In Memoriam: The Essex Mountain Sanatorium

**Special thanks to Jim for sending me the link to the The Essex Mountain Sanatorium website.**

As terrifying as I find abandoned buildings, they never cease to fascinate me. During my senior year of high school, and in the beginning of my college years, there was Blue Hill....which is a creepy haunted house that was boarded up and abandoned and the police blocked it off for some reason (because it was haunted, obviously) years ago.

The past few years, I was hellbent on Eastern State Penitentiary.


And now, The Essex Mountain Sanitorium, formerly located in Verona, NJ has grasped my interest.

It has now become the Hilltop Reservation, a natural preserve made of the lands that once contained the EMS.

But prior to that, this place looked terrifying! Even the website gives me the creeps!

The history of the building is truly fascinating. Its uses constantly evolved, from beginning as a type of orphanage, then to a home for girls, then to a Tuberculosis treatment ward (where apparently there was great success in treatment of the disease) and haven for soldiers with lung injuries during WW1. As Tuberculosis was being contained by vaccines and science breakthroughs, the sanatorium became obsolete and was closed in 1982.

In 1987, the moderator of the website discovered the sanatorium and was fascinated by it.

I totally agree, it is extremely bizarre how everything was left behind. Why would people just leave behind everything as if they were in a hurry to get out? The website shows different files that were left behind after the sanatorium closed.

And of course, the scary stuff! There's an entire section of strange things caught in pictures. There is also a section where people can share their own stories of the sanatorium.

The website is extraordinary in the extensive amount of information it provides. You can see pictures of the sanatorium from all different eras here. You can also find comparison pictures from way back when to more recently to see how the buildings have changed.

WeirdNJ has also covered the Essex Mountain Sanatorium.

So has VacantNJ.

Here is a tribute video that someone made about the sanatorium (the pictures are very eerie and haunting):



This is another short film made, and it is frightening:


So what's the deal? Were there horrible experiments being performed and that's why it was closed so abruptly? Did escaped mental patients hide out there? Is it really haunted? Perhaps the answers were demolished along with the buildings.