Two questions, Motts. First, from your outside shots it looks like these tunnels are above ground. What is making them collapse. It is just the weight of the roof/snow? It doesn't look like there is any sideways pressure from soil or water.

Secondly, I wonder if these tunnels were used to prepare the troops for the rigors of trench warfare. Once they got "over there" they were confined to narrow trenches and tunnels for months. If they got claustrophobic and jumped out they wouldn't have lived more than a few seconds. Just a thought.

there is a link on that wikipedia site to the one I've been reading, Ron's Official Waverly Hills site. He is a security guard at the hospital and is doing a lot of research into its history. Its a very interesting read.

now i have a better understanding of how patient abuse became so easy in these places being self sufficient kept locals away no one to blow the whistle so to speak on the treatment of patients

Let us not forget that this was a tuberculosis sanitarium and not a mental hospital when it was built. I have never heard of patient abuse being common in TB hospitals. Or could it be that this disease has become so uncommon that some folks don't know what TB is? Its a highly contagious bacterial disease that primarily attacks the lungs but can settle in bones and in other organs and systems. These hospitals weren't located in remote areas so sadistic people could torture the patients. They were located remotely to help keep the disease from spreading in the days before antibiotics.

Lynne, I read somewhere that the reason for having housing on site was also that the disease was so highly contagious that it was not uncommon for the staff to contract the disease and become patients themselves. Keeping all staff on grounds was just another way to help keep the epidemic in check.

I used to live and work on the grounds of an abandoned TB hospital. My boss at the time leased some of the buildings. That hospital included, at the time, nearly every building that had every been built on site, including stately houses for the doctors, dormitories for the nurses and orderlies, hospital buildings from the WWi era (cottages), medical buildings from the 30's or 40's and from the 60's, power plant, a dairy barn, pig barns and housing for the maintenence workers and farm workers. It has since been turned into a life care center, but I haven't seen it in nearly 20 years.

There is a really cool website on an abandoned sanitarium in Louisville. If I knew how to import links, I'd post it. Unfortunately I'm nearly computer illiterate. I believe the hospital is called Waverly, if anyone wants to look for it.

I feel the need to jump in here. I have been looking at this site for some time, but have mostly refrained from joining the debate.

I think we need to remember that there are a lot of immature people looking at this site for a ghostly or romantic thrill, along with those of us who are looking at it for a love of architecture or an interest in the history of the medical field. They probably haven't been around long enough to look at what the media tells them with a critical eye.

That said, I agree totally with Lynne, Lyric and the rest of you who are in the field and standing up for your colleagues and profession.

I taught for three years in an alternative school that was housed on the grounds of a home for troubled youth (which is often a polite way of saying mentally ill). Three years was all the time that I could bear that heartache and my hat is off to those who show up for work in mental health day after day and year after year. It is really hard to keep showing up and putting in your best effort for people who aren't going to get better in a place with no funding in an environment of scrutiny and criticism. I too had to cut my hair, remove all jewelry for my own protection. I had to take Safe Physical Management every month to learn how to wrestle down a patient without harming them or myself. Several times a day I had to run to another room to help with a violent kid or call for backup myself. I've been spit on, had chairs and books aimed at my head and been threatened and sworn at daily. All the while, I had to deal with threats of lawsuits from parents (who had often abused their kids horribly).

Let us not forget that we are talking about people with mental illness. They did not ask for this illness and we would not wish it on them, but nevertheless, the illness is there. Wishful thinking will not make it go away. It is a terrible and cruel thing to have that type of illness, far more terrible than any cruelty perpetrated by some small number of the staff of these old hospitals. It is a terrible and frightening thing to be betrayed by your own brain. At the very least, these patients probably had little grasp of reality. They probably spent a lot of their time being confused, frustrated and unable to communicate their needs. They would have suffered confusion and frustration wherever they were, it is the nature of their disease, but they probably suffered far less within these familiar walls than they did when turned out into the streets to live as best they could in unfamiliar surroundings. Many of these folks have probably died since this building closed: victims of a cold snap or storm or heat wave when they refused to go to a shelter or couldn't find one that had room for them. Many are probably in prison for some petty crime or a threat that was taken seriously. Some are sleeping out in the cold tonight, maybe under a bridge or wrapped in newspapers on a park bench or sitting on a subway car muttering to themselves.

Some of these folks were probably violent. This probably wasn't how they chose to be, again it was the nature of their disease. Many are frightened and trying to protect themselves against something or someone they perceive as a threat, but that makes them dangerous nonetheless. Some have little "impulse control" which is a sanitized way of saying that they little control over their animal nature. The most primitive part of their brain is in control. Things that you and I can do at appropriate times and in appropriate ways are uncontrollable to them. That includes sexual behaviors and predatory behaviors. That lack of control quickly lands them in prison if they aren't in a place where they can't hurt someone. However bad this place may have been, I'm sure being here was preferable to being in prison.

So for those of you who feel the need to continually comment about how creepy, abusive, disturbing or frightening these hospitals may have been, lets not forget that they were home to a lot of frightened, confused people who were made homeless when they closed. Many of them have probably not had a decent meal since it closed.

And while you are talking about how abusive the staff was, let's not forget that most of this staff was decent and caring and endured much abuse and discomfort in order to take home what was probably a pretty meager paycheck.

