Students occasionally ask me for interviews pertaining to my adventures. Sometimes I say yes. Sometimes I say no. This time the project was about one of my favorite subjects so I said yes. The following interview is for a Wesleyan University student named Seth. He's doing a paper about urban wildernesses, which led him to the Essex Mountain Sanatorium and the Essex County Hospital Center. His questions really jogged my memory and I had a lot of fun typing out the answers. Since very few people were going to read this, I figured I might as well post the interview here to share with all my inernet friends. Here's the text and some pics for your enjoyment. -wheeler 
Where did the legends about the sanitarium come from? Did more start circulating after Weird NJ started writing about the area? I had actually never heard of the sanatorium by word of mouth. I stumbled upon the buildings one day while I was playing in the woods with some friends. We were building forts behind the Fox Hollow housing development in North Caldwell. The closer we got to the top of the hill, the more junk we found. Eventually our quest for building materials led us to a crumbling road, which had served as an illegal dumping ground for many years. After we got bored of picking through the trash, we made our way up to the water towers, where we first spotted the hospital buildings looming over the trees. This was around 1987 when the main hospital complex was still standing. The dilapidated structure was intimidating, to say the least. It was a horror movie come to life for the benefit of our young eyes. We spent the first few months of our discovery just daring each other to go in, but after repeated visits I began to gain confidence inside the hospital.
My early adult years were spent on the top floor of the nurses building or the roof of the red buildings, smoking pot and drinking beer. It was during this period that I began consolidating my pictures and building my former website, welcometohell.net. As a means of advertising, I spray painted the web address all over the walls and it didn't take long for the site to spread across the internet. After that, there was a noticeable influx of out-of-town visitors to the sanatorium and the legends began to spread. Weird NJ probably contributed to this as well, but unlike my site, WNJ has strict rules about not publishing directions to illegal spots. Welcometohell had maps, directions, and tips for not getting caught so I would guess that most people who visited the abandoned hospital at that time had also visited my site before taking the trip.
Can you describe or send a link for a few of those legends? The legend was that there was a huge abandoned hospital on the top of the hill. For once, the legend was correct! Here is a link that might be helpful: click this
In your opinion, has Weird NJ's publication of these stories led to a lot more people from out of town showing up at the Hilltop? Yes, I think that people have become curious about the sanatorium and neighboring Overbrook hospital from what they have read online and in the pages of the magazine. These stories however, always include the disclaimer that it is illegal to trespass on the property and in the buildings. People who take it upon themselves to trespass can't hold Weird NJ or anyone else responsible for the actions they choose to take. It's not illegal to write a story about an abandoned building, but it is illegal to trespass in one. For some reason the cops and the Weird NJ readership have a hard time grasping that concept.
Did you ever go into the tunnels? After the main hospital was torn down there were only 2 tunnels left. The first one went from the nurses' building to the red building (the one with the skylights). The second tunnel originated in the red building and terminated abruptly in the field where the hospital once stood. This tunnel had been purposefully collapsed during the demolition of the main structure and was marked by a hole in the field. My friend, Mad Mike, and I spent many hours in this concrete burrow, attempting to clear a passage through the obstruction and gain access to the rest of the tunnel system. Unfortunately, they had blocked it with too much rubble and we weren't able to bust through. I suspect there may still be tunnels in the field buried under the topsoil, but it's hard to know for sure. During the time when the main sanatorium was standing, there were, what seemed to be, miles of tunnels under the buildings which my friends and I thoroughly explored. The interior of these underground passages were lined with steam pipes. Their job was to deliver heat to each section of the massive hospital.
Have you gone to the Hilltop since you were a teenager? If so, how do feel about the new houses? Did you ever go in the jail? Whenever I visit my parent's house in West Caldwell I try to avoid Mountain Avenue. I can't stand to look at what they've done to my childhood stomping grounds. A few months ago my curiosity got the best of me and I drove up there to see the damage. I was thoroughly sickened by the Mc Mansions which have been erected on what I consider to be sacred ground. However, even though I don't like what they've done, I realize that all good things must come to an end. I am mature enough now to understand that abandonment moves in cycles. It does no good to cry about old buildings that have been torn down. All manmade structures will eventually fall, that is their natural and inevitable fate. One day even the Mc Mansions will be burned and abandoned for a future generation of dropouts and misfits to enjoy. As for the jail, nah I don't like jails, abandoned or otherwise. I do my best to stay as far away from prison as possible.
Much of the stories I've heard about the Hilltop involve the Sanitarium, and not the nearby Overbrook hospital in Cedar Grove. If that's the case, why are there less stories attached to Overbrook? The Essex Mountain Sanatorium was a tuberculosis hospital built in 1901 and abandoned in the 1970s. It wasn't completely demolished until 2002. 30 years of neglect made it much much scarier than The Essex County Hospital Center, which closed its doors only a couple years ago. Overbrook is plenty scary and beautiful in its own way, but it pales in comparison to the abandoned sanatorium that once stood on the hilltop. The isolation that the sanatorium attained high atop Second Mountain made it a one of a kind, never to be repeated, paradise in North Jersey.
This van would appear at random times over the years and stay in effect for a week or two here and there, but never seemed to deter anybody. I suspect that it was some kind of administrative punishment for a sheriff's officer to be put on sanatorium duty. It truly was a boring and pointless job, not to mention a complete waste of taxpayer money. The same may hold true for the cops driving around Overbrook today. I'm sure when they signed on to the police force it wasn't with the intention of playing babysitter to a bunch of abandoned buildings.
What are some of the stories that stick out most in your mind from the Sanitarium? I remember sitting in the copper lined gutter of the main hospital, five stories above the courtyard with my legs dangling in space. I was probably 13 or 14 years old. In my hand was one of those really big bottles of Southern Comfort. The bottle was half full when I stole it from my friend's parents and I stashed it at the sanatorium because I couldn't drink that much in one sitting. There I was, five stories above the pavement, swigging SoCo and feeling no pain. Below me were 4 teenagers who I didn't know, messing around in the courtyard. Eventually they caught sight of me up on my perch and tried to start a friendly conversation from below. To this day I don't know what the hell I was thinking, but I tipped the whiskey all the way back, swallowed the last gulp of burning fire and launched the bottle into the abyss, right at the group of kids. This was so wholly unexpected that they just stood there in surprise as the bottle came hurtling towards them.
One of the weirder stories happened about the same time and is the only piece of evidence I have personally witnessed suggesting ghosts may possibly exist. I have been a skeptic since I was a kid, which is one of the reasons why I was able to get over my fear of the sanatorium as quickly as I did. Those dark hallways were no place for someone who believed in ghosts. Thousands of people died within those wards and even if that hadn't been the case, the place just downright looked haunted. Anyway, one day my friend Scott and I were patrolling the hallways of the main hospital around the area of where the auditorium and the chapel once stood. I had my trusty M17 BB gun in my hands, which I kept stashed in the ceiling above the auditorium. 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 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. It was a week or more before I was able to shrug it off and return to the sanatorium.
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