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Viktoria Nasyrova & The Waverly Hills Sanatorium
26 Plays1 year ago
This week, it’s killer pastries and ghostly patients!
First up this week, Felicia covers the case of Viktoria Nasyrova - a woman who was convicted just this year in February 2023 for poisoning her friend Olga Tsvyk...with a slice of cheesecake! Right in the Cheesecake Capital - New York City! But why did one woman poison the other? Viktoria and Olga eerily resembled each other at the time, both were Russian speakers…was Viktoria trying to steal Olga’s identity?! It’s a case of pie-dentity theft!
Next, Lauren explores Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, KY - a hospital that treated tuberculosis patients in the early 1900s. In the decades since, the building has housed numerous institutions: a sanatorium, a nursing home, a prison, and a haunted house (naturally). But has it also been home to some patients that checked in but never checked out?! Waverly Hills is now known as one of the most haunted hospitals in the United States! Find out about its cursed “Body Chute" aka "Death Tunnel” and its numerous notorious spirits that haunt its historic halls.
PS: If you have requests for future episodes or just want to hang out, follow us on Instagram @sinistersisterspodcast
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Transcript
Introduction and Movie Recommendations
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to the Sinister Sisters podcast. I'm Felicia. I'm Lauren. We're best friends. And we like spooky stuff. And my recommendation is something that I just found out Lauren already recommended. So I'm just going to yes and her by saying that I See You was a really cool movie. Right? Like The Frogging or whatever. That was horrifying. Yes.
00:00:42
Speaker
That makes me scared to ever live in a house again. I know. Honestly, it's like one of my favorite parts about living in an apartment is that there aren't that many places people could be. Yeah, exactly. Like there's no I don't have like an attic or a spare room. Exactly. It's scary.
00:01:06
Speaker
Yeah, but it was it was really good. I really enjoyed it. Lots of twists and turns and things I didn't expect. So that was cool. And the ending was like a nice.
00:01:18
Speaker
Oh, oh my God, yes. A nice acting too, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, good acting for sure. Yeah, overall was good. What did you watch?
Personal Anecdotes and Anxiety Management
00:01:28
Speaker
I know I was trying to, I'm really trying to see if I have anything. Oh, okay. Well, this is kind of silly, but I'm going to say it anyway. So if anybody doesn't know this aspect of James and I's falling in love story, we, like the first like text that, well, so I sent a text to him at some point.
00:01:47
Speaker
or a DM. And then on April 21st, I sent fire emojis back to him watching Silent Hill. And so that was like the conversation that actually like kicked off and like we started talking from. And so we watched Silent Hill. You didn't remember that? No. It's so silly. So we watched Silent Hill last night.
00:02:17
Speaker
in honor of our first romantic DMing anniversary. Oh my gosh, so funny. Honestly, I know it's not the best movie, but I really enjoy it. I think it's a lot of interesting stuff going on and I love the design parts of it still, even if the CGI is so terrible to look at now.
00:02:40
Speaker
I remember watching that movie when I was young and I thought it was the most horrifying thing I'd ever seen. I was so scared. And now? Not as scared? I'm still scared. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, honestly. That's one I have not seen in a long time. There are parts that are ridiculous through our modern lens, but I still do think the design is really cool and the
00:03:07
Speaker
They are really creepy and it like the whole tone of it is super unsettling and it has that, you know, since it was based on a video game, like it has like a very video game kind of feeling for sure. Yeah, but I still need to watch that other show The Last of Us or whatever. Oh my gosh, you have to. I know it. I know it.
00:03:29
Speaker
Although I told my friend at work to watch it, and he's now angry with me because he was like, that was so deeply upsetting. Yeah, he was very sad. And he was like, how did you just watch that casually? And you were like, I guess we were not as close as I thought. You don't know me that well. Exactly.
00:03:50
Speaker
Well, anyway, what else do I have? Oh, I also, you know, I've just been watching my trash TV to handle my anxiety. So I've watched a lot of Love is Blind the new season. It's been great. I just started watching one of those seasons. Oh, no, no, no. Sorry. I'm thinking about. No, my bad. I always mix up that one and Married at First Sight.
