circles under my eyes in the rearview mirror.

“This place is hell,” I said. “And I never want to come back.”

Shane laughed. “See you next week, Ryan.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, leaning my head against the cool glass. “See you next week.”

Chapter 10: The Post-Mortem

(A week later, in the safety of the editing room)

“Pause it there,” I told the editor.

We were watching the footage of the ball. Frame by frame.

“Look at the rotation,” I pointed at the screen. “It’s spinning forward. Then it hits a divot, maybe. But look at the bounce. It gains height.”

“It’s hard to tell, Ryan,” the editor said. “It’s dark.”

“Zoom in on the audio waveform,” I commanded.

We looked at the audio track. Thud. Roll. Silence. Then: Thud. Thud.

“See!” I shouted. “It stopped. There’s three seconds of silence. Then it bounces again. Physics doesn’t allow for a three-second pause in momentum!”

“Maybe it hit a rat?” the editor suggested.

“A rat?” I stared at him. “A invisible rat that kicked the ball into a room labeled ‘Ryan’?”

“I’m just saying,” he shrugged.

I slumped back in my chair. No one believed me. But I knew. I knew what I felt in that tunnel. I knew what I heard in the hallway.

Waverly Hills wasn’t just a building. It was a battery. A battery charged by pain, suffering, and the slow, agonizing deaths of thousands of people who drowned in their own lungs.

And for one night, we had tapped into that current.

I picked up the blue rubber ball, which I had kept as a souvenir. I tossed it lightly against the wall of the editing bay.

Bounce. Catch. Bounce. Catch.

It was just a ball. Just rubber and air.

But every time I looked at it, I saw that dark hallway. I saw the empty room. I saw the name on the wall.

And I wondered… if I rolled it down the hallway of the office right now… would it come back?

I put the ball in my desk drawer and locked it.

Some questions are better left unsolved.

PART 4: THE RESIDUE OF FEAR

Chapter 11: The Static in the Air

The silence in the car was heavy, a stark contrast to the cacophony of groans and creaks that had filled our ears for the last twelve hours inside Waverly Hills. We were driving down the winding road, leaving the imposing gothic structure behind, but the atmosphere inside the vehicle felt pressurized, like a popped eardrum.

“You okay?” Shane asked, breaking the silence. He was driving, one hand casually draped over the steering wheel, looking annoyingly unaffected by the night’s events.

“I’m fine,” I lied. I was staring out the passenger window into the dense Kentucky treeline. Every shadow looked like a figure. Every flash of moonlight looked like an orb. “Just tired.”

“You were pretty jumpy back there,” Shane noted, a hint of a smirk in his voice. “Especially with the elevator.”

“I felt something, Shane,” I snapped, turning to look at him. “I know you think it’s all wind and drafts, but that breath on my neck? That was real. It was targeted.”

“It’s an old building, Ryan,” Shane reasoned, his voice calm and logical. “It’s full of holes. The wind comes up that shaft like a chimney. You were primed to be scared. You went in there expecting a ghost, so your brain turned a draft into a breath.”

“And the ball?” I challenged him. “Explain the ball.”

Shane hesitated. It was a split second, but I saw it. He shifted in his seat. “The ball was… weird,” he admitted. “But ‘weird’ doesn’t mean ‘dead child named Timmy’.”

“It stopped, Shane,” I recounted, replaying the memory that was burned into my retina. “It rolled, it stopped. We heard it stop. And then it started again. And it didn’t just roll forward; it took a hard left into a room. A room that had my name written on the wall.”

“Coincidence,” Shane said, though his grip on the steering wheel tightened slightly. “A one-in-a-million coincidence. But still a coincidence.”

I leaned back in the seat, closing my eyes. I could still smell the place—that unique mixture of wet concrete, old dust, and decay. The “White Plague” had decimated thousands of people in that building. Two billion lives claimed by TB globally, and a significant concentration of that suffering was localized right where we had just spent the night. The energy of that much death doesn’t just dissipate. It hangs. It soaks into the walls.

“Turn on the radio,” I said. “I need to hear something that isn’t us talking about dead people.”

Shane reached over and twisted the knob. Static hissed through the speakers, loud and harsh. I jumped, my heart skipping a beat.

“Sorry,” Shane laughed. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Reception is spotty.”

He fiddled with the dial until a classic rock station faded in, tinny and distant. I tried to focus on the music, but my mind kept drifting back to the footage we had captured. There were hours of tape to go through. And I had a sinking feeling that what we saw with our eyes was only a fraction of what the cameras had seen.

Chapter 12: The Lost Tape – The Nurse’s Station

(Three days later. Los Angeles. The editing bay.)

