In Brief
At the abandoned Indiana State Sanatorium near Rockville, two paranormal teams a year apart kept recording the same two things in the old nursing wing: a woman's name, Mary, and a room number, 120. Thousands of TB patients died here waiting on a cure.
The Full Story
At the Indiana State Sanatorium near Rockville, Indiana, a ghost-hunting team named Paraholics spent the night of September 18, 2022 in the old nursing-home wing, and their recorder kept circling back to the same two things: a woman's name, Mary, and a room number, 120. They didn't make much of it at first. Then a second team returned on February 12, 2023 and picked up what they described as frustration and a cry for help, still anchored to that same room.
There is no record of a patient named Mary in Room 120. The teams only report what they captured, not who she was. And they were listening for her inside a 120,000-square-foot complex where, by the owner's own estimate, several thousand people died over a century.
The place opened in 1911 as Indiana's state tuberculosis hospital, built to fight an epidemic in the years before antibiotics. Patients came to breathe Parke County's clean air and wait for a cure that didn't exist yet. One account puts the early death rate near 80 percent. The campus ran itself like a small town in the meantime, with a dairy barn, a slaughterhouse, a church, a school, and a power plant feeding thousands of feet of steam tunnels that connect the buildings underground. People came here to get better, and most of them stayed.
When streptomycin finally made TB curable in the late 1960s, treatment wound down, and in 1976 the property reopened as the Lee Alan Bryant Health Care Center, a nursing home paired with a private mental hospital.
That chapter ended in 2011, when U.S. Marshals executed an abrupt shutdown amid tax problems and wrongful-death suits. Staff left calendars on the walls, meal trays out, wheelchairs and beds and patient belongings where they stood.
Most of it is still there. Owner Gregg Larson opened the site to tours in 2021, and the reports came with it. In the older TB corridors, visitors describe disembodied coughing and wheezing, the sound of failing lungs. The laundry is the poltergeist hotspot, with machines starting up unprompted and objects moving on their own. A weeping woman is reported near the old office. In Adams Hall, a 1950s staff residence later tied to psychiatric use, people describe footsteps in the stairwells and a heaviness on the upper floors.
But it's Room 120 the investigators keep returning to. A specific door, in a building full of them, where two teams a year apart heard the same name and could find no one it belonged to.
