Waverly Hills

Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky is said to be one of the scariest places on earth. It is an abandoned hospital that is haunted by ghosts and shadow people and was investigated by Ghost Hunters and Most Haunted.

In 1900, Louisville, Kentucky had the highest tuberculosis death rate in the country. Hospitals were needed to care for the sick so, in 1926, Waverly Hills was constructed. It was considered to be the most advanced tuberculosis hospital in the country.

Treatment of the disease in those days was primitive at best, meaning that many people simply came to Waverly Hills to die. Records have been lost, but it is estimated that tens of thousands died at Waverly. At the height of the tuberculosis epidemic, it is reported that one patient an hour died.

Room 502 in Waverly Hills Sanatorium has a scary reputation. In 1928, the head nurse was found dead in Room 502. She had hanged herself from the light fixture in a fit of depression. She was 29 years-old at the time, unmarried and pregnant. It is unknown just how long she may have been left hanging in this room before her body was finally discovered. They say that the mental patients continued to walk around, ignoring her hanging body until the next nurse showed up for duty.

In 1932, another nurse who worked in room 502 jumped from the balcony of the roof that leads from the room and was killed when
she landed with a splat on the ground, several stories below.

The Death Tunnel or Body Chute is a 500 foot long tunnel that leads from the hospital to the railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill. Originally, it was built to transport produce to the hospital. However, as the deaths continued to rise, the staff began using the Death Tunnel to transport the bodies of the dead so that the other patients would not see how many corpses were leaving the hospital.

Stories of ghosts at Waverly continued to surface, and amazingly, most of them are akin to what others have experienced. Many have seen a little boy playing with his ball on the third floor, many people have witnessed “shadow people,” and there has been a report of a woman running from the building with chains on bleeding from the wrists shrieking, “Help me! Somebody save me!”