Abandoned Places

Elevator broken, go on foot...

( some more photos )

 Some old photos of Smithtown General Hospital closed in 99 and was torn down in 07.

Im new to this community and thought I would start with sharing one of my fav places.

Kings Park is one of the 4 Psych Centers that is located on Long Island. It opened in 1895 and closed its doors in 1996. The property now has become State Park land. Only one building in Kings Park remains opened and its used for out-patient programs.



Building 93. This building tends to be everyones fav. It was used to house patient who were there for long term care. Only the first 4 floors of the building were ever opened.

Waverly Hills Sanitarium (Part 2)

First off, I want to welcome the folks in the waverlyhills community who’ve come over and joined this community as well.

I’d also like to comment on the 63,000 death figure. Originally I was skeptical of this number too. My research led me to think this was the number of deaths in the entire state of Kentucky during the era. I then discovered that Waverly Hills was the regional TB hospital for the entire state and was where all the serious cases (requiring isolation) were sent. Because it was the primary state hospital, the figure may have come from this article (http://whsmemorial.tripod.com/id30.html). In reading through the Waverly website and the memorial website (now linked below), the staff and former patients note in correspondence that at the height of the outbreak, 12 to 14 deaths each day were not uncommon. The historical information notes that at the bottom of the “Death Tunnel” notes that hearsts were parked and awaiting “constant stream of” bodies 24/7 for a number of years. In lieu of that, the journals of former medical staff and patients indicate there was quite a number of daily fatalities.

As I noted in the first post Waverly is haunted. Not just mildly haunted, but it reeks of the spiritual detritus of tens of thousands of live that touched this place. When we first entered the grounds my daughter and I commented to each other that we were being watched. When we entered the place on the tour, the place has a very ‘close’ feeling to it, it’s like you’re jostling to get through crowds of the unseen. On several occasions there even seemed to be mild interaction between we the living and the spirits retained there.


In these dark halls, the past lingers

( Memories fade, but the spirit(s) lives on [18 Behind the cut] )

Waverly Hills Sanitarium

Folks, I’ve been saving the best of the trip for the last. I hadn’t planned for this part of the essay to be delayed till the week before Halloween, but I can appreciate the irony. Near the end of my visit home to the Louisville area, my daughter and I paid a visit to one of the most haunted and certainly most unique “abandoned” sites in North America.

Waverly Hills Sanitarium was a TB hospital from the 1926 till it closed in 1961. It briefly reopened as a geriatric care center until the State of Kentucky forced it to close in 1980 (due to severe cases of patient neglect and abuse). Approximately 63,000 TB patients died within the walls of Waverly Hills.



( Welcome to the House of the Dead [14 behind the cut] )