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Danvers State Hospital
Located 1101 Kirkbride Drive Danvers, Massachusetts 01923, this hospital is known as one of the most exquisite mental institutions ever built in the United States. Danvers is known by a few different names, The Danvers State Insane Asylum, Danvers State Lunatic Asylum, and DSH. It was built in 1874, opened in 1878 and then closed in 1992. This hospital is over 136 years old, and was renovated in 2006 after being abandoned for over fourteen years. Danvers was a 70,000 square foot Kirkbride building that held over 2,4000 patients in it's peak operational times, although the recommended amount of beds were only for 600 patients. It is said that by November 1945, one evening shift of nine people were expected to care for more than 2,300 patients by themselves.
It had an unusual architecture and grand scale, with its fortress-like central "tower" section and eight branching wings. To this day, the old hospital grounds hold a prominent place in the online pages of New England-area paranormal research groups and in the belief there are real hauntings there.
With it's Gothic peaks and spires looming over the solid red brick of the building, it was by far, an incredible sight of beauty and a symbol of grandeur and fortitude, but at the cost of over $1 million to build, local residents resented and began to hate the beautiful castle on the hill being given to the "insane" while those living within the town were living quite poorly. The hospital at Danvers was a model for humane treatment during it's functional time, with no restraint policies and boasted a highly regarded pathology laboratory.
Danvers was soon filled with a variety of different types of patients that it soon became a problem for those who worked there. The patients consisted of geriatrics, the mentally disabled, alcoholics, drug addicts, the criminally insane and all other people with varied degrees of mental illness who were housed together under one roof. In the 1950's Danvers was reported to be just as bad, if not worse, than the notorious Byberry hospital in Philadelphia. Faced with overcrowding and under staffing, hospital staff depended on the primitive, and often brutal, psychiatric treatments of the day, including early-style shock treatments, lobotomies, hydrotherapy, and other methods all used just to get the overwhelmingly amount of patients under control and to maintain a sense of stability. It is said that it was the pain that accompanied these treatments and the decay that accompanied from overcrowding and tight budgets that caused the hauntings that are said to still exist today on the grounds.
The original Kirkbride building was abandoned in the early 1970s and the remaining patients were moved to the Bonner Medical Building across the lawn from them. The National Guard helped the doctors move the patients by sending 80 ambulances to move the last of the patients to other facilities. It was due to the decreasing amount of patients that Danvers and other insane asylums were facing. In the summer of 1992, Danvers was closed due to the claims and allegations of overcrowding, abuse, and neglect that was being reported about those who worked there.
In 2001 the movie "Session 9" was filmed on the Danvers location, and from there had brought a lot of attention to the old hospital. From that point, security was increased to 24 hour patrols, and the boarding of all the windows and doors were put into place. A fire was started inside the original structure in 2004, forcing firemen to enter the dangerous building and distinguish the fire from within to prevent the whole Kirkbride building from being engulfed in flames and collapsing. Since the fire until 2007, Danvers was on a total lock down with constant security patrols twenty four hours a day and seven days a week with mandatory checkpoints, and police were required to arrest of anyone caught anywhere on the grounds (they even began to publicly announce the arrests in newspapers and on the news to make everyone aware of the situation). There was an article on the arrests that states over 120 people had been arrested from 2000 alone for trespassing on the old asylum's grounds.
The staff of the Massachusetts Department of Capital Asset Management will tell you that the interest of the those who love ghost stories and those who wish to speak with or see ghosts are lured to this place by curiosity. There have even been people who had requested to do seances on the grounds. The DCAM had denied all request of visitors due to the state of decomposition the buildings were in prior to renovations.
In the early 2000's, Avalon Bay became the owner of Danver's property, they had plans to tear down and redevelop 1/3 of the Kirkbride buildings and to gut them in order to furnish apartments from their core. The preservation society had filed a lawsuit for the sale of property in order to block the sale of Danvers, but the Salem Superior Court has denied their lawsuit. As of 2007 the hospital was fully converted to
Avalon Danvers, a condominium complex.
There was an interview taken of a woman, Jeralyn Levasseur, who grew up on the grounds of Danvers State Hopsital, in a house lent to her father, who was the hospital administrator, Gerald Richards. She states that growing up her 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 at all hours of the day and night. Mrs. Levasseur stated, while in her early 50's, she could clearly remember her days as a child when her, her sister, and her brother would be playing in the attic upstairs and remembers seeing an apparition of an older women looking angrily at them. She remembers being rooted to the spot where she stood until they called downstairs by their mother.
She also claims that, while she was a student in high school, one night her bed covers were ripped completely off the bed, although no one was visibly in the room with her. She claimed although she would feel the presence of some one there, she never felt like any harm would come to her. Her final statement in the interview was this:
" 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?"
She believed that the things she saw and heard were that of the tortured spirits that knew Danvers State Hospital as their home and still linger on those grounds.
It also a historical notion that, Jonathan Hathorne, who is perhaps the most notorious judge at the Salem witchcraft hearings and had sentenced 19 innocent people to be killed in the 17th century, is said to have lived in a house built by his father in 1646 on the spot where the main Kirkbride was later constructed in 1874.
Up until 2007, there were tours of the grounds . They were opened to the public through registering at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. They were conducted on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month from 10 am til noon. They were not allowed to show the maximum 20 visitors the inside of the buildings due to the decaying building and the danger it presented. You had to be 18 years of age or older. Once Avalon Bay had received the go to demolish and renovate the buildings the tours were canceled.
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