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Eastern State Hospital, located in Williamsburg, Virginia, was the first public facility in the United States constructed solely for the care and treatment of the mentally ill, and remains in operation today.



The Royal Governor of the colony of Virginia, Francis Fauquier, addressed the opening session of the House of Burgessess in Williamsburg for the first time on November 6, 1766, since he had dissolved it following the Stamp Act Resolves. He presented the relationship between the Mother Country and the colonists, and expressed high optimism for the future relations between these two parties. Before concluding his speech, he added the following statement: "It is expedient I should also recommend to your Consideration and Humanity a poor unhappy set of People who are deprived of their senses and wander about the Country, terrifying the Rest of their fellow creatures. A legal Confinement, and proper Provision, ought to be appointed for these miserable Objects, who cannot help themselves. Every civilized Country has an Hospital for these People, where they are confined, maintained and attended by able Physicians, to endeavor to restore to them their lost reason."



About a year after this speech was given, Governor Fauquier presented another to the House of Burgess on April 11, 1767 which included:





"There is a subject which gives me concern, on which I shall particularly address myself to you, as it is your peculiar province to provide means for the subsistence of the poor of any kind. The subject I mean is the case of the poor lunatics. I find on your journals that it was Resolved, That an hospital be erected for the reception of persons who are so unhappy as to be deprived of their reason; And that it was Ordered, that the Committee of Propositions and Grievances do prepare and bring in a bill pursuant to the above resolution. But I do not find that any thing more was done in it. It was a measure which I think could offend no party, and which I was in hopes humanity would have dictated to every man, as soon as he was made acquainted with the call for it. It also concerns me much on another account; for as the case now stands, I am as it were compelled to the daily commission of an illegal act, by confining without my authority, a poor lunatic, who, if set at liberty, would be mischievous to society; and I would choose to be bound by, and observant of, the laws of the country. As I think this is a point of some importance to the ease and comfort of the whole community, as well as a point of charity to the unhappy objects, I shall again recommend it to you at your next meeting; when I hope, after mature reflection, it will be found to be more worth your attention than it has been in this."



Governor Fauquier's idea was well received by the legislature. There hadn't been any thought at all about establishing a hospital of this particular nature, especially in Wiliamsburg, before his speech was given, but Governor Fauquier's benevolent and bold expressions did eventually lead to the creation of the Eastern State Hospital. Although Governor Fauquier never lived to see his Public Hospital built (died March 3, 1768), it meant a great deal of importance to him. His speeches had shown extreme compassion and care for those who needed it the most at that time. As a humanitarian, he was popular with the people, making it easier for his ideas to be created and built. The key to his idea lies in the Enlightenment principles, which were so widespread throughout the time. The 18th century was a time for rejecting superstitions and religions, and substituting them with science and logical reasoning. It was the time of great philosophers who were studying and investigating the worth of human life such as David Hume and Voltaire. Views of the mentally ill were altered. During this time in London, insane people were viewed and used for as entertainment and comical relief. The Bethlehem Hospital in Bedlam attracted many tourists to enjoy the parades that were often held. Since the Enlightenment, people had grown to feel more sensitive towards the mentally ill. They rejected the idea that mentally ill people were outcasts and fools. People started to believe that being mentally ill was, in fact, an illness of the mind much like a disease or sickness one would have physically, and that these mental illnesses were treatable.

Before Governor Fauquier took over, a person who was mentally ill was not diagnosed by a doctor, but rather judged by 12 citizens, much like a jury, to be either a criminal or a lunatic or Idiot. Most of the people who were diagnosed as being mentally ill were already placed in the Public Gaol in Williamsburg. None of the citizens cared for idea of the hospital unless they had a family member or close friend who was mentally ill. There had only been one hospital where mentally ill patients were sometimes taken before Eastern State Hospital was built, and that was the Philadelphia Hospital, a Quaker Institution, where the patients were kept in the basement and out of the way of regular patients who needed medical assistance before anyone else.