00:04:08
Speaker
Oh, yes. Very similar. I mean, kind of same idea though. So yeah, Love is Blind is just like real juicy. So it's always entertaining to me. And they always have like terrible people. Like some of them are great, but some of them I'm like, you're just like an asshole. Like how do you exist in life? That's funny. I don't know. But it's entertaining. Oh, I bet. Yeah. And then yeah. And then I've been watching the new Yellow Jacket season. I think I mentioned it last time, but I finally
00:04:38
Speaker
I guess it's been a couple episodes now, but we did get to Elijah Wood and it's been so fun. Oh my God, I can't wait. Yeah, that's something I need to watch for sure because I loved season one. Oh my God. Yes. Amazing. Well, I think that's it for me. Okay, cool. All right.
Victoria Nasserova's Crime Story
00:04:57
Speaker
So I am doing a story today that is recently in the news because the person it's about was just convicted of murder.
00:05:08
Speaker
JK, actually, she's coming to something else, but it's like a whole thing. It's a whole thing. Oh. Because I guess she actually didn't murder this person, but she might have murdered other people. That was a really weird way to start this. OK, this is the I don't even know. I wish she had a name in the press or something, but I'm going to call her the cheesecake attempted murderer. OK.
00:05:34
Speaker
So this happened in Queens, in Forest Hill, Queens. And this woman named Victoria Nasserova, she's Russian, was sentenced to 21 years in prison, like two days ago, for poisoning a woman with a sedative-laced cheesecake in Queens who resembled her enough that she would then steal her identification
00:06:03
Speaker
and other stuff. And yeah, so that's what she was convicted of, is poisoning a woman. And attempted murder, but she also has had a lot of other issues. But I guess the thing she was technically convicted of is attempted murder in the second degree, attempted assault in the first degree, assault in the second degree, unlawful imprisonment in the first degree, and petite larceny.
00:06:32
Speaker
So yeah, so she's got 21 years in prison and followed by five years post-release supervision. Okay, so this is why I went down. Wait, really quick? Yeah, go ahead. Did you watch Orange is the New Black? Oh yeah. Doesn't this kind of remind you of like what Red would do? Like I feel like this woman is 100%. Oh my gosh, totally. Absolutely. Oh my gosh, yeah.
00:06:56
Speaker
Okay, so she is 47 years old now. The event that we're talking about today happened in 2016. So she had visited the home of the then 35-year-old Olga, I don't know how to say this, it's T-S-V-Y-K, speak, maybe, I don't know.
00:07:20
Speaker
Also Russian. That's a lot of consonants. That's a lot of consonants. So also Russian. And she had previously known her because she is a beautician and so Olga would do her eyelashes, like eyelash extensions or whatever. They did resemble each other. So they both had dark hair. They're both obviously Russian and speak Russian. Similar complexion and just like kind of similar faces. Like I can see
00:07:49
Speaker
mixing them up if you if you didn't know them very well. So she comes over kind of unexpectedly and brings this cheesecake. And she herself eats two pieces of cheesecake, gives Olga a piece. Turns out her pieces were not poison. And she gave her a
00:08:15
Speaker
a poisoned piece that had, it's called a phenazepam, which is basically a very potent sedative. So she, this is just funny to me. Okay. So she tried to set it up. So she lived. The only reason this is a little funny is because the girl lived. So she set it up to look like Olga had killed herself.
00:08:43
Speaker
So she laid her out on the bed. She threw all these pills everywhere. She left the cheesecake things, which was probably pretty stupid. She stole her passport, her work permit, because I think I'm not sure if she was here on a green card or not, but she had to have a work permit and some other just like general valuables. And so at some point after she's gone and she thinks Olga is
00:09:08
Speaker
basically dead. Olga wakes up and she is sick. Yes Olga fight for your life. So she gets up and her I think either her sister or like friend like shows up and she's like, I'm really sick. I'm sick. I'm sick. They call 911 and the doctors
00:09:32
Speaker
like you've been poisoned and they basically tell her like 20 more minutes, you would have been dead. Like she was on the brink of death. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. So.
