Sauerkraut Cave

Located in E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park, this cave is the last remnant of the Lakeland Asylum (later Central State Hospital), where horrific early experiments on the mentally ill took place. The cave was used to store goods including sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut Cave lies within the grounds of E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park in Louisville, a seemingly ordinary state recreation area with an extraordinarily dark past. The land was originally part of a tract given to Isaac Hite, a Virginia militia officer who fought in the French and Indian War, and the cave itself earned its name from its early use aging sauerkraut in its cool, constant temperatures. But in 1869, the State of Kentucky acquired the property and constructed the State House of Reform for Juvenile Delinquents at Lakeland. By around 1900, the facility had transformed into the Central Kentucky Asylum for the Insane, and Sauerkraut Cave became entangled in its worst horrors.

What began as a single brick building housing 370 patients grew into a sprawling complex of 15 buildings crammed with 5,000 patients — far exceeding its designed capacity of 3,500. The asylum became synonymous with the abuses of early twentieth-century mental health treatment: ice baths, electric shock therapy, lobotomies, wrongful deaths, and escapes fill its documented history. Reports of ill treatment were published regularly in local newspapers. In one case, an employee was charged with murder after drowning a patient in a bathtub. The cave, connected to a network of underground tunnels beneath the facility, became an escape route for patients desperate enough to risk the dark, flooded passages. Without flashlights or any source of light, many are believed to have drowned or frozen in the pitch-black tunnels rather than reaching freedom on the other side. According to the darkest local legends, pregnant patients were brought to the cave, and some of those infants may have been disposed of within its depths.

The asylum closed in 1986, and its buildings were demolished in 1996, with the land absorbed into the state park. But what happened within those walls and tunnels did not go quietly. Park visitors entering the cave report an immediate and overwhelming sense of unease. Strange music and mumbling voices echo from within the brick-reinforced passages. One visitor felt something unseen tug at her hair and her skirt. The most frequently reported and most disturbing phenomenon is the voice of a young girl crying out the word "Mommy!" from deep inside the tunnel — a sound that has been reported by numerous independent visitors over the years.

Paranormal investigators have captured numerous EVP recordings in and around the cave, and one local group claimed to have photographed the image of a large, burly, bearded man with an angry expression leaning against tiles stacked on one side of the cave. The park's own naturalist has described the site in chilling terms, calling it "a sad place" and observing that "there's people trapped there, spirits trapped there. There's a man who's angry and they say he's not letting any of the other spirits go."

The cave is now officially closed to the public for safety reasons, with surveillance cameras set up to deter trespassers. But the sounds still carry through the park on quiet evenings, and those who walk the trails near the cave entrance report the persistent feeling that they are not alone — that somewhere below the jogging paths and picnic shelters, the patients of Lakeland Asylum remain, waiting in the dark for a freedom they never found.