Dreemit's World: "Abandoned Insane Asylum"
Walk, hike, bike, take a motorcycle ride and a road trip, go wine trailing, hit a brewery, come kayaking, jet skiing, walk through woods and cemeteries. Visit the house of Harriet Tubman, see one of the oldest state run asylums, or marvel at the many waterfalls and gorges. Through my words and a lens, see the beauty of the Finger Lakes and other fascinating places in New York and beyond!
From The Window of my Secret Childhood Fort-Episode One of Dreemit's World
A brief history:
source 1 source 2Construction of The Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane began in 1866, the proposal coming from New York State's Surgeon General Dr. Sylvester D. Willard in response to the squalid conditions of Almshouses. It is said that Abraham Lincoln signed off on the proposal himself a mere six days before his death.
The first patient, Mary Rote, arrived at Ovid Landing in 1869. Deformed and demented she’d been chained for ten years without a bed or clothing in a cell at the Colombia County almshouse. Three men arrived later that day, all in irons and one in what looked much like a three and a half square foot chicken crate. The almshouses dealt with difficult patients by flogging, dousing and hanging them by their thumbs. In light of these conditions, the Willard Asylum was a paradise; with regular meals, bathing and clean rooms.
By 1877 it housed more than 1500 patients and was the largest asylum in the whole of the United States.
The name was officially changed to Willard State hospital in 1890,its function to house mental patients from the acute to the chronic. Somewhere around this time came the addition of Hadley Hall which is still standing today (as you will see below), a building created for the sole purpose of recreational activities-home to a movie theater and a small bowling alley.
As pleasant as this all sounds, the common treatments of the time included severe electroshock therapy and ice baths...and there were many whispered stories of abuse, as well as mysterious deaths, and a number of suicides.
But the scariest stories of all were of the patients themselves.
My dad worked at Willard Hospital as a Nurse Administrator for the last five or so years before it was closed down in 1995. During the first week of his employment he came home and told my mom about the patient files he’d read. There was one in particular I overheard and will never, ever forget. It was of a woman who had murdered her son with an ax, chopping him into pieces. In her statement she said the only thing she remembered about the incident was “his eyeballs rolling around on the table”.
Due to this story and others, this asylum is renowned for hauntings and has been placed on lists such as this one:
http://theghostdiaries.com/9-haunted-insane-asylums-you-should-never-spend-the-night-in/
My parent’s home, which appears in my second episode of dreemitsworld
Is roughly three quarters of a mile from the former asylum.
Some of the buildings are still in use but many are abandoned. And of course with abandoned buildings of an insane asylum there are inevitably ghost stories. My friends and I used to bike up through these buildings, and in the bright light of day they never bothered us, but there were evenings, when the sun was going down, where we'd get to the edge of the property and a decidedly eerie feeling would settle over us.
I found several of the older pictures online at:
https://inmatesofwillard.com/
http://theghostdiaries.com/9-haunted-insane-asylums-you-should-never-spend-the-night-in/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/390616967650456508/
All of the photos in color were taken by me, with the exception of the Grandview Basement, the inside of Hadley Hall, and the room with the eerie writing.
Basement of Grandview
And here is where I began my journey through the grounds:
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Willard hospital is now a state run correctional facility for non-violent offenders. It offers a six month Boot Camp style rehabilitation.
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Willard Asylum: The history and strange encounters
In the next episode of dreemitsworld we will explore the mass burial ground dedicated to the thousands of patients from the Asylum from over the course of a century. (Just over a quarter mile from my parent's house on a small stretch of road with no houses...) So stay tuned!
Generously created for me by @son-of-satire
This got me thinking about - what is humane? It's a judgement based on the morals and ethics of a point in time. Hopefully as we evolve, our ideas of what is humane evolve as well. Once the almshouses would have been considered kind, as they gave the insane some shelter, better than living on the street. Then the insane asylums were better again, and even the "treatments" that we consider horrendous now would have been attempts at a cure.
