In Brief
Herdklotz Park in Greenville, South Carolina is a normal suburban playground: ballfields, swing sets, picnic shelters. It sits on the sealed basement of a tuberculosis sanatorium where hundreds died, and after dark people still hear screams and banging near the playsets.
The Full Story
After dark at Herdklotz Park in Greenville, South Carolina, people standing near the playground report footsteps that build into a run, and then screams. In daylight it's an ordinary suburban green space off Beverly Road, all ballfields and walking track and picnic shelters. But the stone steps that climb to the playground equipment are the original entrance steps of a tuberculosis hospital, and its boiler room is still down there, sealed in a basement beneath the grass.
The Greenville County Tuberculosis Sanitarium, known in its earlier years as Old Hopewell, ran here from the 1930s until around 1950. Hundreds of patients were quarantined on the grounds, and many of them died before a cure for TB arrived. When the hospital closed, the building went on to hold the criminally insane, and by the 1990s it was a prison work-release site. Fire gutted it in the early 2000s and the remains were torn down, but the foundation stayed. The county laid a park over it, saved what was left of the root cellar during construction, and put up signs explaining the tuberculosis years. They named the place for Dick Herdklotz, a late county councilman who pushed for the land to become recreation.
Jason Profit, who runs Greenville Ghost Tours and wrote a book on the city's hauntings, recorded a session on the old hospital steps in 2008. In broad daylight, the tape came back with what he described as a busy lunchroom, the echoing of voices in a hallway or large room, and a single bell that rang with an echo and no source anywhere near him. The story people tell to explain the bell is that the hospital's staff once rang bells to signal between the wards. He called the grounds "all the ingredients for an active paranormal soup." Just before Halloween 2009, a TV crew called him back to the park to talk about what people kept reporting there; he has since called it "one of the most haunted parks you're going to find in Upstate South Carolina."
Others have added to it since. Visitors report banging on the playsets at night, a sensation of being shoved, objects moving on their own, and shadow figures crossing the property. Some of the neighbors say the shadows followed them home, standing in their own houses on the nights after they'd spent an evening at the park.
The steps still climb to a swing set. Whatever the sanitarium left behind is sealed in the basement underneath the children who play on top of it.
