Four Sanatoriums That Sold a Climate as a Cure
In 1900, 194 of every 100,000 Americans died of tuberculosis, and it ranked among the leading causes of death in the country. The bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis spreads through the air when a person with active lung disease coughs, sneezes, speaks or sings. For much of the 1800s the disease was called consumption. There was no antibiotic. The accepted treatment was rest, good food and fresh air, a method Hermann Brehmer had built around cold, clear mountain air in Germany. Edward Livingston Trudeau followed that example, and his Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, was the first such establishment in North America. After that, climate became the product. Arizona's sunshine and dry desert air drew so many people (called "lungers") that Tucson had the greatest concentration of sanatoria. The four below were built on that logic, from a hill above Louisville to the woods outside Duluth, and on to the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota and the Arizona desert. Then, after Albert Schatz discovered streptomycin in 1943, sanatoria began to close, and isoniazid later joined the standard list of tuberculosis drugs. The buildings often outlasted the cure. Big hospitals that held decades of illness and death, then sat empty, make easy settings for stories, and television crews have gone looking for them. The numbers run east to west across the map and are not a ranking. Every heading opens that location's pin on the map, with its description and episode list.
Waverly Hills Sanatorium
📍 4400 Paralee Drive, Louisville, KentuckyThe first Waverly Hills Sanatorium was a two-story wooden building with two open-air pavilions, twenty patients in each, and it opened in Louisville on July 26, 1910. Louisville then had one of the highest tuberculosis death rates in the country, and a hill above the city became the site. The five-story brick and concrete building most people picture opened on October 17, 1926, and could hold more than 400 patients.
Black patients were housed in segregated facilities apart from the main building. After streptomycin was introduced in 1943, tuberculosis cases dropped, the remaining patients were moved to Hazelwood Sanatorium in Louisville, and Waverly Hills closed in June 1961. It reopened in 1962 as the Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a nursing home, which the state closed in the early 1980s after a grand jury inspection found patient abuse and poor conditions. The buildings were listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 12, 1983, and have been in private hands since.
A 500-foot tunnel runs between the heating plant at the bottom of the hill and the main building, built to carry steam and supplies. On the map, the Waverly Hills pin is described as a tuberculosis hospital where thousands of patients perished, with shadow people, EVPs and full-bodied apparitions reported in the wards and the chute. The story goes that between the 1920s and 1940s the tunnel also let staff move the dead to an ambulance quietly, so patients would not know someone had died, but that part rests on anecdote. The better-known legend is a toll of 63,000, and none of the histories used here gives any total. The Kentucky Historic Institutions site notes only that a patient death index begins in 1911. The legend rounds up where the records go quiet.
On television
Ghost Adventures investigated the building in "Waverly Hills Sanatorium," Season 4, Episode 4, which the Travel Channel first aired on October 8, 2010. Episode guides summarize it plainly: the crew looks into a former tuberculosis hospital from the early 1900s that housed thousands of patients.
📍 See Waverly Hills on the map
Nopeming Sanatorium
📍 Midway Township, outside Duluth, MinnesotaNopeming is said to mean "out in the woods" in Ojibwe, and the sanatorium that opened on May 22, 1912, kept to the name. It stood in Midway Township, outside Duluth, run by St. Louis County, which first called it the St. Louis County Hospital. It began as two cottages, one for adults and one for children, offering the traditional fresh air treatment, with 30 beds that quickly grew to 50. Larger buildings later raised capacity to 300.
In 1957 the Trudeau Building was renovated into a 42-bed nursing home for chronically ill patients, and for the next fourteen years Nopeming served as both sanatorium and nursing home. An archive review in The Bark counts about 4,000 patients treated before 1971. Funding and operating costs led St. Louis County to decide on closure in 2002, and the official closing date was November 27, 2002, with residents moved to other local facilities. The main building still stands, unoccupied.
On the map, the Nopeming pin is described as an abandoned sanatorium where thousands died and spirits are said to echo in the empty halls. The records are more modest. The same archive review puts the number who died inside Nopeming at approximately 1,500 between 1912 and 2002, a span that includes the nursing home decades, and it adds that the paranormal activity "cannot be entirely confirmed." Two local stories circulate. One holds that bodies were burned in the boiler room, and the grounds did have a crematorium in later years. The other is a nine-year-old girl said to giggle or ride a tricycle through the halls. Both are folklore, and the sources used here give the girl no name and no date.
On television
Ghost Adventures took on Nopeming in "Nopeming Sanatorium," Season 13, Episode 03, shown on the Travel Channel in 2015. Episode guides say the crew heads to Duluth and is billed as the first paranormal team to investigate the sanatorium, where thousands of people are said to have died of tuberculosis. The "first" is the show's billing.
📍 See Nopeming on the map
San Haven Sanatorium
📍 Turtle Mountains, northeast of Dunseith, Rolette County, North DakotaSan Haven began accepting patients in November 1912, on the southern slope of the Turtle Mountains northeast of Dunseith, in Rolette County. The site was chosen in part because its elevation, relatively low snowfall and dry atmosphere were considered favorable. In the thinking of the day, that made the hillside part of the treatment. The sanatorium admitted 170 patients in its first eighteen months.