We were back in the safety of the office. The sun was shining outside, traffic was humming, and the world felt normal again. But in the dim light of the editing room, we were back in the dark.

“I want to look at the Fourth Floor footage again,” I told the editor. “Specifically the section near the Nurse’s Station.”

“The place where Tina saw the apparition?” Shane asked, swiveling his chair around.

“Yeah,” I said. “We kind of rushed through that part in the initial cut, but I remember feeling… watched.”

We pulled up the file. The time code read 01:14:00. We were on the fourth floor, the area notorious for Shadow People.

On screen: The camera pans across a long, desolate hallway. Peeling paint hangs from the ceiling like stalactites. The flashlight beams cut erratic paths through the darkness.

“Stop,” I said. “Go back five seconds.”

The editor rewound.

“Play it at 50% speed.”

We watched. The camera swept past a doorway—the room that used to be the nurse’s waiting room. In the corner of the frame, just for a fraction of a second, a shadow seemed to detach itself from the wall.

“Did you see that?” I pointed at the monitor.

“I see a shadow, Ryan,” Shane said, squinting. ” created by your flashlight moving.”

“No, look at the angle,” I argued. “My light is moving right to left. The shadow moves left to right. It’s moving against the light source.”

We watched it again. And again. It was ambiguous, as always. A trick of the light? Or one of the “Shadow People” that Waverly Hills is famous for?.

“Tina Mattingly said she saw a full-bodied apparition here,” I reminded Shane. “Her friend took a picture of it. We saw the picture. It looked like a person.”.

“The picture was a picture of a camera screen,” Shane countered. “It was grainy. It could have been anything. Pareidolia. Our brains are wired to see faces in chaos.”

“You’re impossible,” I sighed. “Okay, keep playing.”

On screen: We walk into the room. I’m holding the spirit box, a device that scans radio frequencies to allow spirits to communicate. The white noise chugs rhythmically. Ch-ch-ch-ch.

“Is there a nurse here?” my on-screen self asks. “Do you need help with the patients?”

Silence from the box. Then, a sharp sound. Not from the box, but from the hallway.

SLAM.

On the video, both of us jump.

“That was a door,” on-screen Ryan whispers.

“Wind,” on-screen Shane says immediately.

“Pause,” I said in the editing room. “Shane, look at the trees outside the window in this shot.”

We looked at the edge of the frame where a broken window revealed the night sky. The branches of the trees were perfectly still.

“No wind,” I declared triumphantly. “The trees are dead still. So what slammed the door?”

“Drafts inside the building,” Shane said, not missing a beat. “Temperature differentials. Hot air rises, cold air sinks. It creates pressure. Doors slam.”

“It’s always physics with you,” I grumbled. “Never metaphysics.”

“Because physics is real, Ryan,” Shane smiled.

We continued watching the “Lost Tape.” The investigation on the fourth floor had been more intense than I remembered. We spent a good twenty minutes in that nurse’s station. At one point, I had set up a “laser grid”—a pen that projects a grid of green dots onto the wall. The theory is that if something transparent walks in front of it, the dots will distort or disappear.

On screen: The green grid covers the far wall. We sit in silence, watching the dots.

“Watch the lower left quadrant,” I told the editor.

We stared at the green dots. Suddenly, three dots in the bottom left corner seemed to flicker out. One, two, three. Gone. Then they reappeared.

“A bug,” Shane said. “A moth flew in front of the laser.”

“It blocked three dots simultaneously,” I argued. “That’s a big moth.”

“It’s Kentucky,” Shane shrugged. “They have big bugs.”

I rubbed my temples. This was the dance we did. I presented anomalies; he presented mundane explanations. But the cumulative effect of the evidence was what mattered to me. The door slam. The shadow. The laser grid. And all of this in a room where the owner claimed to have seen a ghost.

Chapter 13: The Anatomy of the Ball Throw

We moved on to the most contentious piece of evidence: The Timmy Ball incident. This was the moment that had truly shaken me.

“Bring up the raw footage of the second throw,” I instructed.

We were looking at the moment I threw the ball for the second time, trying to replicate the first “ghost” throw.

On screen: I wind up. I throw the ball. It hits the floor. Bounce, bounce, roll. It stops dead center in the hallway.

“Okay, now pull up the first throw. The ‘ghost’ throw.”

We switched clips.

On screen: I throw the ball. Bounce, bounce, roll. It goes into the darkness. We hear it stop. Then… Bounce. Bounce.

“Listen to that,” I said, leaning in. “The cadence is different. The initial roll has a rhythm. Dak-dak-dak-woosh. The second set of bounces sounds distinct. Like it was dropped.”

“It sounds like it hit something and ricocheted,” Shane argued. “Maybe a piece of debris we didn’t see.”