Civil War and decline



On May 6, 1862, Union troops captured the asylum, which in the same month was struck by the death of Superintendent Galt. In the following decades, the increasingly crowded hospital saw a regression in methodology as science was increasingly viewed as an ineffective means of dealing with mental illness. During this era of custodial care, the goal became not to cure patients, but to provide a comfortable environment for them, separate from society. On June 7, 1885, the original 1773 hospital burned to the ground due to a fire that had started in the building’s newly-added electrical wiring, an unfortunate consequence of the great expansion of facilities at this time.



Restoration



By 1935 Eastern State Hospital housed some 2000 patients with no more land for expansion. The restoration of Colonial Williamsburg and the Williamsburg Inn surrounded the facility with a thriving tourist trade. It is said that, on one of his frequent strolls through the restored town he helped finance, philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. happened to pass by Eastern State and introduce himself to an inmate out for a walk around the grounds. Upon hearing Rockefeller’s name, the inmate is said to have replied “Oh sure – and I’m Napoleon Bonaparte.”[citation needed] The hospital’s location and space issues made a move become necessary. Between 1937 and 1968, all of Eastern State’s patients were moved to a new facility on the outskirts of Williamsburg, Virginia, where it continues to operate today.

In 1985, the original hospital was rebuilt on its excavated foundations by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and now operates as a museum.

In the 1920s, New York State had operated six mental hospitals to facilitate the growing need for psychiatric care, and all were extremely overcrowded. The state's answer was to build the solution to this problem that plagued the New York City area once and for all - Pilgrim State Hospital.



Originally designed to house 12,500 patients on 1,900 acres of land, Pilgrim still holds the record of being the largest psychiatric hospital in the world - its peak patient population at one time was 16,000. The original hospital constructed from 1930-1941 consisted of four large continued treatment groups, each having about six separate buildings. The hospital also included a large medical building where patients and employees with acute diseases would be diagnosed, as well as housing laboratories, consultation rooms, a nursing school, and the pathology department. This building was flanked by two large reception buildings, where new patients would stay for an average of one month to be examined and diagnosed. These two buildings were kept separate by gender, and connecting corridors on each floor allowed patients and staff to work closely and quickly between the common medical facility.



Also on campus was a tall hospital building for chronic patients, a theater, employee and nurses' homes, a bakery, laundry, firehouse, power plant, and a farm which included a horse barn and piggery. Doctors and their families lived a small community on campus, but separated from the hospital by a major road (and later the Sagitkos Parkway). A ten acre cemetery lies behind a brick water tower, where unclaimed bodies were buried with a simple headstone engraved with a patient number. In the late 1930s Pilgrim averaged one death per day.





In the early 1940s the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) began constructing another large hospital on the grounds adjacent to Pilgrim, which was later completed and leased by the U.S. Army. This new facility, called Mason General Hospital, was dedicated in 1944 and served as a POW camp, tuberculosis hospital, and a psychiatric center for war veterans. The campus consisted of a massive thirteen story structure with French château roof, three eight story X-shaped buildings, theater, gym, church, power plant, residences, and a multitude of temporary military structures. It only operated under the U.S. Army until 1946, when it was given back to the state and renamed Edgewood State Hospital. Mason General's X-shaped buildings 81, 82 and 83 were given to Pilgrim, and due to patient decline they were renovated to be used as a state prison in the 1980s. Due to much local opposition, they were modernized and put back to psychiatric use in the 1990s. The annex of these buildings raised Pilgrim's capacity to a total of 15,000. Edgewood closed in 1969-1971, and was demolished in 1989-1990. To read more about Edgewood, visit edgewoodhospital.com, which has a plethora of photos, video, and information about the site.



In 1945, academy award winning director John Huston created a documentary called Let There be Light for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Filmed at Mason General Hospital, the 58 minute piece was one of the first chronicles of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but was not publicly released until thirty-five years after it was produced. Let There be Light can be viewed online, where the viewer is taken inside the wards of Mason General and shown the process of recovery.



Treatments at Pilgrim included many types of shock therapy; methods that were risky, but the only kind of relief that science could offer at the time before Chlorpromazine (Thorazine) was developed in the 1950s. They include:



Insulin shock therapy: The patient is injected with large doses of insulin, which causes convulsion and coma. Introduced at Pilgrim in 1936.