Beds in use had declined substantially by 1958, and in 1973 responsibility for tuberculosis patients passed to the state Department of Health, after which treatment at San Haven was phased out. The grounds had already taken on a second life: residents of the Grafton State School were first admitted in 1957, the section became part of that school in 1961, and in 1973 San Haven became a division of it. The state closed the hospital in December 1987 and vacated the buildings by 1989. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa bought the property from the state in 1992, and a news report in October 2025 said demolition of the buildings was nearing completion.
On the map, San Haven is flagged for patient apparitions, whispers in empty wards and a pervasive feeling of sorrow. History is thin on the number that legends like to supply. None of the sources used for this entry gives a reliable count of deaths or burials, so any figure attached to the place should be read as rumor. What does exist is a paper trail: the State Archives of North Dakota hold patient records, a better way to meet the people who lived there than any tally of ghosts.
On television
Ghost Adventures took on San Haven in "Dakota's Sanatorium of Death," Season 16, Episode 12, which aired on Travel Channel in 2016. The title does not hedge; the records above are far more modest.
📍 See San Haven on the map
Acadia Ranch Sanitorium
📍 825 E. Mt. Lemmon Highway, Oracle, ArizonaAdobe and stucco, a one-room adobe addition from about 1915, a water tower: Acadia Ranch grew in pieces between 1885 and 1930, and the pieces are still there. Edwin S. Dodge and his wife developed it in the 1880s as a boarding house and sheep ranch, in partnership with Jack Aldwinkle. The Dodges were soon accommodating the "lungers," the local name for people with tuberculosis and other lung afflictions, in the years before antibiotics.
Oracle gained international fame around the turn of the twentieth century as an ideal cure for consumption, and fresh air was the selling point. The National Register of Historic Places listed the ranch's main house, an outbuilding with a smokehouse and garage, and the water tower on February 22, 1984, citing its association with a regional industry oriented toward health and tourism. The Oracle Historical Society, founded in 1977, now keeps the Acadia Ranch Museum in the buildings.
On the map, Acadia Ranch is described as an abandoned sanitorium with tragic deaths, including child murder, poltergeist activity and aggressive spirits. The history sources used here do not support that wording. The National Register listing and the historical society describe a boarding house, health resort and ranch, and neither mentions a murder. Nothing was found that would turn the child murder into a documented event, so it stays unverified legend. The word "abandoned" also sits oddly beside a building a local historical society has kept up.
On television
Ghost Adventures covered the ranch in "Acadia Ranch Sanitorium," Season 25, Episode 17, released on Discovery+ in 2022.
📍 See Acadia Ranch on the mapSanatoriums on Television: The Episode List
-
Ghost Adventures, "Waverly Hills Sanatorium"
S4 E4 · Travel Channel · 2010 · Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Louisville, Kentucky -
Ghost Adventures, "Nopeming Sanatorium"
S13 E03 · Travel Channel · 2015 · Nopeming Sanatorium, Duluth, Minnesota -
Ghost Adventures, "Dakota's Sanatorium of Death"
S16 E12 · Travel Channel · 2016 · San Haven Sanatorium, near Dunseith, North Dakota -
Ghost Adventures, "Acadia Ranch Sanitorium"
S25 E17 · Discovery+ · 2022 · Acadia Ranch Sanitorium, Oracle, Arizona
Did 63,000 people really die at Waverly Hills?
That figure is a widely repeated legend. None of the histories used here gives any total, and the Kentucky Historic Institutions site notes only that a patient death index begins in 1911.
Why were tuberculosis sanatoriums built on hills or in the desert?
With no antibiotic, the accepted treatment was rest, good food and fresh air, and climate became the product: cold mountain air in Switzerland, dry air in Colorado Springs, sunshine and dry desert air in Arizona. San Haven's site was chosen in part for its elevation, relatively low snowfall and dry atmosphere.
What happened to the sanatoriums after streptomycin?
After Albert Schatz discovered streptomycin in 1943, sanatoria began to close. Waverly Hills closed in June 1961 and reopened in 1962 as a nursing home, and Nopeming ran as a nursing home until 2002.
Four pins is a small corner of the map. All four are free to explore there, each with its own card. From here, filter for ghost locations and keep going.
Report compiled by the Phantom-Finder.com Research Team • October 28, 2026 • Episode data from the Phantom-Finder.com map database, cross-checked against Wikipedia's list of Ghost Adventures episodes and TheTVDB. History from Wikipedia (the four sites, Sanatorium, Tuberculosis and Edward Livingston Trudeau), the Kentucky Historic Institutions site, the Frazier Kentucky History Museum, the CDC, The Bark (University of Minnesota Duluth), Inforum, KFYR-TV, the State Archives of North Dakota, the National Park Service and the Oracle Historical Society. Images via Wikimedia Commons: Waverly Hills Sanatorium by Royasfoto73, CC BY-SA 4.0; Nopeming Sanatorium, 1913, unknown author (Star Tribune, Minneapolis, July 6, 1913), public domain; San Haven by In memoriam afiler, CC BY-SA 2.0; Acadia Ranch Museum by Ammodramus, CC0. Header image: Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Louisville, Kentucky, photo by Royasfoto73, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}
_from_NW_1.JPG){kind=link}