“We walked down there, Shane,” I said. “The floor was clear. And look where it landed.”

We scrubbed forward to the discovery. The ball was inside the side room.

“Okay, look at the geometry,” I said, grabbing a marker and walking to the whiteboard in the editing room. I drew a diagram of the hallway.

“Here is me,” I drew a stick figure. “Here is the hallway. It’s a straight line. I throw the ball. Vector A.”

I drew a straight arrow.

“The ball stops here,” I marked a spot in the middle of the hall. “Point B.”

“Allegedly,” Shane corrected. “We couldn’t see it stop.”

“We heard it stop,” I insisted. “Then, it moves to Point C.” I drew a line turning 90 degrees left into the room.

“To get from B to C,” I said, tapping the board, “a force must be applied. An external force. Newton’s First Law. An object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

“Gravity,” Shane said. “The floor is uneven.”

“We tested the floor!” I shouted. “We threw the ball ten more times. It never went left. If the floor was slanted enough to make a stationary ball roll twenty feet into a room, it would have done it every time.”

Shane looked at the diagram. He looked at the footage. For a brief moment, the skepticism wavered.

“It is… odd,” he conceded. “I’ll give you that. It’s the weirdest thing that happened.”

“And the name?” I pressed. “The graffiti?”

“That’s just creepy,” Shane admitted. “But ‘Ryan’ is a common name. If it said ‘Shane Madej is a Coward’, I’d be impressed.”

“If it said that, I would have run out of the building and never returned,” I laughed.

Chapter 14: The Psychological Aftershocks

The editing session ended late. I drove home through the LA traffic, but my mind was still in Louisville.

That night, I had the dream again.

I was back in the Body Chute. The tunnel was endless, stretching out into a dark infinity. I was running, but my legs felt heavy, like I was moving through molasses. The air was cold and damp.

Whoop! Whoop!.

The sound echoed off the concrete walls. I turned around, but there was no one there. Just the dark.

Then, I saw him. At the top of the tunnel. The tall man Tina Mattingly had described. Thin, long hair. He was just a silhouette, backlit by a faint, sickly light.

He pointed at me. And then, he pushed something down the ramp.

It wasn’t a gurney. It wasn’t a body.

It was a blue rubber ball.

The ball rolled toward me, gathering speed. It grew larger and larger until it was a giant boulder, crushing the air out of the tunnel. I tried to scream, but no sound came out. The ball hit me, and I woke up gasping for air, tangled in my bedsheets.

I sat up, sweating. My heart was racing. I looked at the clock. 3:00 AM. The Witching Hour.

I got out of bed and walked to the kitchen for a glass of water. My apartment was quiet. Too quiet.

I thought about the “White Plague.” Tuberculosis. It consumes you from the inside out. It’s a slow, suffocating death. The patients at Waverly Hills lived in a community of the dying. They created their own world because the outside world rejected them. They had their own post office, their own farm. A self-sufficient city of the damned.

And when they died, they were “chutted” down the hill so the others wouldn’t see.

It was a tragedy of immense proportions. And we had turned it into entertainment. We had walked through their suffering with cameras and jokes.

“Are ghosts real?” That was the question we asked at the beginning of every episode.

I sipped my water, looking out at the city lights.

I didn’t know if ghosts were real in the scientific sense. I couldn’t put a ghost in a test tube. I couldn’t measure a spirit with a ruler.

But looking at my shaking hand holding the glass, I knew one thing for sure.

Fear is real.

And Waverly Hills had planted a seed of fear in me that wasn’t going away.

Chapter 15: The Skeptic’s Reflection

(Shane’s Perspective)

I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve said it a thousand times. I’ve been to the Lizzie Borden house, the Sallie House, the Queen Mary. I’ve taunted demons and invited possession. Nothing has ever happened.

But Waverly Hills… Waverly was different.

Not because I saw a ghost. I didn’t. The “Shadow Person” was a shadow. The breath Ryan felt was a draft. The ball was… gravity. Probably.

But the feeling of the place was undeniably oppressive. It was huge, rotting, and sad.

I was sitting in my living room, watching a rough cut of the episode. I watched Ryan freak out in the tunnel.

“This is like Satan’s cement b*tt hole,” I had said. It was a funny line. But watching it back, I saw the genuine terror in Ryan’s eyes.

Ryan isn’t acting. That’s the thing people don’t get. He genuinely believes this stuff. To him, the world is filled with invisible monsters waiting to grab him.

I paused the video on the shot of the graffiti.

RYAN.

I remembered the moment we found it. I remembered the chill that went down my spine, just for a second. It was a statistical anomaly. What are the odds that the ball lands there? 1 in 100? 1 in 1,000?

But what if?

