Greenville Tuberculosis Hospital

The Greenville County Tuberculosis Hospital treated hundreds of dying patients from the 1930s to 1950s before being abandoned, burned, and demolished. A children's playground now sits directly above the sealed basement, where visitors hear screams, bell sounds, and banging after dark.

They built a playground on top of the basement. The basement door remains, sealed shut, with a plaque next to it explaining what used to stand on this ground.

The Greenville County Tuberculosis Hospital opened in the 1930s on a hillside near Paris Mountain, in what is now Herdklotz Park at 126 Beverly Road. For roughly twenty years, hundreds of TB patients were treated here. Tuberculosis in the 1930s and 1940s was a slow death for many. Patients spent months or years in isolation, separated from their families, coughing through long nights in shared wards. When a cure finally emerged in the 1950s, the hospital closed. But the building didn't go away.

After the TB patients left, the facility served as a psychiatric hospital for a period. At some point it also functioned as a prisoner release site. The building deteriorated over the decades, and in 2001, most of it burned. What was left got demolished. The county sealed the basement entrance and built a children's playground directly above it.

The park is a normal suburban green space during the day. Families bring their kids. People walk dogs along the trails. At night, Herdklotz Park has a different reputation.

Visitors report screams of pain echoing across the grounds. Bells ring when no bells are present, a sound that makes more sense when you consider that hospital staff used bells to signal between wards. Banging comes from below, from the direction of the sealed basement. The gazebo seems to draw the most activity. People describe shadowy figures standing at its edges, watching. Nearby residents have reported shadowy shapes inside their own homes after spending time at the park.

The sealed basement door at Herdklotz Park is one of those details that makes a place hard to forget. You can stand on a playground, read a plaque about hundreds of people who suffered and died on this exact spot, and look down at a door that goes to a room nobody is supposed to enter anymore.