A former tuberculosis hospital, now a tour site
Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky opened in 1910 on a hilltop farm once owned by Major Thomas H. Hays, treating tuberculosis patients until a new five-story brick building replaced it in 1926. Streptomycin ended its use as a hospital in 1961; it later became a nursing home, then an abandoned building, and since 2001 has operated as a restored tour site.
A farm's schoolhouse name became a tuberculosis hospital
Waverly Hills Sanatorium is a former hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, now run as a tour site built on a story of sickness and survival. The land was once the farm of Major Thomas H. Hays, who bought it in 1883. His daughters' schoolteacher, Lizzie Lee Harris, loved the Waverley novels of Walter Scott and named the family's one-room schoolhouse after them. The name stuck to the hill itself.
By the early 1900s, Louisville had one of the worst tuberculosis death rates in the country. The Ohio Valley trapped stagnant air, and the disease spread fast through crowded neighborhoods. Jefferson County's Board of Tuberculosis Hospital bought the old Hays land for its height and its open air, both thought to help sick lungs breathe.
The first sanatorium opened on this spot on July 26, 1910. It was a plain two-story wooden building with open-air porches, built to hold 40 to 50 patients. Doctors believed in fresh air, rest, and sunlight as medicine. Patients were wheeled out onto porches even in winter.
The hospital grew fast. By 1912, tuberculosis patients from across the city were living in tents on the grounds while a bigger hospital went up. A children's pavilion opened in 1914, housing sick children alongside the children of patients too ill to care for them.
The wooden buildings wore out quickly and could not hold enough people. Architect James J. Gaffney designed a much larger building in the Tudor style, construction starting in 1924. It opened on October 17, 1926: five stories, over 400 beds, a kitchen, an operating room, and a rooftop sun porch for treating bone tuberculosis with light. The new sanatorium ran almost like its own small town, with gardens, a laundry, and even a post office. It also kept Black and white patients in separate wards, a segregation written into the building itself. One nurse hired there that summer, Esther Maxwell Barrens, was the first Black nurse on staff.
A new drug closed the sanatorium for good
In 1943, doctors developed streptomycin, the first drug that actually killed the tuberculosis bacteria. Waverly Hills began using it in 1949. The hospital had treated an estimated 50,000 patients over five decades. A death toll of 63,000 is often repeated, but historians who reviewed Waverly Hills's own death index argue the real number is closer to 8,000, with the worst single year, 1945, recording 152 deaths. Waverly Hills Sanatorium closed for good in June 1961. The last patients moved to Hazelwood Sanatorium.
A nursing home here was shut down for abuse
The state reopened the building in 1962 as Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a nursing home for elderly patients, including people with dementia and mental illness. Woodhaven ran for twenty years, and reports of overcrowding, understaffed wards, and patient neglect followed it for most of them. A Kentucky grand jury inspected the facility and documented abuse and degrading conditions. The state shut Woodhaven down in 1982.
A failed Jesus statue plan preceded its restoration
The building sat empty for most of the next two decades. Vandals and trespassers broke in, and the five-story Tudor hospital earned a reputation as one of the most haunted places in America, a reputation its later owners would lean into. In 1996, Robert Alberhasky bought the property planning to build a 150-foot statue of Jesus on the roof and convert the wards into a chapel and theater. A National Historic Register listing, granted in 1983, blocked him from demolishing the main building. The statue project collapsed in 1997 after fundraising brought in only a few thousand dollars nationwide. Alberhasky held onto the ruin until 2001.
That year, Charles and Tina Mattingly bought the 29-acre property and began repairing it room by room. Charlie's father had worked at Waverly Hills as an orderly, and he died in 2005 while the restoration was still underway.
Two stories from inside the hospital still draw visitors to Room 502 on the top floor. One tells of a nurse named Mary Hillenburg, said to have hanged herself there in 1928 after becoming pregnant by a doctor on staff; another version claims the doctor staged her death after a botched abortion. A second story describes a different nurse jumping from the room's roof patio in 1932.
Tours and ghost stories now fill the old wards
The Mattinglys founded the Waverly Hills Historical Society and opened the building for tours, leaning into its reputation as a haunted site with year-round ghost walks and a Halloween haunted house. A dispute between the family and the historical society closed the building to the public for a time, ending in a 2023 settlement that reopened it for tours that March. In 2026, the site added an escape room built around Room 502's legend. Also in 2026, Louisville Public Media spoke with Lillie Gilliam, 93, one of the few living patients from Waverly Hills's segregated ward, who was treated there as a 14-year-old in the late 1940s.
The five-story building still stands on its hilltop, its porches empty now, open for tours of the wards it once filled with the sick.
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