So the real point is - what are we doing now that we think is better, but that future generations will look back at in horror? I think maybe it is the new drive to get people who have mental disabilities (and I'm not including the criminally insane) out of group homes and "back into the community". It sounds like a good thing, but when it means shutting down what has been a person's only home for their entire life and putting them in the community with inadequate support, how humane is that?
I think you make some very valid points.
Incredible post. So much history.
Feels like home... but I'm speaking for myself only ; )
Thank you! Feels like home huh? hahaha! Ironically it does for me too, since I did a lot of playing on those grounds ;)
Fascinating post. I researched some of the UK's old asylums a while back when they started to close and redevelop them.
Thank you! I will be putting up a post about the burial ground next, and actually find that to be more interesting--probably because there is a number of personal details from childhood that will go with it.
Now that is a good post title. ;) Great job with this-- it's as creepy as it gets.
Thanks! Although I think the mass burial ground post will be even cooler, have lots of personal history with that place, and knowing what I know now, that I didn't then, creepy doesn't cover it!
So neat on many levels! The history, the connections, the pictures, and that some still had a 'jolly time' through it all. :)
It really is a neat place, and I would say that those who came from the almshouses had a jolly time simply because it was worlds better. And by the time my dad worked there it was entirely humane and respectable. But the next post I'm doing on the mass gravesite...that one is creepy. Over fifty thousand people buried there and the only stones are the ones for the veterans. There's not even markers for the rest, they are grassy hills that you would never even know had piles of bodies underneath (and in fact when I was a kid, I didn't know which I will talk about in the post)
Glad he was able to help make it a better place. I look forward to the next post to find out more!
The one picture with the writing all over the walls and bathtubs is creepy. I wonder what happened there? Your dad must have had interesting stories about the place. The old asylums were horrible places.
I asked my dad about that picture, he said it was actually pretty common for some of the patients to do that if they got a hold of a marker, they were usually diagnosed with some form of OCD.
By the time he worked there it was very humane and nothing like it was in the early days of course, but at one point he'd read ledgers from way back when. He said what disturbed him most was that they would have the patients name and a brief history then write if there were any changes in behavior---at first he saw 'no change' written a number of times and didn't think much of it-until he saw the dates, some of them had years between one note and the next. When he worked there they were required to make notes of behaviour on a daily basis.
Asylums really have such a sordid past. It's horrifying to think about what passed off as acceptable behavior back then. I'm just so glad that we didn't live through that time. Is it wrong to assume that the case file you pasted on here involved being admitted to asylum because of their lesbian tendencies? I can't even ... To think "sarcastic" was considered a category for admission as well.
Old photos are so eerie but the one with the two people in dresses really freaked me out. To say that goosebumps littered my whole body doesn't do it justice. Great installment, my friend!
I completely agree with you about the two dresses pic, most people were more disturbed by the writing all over everything in that room, but I thought that one was the creepiest.
I seem to recall that homosexuality was considered an illness, so I would not be surprised.
The writing over everything in that room has been emulated by art installations, so it had lost the creepiness factor. The two dresses pic... even though horror movies would depict it, it still creeps me out. I like to imagine that those two ladies are casually chatting about what they had for lunch.
Wow, that's incredibly creepy!
Hey! I was just thinking about you. I'm putting up a milestone post today and I was going through my follower's list and ran across a few people it had been awhile since I'd touched base with. Part of the reason I'm making the post is to alert people that I'm no longer almost strictly fiction, I've added a few more layers to my blog as you can see ;) I'll be over to your 'place' soon, thanks for stopping by!
Cool! Thanks!
I was searching for Steemit posts on old asylums and found yours. Thanks for the cool pics and background information regarding the The Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane.
I've done two posts now on asylums -
https://steemit.com/life/@nandibear/as-many-as-7000-human-bodies-found-buried-under-the-university-of-mississippi-in-jackson
and
https://steemit.com/art/@nandibear/nandi-bear-explores-the-haunted-kuhn-memorial-state-hospital-in-vicksburg-mississippi
really amazing post and pics!
Thank you!