Sauerkraut Cave

Asylum patients tried to escape through a tunnel into this Louisville cave. Most drowned or froze. Louisville.com tells the darker rumor.

The patients tried to crawl out through here. A lot of them didn't make it.

Sauerkraut Cave sits inside E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park in Louisville, and the name sounds like a joke until you know why it's called that. Staff at the neighboring asylum, later renamed Central State Hospital, used the cave as cold storage. Large cans of sauerkraut went in. So did other things. A tunnel ran from the hospital grounds down to the cave, and patients knew about it. They used it as an escape route. Local histories agree that most of the people who tried to get out this way were more likely to drown or freeze in the flood water than to reach the far end. An unknown number didn't make it.

Lakeland was a bad place. Newspapers from the late 1800s and early 1900s ran reports of overcrowding and mistreatment. Louisville Underground's piece notes the hospital housed around 4,571 patients in quarters designed for 3,500. An unknown number were buried on the grounds in unmarked graves. Louisville.com tells one of the darker Sauerkraut stories plainly: pregnant patients who had not been pregnant when they entered. That's reported in those words. Whether every version of the rumor is true or not, the facility's own records and contemporary newspapers earned the rumor for themselves.

The asylum buildings that gave the cave its purpose are gone. The cave is still there, behind a fence at the back of the state park, and people climb the fence anyway. Urban explorer accounts cluster around two things. First, voices carrying from deeper in than where the visitor is standing. Second, flashlights failing at the mouth. Both are classic cave phenomena that can happen for non-paranormal reasons. Both get reported here with enough frequency that they've become part of why people go.

People who've made it deeper into the cave system describe a heaviness that changes when they move past a certain point. In the old layout, that's roughly where the tunnel would have connected to the hospital grounds. The tunnel is sealed now, or collapsed, or hard to find. The feeling is still there.

If you go, know that the site is technically off-limits. The ground is unstable. The cave floods fast when it rains. Graffiti covers most of the accessible walls. The authors of the unremembered history piece on the cave describe it as already compromised by the explorers who came before. What's left is less a natural site than an open scar on a park where the hospital used to stand. That gets you closer to the truth of Sauerkraut Cave than any EVP capture. It is the leftover architecture of a facility that had an unknown number of dead and never bothered to write most of them down.