00:09:44
Speaker
She looks around her home, she realizes her passport is gone, her employment authorization card, her gold ring, all this stuff is gone. And she's like, okay, I think we all know who did this. Pretty clear. It was Victoria. So she calls the police and turns out
00:10:07
Speaker
Victoria was also wanted for a couple of other things. So she had been wanted by Interpool for a 2014 murder that she hasn't actually been charged for, but they think she she did it about another person that was poisoned, I guess, in Russia. And they have footage of her. But I guess because she's in Russia, I guess that's why they're not charging her. But there's like footage of her like driving around
00:10:38
Speaker
for like a really long time with someone in the passenger seat that appears to be dead. So I don't have a lot of information on that because it happened in Russia, but she might have done that one.
00:10:51
Speaker
And then in addition, in 2015, so the year before this attempted murder, she had been brought in to police already for all these grand larceny charges from all these men that said that they met her on a dating site. She used a bunch of different identities and that she would basically drug their drinks and steal from them and leave.
00:11:19
Speaker
It's not good. It's not good. She also has a, she's evil. She's literally evil. Yeah. Yeah. She had one ex-boyfriend that said that she killed his dog. Like poisoned him. So obviously she should go to jail for the rest of her life. For no reason. Yeah. Just cause like she was mad at him or something. And that he woke up- No, cause you can't steal from a dog. I know. And that he woke up, realized he had been passed out for two days after a date with her.
00:11:49
Speaker
and was missing like tons of stuff from his apartment. And there was two other men from New York that came forward saying that she drugs them and stole from them. And it's interesting because I did wonder if these men had come before, because I do think there's like a like a thing where men, like men don't typically report assault, right? Because like, they feel
00:12:17
Speaker
that they wouldn't be believed that a woman was able to take advantage of them like this. So at least three men have come forward, but I bet you anybody knows more. So she's been interviewed in prison about all of these allegations. And by the way, we do have to remember that English is her second language, but one quote that I really loved is that they said,
00:12:44
Speaker
Okay, they're saying you poisoned this girl with cheesecake. Is this true? And what her response is is, I did not force her to eat it. Like I did, maybe I brought the cheesecake and maybe it was poisoned, but I didn't shove her down her throat.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah, she wanted a tasty snack. She just wanted a snack. So I thought that was very funny. I mean, she basically denies every allegation when she was sentenced the judge. I can't remember exactly what he said, but he was like basically like you are a diabolical con artist and need to go to jail for a very long time. And as they are taking her away, she just screams. Fuck you at the judge.
00:13:35
Speaker
as they're taking her out. Wow. But yes, not not not a great lady. I was curious that I don't have any information on an amazing character.
00:13:48
Speaker
Oh, yeah, great character, great character. When you see her, you're just like you're going to be like, wow, this she should have been on Orange is the New Black for sure. Yes. But one thing I wondered, though, I have no proof of this is just me speculating. I was like, I wonder if she was trying to steal her identity because of the charges from Russia. Like I wondered, oh, maybe. Yeah. And the charges now she's facing in the US. I wonder if she was like, I'm just going to start over.
00:14:16
Speaker
as Olga because we look pretty similar. I can take her passport and just go somewhere else. So that's not a bad idea. Yeah, but it's hard to say. That might not be exactly the right, but that's what makes the most sense to me. I agree with that for sure. Yeah. And that's basically it. So she was sentenced two days ago. She's going to be in jail for the next 21 years. I really hope that we get some more information about the murder
00:14:45
Speaker
in Russia from 2014 because it's not looking good for her, but I don't know how that works when she's already in jail here and to be tried from another country because I think normally they have to take you back to that country to try you. Yes. But I'm definitely curious about that one because I would not doubt it.
