Waverly Hills Sanatorium

Perhaps the most famous haunted building in Kentucky, this former tuberculosis hospital opened in 1910 and expanded to a massive facility by 1926. An estimated 63,000 patients died here before it closed in 1961, making it one of the most paranormally active locations in America.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium rises on a windswept hill in southwestern Louisville, a massive five-story Gothic structure that has been called the most haunted building in America. It was built to fight tuberculosis — the "white death" — at a time when Louisville had the highest TB death rate in the country. The original two-story hospital opened in 1910, but as the epidemic worsened, construction began on the enormous building that still stands today, opening in 1926 as one of the most advanced tuberculosis sanatoriums in the nation. Even with cutting-edge treatments — sun rooms that exposed lungs to ultraviolet light, open-air porches, and invasive surgeries that involved implanting balloons in lungs or removing ribs and chest muscles — most patients who entered Waverly Hills did not leave alive. According to Dr. J. Frank Stewart, the former assistant medical director, the highest annual death count reached 152 in a single year. Approximately 6,000 people died within the facility across its operational history beginning in 1911. The sanatorium closed in 1961 after the antibiotic streptomycin finally conquered the disease.

The Body Chute — popularly known as the Death Tunnel — is a 500-foot enclosed underground passage that runs from the hospital down to the railroad tracks below. It was built with a motorized rail and cable system to discreetly transport the bodies of the dead from the hospital without living patients seeing the constant parade of corpses — a grim acknowledgment that watching others die destroyed whatever hope the living patients had left. Today, visitors walking through the tunnel report hearing unexplained footsteps, disembodied voices, and the sensation of being followed through the darkness.

Room 502, on the fifth floor, is the sanatorium's most infamous location. According to legend, a nurse hanged herself there in 1928, and a second nurse either jumped or was pushed from the room's window in 1932. While no official records have been found to confirm these accounts, the room exerts a powerful effect on visitors. Many describe an overwhelmingly negative feeling upon entering, and some have heard a disembodied voice shout "Get out!" as soon as they cross the threshold.

Among the spirits believed to inhabit Waverly Hills, a child named Timmy is the most frequently encountered. Described as a six or seven-year-old boy who died of tuberculosis in the hospital, Timmy has reportedly never moved on. Visitors bring small rubber balls to the sanatorium and leave them in hallways, reporting that the balls roll on their own as if Timmy is playing with them. The entity known as the Creeper is a far more disturbing presence — a dark, shadowy figure that has been seen crawling along walls and ceilings in defiance of gravity, moving in ways that no human body should.

Full-body apparitions, slamming doors, objects thrown by unseen hands, lights flickering in windows visible from the road, and strange sounds echoing through the empty wards have been reported by thousands of visitors. Author and paranormal investigator Troy Taylor reported witnessing a silhouetted figure draped in white crossing a doorway on the fourth floor during a 2002 visit. Waverly Hills has been featured on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Most Haunted, and numerous other paranormal television programs, and the 2006 horror film Death Tunnel was filmed on location. The sanatorium is now open for historical and paranormal tours, overnight investigations, and a seasonal haunted attraction. It remains one of the most investigated — and most feared — buildings in the world.