For those who feel congested, or sick, or just stressed out, Sue Sullivan has a suggestion: come hang out in a room filled with salt.
That’s the idea behind the Port Salt Cave, which Sullivan recently opened on Main Street in late November.
“Salt if you think anout it, has a lot of healing purposes,” she said. When you have a sore throat, you gargle salt. When you’re clogged up, saline in the nose… when you go to the ocean, you’re very relaxed.”
The salt room is a mock-up of a cave interior with four-and-a-half inches of salt on the floor (“All edible,” Sullivan points out). The cave is kept at a cool 66 degrees and pharmaceutical-grade salt is pumped in, giving a slightly salty taste to the air.
With reclining chairs and warm, dim lighting, it is not surprising that many of Sullivan’s customers fall asleep during their sessions.
“It’s good for your mental health, anxiety, people feel rejuvenated when they come out,” she said.
She said the process is especially helpful for people with respiratory problems, such as 9/11 responders.
Sullivan said a police officer who makes weekly visits is now off his medications.
“The salt is anti-fungal, anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, and most important, anti-inflammatory,” she said. “And that property helps people with respiratory problems.”
Even those who are just feeling congested by the winter weather can benefit from a session, Sullivan said.
“The atomized salt in the air… it helps clear out the mucus, it helps open up the airways,” she said.
It also helped people with skin problems such as eczema and acne, she said.
Sullivan has a background in medicine. She worked in pharmacy sales for more than two decades and specialized in respiratory medicines.
When she fell ill in 2014, she was let go by her company. She didn’t know what her next move would be other than she did not want to work for somebody else.
Her sister told her about a salt cave in Montauk, which caught Sullivan’s attention.
She started researching salt caves and talking to out-of-state cave owners.
“I knew people probably wouldn’t give me information here on Long Island,” she said.
Construction on Port Salt Cave started in October.
Almost all of her salt comes from Poland, which she said was the preference of the contractor who helped to build the cave. She said it comes caves compared to Himalayan salt, which comes from mountainsides.
“It’s just [the contractors] preference because he is Polish,” she said with a laugh.
It was Poland where a doctor first realized the healing power of salt.
In the 1840s, Dr. Feliks Boczkowski noticed that miners working in salt caves had clear lungs and did not have tuberculosis. A few years later, a salt clinic was founded in Krakow.
Ten tons of Polish salt was used for the cave — including the salt on the ground and the blocks that make up the cave’s walls.
One session lasts 45 minutes and costs $45.
Customers can purchase weekly sessions at a lower price per session, and the entire room can be rented out for parties. $135 buys a monthly pass for four sessions, one each week.