00:15:07
Speaker
No, me either. I think I'm fascinated about that Russia charge. Yeah, me too. But yeah, that's uh, that's Victoria. She's basically the worst super evil might have other victims. I don't know. But she is another one of those cases of women using poison
00:15:29
Speaker
And her definitely, by the way, I will say this, like using her looks to seduce and take advantage of men, which normally I would support, but not in this case. I'm just kidding. But not in this case, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. When you see. That was incredible. I'll post it. But she's like very glamorous. She's like wearing furs and like diamonds and all this stuff. And she's like gorgeous and like
00:15:58
Speaker
very made up and like she's Russian. She's very beautiful. And then it's just like evil. That's incredible. She's like a villain. I mean, she's such a cartoon character villain. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. She really should be in like a movie, but yeah, definitely would not want to meet her in real life. Yeah, definitely not. Definitely not. But that's her. That's her. She's going to jail. Wow, incredible. I love that it's such a recent story, too. I feel like we don't do this very often. No.
00:16:28
Speaker
Spirit, I hate you.
Waverly Hills Sanatorium History and Hauntings
00:16:39
Speaker
All right, so I'm going to be talking about the Waverly Hills Sanatorium today. So I know, so going back in time in some ways, but it is a former mental asylum and it's located in Louisville, Kentucky. So yeah, very spooky. My sister-in-law is from Louisville, I think.
00:17:04
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Well, I was going to say it's very close to Cincinnati, Ohio too, where James's family is. But yes, it's been on all those like ghost adventures.
00:17:19
Speaker
All those shows because it's definitely a very it's got a very spooky history and going like all the way back to the very beginning the area that's now known today as Waverly Hill was purchased by Major Thomas H. Hayes in 1883.
00:17:39
Speaker
for their family home. So schools were kind of a little bit of ways, so he actually established a schoolhouse for his children to attend there, hired a teacher. Just his kids? Yep. Oh, wow. Very fancy, right? I think it eventually grew from there. So the teacher, the reason the name came about is because that teacher of that
00:18:03
Speaker
Schoolhouse had a fondness for the author Walter Scott's Waverly novels. So she, with permission obviously from Thomas Hayes, decided to name it the Waverly School. And then he actually named the property Waverly Hill as well. So in the early 1900s, the amount of people infected by tuberculosis across America
00:18:31
Speaker
Made or you know created the name the white plague. I'd actually never heard that. I've never heard that either No, cuz I've I did another story about a sanatorium But the Costa Rican one during tuberculosis outbreak, but yeah, I've never heard that term before
00:18:46
Speaker
It really, everything that I feel like I've read about previous pandemics, I'm just like, I know COVID was so terrible, but it's just so weird to think about it in a way of like, this has happened before, if that makes sense, in some ways, right? Yeah, it is weird. It just felt so unprecedented and so out of what I thought I would experience in my life.
00:19:10
Speaker
That now I'm like, oh my God, so many people have, you know, so many people across history. Like every couple generations. Like that's so scary. Yeah, it's crazy. So, you know, tuberculosis was happening. The white plague was happening. And actually Louisville, Kentucky had the highest tuberculosis death rate in America.
00:19:32
Speaker
So the area has some swampland, which I guess is perfect breeding ground for disease. So the city actually created a board of tuberculosis
00:19:44
Speaker
It's called, or it was called the board of tuberculosis hospital, which I think is a weird name, but they created it in 1906. And so they decided they needed to like find a location to build a facility to house all these tuberculosis patients. And they landed on the area Waverly Hill. So they kept that name. They started construction. I'm assuming they purchased it from, I'm not sure if it was Thomas Hayes, his family, you know, generations.
00:20:12
Speaker
still, but they started construction. They opened it in 1910 as a two-story hospital ready to accommodate 40 to 50 tuberculosis patients. They basically made the decision that they would continue to build out this hospital. There was a period of time that there were tuberculosis patients that were
00:20:40
Speaker
intense on the grounds as they were building, which makes me really sad.
00:20:45
Speaker
It's scary to imagine. But then they moved the patients in. They added two other buildings to accommodate one for more advanced cases, one for children. And so with that new construction, it could house 400 patients at once, which is a lot. Yeah, that is a lot. Yeah. And the goal was to just keep building every year to continue to grow.
00:21:12
Speaker
But the good news is that they actually created this antibiotic drug that meant that patients wouldn't need the hospital as much. And so it led to the hospital being closed in 1961. So all in all, it was about, I guess that's like 50 years as a tuberculosis hospital, which I am sure
00:21:34
Speaker
I'll get into it a little bit more later, but I'm sure just terrible shit went down. The facility was renovated and it was reopened. If you could just imagine what another place that could possibly breed ghosts would be, they reopened it the following year as a nursing home.
