Waverly Hills Sanatorium · The Body Chute

Waverly Hills was Kentucky's sanatorium for tuberculosis, in the years when there was no effective drug for the disease. Thousands of patients were admitted, and the deaths ran into the thousands.

Bodies were taken out through a tunnel cut under the hill, angled so that they could be hauled by pulley and kept out of the patients' sight. It came to be called the body chute.

The hospital closed in 1961 and stood empty for decades. Today it runs historical tours, and a haunted house each autumn. Former staff, interviewed years later, remembered it as a bright, clean place, and the patients as unusually polite.

Bureau note: the tunnel was built for logistics. It is the part everybody asks about now.

Haunted Ruins / Louisville · USA / 1926