Indiana State Sanatorium

At Indiana State Sanatorium, named ghost Mary communicates from Room 120 in the nursing home wing. Investigators logged EVPs across two visits.

Mike Culwell had a personal connection to Mary before he ever set foot in the nursing home wing of the Indiana State Sanatorium. When the Paraholics team visited on September 18, 2022, the EVPs they captured kept circling back to the same words: a name, and a room number. Room 120. On the February 12, 2023 return trip, lead investigator Evel Ogilville and the Paranormal Cases team of Colin Bonnell and Bridget Howell picked up what they described as frustration, a cry for help from the other side, still tied to the same room.

The sanatorium opened in 1911 on more than 500 acres three miles east of Rockville, built by Indiana to fight the tuberculosis epidemic at a time when TB was a death sentence. Streptomycin didn't exist yet. Patients came here to breathe the clean Parke County air, take the sun cure, and most often, die. Owner Gregg Larson estimates several thousand people died on the grounds over the hundred years the complex operated. "The majority were tuberculosis deaths," his coworker Bill Mundo has said. "Not sensational but significant in volume."

TB treatment wound down in the late 1960s after antibiotics made the disease curable, and in 1976 the property reopened as the Lee Alan Bryant Health Care Center: a nursing home paired with a private mental hospital. The five-story psychiatric wing housed violent male patients on the upper floors. Several of them found their way to the roof and jumped. There was also a murder-suicide in the steam tunnels that run beneath the coal power plant, connecting building to building underground. The facility closed abruptly in 2011 when U.S. Marshals shut it down, with medical equipment, patient belongings, and personal effects left in place like staff had walked out mid-shift.

For roughly a decade the complex sat empty and locals started seeing things. Lights in windows of wards with no electricity. Figures pacing behind panes in buildings nobody was supposed to be in. Sounds at night. Gregg Larson bought the property during COVID-19 and opened it to public tours and investigations in 2021, partly because trespassers were already coming. Now the site runs daytime tours, flashlight tours, overnight stays, and full paranormal investigations across more than 120,000 square feet of buildings.

The activity reported across hundreds of visits clusters in a few places. The laundry facility generates the most dramatic poltergeist behavior: objects moving, laundry machines starting up on their own, the mundane mechanics of a working hospital apparently still cycling decades after the last patient left. A female figure gets sighted near the old office and laundry areas. Adams Hall, the five-story staff residence, produces phantom footsteps in its stairwells and an oppressive heaviness on the upper floors that visitors describe before they know the staff residence is supposed to be haunted at all.

Visitors who walk the older tuberculosis wings describe the coughing first. Wet, labored, the sound of somebody whose lungs are giving out, in a corridor where the only other person is them.