Metrazol shock therapy: Injections of Metrazol (or commercially known as cardiazol) quickly induces powerful seizures.

Electric shock therapy: Currents of electricity are passed through the brain to induce grand mal seizures, commonly used to treat schizophrenia and mood disorders. Pilgrim State started using this technique in 1940, and has recently been under investigation for forcing this treatment onto patients.

Pre-frontal lobotomies were performed at Pilgrim starting in 1946, and by 1959 as many as 1,000 to 2,000 lobotomies were performed here; most procedures were done in the central medical building #23. A report on lobotomies was filmed at Pilgrim in 1992, hosted by Tom Jarriel of 20/20. It contains information on the history of the procedure, personal case studies of Pilgrim patients, as well as footage from some of the now-abandoned buildings on the Pilgrim campus.



After the two other major psychiatric facilities on Long Island closed down - Kings Park Psychiatric Center and Central Islip Psychiatric Center - many of their patients and programs moved to Pilgrim, but the facility was still too large for the ever dwindling need for psychiatric care. The four treatment groups at Pilgrim were shut down, and eventually the fifty buildings were demolished in early 2003 after being sold to a developer. The future of the old medical building, administration, and admission buildings are unclear, but have been abated and seem to be ready for demolition. Pilgrim still remains as a psychiatric facility to this day, currently occupying most of the buildings extant on campus. In 2011, most of the staff and doctor's private homes were demolished.

At one time there were large public mental institutions serving every part of the state of Ohio. Asylums existed in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo, Akron, and Dayton. Southeastern Ohio's hospital was established in Athens, near the campus of Ohio University. Today the only one of the Ohio mental hospitals which still stands in anything resembling original condition is the Athens Mental Health Center--also known as The Ridges.





Originally monikered the Athens Asylum for the Insane, this massive institution first opened its doors on January 9, 1874. The state and federal government had purchased the more than 1000 acres of land from the Coates family, whose farm had previously occupied the spot, and spent six years building the hospital. Giant asylums in the Kirkbride style were going up all over America at this time because of the number of Civil War veterans suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. If you visit the cemeteries behind the building you will find a large number of the nameless graves marked with metal veterans' plaques from the Civil War.



The first patient at the Ridges is believed to have been Thomas Armstrong from Belmont County, followed by Daniel Fremau. Fremau apparently thought he was the second coming of Jesus Christ.



The asylum itself was built from bricks which were fired on-site from clay dug on-site. Herman Haerlin, a student of Frederick Law Olmstead (the designer of Central Park), was responsible for the design of the hospital and its grounds. By the turn of the twentieth century, orchards and farmland were maintained on the property, tended to by hospital residents and employees. This made the hospital nearly self-sufficient. Nevertheless, at the time of its construction it was a major boon to the economy of the city of Athens, which was able to supply milk, eggs, linens, and other necessities. Local citizens made use of Haerlin's extensive grounds, which included landscaped hills and trees, a pond, a spring, and a creek with a falls. Apparently they were able to get past what was happening on the hill above them.



The main building is gigantic. Thomas Story Kirkbride's designs centered around the idea that it was therapeutic for patients to be housed in a facility that resembled a home--a much more humane approach than bleeding, freezing, and kicks to the head, which were thought to be ways to "shock" the illness out of the brain. In a Kirkbride building the less disturbed patients were housed closer to the center, where the administrative offices and employee housing were. This encouraged them to socialize and become more accustomed to human contact. Violent patients were housed at the far end of either of the long wings--farthest away from the center, which was the only part of the building with convenient entry and exit.



The Athens building had 544 patient rooms. When it opened it housed around 200 patients. The more sedate among them participated in recreational activities like boating, painting, dances, and picnics. They were offered church services and plays, and were often free to roam the grounds. Some patients tended the farms and orchards. Nurses trained at the Athens State Hospital School of Nursing inside the hospital and were able to live there while they cared for its other inhabitants. The late nineteenth century was a good time for the mentally ill in America; progressive policies, modeled after European methods, gave people confidence in the way their loved ones were treated in the public asylums.



