Listed below are a few of the dark tunnels and urban legends around Louisville. Explore them ... if you dare.

These tales are scattered all over — ranging from the passages underneath one of the city's most famous hotels to the basement of the company whose very article you're reading.

Abused mental patients, a mummified Egyptian priestess and the notorious Al Capone. They are all characters in real-life horror stories revolving around secret underground tunnels throughout Louisville.

Sauerkraut Cave Central State Mental Hospital, E.P “Tom” Sawyer Park. 3000 Freys Hill Road Tours available Families flock to E.P. "Tom" Sawyer Park each year for picnics, soccer games and marathons. But its roots lie in a gloomier past, including the uniquely named Sauerkraut Cave. The 550-acre piece of land is the only urban state park in Kentucky, but it was once home to Louisville's mental hospital. In 1869, the state legislature issued an order for a boys reformatory school on the property. But due to an influx of mental patients at the state's other hospitals, they repurposed the property and renamed it the Central Kentucky Lunatic Asylum in 1874, said Nick Price, the park's program services leader. Conditions at the hospital were not ideal. One 1882 article from the Courier-Journal reported a grand jury had indicted several employees for assaulting patients, and one was even charged with murder for submerging a patient in a bathtub. By the 1990s, the hospital had been renamed Central State Mental Hospital and moved to LaGrange Road, where it still operates today, Price said. The buildings were torn down but some of the structures remain, including two graveyards on the property. “It was crowded ... tight quarters for everyone who was living there,” Price said. “With the cemeteries being here, it was clear that people died.” Sauerkraut Cave played a central role at the hospital. Its brick entrance, located in the woods behind the park's archery fields, is now covered in graffiti. At one time, before refrigeration, the cave was used for food storage and housed barrels of sauerkraut for patients. Inside the cave, there are brick pillars and a small trench on the far left side filled with water. Following it brings an explorer to a tunnel. When crouching, a narrow cavern can be seen stretching for at least a hundred yards, far beyond what the eye can see. The only way to reach back that far is to send an echo through the cavern. Crystals coat the tunnel's ceiling, and the occasional newt can be seen swimming through the water on the ground. The cave is open and anyone can walk inside, but Price said it is considered off-limits to wanderers because of the dangers of the cave's tight spaces. The park hosts paranormal ghost tours every Halloween season, where curious investigators can see if the scary stories have any truth to them. “There have been a number of accounts from park visitors who have had weird feelings and actually experienced things while up and around the park,” Price said. “Some people have stories of hearing music and mumbling ... one woman felt something tugging on her hair and her shirt. It varies."

