As the official Waverly Hills site explains, the original sanatorium was a two-story frame building with a half-timber design, with an administration building and the open-air pavilions for the patients to be exposed to air and sun. This original building was meant to hold 40-50 patients at one time, roughly half male and half female. However, tuberculosis reached epidemic proportions by 1910, and Louisville was particularly hard hit due to its low-lying position on the waters of the Ohio River, and–according to Abandoned Online–Waverly was soon overwhelmed with over 140 patients in a facility designed for 40 people. As a result, construction soon began on a much larger, more permanent facility.

In 1924, construction began on a new building that would be four stories of brick and concrete sprawling across 180,000 square feet, including separate rooms for patients rather than communal ones, sunrooms, labs, and recreation rooms. This new hospital was designed to hold up to 400 patients. It turns out they would need the space. By the late 1930s, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in Kentucky, and in fact, Kentucky led the nation in tuberculosis deaths, due to a lack of state funding, long-term treatment options, and more permanent facilities like Waverly. Some 2,000 people a year were dying of tuberculosis in Kentucky alone.

While it’s nice to imagine Waverly’s philosophy of making things as pleasant as possible for their patients suffering from tuberculosis worked, the fact is, there’s a limit to how pleasant you can make life for someone who’s constantly coughing up bloody mucus. So while it’s true that the most common treatments were exposure to sunlight, bed rest, healthy foods, and fresh air, the Waverly Hills Sanatorium Memorial records that several other methods were applied to patients, including surgical methods that were cutting edge for the time, but that might sound barbaric now. These included perhaps most famously artificial pneumothorax, which involved blowing air into either the lung itself or the cavity between lungs in order to artificially collapse the diseased portion of the lung, allowing it to rest and (theoretically) allowing the lesions caused by the tuberculosis to heal. Patients who were unlikely to survive this procedure tried to maximize rest to their lungs by lying on the side most affected by lesions, restricting the movement of the diseased lung naturally with posture and gravity.

For some time, a commonplace surgery for the treatment of tuberculosis was thoracoplasty, which involves the removal of multiple ribs with the intention of collapsing the lung. While doctors preferred to only remove two or three ribs at a time, most patients required as many as eight removed for this technique to be effective, meaning they had to endure multiple painful surgeries.

Although Waverly Hills did their best to make life as comfortable as possible for their patients and their families, nothing was going to truly make things better until a cure for the disease was found. As luck would have it, 1943 saw the introduction of a new antibiotic called streptomycin that was an effective combatant against the infectious disease. However, as Kentucky Historic Institutions explains, this treatment wasn’t made available to the patients at Waverly until 1949. Once it was, though, new patients could now be treated at a regular hospital as outpatients. Slowly but steadily, the population at Waverly Hills was decreasing, but, like, in a good way. Abandoned Online records that the number of patients dropped from 373 in 1950 to 293 in 1960. In 1962, Waverly Hills closed as a tuberculosis hospital and all of its patients were transferred to a regular hospital.

The buildings subsequently sat empty for nearly a year before the facility was reopened in 1963 as Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a live-in nursing facility for elderly patients with dementia, mobility issues, or severe mental disabilities. Woodhaven operated in this capacity until 1982 when it was closed by the state. A grand jury found multiple instances of patient abuse and signs of neglect of the facility itself. Woodhaven was closed and all of its patients were transferred to another care facility.

Let’s be honest: it’s no surprise that Waverly Hills Sanatorium is considered one of the most haunted places not only in Kentucky, but in the whole United States. Despite its being founded on the principles of feeling good all the time no matter what your lungs are doing, it’s still a big spooky building where thousands of people died before being wheeled through a body chute when their Marilyn Manson surgery went bad. As LiveScience explains, various ghost hunters and spook chasers have reported encountering all sorts of creepy phenomena within the halls of the long-abandoned hospital. You’ve got your old standards, like unexplained footsteps and the slamming of doors, weird noises, and so on. Obviously as Waverly was a hospital, the sound of screaming patients is thought to emanate from the long-empty rooms. The hallways are said to be the scene of phantom shadows running around, and of course there are numerous reports of footsteps, voices, and other sounds within the hallway known as the “body chute.”

American Hauntings reports sightings of more specific apparitions, including a ghostly hearse seen dropping off coffins at the back of the building, a woman with bleeding wrists begging for help, and a man in a white coat seen wandering around a trashed kitchen full of broken windows and destroyed furniture, accompanied by the scent of food.

As is frequently the case, however, reality comes in to poop the party. American Hauntings explains that the legendary fifth floor of Waverly Hills was not at any point used to house or confine mentally ill patients. Its residents were just as free to move about the floor as patients on any other floor. In fact, the floor was designed for this exact purpose, with two wards centered around the nurses’ station that were glassed in on all sides in order to maximize sunlight, according to Waverly’s treatment philosophy. These glassed-in wards did, however, lead to rooftop patios such as the one the legends say the nurse jumped from, and from which visitors allege they’ve felt compelled to leap from.

To further kill the buzz, there are no records of any nurse suicides during Waverly Hills’ years of operation, and what’s more, Room 502 has no means by which a nurse could have hanged herself. The room has no rafters, the sprinkler pipes that exist in the room now weren’t added until the 1970s, and the light fixture in the room is far too delicate to support the weight of a person. The only source ever cited by people telling these stories of Room 502 is a now-deceased former staff member who would have been elementary school age at the time of the nurses’ alleged deaths.