The downside of the progress accomplished by the Kirkbride plan was the increasing popularity of the asylums. In Athens, as elsewhere, it was common for families to drop elderly relatives off at the hospital when they could no longer afford to care for them. Parents committed teenagers for insignificant acts of rebellion. The homeless would use the hospital for temporary shelter. The population of the Athens Asylum shot up from 200 to nearly 2000 in the early 1900s. Overcrowding led to the sharing of patient rooms and a severe decline in the quality of treatment administered by a staff which had barely been increased in size since 1874.



This decrease in individualized care and attention led to a renaissance of many of the primitive treatments of Colonial days--with a few new tortures thrown in for good measure. What sorts of things were done to human beings at the Ridges? Well, to name just a few...



1. Water Treatment

Patients were submerged in ice-cold water for extended periods of time. Sometimes they were wrapped in sheets which had been soaked in icewater and restrained.

2. Shock Therapy

Electric shocks were administered to patients submerged in water tanks or, more commonly, directly to the temples by the application of brine-soaked electrodes. A patient held a rubber piece in his mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue off during the convulsions which followed a treatment. (See One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for a painful example of electroshock therapy.)

3. Lobotomy (Original)

Patients had their skulls opened and their neural passages separated midway through the brain. This difficult and arduous procedure killed many people, but those who survived did in fact forget many of their depressive or psychotic tendencies. They also forgot a lot of other things, like how not to shit down your leg at dinner time, but with such an abundance of patients the only thing most doctors worried about was how to streamline the process. Open-skull brain surgery is a tricky business no matter how you slice it.

4. Lobotomy (Trans-Orbital)

Developed by Dr. Walter J. Freeman in the early 1950s, this simpler lobotomy became something of a craze in mental health circles up through the 60s. Dr. Freeman's method involved knocking the patient unconscious with electric shocks, then rolling an eyelid back and inserting a thin metal icepick-like instrument called a leucotome through a tear duct. A mallet was used to tap the instrument the proper depth into the brain. Next it was sawed back and forth to sever the neural receptors. Sometimes this was done in both eyes. There is some evidence that this method actually helped some people with very severe conditions, but much more often the patient had horrible side effects and in many cases ended up nearly catatonic. It also killed a whole bunch of people, too.



This of course leaves out any extra cruelties which might have been given without the justification of therapy. Patients were often restrained and were forced to sleep in group bunks in rooms intended for one person. One nurse was sometimes responsible for as many as fifty patients. In these conditions some restricted patients would carve messages on the sandstone windowsills of their rooms, reaching through the ornate bars to leave an anonymous word or sentence. One poignant carving still reads, "I was never crazy."

The Castle on the Hill. The Palace on the Hill. The Haunted Castle. The Witches' Castle. The Kirkbride.



The massive red-brick gothic landmark that stands atop Hathorne Hill has been given many names during the past 129 years. These names stand as evidence of the special place the building, and Danvers State Hospital, holds in the minds and mythology of the people of Danvers, the North Shore and beyond.



Many believe it to be haunted. Others are simply intrigued by its history, its unusual architecture and grand scale, with its fortress-like central "tower" section and eight branching wings.



An internet search of "Danvers State Hospital" quickly yields a long series of web sites. The hospital grounds hold a prominent place in the online pages of New England-area paranormal research groups. It is also a staple in many web sites dedicated to "urban exploration" - a type of subculture dedicated to sneaking into abandoned facilities.



The building has long been a favorite target of area youth, many of whom travel there seeking a good scare in its rotting hallways or in the deserted tunnels running underneath the hospital grounds.



In 1992, when the hospital closed, the National Guard helped by sending 80 ambulances to move the last of the patients to other facilities. Since then, the hospital has been a draw for other people, including dozens who have been arrested for trespassing on the abandoned hill.



A dozen people had been arrested as of mid-October this year.



Today, the Kirkbride stands out like a towering, red-brick beacon, regularly attracting the state's allowed maximum of 20 people to the twice-monthly, two-hour tours of the grounds.



