Medium Lynne Olson
Waverly Hills Sanitorium
Investigating Waverly Hills last year (May 2009) and this year (May 2010) were vastly different experiences. LightSpirit13 (Karen Lambert) and I were fortunate to be able to investigate together in 2009, but due to some travel snarls were obliged to investigate on separate nights this year.
I was part of the Monday night group. As you can imagine, excitement was at a fever pitch among participants because the Ghost Adventures Crew was not only present but also had split up so each group got an hour to investigate with Zak, Nick and Aaron respectively.
My first hour of investigation was with Shannon Sylvia, a psychic medium I had met for the first time at this event. We started on the fourth floor that had a lot of small isolation patient rooms. Author Jeff Belanger was also with this group. A factual story was told about a local homeless man who was known to have squatted at Waverly about 15 years ago when it was an unattended, abandoned building. He and his dog were known for walking the halls together. One day he was found dead in an elevator. Of course, this story was told directly in front of the elevator involved. (Today the elevators at Waverly are welded shut to prevent tragedies.) Immediately I saw the old man dead in the elevator. He was curled up and the dead body of his dog had been thrown in after him. He told me that his dog had been with him and dying in that elevator wasn’t his idea. He was murdered. Jeff Belanger, who does all the location research for Ghost Adventures was able to confirm that the old man was found with his dog and both, had been murdered. Not surprisingly the old man was mad as hell at being killed. It wasn’t an easy or neat death.
Since LightSpirit13 and I had to investigate separate nights I was fortunate to investigate with Mike and Rhonda Schienle. Rhonda is the founder and current President of Indiana Paranormal Investigations Inc. http://www.indianaparanormalinvestigators.org/ She is also a medium in her own right. Mike is her sword carrier and tech guru. Running around an event that some treated more like a party than an investigation and conference, I was happy to be hanging out with an old married couple. It was also great to be able to bounce my psychic impressions around with another medium. I also appreciated the fact they had good investigation protocols.
Up on the fourth floor, Rhonda, Mike and I broke off from the main group after awhile. I encountered Molly, the ghost of a young TB victim I first met last year at Waverly Hills. Sadly she was weaker than when I had first seen her. She was tucked into bed this time. I asked her if she was strong enough to get out of bed and move a plastic ball around for us. (She did last year.) Molly was game but told me she didn’t dare leave her bed because if she did Matron would be upset with her. The following night LightSpirit13 and some of the people with her were able to talk Molly into moving the ball again. I guess Matron was far away at that point.
Just outside Molly’s room, I saw a group of student nurses chatting and smoking. Based on their tea length uniform dresses, full starched caps and distinctive cloaks they dated from the 1930’s into the early 1940’s. For some reason the year 1942 stood out for me. I walked up to them and tried to engage them in conversation but they scattered telling me that my presence would alert Matron to the fact they were standing around and smoking. They didn’t want to get caught so left the area. The Matron on duty that night must have had a formidable personality!
Rhonda and I both picked up on the ghost of a young father named Daniel. He was terribly sad. When diagnosed with TB, had been forced to leave his son, a blond charmer who was “Just twoooo” years old at the time. Rhonda heard Daniel’s comment several times via her medium skills. Daniel showed me his darling little boy he hated to leave for a TB hospital. I don’t think he saw his son ever again.
At one point the three of us walked into a storage room. Adhesive from removed labels still showed on empty shelves. Matron herself finally showed up. Middle aged, short gray hair, dressed fairly similarly to the student nurses. She told me the higher, taller cupboards stored blankets and pillows. She commented bitterly that they didn’t stay on the shelves for long, there were so many patients, always too many sick coming into Waverly. The medical staff frequently struggled to keep up. Sometimes when she needed a break she would go into the storage room, especially in winter as it featured a huge, long hot water heater. She would warm herself up for a few minutes, staring outside the window of the room, onto a bleak, snow-covered scene. One of the Waverly remaining gargoyles on the outside of the building had a cap of snow on it too. I had a strong sense of her intense feelings of exhaustion and depression.
Zak playing an EVP for the group.
For some reason I saw a lot more of the Waverly medical staff this trip than I had last year. Our second hour was spent doing a group EVP with Zak on the third floor. Zak told us about his experiences in an operating suite. Something had touched his hand. He shared a clear EVP telling him to “Get back”. I looked into it and saw that Zak had walked into a past operation. The surgeon was the ghost who told Zak to “Get back”, as in out of the room to avoid contaminating his surgical field with germs. I would call this particular encounter both a residual and an intelligent haunting. The surgeon reacted to what he saw as Zak’s intrusion, but from the surgeon’s perspective he was still in his own era in the middle of an operation.
I had spent part of the previous hour in the same surgical suite Zak had his experiences in. In fact I was standing about a foot behind a taped X where GAC had experienced some activity. I was just a few feet away when Chris from T.S.P.; was scratched by a ghost on the back of his neck. The scratch drew little blood but raised a significant four-inch welt on his neck. Chris had not been doing any hostile or aggressive provoking. Instead of being scared, Chris got mad telling the ghost of the man who scratched him; “I don’t like being scratched like that. That’s not cool. Only whimps scratch!” Interestingly the angry man who scratched Chris looked exactly like the murdered homeless man I had seen in the elevator. He was striding around the room, highly agitated, but without his dog this time. I don’t know why he scratched Chris, but I do think he was responsible.
When the change signal came, Fr. Andrew Calder came into the room and offered to bless Chris and anyone else who had been present at the time of the scratch. Chris, myself and perhaps half a dozen other people took Fr. Calder up on his offer. I was surprised at how few people accepted the blessing. Personally, I will take whatever grace comes my way.
For our group EVP Zak had the paying public stand in doorways along the third floor while he handled provocation, inviting the ghosts to use all his energy if needed to create an EVP. He had those of us with video cameras set them on the floor, pointing into the hallway. I cannot speak to anyone else’s experience but my handycam got zilch. Zak was luckier. I took some video of him reviewing the results of the EVP he got during my group EVP session. As we have seen on TV, ghosts tend to remember the GAC guys. Zak got several EVP’s. The first one said, “Zak go away”. The second said, “Hate you”. It was pretty cool to be in a group with Zak that got some measurable results.