00:21:57
Speaker
Oh no. See, it's like people just want things to be haunted. I'm telling you every time. Right? I'm like tuberculosis patients. Now we've got, I mean, well, we started with schoolchildren. Now we've got tuberculosis patients. And now let's just add some old people on top of it.
00:22:13
Speaker
So the nursing home was called Woodhaven Geriatric Center and it served patients until being closed in, and it was closed by the state of Kentucky in 1982 after a grand jury inspection found that there was patient abuse going on and they were just not, you know, the state of the facilities was completely out of control.
00:22:40
Speaker
So again, just sure that terrible things went on there. So the land was then auctioned off and most of it was purchased by John Clifford Todd. His plan was to turn it into, are you ready for the third whammy, into a minimum security prison for state use. Perfect. Perfect.
00:23:01
Speaker
but they're actually so it didn't actually happen so they were there was like pushback to this and they said you're gonna get ghosts they said we just can't do all of these scary things uh and so they his like next plan was to turn it into apartments which i'm also like what can you imagine living there oh my god no
00:23:25
Speaker
But that actually fell through due to lack of funding. And so in 1996, a new owner named Robert Albert Haski bought it. And his intentions, this gets crazy too, were to reconstruct the world's tallest statue of Jesus on the site.
00:23:46
Speaker
Why? Just for fun? To make it a church? Yes. So he was going to have the tallest statue of Jesus and then an arts and worship center. So it would have been a hundred and fifty foot tall statue situated on the roof. That might be too tall. That might be too tall. I just really like to imagine this like giant Jesus statue.
00:24:15
Speaker
But it was going to cost $4 million just for the statue. And do you know how much money he was able to raise? $3,000. I was going to say $20. $3,000 is pretty bad too. It's pretty bad. I think we raised more than that in our very first Insomnia GoFundMe. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:24:36
Speaker
So the project was cancelled and it kind of led to everything just falling into abandonment. So it was then purchased in 2001, so that's like five years later.
00:24:51
Speaker
And that was by the current owners. So they are Charlie and Tina Mattingly, and they founded the Waverly Hills Historical Society two years after they purchased it. So they basically came in and worked to renovate it a little bit. And at this point, it was also growing in popularity for being haunted and people, you know, believing that there was paranormal activity. Ghost hunters at least filmed on location there.
00:25:18
Speaker
There was an on-site taping of Fox Family's Scariest Places on Earth. There was a newspaper story in the Courier Journal that noted that there were countless stories of the place being haunted.
00:25:34
Speaker
The name definitely adds to this kind of lore about it being haunted. In that Courier Journal article, the reporter calls it something out of a comic book, a place where the Joker might hide from Batman. I think that is so true with the name.
00:25:55
Speaker
But now it's kind of cool. They've fully embraced it. So it now offers ghost tours, haunted houses, really capitalizing off these rumors of it being haunted. So just to dig into a little bit more, going back to when it was a tuberculosis hospital, I did a little research on what maybe we could expect from the ghosts or what was happening there.
00:26:21
Speaker
As we know, tuberculosis was definitely deadly and it was extremely contagious. And so again, trying not to make it too reminiscent of COVID things, but the patients were often kept quarantined in secluded spaces.
00:26:38
Speaker
And the Waverly Hills Sanatorium was actually built to be a self-sufficient community so that people could go there and just fully live. So they had their own zip code, post office, butchery, laundry facilities, a maintenance garage, a farmland. They had everything. And some doctors and some employees were even forced to stay there and live there as well.
00:27:06
Speaker
Obviously there's a lot of death on site. It's something like, I'm so sorry for this ridiculous research because some places said 6,000 people and then up to other places saying 50,000 people died on site. That's a big difference. A very big difference to me, but lots of death.
00:27:28
Speaker
And the treatment plans for tuberculosis were really broad. So some patients were told to get rest and fresh air and sunlight. And really sadly, this like advisement of sunlight, you know, was like taken to the extremes. And so even in the depths of winter, there are like pictures of beds of tuberculosis patients like out in the snow basically.
