Sunland Hospital Site – Orlando

Sunland Hospital no longer stands. The main building was demolished in 1999, the last administration building torn down in 2006, and the site in the Pine Hills neighborhood of Orlando now holds a children's playground. But the ground remembers what was built on it, and so does everyone who lived near it, explored it, or worked to shut it down.

The facility began in 1938 as the Florida State Tuberculosis Sanitarium, part of a statewide chain of hospitals funded by benefactor W.T. Edwards. The building was constructed in the style common to TB hospitals of the era—long, thin, five stories tall, lined with enormous windows that could be cranked open to let in the fresh air believed to aid recovery. By 1960, antibiotics had conquered tuberculosis, and the State of Florida converted the Orlando facility into the Sunland Training Center, a residential institution for children and adults with profound mental and physical disabilities. The patients—most of them children, many of them wards of the state whose parents had surrendered custody on the advice of physicians—were supposed to receive expert care. What they received was something else entirely.

Over two decades, conditions deteriorated into documented atrocity. Wards were severely overcrowded. Patients were bathed on bare concrete slabs. Staff and residents were bitten by rats. Gastric feeding tubes were surgically implanted in over four hundred patients, delivering a cereal-like gruel three times daily—a procedure performed here at rates far exceeding the national average. Investigators documented rampant infections, skin breakdown, and nutritional deficiencies. In 1979, the Association for Retarded Citizens filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the "Sunland Six," alleging gross neglect and abuse. The lawsuit succeeded. The hospital closed in 1983. One hundred and six Sunland patients are buried in Section Q of Orlando's Greenwood Cemetery.

The building sat vacant for over fifteen years, and during that time it became the most infamous destination for urban explorers in Orlando. What they found inside was a decaying monument to institutional cruelty—wheelchairs left in corridors, medical equipment scattered across floors, old Disney characters painted on the walls of the children's ward, and an atmosphere that visitors described less as spooky and more as deeply, physically wrong. The reports were consistent and disturbing. Visitors heard screams and moaning, some distinctly childlike. Shadow figures moved through corridors and appeared in upper-story windows. Apparitions of small children were seen wandering the halls. A shadow resembling a figure hanging from the ceiling was reported more than once. In 1997, a twenty-three-year-old man exploring the building with friends fell three stories down an elevator shaft and was critically injured. When police arrived, an officer reported seeing a child peering through a window. The child was never found.

The incident galvanized the Pine Hills community, and residents successfully lobbied for demolition. Today the site is a playground and open field where neighborhood children come to play in daylight. But visitors to the grounds after dark still report the presence of children who are not living ones—small figures seen at the edges of the field, the sound of laughter with no source, the unmistakable feeling of being watched by someone too short to see over the fence. The spirits attributed to Sunland are not vengeful or aggressive. They are small. And they are still there, playing on the ground where no one played when they were alive.