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Heavily Investigated

Something heavy lives inside Waverly Hills — not just the memory of the eight thousand or so who died here, but something that seems to know you've arrived. Walk the fifth floor and Room 502 pushes back with a dread visitors struggle to name. Deep below, the Body Chute — a tunnel built to slip the dead out unseen, so the living patients wouldn't count the gurneys — swallows flashlight beams and returns knocking, moaning, the sense of being followed. Leave a ball on the fourth floor and folklore says Timmy will roll it back.

Jefferson County opened a modest two-story tuberculosis ward here in 1910 — fresh hilltop air being, at the time, about as good as medicine got. By 1926, the epidemic had outgrown optimism, and a five-story, Tudor-Gothic brick sanatorium replaced it, built to hold 400 patients at a clip. It operated until 1961, when streptomycin made it obsolete. Purchased and nearly crowned with the world's tallest Jesus statue in 1996 — fundraising yielded $3,000 of the $8 million goal — it passed to the Mattingly family in 2001, who wisely pivoted to ghost tours.