The scariest overnight stay in Kentucky is a crumbling TB ward on a Louisville hilltop

It’s still standing on that hill

Waverly Hills Sanatorium sits on a hilltop in southwestern Louisville, Kentucky, five stories of brick and concrete spread across more than 180,000 square feet.

The building went up in 1926, and thousands of tuberculosis patients passed through its doors. Today it pulls in thousands of visitors a year for historical tours, paranormal walks, and overnight investigations.

It sits on the National Register of Historic Places, and the story of how it got there starts with a one-room schoolhouse.

A schoolteacher named it after her favorite novels

Major Thomas H. Hays bought the hilltop land in 1883 as a family home.

He built a one-room schoolhouse for his daughters and hired a teacher named Lizzie Lee Harris, who loved the Waverley novels by Sir Walter Scott.

She named the school after them, and Hays kept the name for the whole property.

By the early 1900s, Louisville had one of the worst tuberculosis death rates in the country, fed by the wetlands along the Ohio River.

A Board of Tuberculosis Hospital formed in 1906 and picked the hilltop for its fresh air. The first sanatorium opened on July 26, 1910, a two-story wooden building that held 40 to 50 patients.

The batwing building went up for $1.1 million

That small wooden hospital ran out of room fast. Construction on a new building started in March 1924, designed by Louisville architect D.X. Murphy.

The five-story structure opened on Oct. 17, 1926, at a cost of $1.1 million. Murphy designed it in Tudor Gothic Revival style with a tower and ornate stonework.

The layout followed a boomerang shape, sometimes called a batwing, so natural air could move through every ward. The facility was segregated.

White patients used the new building, and Black patients received care in the older wooden structure on the grounds.

Patients got their own phones and a zip code

Waverly Hills ran like its own small town. It had a post office, a zip code, a water treatment facility, and a farming operation with livestock and gardens.

The kitchen could push out 2,100 meals a day, and the dining hall seated over 300. Nobody left.

Patients and staff stayed on the grounds because tuberculosis spread so easily. Every patient had a telephone, a radio, and time on the solarium porches.

You could live there for months and never step beyond the property line.

Kids with bone TB got a rooftop playground

Before antibiotics, doctors had no cure. They relied on fresh air, sunlight, rest, and nutrition.

Patients spent hours each day on open-air solarium porches, even in winter, because the thinking at the time was that cold, fresh air helped fight the disease.

The fifth floor was set aside for heliotherapy, where patients with bone tuberculosis sat under controlled sunlight. Children with bone TB went to the rooftop, which had a small playground.

When none of that worked, surgeons collapsed infected lungs, removed ribs, or cut out diseased lung tissue.

The tunnel hid the dead from the living

A 500-foot concrete tunnel runs from the ground floor straight down the steep hillside to a heating plant at the bottom.

Crews originally built it to move steam, supplies, and staff between the two buildings, with a motorized cable system pulling items up and down the slope.

During the worst years of the epidemic, staff started using it to carry out the dead. They moved bodies through the tunnel so patients in the wards above would not see the constant flow of death.

Staff believed that shielding patients from the toll kept hope alive, and they treated hope as medicine. The tunnel reportedly doubled as an air raid shelter during World War II.

A flood wiped out decades of records

Nobody knows exactly how many people died at Waverly Hills.

Medical records from before 1935 were destroyed in the Great Louisville Flood of 1937, and whatever survived was poorly kept after the hospital closed.

Some popular accounts throw around numbers as high as 60,000, but independent researchers put the real figure far lower, likely in the thousands. At its worst, patients died on a near-daily basis.

You walk those corridors today and the weight of that loss sits in the walls.

From TB ward to neglected nursing home

The antibiotic streptomycin changed everything in the 1940s. It worked against tuberculosis, and the patient count dropped year after year.

Waverly Hills closed as a TB hospital in June 1961.

The building reopened in 1962 as Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a nursing home for elderly patients with dementia and mobility issues.

Woodhaven packed in more patients than it could handle with too few staff, and reports of neglect piled up. Kentucky shut it down in the early 1980s.

Someone tried to put a 150-foot Jesus on the roof

After Woodhaven closed, the building sat empty and passed through several owners. In 1983, a developer tried to turn it into a minimum-security prison, but neighbors shut that plan down.

In 1996, a buyer wanted to build a 150-foot statue of Jesus on the roof and convert the place into a worship center. That project raised $3,000 and went nowhere.

Through all of it, vandals smashed windows, destroyed fixtures, and the building kept falling apart.

Two people bought a crumbling ruin and saved it

Tina and Charlie Mattingly purchased the property in 2001 and started putting it back together. They created the Waverly Hills Historical Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, to fund the work.

Every dollar from tours, investigations, and the annual Halloween haunted house goes toward restoration.

Over two decades, the Mattinglys have replaced windows, removed asbestos, and made structural repairs across the building.

You can see where the decay ends and the restoration begins, and the line keeps moving in the right direction.

Tours run two hours, investigations run all night

Historical tours take about two hours and walk you through all five floors with a guide who covers the building’s full story.

Paranormal tours happen after dark and focus on the tunnel, the upper floors, and the areas with the most reported activity.

If you want more time, public investigations run about six hours in a semi-guided format for first-timers.

Private investigations last about eight hours and give your group of up to 10 full run of the building, starting at $1,000. The sanatorium has appeared on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, and Scariest Places on Earth.

Room 502 comes with a story nobody can confirm

The Body Chute draws the biggest reaction on every tour. You stand at the top and look down that steep, dark tunnel, and you feel the slope pulling at you.

Room 502 on the fifth floor carries long-told stories about two nurses who reportedly died there decades ago, but nobody has verified them. Guides present the tales as local legend, not fact.

The fourth-floor surgery and recovery wing hits different. Peeling paint, long curving corridors, and the sheer size of the building do their own work.

Up on the rooftop solarium, you get the Louisville skyline, the same view patients saw during treatment.

Explore Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville

You can visit Waverly Hills at 4301 E Pages Lane in Louisville, Ky. The 2026 tour season runs March 1 through Aug. 31, and off-season tours happen when the weather cooperates.

Use Waze for GPS directions, because Google Maps may send you to locked gates.

Follow the road past the golf course entrance to Gate A. The office takes bookings Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. If you have teenagers between 13 and 17, junior investigations are open to them with a parent or guardian present.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

Read more from this brand:

• $32 Million in Packages Trapped In UPS Warehouses Since August 29
• How to enjoy your first Kentucky Derby weekend without rookie mistakes
• A cruise line’s sudden new fees are raising fresh worries about where travel costs go next