Boy I am glad I wasn't commited back then

yeah, well, the current alternatives aren't great either. It sucks to be homeless and hungry and out in the cold too. And I'm sure the huge percentage of mentally ill and "developmentally challenged" folks who are housed in prisons these days might actually prefer being in a place like this. At least they had "three hots and and a cot" and while they might have had to deal with the cruelties of some of the staff, at least they weren't being preyed upon by a prison full of criminals and predators. To find a place like this so overwhelmingly creepy, I guess you have to believe that we stand on some moral high ground now and that things like this belong safely in the past. In a lot of ways, things are worse now.

actually, in that 1930's to 1970's time frame, most women gave birth under general anethesia. Mrs. Smith would've had no clue who was there or what happened until she woke up hours later.

passing the emesis basin

wow, a giant parcheesi board!

Motts, have you ever explored the old Rocky Springs Amusement Park in Lancaster, PA? Most of it has been torn down for a retirement community, but parts were still standing a few years ago when I checked into it.

Iron lung may not be PC, but it saved a lot of lives.

truly, I'm glad you all find this disturbing. It means that because of the vaccine, you aren't familiar with all this. It wasn't at all uncommon when I was a kid to see people on crutches who'd had polio as kids. It isn't so common now, thank God. Although it is only beaten back, not gone. AOL news reported five cases among the Amish in Minnesota last week.

I guess they would have had to wear diapers or be catheterized. Maybe those holes in the side were for tending to those needs. I wonder if the patient could breathe while those holes were open? That would have been truly terrifying if you stopped breathing every time they tended to your bodily functions

I hate to say it, but it wouldn't matter if you did want to turn over. If you had polio badly enough to need one of these, the rest of your body was paralyzed too.

I don't think most people were in these for thirty years. If I'm not mistaken, most folks did improve over time and regained some use of their bodies. I think some even made pretty complete recoveries. I don't know if I am allowed to mention the name of an author here, but a certain writer of racing mysteries told in his autobiography of how his wife had polio when she was pregnant with their first child. She was in an iron lung through most of the pregnancy, but she recovered completely and the child was perfectly fine.

gee lynne, I wish I'd known about this site back in July so I could have posted this when you might have actually seen it, but beautifully well said. I have been savoring this site, looking at it every night for over a week now. The more I read the comments, the more I was thinking exactly what you just said so well. If all we come away with is titillation and horror, we haven't learned very much. I taught for three years in a home for troubled (mentally ill) youths and I learned that this problem is never as simple as it seems. It is only too easy to tar all mental health workers with the same brush, but most are hard working decent people trying to make the best of a bad situation. Lets not forget in all this, that the patients are mentally ill, which means that their brains work in bizarre and disfunctional ways. Some of them aren't safe in the outside world, by which I mean that they will hurt themselves or be hurt by someone else. Some are too trusting, making them easy marks for thugs and criminals. Some have no grasp of reality. And some are predators in their own right. So while some can survive in the outside world with the help of medications, some left these hospitals only to be homeless, hungry and cold. Others left only to commit a crime and are now in prisons where they are getting abuse the likes of which was unheard of in these hospitals. Sometimes I think that closing these old institutions was a truly unkind thing to do to the patients. They were not equipped to go out into the world and make a living. Thats why they were in the hospital in the first place.

its also the right height to have been hit but hundreds of gurneys, carts, wheel chairs and mop buckets pushed by harried orderlys and staff.

Your site has really piqued my curiousity Motts. I have spent a happy week purusing your site and doing research on other sites. I now know who Kirkbride was, what he did for mental health and what he had to do with these vastly different buildings. I did some digging and figured out where this facility is. I'll respect your wish to leave it nameless. The cool thing is knowing that we can also imagine the acitivity going on in these hallways in the future. It will apparently soon be converted to a hotel. If I have the right facility, (and I have been able to match other photographs to yours), they are going to try to save the whole building, as well as construct townhouses and a marina around it. They have a real job ahead of them. I can't imagine how they will safely get all those hanging floors down without damaging the masonry walls or remove all the lead paint, but that is apparently the plan. I wish them well.

anyone know anything about the old Mt Wilson Hospital (another branch of the Maryland Tuberculosis Hospital, located in the Pikeville/Garrison area) I worked on the grounds after it closed and before it was turned into a retirement home, but I never saw the inside or learned much about its history.

what is even cooler is that tb isn't common anymore and most of us don't know what most of this stuff is or was used for. Thank God for penicillin and tb testing for people and cattle. No longer do we have to worry about our kid's milk carrying a deadly pathogen or the person next to us coughing on us and putting us in a place like this one.

if this is the place I think it is, part of the facility is still being used. There are newer buildings ca. 1960-1980 in the back of the grounds. You would think they would cut the power to the abandoned buildings tho...unless they want them to burn down.

This looks very much like a place I was familiar with in Maryland, and since it is paired with another site in Maryland, I'm guessing this is the same place. If so, I knew someone who worked there as her first job as a teenager. She described caring for and bathing a 65-year-old woman who had been a vegetable since birth.

I also knew someone who grew up there. From what I know of it, it was basically a home for children and adults who were profoundly retarded, many of whom were basically vegetables. So most of what you are seeing is probably the equipment needed to bathe and care for people who were unable to sit or stand. However, they apparently took overflow from local orphanages. My friend who grew up there was an orphan or was abandoned, I don't think she knew which. She was functionally retarded, but apparently was not placed there for that reason. She may have just suffered a complete lack of stimulation in that place . There apparently weren't many other children there who functioned as well as she did, so she wouldn't have had anyone to talk to.