There’s something intensely creepy about abandoned places. Perhaps it’s in the look of a place that is no longer lived in but has instead died and begun to rot, something that seems to push visitors away even as it draws them in. An atmosphere that almost seems to shout, “You don’t belong here, go back!”
This is even more true of places that have some sort of bitter history about them: prisons, orphanages, or – dues avertat- insane asylums. It doesn’t matter how nice an example of the breed they were while alive, when abandoned its halls are peopled with the very worse of horrors by those who explore its decaying halls.
Such is the case with the Essex Mountain Sanatorium and its neighbor, the Overbrook Psychiatric Hospital. During its life it was one of the premier tuberculosis facilities in North America with a recovery rate of 50% (the fact that 50% was an impressive number for recovery only goes to show how horrible of a disease TB really was). It was a huge facility that covered almost 200 acres with a chapel, hospital, auditorium, and many acres of farmland that (worked by prisoners from North Caldwell Penitentiary) produced fresh produce to patients.
As TB was eradicated with the discovery of Streptomycin in the 1950’s the population of patients dropped and the sanatorium became home to overflow patients from nearby Overbrook, then to Turning Point, a rehabilitation center for patients recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. Eventually both facilities were closed in the 1980’s and abandoned.
Here was a facility with a mostly happy history, as far as sanatoriums and mental hospitals are concerned anyway. There were no whispered stories of widespread abuse or cruel experiments, and most people who were admitted knew that they stood a better chance of getting better here than in other facilities.
Not to say that the entirety of the record here was clean. There was one horrible incident on record, reported by the New York Times. In 1917 during a particularly bad cold snap the hospital’s boilers failed and within 20 days 24 patients had died, freezing, in their beds.
But the fact that on the whole this was a place of hope and healing during life isn’t as important as what happened later. After being abandoned both Essex and Overbrook became places of renown for the young people of New Jersey. What better place than an abandoned sanatorium/insane asylum to go for a thrill on a boring summer night?
And go they did. The abandoned complex became legendary, a haven where teens could explore, party, hang out, and scare the crap out of their friends and younger siblings, imagining it as they did full of monsters, escaped lunatics, and the spirits of the restless dead.
It doesn’t help that the sites seemed to be abandoned in haste, with medical equipment, paraphernalia, beds, jars full of formaldehyde and organs, gurneys, and records all strewn about as if everyone just decided one day to get up and leave. Because while exploring an empty building is frightening, exploring one that is filled with strange medical equipment rusted and waiting for just one more patient is infinitely more so.
Stories abound of people frightened by strange things that happened on the grounds. Most commonly, people who visited Essex often describe it as infused with a strange feeling of sadness.
“My initial impression was one of sadness.”
“There was always a sadness I felt at the sanatorium, and it affected me deeply.”
“It was a very sad place, but there was something that I loved so much about it. I couldn’t get enough of going there.”
“I haven’t been up there in years, I don’t know why, maybe it’s just too sad.”
“I’m not saying there’s ghosts or anything like that, but as soon as I walked onto the areas perimeters, I felt such a sad feeling. That feeling came without even knowing its history.”
“ It is a very sad place and I do believe that it is being haunted by the souls that died there”
There are ghostly impressions too, everything from sightings of a nurse who walks from one side of the hospital to the other and footsteps up on floors above you to strange faces in the windows and wheelchairs or gurneys moving through the deserted corridors, unaccompanied by wind.
“We were just coming out into the main hallway, when we suddenly heard running boots at the other end of the corridor. Scott was one of the toughest dudes I have ever met and I had a machine gun in my hand, so we glanced at each other and instinctively took off in pursuit.
The footsteps were booking fast down the hallway, towards the bridge that spanned the courtyard’s driveway. There was a slight angle the way the bridge was built, so we couldn’t see who we were running after, but we could hear the fleeing footsteps pounding along with our own. As we made the slight turn onto the bridge, we caught the most fleeting-shadow of a glimpse of our victim, as he turned right into the hallway of the main building. We heard him run for a very brief few feet, open a door and slam it behind him. This whole altercation had taken no more than 15 seconds from the time we heard him start running, to the time he went through the door. We were at the door in an instant and Scott violently kicked it in, as I rushed in wielding the BB gun.
The room, as it turned out, was a bathroom. We kicked in every stall door and peered behind every nook and cranny, but there was simply no one there. We checked the ceiling, behind the door, behind the toilets. We looked out the window, which was a 3 story drop onto the asphalt driveway below. We left the bathroom and checked all the rooms in the wing, but there was nobody there and no evidence of anyone being there at all. The two of us had left footprints in the plaster dust of the floor, but ours were the only fresh ones to be found. After a while of fruitless searching, we started to get really spooked. I stashed my gun back in its hiding place and we got the hell out of there.”
But perhaps one of the scariest repeat occurrences tends to be the voices. People report everything from undecipherable whispers to bloodcurdling screams. Sometimes someone even seems to try to shout people off the property, saying something along the lines of “”Get the hell out of here!”
“It was getting dark when we finally arrived. In the distance, I started to see the skeletal standings of the water towers, and what appeared to be the entire facility – it held an outline in the moonlight. It was extraordinary, not to mention truly eerie, and frightening. I tried to compose myself, but fear took over me and my friends. As we continued up the path, we heard someone scream “You’ll burn in hell!” We turned around in the direction of the voice, and to no surprise, there was no one there. What really scared us though was that when we looked back in the direction of where we had just seen the buildings, we couldn’t find anything. After that we left, horrified.
Now, I’ve read the information about the destruction of this facility, and I’m not sure how to say this without sounding insane, but I went on this trip in November 2001, after most of this place had been destroyed.”
Of course it’s not just teenagers out for a thrill that report strange experiences. The hospital was used in the Film Choke and many crew members had weird experiences, which is part of the reason why both Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters explored the site, even going as far to lock themselves into a body drawer in the morgue. They experienced a lot of random noises, including carts moving and footsteps, but not much hard evidence beyond a couple of EVPs and a camera that seems to have been moved when no one else was around (a complete write up of the episode is
here).
The property has since been demolished. Too many fires started by random visitors, too many police tracking down trespassers and runaways. But despite the massive amounts of stories online the spooky experiences mostly seem to boil down to things heard or people seen from afar in a building complex known to attract lots of different people, several of which probably lived in it at any given time.
And maybe that strange sadness that everyone feels isn’t from the pain and suffering that happened here. Perhaps it’s just nothing more than the feeling that all explorers have when faced with a grand edifice that is in decay- a reminder that all of us are mortal and the things we make will not last forever.
