Ghosthunting Kentucky. Patti Starr
he told me that it was near the border of Tennessee about sixty miles from Nashville. He bragged about the closeness and fellowship of his small town with pride. I remember the first time I saw David; he reminded me of a character from my childhood. Mr. Brown was a deacon at our Baptist church, and he played the part of Santa each Christmas. I’m not saying that David was as big as Santa, but he had this perfect, jolly round face that made me think of what the real Santa would have looked like.
When we entered the city of Scottsville, which is the county seat for Allen County, we passed a welcome sign with Scottsville’s motto, “The Friendly City.” Soon after that we found ourselves driving through the public square, admiring the concentration of delightful and colorful retail shops. The courthouse sits in the center of the turnpike leading from Louisville to Nashville. It was one of the most pristine small towns, reflecting a loving history, that I had ever visited.
I called David so we could meet before my seminar at the local library that David’s wife, Julie, had arranged for me. He gave us directions to check out the hospital grounds before the investigation that was scheduled for the evening. As we pulled into the driveway, I was rather surprised at the sight of the hospital. It looked more like a one-level office building, with tall weeds and lots of winding vines growing all around. It looked very small for a county hospital until we drove around back and could see that there were two stories to the building, as the basement was exposed at ground level and made another floor. The windows were broken out, and you could see the old, white, iron-framed beds that were forgotten in time and left behind. To the right of the drive, in the back of the hospital, was a strange metal structure. David walked over to this rusted-out structure and explained that it was a specially built incinerator that burned all the body parts from surgery and possibly the embryos from miscarriages. It did give me an eerie feeling just standing beside it. On the other side of the incinerator was a wooded area, and as we stood beside this devise, the wind picked up and blew cold through us. That didn’t help my feelings at all.
I asked David about the history of the hospital, and he told me that it was opened to the public in 1952. He said that during the hospital’s construction, there was only one fatality. One afternoon, a laborer was sent into the back part of the basement to work. As he reached down to move some wood panels, he was shocked to find a copperhead snake coiled to strike under the wood. He jumped back but it was too late—the copperhead bit the worker. He died shortly afterwards.
David also pointed out that because EMS was not allowed to pronounce anyone dead, all bodies had to be brought to the emergency room for a doctor to make that call. Because the hospital had two emergency rooms, one for spillover, they would put the bodies in emergency unit two until the funeral home employees could pick them up, since there was no official morgue in the hospital. If the bodies belonged to families in another county, the bodies would remain in this room until they were retrieved by family.
As the hospital aged and become more and more outdated, it merged with a new hospital in 1993, and in 1994 the Scottsville maternity and nursery wards were closed. Soon after that, nurses who worked in that area would comment on hearing the sounds of babies crying, although the nurses knew that there were no babies there. A man whose mother had been a nurse at the hospital told David that sometimes his mother would take him to work when she couldn’t get a sitter, and he would stay in one of the rooms where the nursery used to be. He would be awakened by the sound of a baby crying. He would leave the room to find his mom. When he would find her, she would explain that it was a common sound that everyone heard when they stayed in that room and that he should not be afraid. He would go back to the room and go back to sleep without being awakened again.
The hospital’s body-part incinerator
For thirty years David was an EMT stationed at the hospital. Sometimes when he was scheduled for a twenty-four-hour shift, he would go back into the basement area where there was a room for the EMTs to sleep between calls. He remembers that once, after he woke up in the morning, one of the nurses asked him how he’d slept. He told her that he was kept awake most of the night by doors slamming and objects being moved and dropped on the floor. He asked her who was so busy down there, and she replied that there was no one there but him.
Before we left the hospital and headed for the library, I asked David if I could interview his son, Chris, and some of the volunteers. He called them over to the car, and they were all anxious to tell me about their own ghostly experiences.
Chris started, “One afternoon, while I was working at one of the nurse’s stations where all four halls meet, I heard a clear voice of a young child say, ‘Hello.’ I turned to see who was behind me, and I noticed a broom closet. I thought that maybe a child had gone inside there and was playing a trick on me. I walked over and opened the closet but found nothing there that would have made that sound. This freaked me out so I picked up my tools and left for the day. From then on, when I worked in this room I propped the door open so that if anything like that happened again, I could easily run out of the room.”
David interrupted and added, “I was in what used to be the waiting room for the CCU patients, and while I was working, the door to the room slammed. I went over to open it, but it was stuck. I figured that it must be due to the dampness that the door was swollen and that was why I couldn’t get it opened. I tried for over fifteen minutes to get the door to open. I began to feel a little panicked and realized that the only way out was through a window. I had to hold on to the gutter that gave way as I jumped to the ground. The gutter is still hanging outside the window. I walked around the building and went in through the front to get back to the room, and, to my amazement, the door was standing wide open. And, Patti, I just remembered this,” David continued. “I was working in another one of the rooms to get ready for the Halloween tours. I was standing in the corner of the room with my arms up while attaching a string of lights to the ceiling. All of a sudden, a big splash of water hit my side where I was standing next to the wall. I lowered my arms and looked at my side, and it was soaking wet while the water continued to flow down my legs into my socks. I looked up to see if the ceiling was leaking, but it wasn’t. Anyway, if the water had come from the ceiling, it would have landed on my shoulder, not come from a side angle and hit me in the side just below my armpit. The wall that I was standing close to did not have any signs of water on it. Now that was a totally unexplained experience, and it scared the heck out of me.”
Chris prompted one of the volunteers, Travis Ford, to share one of his experiences. Travis, a bit reserved, began, “I was walking down one of the hallways getting ready to enter one of the rooms where we were working to get it ready for the Halloween tours. To tell you the truth, I have never liked that room. While I’m working in the room, I feel like there are eyes staring at me, so I’ll turn around, and there is no one there but it still creeps me out. Anyway, as I turned to go into the doorway of the room, I stopped immediately. It felt like someone was standing in front of me, but there was no one there. All of a sudden, with a mighty force, I was pushed out the door and landed against the wall in the hallway. Once I realized what had happened, I turned and ran down the hall until I reached the lobby. I was out of breath and scared out of my mind at what had just happened. I remained in the lobby for a while with all sorts of thoughts going through my head, trying to make sense of what had just happened to me.” I asked Travis if he has gone back into the room since then, and he said he had. He told me that he still feels creeped out when he has to work in the room, but nothing has pushed him again.
Once I had finished with the interviews, we left for the library where we had a full house in attendance. While I was there I was able to meet Julie Dinwiddie and she told me about her interests in the haunted hospital. She is a first grade school teacher with a love for ghost lore and ghost stories. She told me how she and David loved to travel, and at each destination they try to find a ghost tour they can go to. Julie and Tallauh, Chris’s wife, complete this family venture by selling tickets for the ghost tours and booking the various ghost groups for overnight investigations.
Now comes the fun part. We left the library and headed out for The Haunted Hospital, as it has now been officially named. We had about forty people waiting to go into the unknown dark site to see what we might experience together. After our prayer of