I am a ghost hunter. I am someone who loves to lose myself in forgotten and over gown places just like Waterfall Sanatorium. I am afraid that for this site I am too late to venture beyond the fences that block the area.I can only imagine what I might be able to find there.
Just one-and-a-half hours drive south of Sydney, 2,000 souls lie lost and buried beneath overgrown bush land: former patients from a century-old sanatorium now long forgotten.
Now the land is an abandoned graveyard, inaccessible by foot and barely visible through broken branches, thick undergrowth and the tree canopies that grow above.
At the turn of the century, tuberculosis - otherwise known as consumption or the White Plague - ravaged the newly federated nation.
With no cure the highly infectious sufferers were instead contained in sanatoriums.
It was here where people were sent to die.
The Waterfall Sanatorium was the state's only purpose-built facility for people suffering tuberculosis.
Sitting at 1,000 feet above sea level, it was chosen as it was believed that tuberculosis patients needed to be elevated and away from the grime and pollution of cities.
Until the 1950s, hospital staff buried around 2,000 people in the graveyard nearby.
Garrawarra Cemetery is so covered by vines, broken branches and time, it's almost as though it never existed.
But beneath the dense bush that has grown over the graves lie the remains of over 2000 poor souls that are now long forgotten.
The cemetery, which also goes by the name of Waterfall General, was the final resting place for about half the tuberculosis patients who died at the nearby at the Sanatorium
Opened in 1909, the sanatorium later became a retirement home.
In the early 2000's a facility for the elderly was built next door and the old sanatorium has been abandoned and unused since then.
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