Among the 15 or so people who visited this Tuesday could be found a mix of those people enthralled by the intricate detail of the Kirkbride and those who are drawn to it because they believe it to be haunted.



Frank and Colleen Short had traveled from New York. Frank is an avid horror movie fan and was familiarized with Danvers State through "Session 9," which was filmed at the hospital. His wife, a mental health professional, was interested in the building due to its history.



" I just think it's amazing," Frank Short said as he gazed at the Kirkbride. "It's 10 times bigger than I thought."



Most visitors on Tuesday were architecture enthusiasts, eagerly snapping pictures of the building's many right angles, its gray slate roof, the green copper roof trim, its spires and many gables.



There were also those who came up in search of ghosts, like Rose Peters, a Middleton writer working on a book on haunting.



" I find it fascinating there are so many people who claim to have experienced or seen something up here," Peters said.



Haunted

Jeralyn Levasseur's family would hear footsteps in the second story hallways of their home when nobody was upstairs. Doors would open and close, lights would flicker on and off.



Levasseur grew on the grounds of Danvers State Hospital, in a house lent to her father, hospital administrator Gerald Richards.



Now 52, Levasseur clearly remembers one day in her youth when her sister and a brother were playing upstairs in the attic and saw an apparition of an older woman angrily scowling at them. They were too scared to move until their mother ordered them to come down, Levassuer said.



Levasseur was in high school when her bedcovers were pulled completely off her bed. Nobody was in the room. She was petrified, but said she always had the feeling no real harm would come to her.



Today, Levasseur works as an assistant to the chief nurse executive at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, a career she said was inspired by her father's teachings about the importance of caring for the mentally ill and sick, as well as to the experiences she had growing up at the mental hospital.



While Levassuer generally had a good experience there, she admitted there were some unsavory practices that took place - most often the result of misguided efforts to treat patients, such as primitive electric shock therapy and hydrotherapy.



" If you think back to the beginnings of medical science and the things done to people, not because they thought they were doing bad, but because they were trying to do right, you have to wonder, did people think they were being tortured?" Levasseur said. She believes it is the tortured spirits that knew Danvers State as their home that linger on the grounds.



Historical reasons

Certainly the history of the hospital grounds lends itself to haunting lore. Jonathan Hathorne, who is perhaps the most fanatical judge of the witchcraft delusions that saw 19 innocents killed in the 17th century, is said to have lived in a house built by his father in 1646 on the spot where the Kirkbride was later constructed.



The Kirkbride and Danvers State Hospital started as an enlightened attempt to bring patients out of their delusions through beautiful surroundings, complete with plenty of fresh air and sunshine. By the early 1900s, this enlightened ideal was being subverted by overcrowding and under-funding, a problem that grew steadily worse as the century progressed, according to Michael Ramseur, a technical adviser to "Session 9" and perhaps the foremost expert on the site's history.



A social worker by trade who works currently at Balpate Hospital, Ramseur's interest dates back to a chance visit in 1986, when he delivered a patient from a halfway house in Haverhill. Enthralled with the building's foreboding architecture, Ramseur began a 17-year quest to unravel the history of the place, through careful study of hospital records and interviews with former patients and staff. He shortly expects to publish a 300 page online book on the subject.



The hospital was designed for a maximum of 600 patients, Ramseur said. In November 1945, one evening shift of nine people was expected to care for more than 2,300 patients, he said.



Faced with overcrowding and understaffing, hospital staff depended on the primitive, and often brutal, psychiatric treatments of the day, including early-style shock treatments, hydrotherapy and lobotomies, to control the burgeoning population, Ramseur said.



It was the pain born of these treatments and the decay that accompanied overcrowding and tight budgets that caused the haunting that exists today, agreed all the believers in haunting who were interviewed for this article by The Herald.



There are more than a few stories from people who believe Danvers State Hospital to be haunted, and plenty of anecdotes from those who believe they felt or heard something go bump in the night.



