Waverly Hills Sanatorium co-owner Tina Mattingly has spoken about spectral sightings in the former tuberculosis hospital’s infamous body chute.
The Louisville, Kentucky property draws paranormal investigators from across the globe, with more than 6,000 deaths believed to have occurred on the grounds during its decades as an isolated medical facility. Mattingly, who owns the site alongside Charlie Mattingly, described unexplained phenomena in a 2017 interview. Orbs and balls of light are believed to have been seen in the chute, along with spirits, she said.
The 600-foot tunnel was constructed to move thousands of corpses discreetly through the facility, sparing surviving patients the knowledge that someone had died. According to stories and anecdotes, the passage linking the heating plant at the bottom of the hill with the main building also carried bodies to a waiting ambulance for a limited time between the 1920s and 1940s.
Another focal point for ghost hunters is Room 502, located in the rooftop chambers. A 2010 Louisville Courier Journal article said the space is believed to have housed tuberculosis patients with mental illnesses, and it was allegedly the site of a nurse’s death. The room has become one of several spots on the grounds that have taken on a life of their own in paranormal popular culture.
Construction of the sanatorium began in 1908, and it opened in 1910 as an isolated medical center for tuberculosis patients. Louisville had one of the highest tuberculosis death rates in the country at the time, with the city’s location in the Ohio Valley and limited airflow considered contributing factors. Tuberculosis was often deadly and extremely contagious, so patients were usually quarantined in secluded spaces.
The facility was built as a self-sufficient community with its own ZIP code, post office and even farmland. After an expansion in 1926, it could hold more than 400 patients at once. An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people died at Waverly Hills Sanatorium during its active operation as a tuberculosis hospital.
Major Thomas H. Hays bought the land in 1883 as a family home, and the teacher he hired for a one-room schoolhouse, Lizzie Lee Harris, named it after Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. That name, too, may have played a role in the reputation, with then-Courier Journal reporter Thomas Nord describing it as “like something out of a comic book, a place where the Joker might hide out from Batman.”
A Courier Journal reporter writing in 2001, ahead of an on-site taping of Fox Family’s Scariest Places on Earth, noted “countless local legends about the place being haunted.” They had been fueled, the reporter wrote, by the high number of people who succumbed to tuberculosis during the more than 50 years it housed patients.
After antibiotics lowered the need for such a facility, the hospital closed in 1961 and reopened the following year as the Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a nursing home for older patients, including people with dementia and mobility limitations, as well as patients with mental disabilities. Reports of overcrowding, staffing shortages and patient neglect brought increased scrutiny before the nursing home closed in the early 1980s.
The property then sat closed for about 20 years and fell into disrepair, until Charlie and Tina Mattingly bought it in 2001. The couple founded the Waverly Hills Historical Society two years later and have worked since to renovate the building. The site has grown in infamy and is often cited as a place where ghostly experiences happen, with shows such as A&E’s Ghost Hunters filming on location.
The Mattinglys now operate multiple tour options at 4400 Paralee Drive. A two-hour paranormal tour costs $25, a two-and-a-half-hour historical tour costs $30, a six-hour public investigation costs $90 and a private overnight investigation costs $1,000. The group also runs an annual haunted house on the main building’s first floor and hosts private events in the restored laundry room.