That’s the question that keeps the show going. The “What If.”

What if Timmy was real? What if a little boy, bored and lonely in the afterlife, just wanted to play catch?

I shook my head, dismissing the thought. “No,” I said aloud to my empty apartment. “It’s a ball. It’s a floor. It’s physics.”

But I couldn’t deny that the story was good. The narrative arc of the skeptic and the believer. The banter. The terror.

“It looks like one of the conjuring films,” Ryan had said. He was right. It was cinematic.

I closed my laptop. I wasn’t going to lose sleep over a rubber ball. But I did have to give Waverly Hills credit. It put up a good fight. It gave us content.

And it gave Ryan nightmares for a month. Which, as a friend, I felt bad about. But as a producer? It was gold.

Chapter 16: The Final Verdict

(Recording the “Post-Mortem” episode for the YouTube channel)

We sat at the iconic desk, the yellow and blue file folders in front of us. The “Case Files” board was behind us.

“Welcome back to the Post-Mortem,” I said to the camera. “Where we talk about the episode we just watched. Today: Waverly Hills.”

“This place messed me up,” Ryan began, leaning forward. “I’m not gonna lie. This is top three scariest places we’ve ever been.”

“Top three?” Shane asked. “What beats it?”

“The goatman’s bridge,” Ryan said instantly. “And maybe the Sallie House. But Waverly is up there. The scale of it. The history.”

“Let’s talk about the evidence,” Shane said. “The ball.”

“The ball,” Ryan sighed. “Look, I know what people are gonna say. ‘It was the wind.’ ‘It was the floor.’ But you were there, Shane. You saw it.”

“I saw a ball roll,” Shane said diplomatically. “I cannot confirm it was pushed by a ghost child.”

“But you can’t debunk it either,” Ryan pointed out.

“I can’t prove a negative,” Shane countered. “I can’t prove it wasn’t a ghost. But the burden of proof is on you to prove it was.”

“I think the fact that it turned a corner is proof,” Ryan said. “Inertia carries things in straight lines. To turn, you need force.”

“Or a slope,” Shane mumbled.

“We checked for a slope!” Ryan threw his hands up.

“Okay, okay,” Shane laughed. “Let’s move on. The body chute.”

“Awful,” Ryan shuddered. “Just awful. The vibe down there is heavy. You can feel the death.”

“I thought it was peaceful,” Shane said. “Quiet. Cool.”

“You’re a sociopath,” Ryan told him.

“I’m a realist,” Shane corrected. “It’s a tunnel. It’s concrete.”

We took questions from the audience (fictionalized for the narrative).

Question from @SpookyGirl99: “Ryan, did you ever go back and check if the graffiti was there before the ball rolled?”

“We didn’t see it before,” Ryan answered. “We didn’t go into that room until the ball rolled in there. So, technically, it could have been there for fifty years. But the fact that the ball led us to it? That’s the spooky part.”

Question from @SkepticSteve: “Shane, did you feel anything at all?”

Shane paused. He looked at the camera. “I felt… sad,” he admitted. “Knowing the history. Knowing that they used electroshock therapy on TB patients. Knowing they threw bodies down a chute. It’s a tragic place. Do I think it’s haunted? No. Do I think it’s a monument to human suffering? Absolutely.”

“That was surprisingly deep,” Ryan noted.

“I have layers,” Shane shrugged. “Like an onion. Or an ogre.”

Chapter 17: Closing the File

The cameras turned off. The lights dimmed. The episode was done.

“You ready to go?” Shane asked, grabbing his jacket.

“Yeah,” I said. I picked up the case file on Waverly Hills. It was thick with notes, photos, and historical documents.

I flipped through it one last time.

July 26th, 1910 – Waverly Hills opens. 1961 – Waverly Hills closes. 10s of thousands died.

 

I closed the folder and stamped it. UNSOLVED.

We might never know for sure if Timmy was real. We might never prove the existence of the Shadow People. But we had told their story. We had remembered them.

“You know,” I said to Shane as we walked out to the parking lot. “Maybe that’s all they want.”

“Who?”

“The ghosts,” I said. “Maybe they just want to be acknowledged. Maybe the ball wasn’t a threat. Maybe it was just a wave. A ‘hello’.”

“Maybe,” Shane said, unlocking his car. “Or maybe it was just gravity.”

I looked up at the night sky. “I’m gonna go with hello.”

“You would,” Shane laughed.

We got in the car and drove away. But in my mind, I was back on the third floor. I saw the blue ball sitting in the darkness. I saw the peeling paint. And I heard, faintly, the sound of a child’s laughter echoing through the halls of the hospital on the hill.

I whispered one last time, just in case.

“Goodbye, Timmy.”