The Hospital Inside the Cave

In the eighteen forties, a doctor named John Croghan owned Mammoth Cave, and he had a desperate idea. Tuberculosis was killing people by the thousands, and there was no cure. Croghan believed the cave's clean, still, unchanging air might heal the lungs of consumptive patients.

So in the autumn of eighteen forty-two, he moved about a dozen sick people more than a mile underground, into stone huts and small wooden cabins built by enslaved laborers. They lived in the dark, breathing the cave air, waiting to get well. Instead they got worse.

The damp, smoky, unventilated environment was terrible for diseased lungs, and the experiment fell apart within a few months. Several patients died inside the cave, their bodies laid on a slab visitors would later call Corpse Rock. The rest went to the surface only to die soon after.

Doctor Croghan himself died of the same disease a few years later. Two of the stone huts still stand in the passage, silent little ruins in the dark, marking one of the first and most tragic attempts to build a tuberculosis hospital anywhere in America.