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Crescent Hill, 2825 Lexington Road Closed to the public Tucked off Lexington Road, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is one of the largest seminaries in the world, boasting a 100-acre campus and roughly 5,500 students. Not as publicized is its series of tunnels — underground passageways that connect the school's chapel and several of its main buildings. And did we mention they have a mummified Egyptian priestess on display? Established in downtown Louisville in 1877, the campus was moved to the Crescent Hill neighborhood in 1926. During its construction, several tunnels were built to help send steam heat and supplies around campus. The tunnels are closed to the public. Greg Wills, a professor of church history and Baptist history, is one of a lucky few who has been inside them. Starting in the facilities building, one tunnel goes under the on-campus hotel and extends to the chapel and the main academic building, spokesman Colby Adams said. Another reaches to the library and other residential buildings. With narrow caverns stretching for hundreds of feet, a tall explorer would walk through most of them hunched over. Along the way, wanderers have to hurtle over steam pipes and limbo under others. Joining the aging and rusted water and steam pipes are campus internet cables and other electrical wires. “The tunnels provided easy access for maintenance and sometimes storage," Wills said. "They’re mysterious, they’re dark. It’s easy to conjure a creepy feeling. But us being Southern Baptist, being people of the Bible, we don’t believe ghosts visit human habitations.” The cavernous tunnels also lead right under the Callaway Archaeological Museum. Among the seemingly uninterested students nestled in their laptops and textbooks lies a glass display of an Egyptian sarcophagus. Inside it lies a woman named Sheryet-Mehyet, a priestess dating back to 700 B.C. The mummy was found in Egypt in 1896 by T.T. Eaton, a pastor of the Walnut Street Baptist Church. It was later donated to the seminary. Although the tunnels are off-limits, the mummy is available for the public to view.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium Pleasure Ridge Park, 4400 Paralee Lane Tours available Tina Mattingly knows first hand that Waverly Hills Sanatorium is haunted, but she wants people to see it for themselves. Perhaps the ideal place to have a paranormal experience is "the body chute," a 600-foot-long underground tunnel that was used to discretely transport thousands of dead tuberculosis patients since the hospital was established in 1926. Tina Mattingly and her husband, Charlie Mattingly, purchased the run-down sanatorium in 2001 with the aim of restoring the hospital. Since then, they've had no shortage of ghostly experiences. During a day of restoration, while standing with two employees in the hospital's morgue, Tina Mattingly saw a man dressed in Victorian clothing walking behind one of her employees. She asked her coworkers if anyone had brought a friend to work or if they saw what she saw. They were clueless. “I saw a spirit, but I didn’t know it at the time," Tina Mattingly said. "I thought it was a real person. He looked at me and I looked at him. We made contact. I can say I looked a spirit in the eyes, and that’s amazing." Charlie Mattingly has seen ghosts, too. “People are always wondering, 'what happens to me when I die,'" Charlie Mattingly said. "I just try to stay out of all that, but I’ll quote them ‘E=MC2.’ That means energy never dies. It’s just transferred; it never goes away.” Kentucky was one of the worst places in the nation for tuberculosis due to its location in the damp Ohio River valley. Charlie Mattingly estimates that thousands died at the hospital. “At one time there was a recorded weekend where there was a death every hour," he said. Because of the high casualties, and the desire to not discourage patients, hospital officials used the body chute as a way to get the dead from the property to the cemetery and railroad tracks without anyone seeing. Tina Mattingly hosts paranormal investigators and ghost enthusiasts throughout the year, and the body chute is filled with activity ranging from the orbs and balls of light caught on camera to the sounds of a gurney being wheeled down the tunnel in the dead of night. “I don’t expect anyone to believe any of that because I know I wouldn’t," Tina Mattingly said. "They need to come and see it.”

Seelbach Hotel Central Business District, 500 S 4th St. Closed to the public The celebrity guest list at the Seelbach Hotel reads like a great American novel, with patrons such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Al Capone and John F. Kennedy gracing its rooms. Since the hotel opened on Fourth Street in 1905, its 500 rooms have held every level of royalty and some of the nation’s most heinous criminals. While the opulent stays of both are well documented, the hotel's darker secrets lie nearly two stories below its lobby. Two tunnels in the Seelbach’s basement hidden from public view have been used by guests to leave in a hurry, said Larry Johnson, the hotel’s historian and concierge. Capone, an avid poker and pool player at the hotel's Oakroom, would need an easy way to leave if police showed up, Johnson said. Luckily, the Seelbach was very accommodating. The first escape route, an old brick tunnel that stretches back 20 feet, was used as a passageway to get steam heat from pipes throughout the hotel in the first half of the 20th century. The open cavern has since been walled off, but it offered easy access to neighboring buildings if a guest was caught in a pinch. “If there was somebody playing cards or one of the gangsters wanted to get away, they could have gone through that tunnel and went right to the building next door,” Johnson said. A lesser-known tunnel in the Seelbach sits in another part of its basement, right off the employee dining room. Once used for water drainage and rain runoff, the tunnel now sits dry and musty. By using an old cable spindle for a boost, an explorer can follow the 60-foot tunnel around a curve, ducking for the occasional rusty pipe. At the end are two doors, both sealed shut. “It led all the way to Churchill Downs, and the other all the way down to the river,” Johnson said. The silver-haired historian was hesitant to say Al Capone and other gangsters used to escape out this tunnel, but he had no problem keeping the mystery alive. “They were used for water drainage throughout the city, but there was a lot of times there was no water in them,” Johnson said with a grin. In addition to the legendary escapes, there's also a famous ghost story. Patricia Wilson, a 24-year-old guest wearing a blue dress, was walking around the hotel on July 15, 1936, when she fell to her death down a service elevator and was never seen again, Johnson said. But in 1987, cook James Scott and housekeeper Sharon White saw a ghost with dark hair and a long blue dress on the eighth floor and the mezzanine area of the hotel. The two employees saw her walk into the elevator and vanish. Johnson said no one has seen her ghost since, but some have heard footsteps or smelled a wisp of perfume belonging to her.