In Brief
The Sunland Hospital site in Orlando, Florida is a children's playground now. The hospital that stood there closed after years of documented abuse. The man who fell down its elevator shaft survived, and said a little girl was at the bottom with him.
The Full Story
Where the Sunland Hospital once stood in the Pine Hills neighborhood of Orlando, Florida, there is now a public playground. It closes at sundown, and the people who go there before it does say the swings move on their own — empty swings, swaying as if children are riding them.
The hospital came down in 1999, and the reason it came down is the worst part of the story.
The site started clean enough. It opened as the Florida State Tuberculosis Sanitarium, one of those long buildings with big windows that opened wide, because fresh air was how they treated tuberculosis then. When antibiotics made the place obsolete, the state turned it into a Sunland Training Center for profoundly disabled adults and children. By the 1970s an investigation had documented what was happening inside: patients bitten by rodents, beaten, left in unsafe conditions. More than 400 of them were fed through gastric tubes — a "cereal-like gruel three times a day." A 1978 federal lawsuit forced every Sunland in the state to close by 1983.
Then the building sat empty. In 1997, a 23-year-old named Keith Murdock went inside with friends to play hide-and-seek in the dark, and fell three stories down an open elevator shaft. Rescuers took roughly two hours to find him at the bottom, his skull fractured. The legend says he died. He didn't — he survived a long coma. And the story goes that he said something about the time he spent down there. A little girl had been with him, he said, at the bottom of the shaft.
His fall is what got the building torn down. The state demolished it and paved the footprint into a place for children.
Many of the children who died at Sunland were buried together across town, in one section of Greenwood Cemetery — at least 88 of them. The ones who come to the playground say they hear a man and children, footsteps with no source, and see a small figure standing near the swings that won't stop moving.
