Waverly Hills Sanatorium

A 500-foot Body Chute moved 6,000 tuberculosis dead out of Waverly Hills. Visitors now bring rubber balls for a boy named Timmy.

The Body Chute is a 500-foot enclosed tunnel that runs from the basement of Waverly Hills Sanatorium down through the hill to a set of railroad tracks at the bottom. It had a motorized cable system, like a funicular, and its purpose was to move dead bodies out of the hospital without the living patients seeing them go. At the height of the Louisville tuberculosis epidemic, the hospital was losing upwards of one patient a day, and every view of a corpse on a gurney was a view the remaining patients had to survive. So the administration put the dead underground and rolled them out at night.

That covers the building's reason for existing. Between its opening and its closure, tuberculosis killed an estimated 6,000 people inside the walls. Today the hospital is regularly described, with some justification, as the most haunted building in America.

Louisville had the highest TB death rate in the country in the early 1900s. The first Waverly Hills opened as a two-story hospital in 1910, and by 1926 the much larger Collegiate Gothic building that still stands today had replaced it, a five-story brick slab on a hilltop in southwestern Louisville. The treatments at the time were what you had when you didn't have antibiotics: ultraviolet sun rooms, open-air porches that ran even through Kentucky winters, and chest surgeries that involved collapsing a lung with a balloon or removing the ribs that held it in place. Most people who arrived at Waverly died at Waverly. Dr. J. Frank Stewart, one of the former assistant medical directors, later said the worst year hit 152 deaths. The sanatorium closed in 1961 after streptomycin rendered it obsolete.

Room 502 on the fifth floor is where the ghost hunters spend most of their time. The legend is that a nurse hanged herself there in 1928 and another nurse fell from the window in 1932, either jumped or pushed. Neither story has been confirmed in any official record. But the room has a reputation out of proportion to its evidence. People walk in and walk right back out. Investigators have recorded voices telling them to get out.

Timmy is the ghost who gets the most tender treatment. He's described as a boy of six or seven who died of TB inside the hospital, and visitors bring small rubber balls into the building and leave them in corridors hoping he'll play. Video has been shot of balls rolling on their own along the floor. The Creeper is a different category. Investigators describe it as a dark figure that moves along walls and ceilings in the way a spider would, against gravity, fast enough to be disorienting. Not everyone who claims to have seen the Creeper is a believable witness. Enough of them are that the name has stuck.

Author and investigator Troy Taylor reported seeing a silhouetted figure in white pass through a fourth-floor doorway during a 2002 investigation. Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, and Most Haunted have all filmed there. The 2006 horror film Death Tunnel was shot inside the building, and the ownership group now runs paranormal tours, overnight investigations, and a seasonal haunted attraction that probably earns more than any functioning hospital on the hill ever did.

Whether the Creeper is real or the dark is just doing what the dark does, the Body Chute is real, and the 6,000 people who died above it are real, and that's a lot of sorrow to seal up in one building.