The Waverly Hills Sanatorium is a closed sanatorium located in southwestern Louisville/Jefferson County, Kentucky. It opened in 1910 as a two-story hospital to accommodate 40 to 50 tuberculosis patients. In the early 1900s, Jefferson County was ravaged by an outbreak of tuberculosis (the "White Plague") which prompted the construction of a new hospital. The hospital closed in 1961, due to the antibiotic drugstreptomycin that lowered the need for such a hospital.

 

The picture of the SSSOMPI team below we are standing at the begining of the "Death Tunnel or Body Chute"

   

While the patients who survived both TB and the treatments left Waverly Hills through the front door, the majority of patients left through what came to be known as the “body chute”. This enclosed tunnel for the dead led from the hospital to the railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill. Using a motorized rail and cable system, the bodies were lowered in secret to the waiting trains. This was done so that patients would not see how many were leaving the hospital as corpses. Their mental health, the doctors believed, was just as important as their physical health.

 

The biggest misconception is that it is a slide.  The "Underground Tunnel" used a rail car system and steps that connect to the 1st floor of the main building and the basement of the original hospital. It stretched 525 feet underground to the bottom of the hill where the dead were collected by the family or cremated. Only about 425 feet remain of the tunnel. The original usage for this tunnel is that it was a warm way to come up the hill in the winter and a very efficient way to bring up supplies and coal to the buildings. As so many patients were dieing from TB the tunnel was used to process the bodies off the hill so the patients would not see the dead taken away in hearses. Directors of the sanatorium decided this was the best way to keep morale up. For fear of the 2 World War coming to U.S. soil, the tunnel could  also be used as an air raid shelter with enough room to fit everyone from all buildings inside safely.