True Bakersfield Horror: Terror at the Preventorium

I heard the story about a year ago. I saw the battered people from the car wreck. There was still fear in their eyes. They’d become victims of their own storytelling, their own curiosity of a maddening place in the hills.

People who want to be scared sometimes step too far over the edge. A midnight drive can turn into a midnight car chase or shooting. A late night dip into the wrong alley can lead to nightmares for years to come.

John startled himself when he blurted it out. Three others sat on the couch nearby. They’d been telling spooky stories—true tales about Bakersfield and the surrounding hills. “We can go up to that insane hospital,” John had said to his girlfriend, Sherry, and friends, Matt and Beth. They didn’t know they spoke of the old Kernville Preventorium and Dark Creek Sanatorium. While Dark Creek was a tuberculosis hospital that opened in 1917, the Preventorium was a place where men, women and children with tuberculosis got some healing, or care while dying. One doctor had said the lack of foggy air was good up in the rocky hills for patients.

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