In Brief
Sauerkraut Cave sits at the back of a Louisville state park, on the old grounds of Lakeland Asylum. It's named for the cans of sauerkraut the hospital stored in its cold dark. The park's naturalist says investigators describe an angry man down there who won't let the other spirits leave.
The Full Story
At the back of E.P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park in Louisville, Kentucky, behind a fence and a row of keep-out signs, there's a graffiti-covered cave called Sauerkraut Cave. The park's naturalist, Nick Price, will tell you what paranormal investigators say about it. "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 name is the mundane part. The asylum that once stood here used the cave for cold storage — tiles, pipes, perishables, and the giant cans of sauerkraut that gave it its name.
The asylum is the rest. Lakeland opened in 1873 as Kentucky's fourth state mental hospital, one brick building and 370 patients, and it grew into a campus of 15 buildings that ended up badly overcrowded for decades. In 1882 a patient named Jansen drowned during a "ducking," and the Board of Commissioners convened a formal inquiry that September. Over 900 death certificates record burials in the hospital's two cemeteries. In June 1997, some of the headstones turned up in a creek.
Patients escaped constantly. "Anyone who lived around here would call all the time," Price says, "wanting to get a glass of water, use the phone, get a ride to Louisville." The cave is remembered as one of the routes they crawled into. A tunnel from the grounds supposedly ran all the way out to Hurstbourne, miles off, though Price calls it treacherous with water and mud. By local legend the people who went in often didn't come back out, though no record confirms anyone died down there. There's a darker story too, told as story: that pregnant patients who hadn't been pregnant when admitted were taken to the cave. Nothing in the record backs it up. It survives only as rumor, passed along with the rest.
The hospital's buildings were demolished in 1996. A replacement opened across town, the land became a park named for Diane Sawyer's father, and the cave is the one physical thing left of the place. Visitors who got in before the fencing reported strange voices, and one described it plainly: walking in felt "like entering a room full of people who have had a terrible argument right before you arrived."
Price himself is skeptical of the photographs people bring back. Too much water vapor in the cave, he says — it makes orbs, distortions. He's less skeptical about the rest of it. He's the one who told you about the angry man.
