Seaside Sanatorium

The Seaside Sanatorium sits empty on the Long Island Sound shore in Waterford, Connecticut, and people who've explored its gutted dormitory wings say they hear children's voices in them. The place was built for children.

Seaside opened in 1934 to treat tuberculosis in kids 14 and under — not the kind that fills the lungs, but the kind that gets into the bones and the glands. There were no antibiotics yet. The cure doctors believed in was the sun. Heliotherapy, they called it: lay sick children outside in the sea air and let sunlight do what no medicine could.

So the state built a place to hold the light. It hired Cass Gilbert — the architect of the Woolworth Building and the U.S. Supreme Court — to design 195 beds across a campus that was supposed to look "elegant and domestic and not institutional and hospital-like," so the children wouldn't feel like patients. He gave them a Tudor Revival estate oriented to the sun, with open terraces and a 1,700-foot sand beach for sunbathing. The kids stayed six months to a year. They went to school, played sports, took music lessons, lay in the sun. Gilbert died in May 1934, about a month before it opened. He never saw a child use it.

When antibiotics finally beat TB in the late 1950s, the children left. The buildings cycled through a geriatric hospital, then a state center for people with intellectual disabilities, and emptied for good in 1996.

They've sat there ever since, gated on some of Connecticut's most beautiful oceanfront, fought over for a quarter-century — a luxury hotel that failed a zoning vote, a state park that never got built, a 2023 plan to demolish the whole campus, a developer's lawsuit to stop it. Nobody can agree what to do with the place built to save children with sunlight.

So it just stands there in the light, and people keep hearing the children.