00:27:57
Speaker
So yeah. Okay. I'm not a doctor, but that can't be right.
00:28:02
Speaker
I cannot be right that it's like we need you to freeze to death in order to have some sunlight on your face. It's really, really just sad. I know. I know. And I really don't understand what was going on. But I will share pictures of that because it's pretty intense to see. But in other cases, there were patients that had their lungs surgically partially removed or collapsed.
00:28:30
Speaker
in order to, quote unquote, let the organ rest, which is also just super effed up. Oh my God. That's insane. That's horrible. Yeah, it's really dark. And so definitely a lot of pain and suffering and death took place there. This is one of the creepier parts to me. There was also this infamous 600-foot body shoot.
00:28:58
Speaker
So this would literally like move corpses through the facility. Oh, like a laundry chute. Oh, my God, it's horrible. Yeah, it's really upsetting. And so it's often cited as a place, obviously, where like ghostly experiences take place. And in particular, people see spirits and orbs and balls of light around this area.
00:29:23
Speaker
And then room 502 is also notorious. So this is a room in the rooftop chambers that's believed to have housed tuberculosis patients with mental illnesses as well. And it was also allegedly the site of a nurse's death by suicide. So people claim to see this woman's ghost roaming the hallways.
00:29:46
Speaker
And I mean, I can't even, yeah, I just always think, yes, I cannot imagine being a patient. And I'm sure so much stuff went down, but can you imagine like either trying to be like a good person working there or even just like, I don't know, being exposed to any of that at all. It's just like so upsetting. I don't know why you would ever want that job. Trying to help people.
00:30:11
Speaker
Overall, many people have reported unexplained slamming doors, sightings of a mysterious man in white drifting through the corridors. I wonder if it's like a doctor or something. And then another famous ghost is people had run-ins with what they think is like a spectral boy whose name is Timmy, who roams the hallways and likes to play ball.
00:30:35
Speaker
So those experiences, you know, I know I gave kind of a lot of different examples, but visitors up to this day still corroborate these stories and still have similar sightings, similar ghosts that they see. Still, you know, people mentioning the nurse in particular, still people mentioning, you know, that that little boy Timmy. So I think it's super interesting where it's like, you know, we're back to like
00:31:02
Speaker
Is this like the suggestion of these ghosts? Like did they, you know, like I just, I'm always curious when it's like so many people have the same experience. I always think it's interesting. Yeah, no, totally. It always makes you wonder. Yeah. Like, is there something real behind all of it? I don't know. But I think of all locations, like if there were a place to have ghosts, I could definitely see this being a place that has them.
00:31:30
Speaker
And there's a lot of just like dark, spooky stuff. And I think it's like, you know, we, for so long, I think horror movies have had focuses on mental asylums and, you know, American Horror Story and Shutter Island. And I think that's not, you know, I think it's, I think it's cause those places really were very creepy and those locations continue to be super creepy to this day. Oh yeah. And we've talked before about just like places where bad things happen, like,
00:32:00
Speaker
bad energy, they can't just like dissipate. I don't know. Exactly. Yeah. Like I think it definitely, even if like, you know, we don't necessarily believe in ghosts or even if ghosts aren't real, like I think there's definitely a case for bad energy or feeling like the space carries that history. Yeah, absolutely.
00:32:22
Speaker
Awesome. Spooky. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the Waverly Hills Sanatorium. I think there, you know, I know maybe once you've researched one mental asylum, you've researched all mental but I still think they're so scary. Absolutely. And I don't really have a joke, but I will say when Lauren first texts me this, my first two thoughts were
00:32:46
Speaker
Wizards of Waverly Place connection, probably not. And second of all was, did you ever go to the Waverly Diner with me? Oh, yes, I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought I remembered that. Yeah, there's a Waverly Diner in New York. Yeah, I love that. Pretty classic diner. I mean, I'll never say no to a diner. Me neither. Awesome.
00:33:10
Speaker
Well, thank you guys for listening. We hope you have some sweet, sweet nightmares. Bye.