It is "one of the crown jewels in the paranormal history of Massachusetts," said Chris Balzano, of the Massachusetts Paranormal Crossroads, one of the groups that lists Danvers as haunted. Balzano said there isn't much information on spiritual activity on the site because the police and the private security agency hired by the state keep it well locked down.



The site is listed as haunted on the web-pages of several paranormal research groups. One of these, the Rhode Island Paranormal Research group, claims to have done a study of the site in 1997, but refused to share their findings for an article.



Current curiosity

The staff of the Massachusetts Department of Capital Asset Management can well attest to the interest of lovers of ghost stories and spirit seekers. In the past year alone the agency has received more than a dozen requests by people wishing to perform séances there, DCAM spokesperson Kevin Flanagan said in a recent interview. The requests were turned down, as DCAM hopes to discourage anything that would fan the interest of people in the place, leading to more trespassers sneaking in and possibly getting hurt in the failing floors of the buildings.



" It has always been a problem," Flanagan said.



Salem resident Bob Murch made one of the dozen requests to conduct a séance at the hospital site. A financial researcher for Fidelity Investments by day, Murch invented and sells a Ouija board, called Cryptique, decorated with artwork from Salem-area grave-sites. He also helped organize the Festival of the Dead, a semi-commercial attempt to promote better understanding of the afterlife as seen by the Salem community of witches, mediums and other paranormal-minded people.



" I think the state has done its own part to create the dark, secret or spooky part of Danvers State by saying it's off limits," Murch said. "They say it's off limits, now everyone wants to go there."



Like a good number of area youth, Murch, now age 29, had visited the hospital grounds to drink alcohol with friends while in high school in Peabody. Even then, the place left an impression.



" It was spooky as hell," Murch said. "The whole thing is creepy really, just the thought of the insane asylum."



Murch is of the opinion that the hospital is haunted, if not in the traditional sense, then by the negative energies given off by thousands of mentally ill who suffered there.



" I believe whether enough good things or bad things happen in a place - I don't know whether the feelings get trapped in the walls or the building - but they just stick there," Murch said. "There have certainly been enough bad things that happened there that it will stick around for awhile."



This emotional energy is felt by visitors, Murch said, and the effects are magnified by the site's imposing architecture.



" It's a very dark place; you feel it," Murch said. "With the huge, tall, buildings and everything being oversized, you feel very insignificant there."



Murch's understanding of the haunting of Danvers State is shared to a degree by practicing Salem witches Sean Poirier and Christian Day, co-hosts of the Festival of the Dead.



" Danvers State is definitely an epicenter of haunting energy, largely due to the confusion of the people who were there when they died, which is why there is such a draw" Day said during a recent interview.



Day claims his talents lay in an innate natural ability to sense and control spirits. To him and Poirier, witchcraft is not a religion, but more of a honed talent.



A decade ago, just before the last hospital building closed, Day visited the grounds with some friends.



" I just felt a very intense foreboding; you could feel there was a lot of pain there," Day said. "You really felt the pain and confusion of the people who had been there."



Poirier said he'd visited friends at the asylum before its closure. During his visits he felt the energy of the place, though whether it was haunted by actual spirits or just an emotional charge of energy, he couldn't say.



While Poirier and Day concentrate on the spiritual and psychic aspects of the paranormal, their friend and fellow Salem businessperson Mollie Stewart concentrates on scientific proof.



Stewart was trained as a para-psychologist and licensed as a "ghost hunter" by the International Ghost Hunters Society. In June she opened a museum of the supernatural in Salem, from which she also leads tours of haunted areas.



Her profession and passion being what it is, Stewart was drawn to Danvers State. In early October Stewart attended one of the regular site visits the state allows. Stewart said she managed to photograph a spirit "orb" by a stand of trees using high speed film during her visit.



Since its closure, the hospital's reputation as a haunting ground has undeniably grown. In the way the state guards it against intruders, the publicity it has achieved and the native draw of the architecture, Danvers State and the Kirkbride have moved beyond the realm of a haunted place and become local legend, Poirier said.



He described it as "deified."



"There is definitely some energy up there," Poirier said. "What people think about, we often make happen."