State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers - A Haunting

“The consequences of our crimes long survive their commission,

and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt

the steps of the malefactor”

~ Sir Walter Raleigh

While in Salem and the surrounding area this October, I made my husband drive me to a location that I've been reading about and eager to visit for the last 6 years. Every time we went to Salem previously, we just ran out of time to make it over to Danvers. It's actually not that far from Salem. In fact, Danvers, Massachusetts is said to be the actual place where the Witch Trial hysteria began, because back in that time....Danvers was known as Salem Village. In fact, it was there that the notoriously fanatical, Witch Trial judge Johnathan Hawthorne resided. He lived high atop Hawthorne Hill in a home his father had built. But it's what was built on that hill later that I was interested in.
On that very same, scenic hill top, in 1878, a mammoth Gothic mansion was built for the care and keeping of the mentally ill. Not being restricted by the PC world in which we now live, this architectural masterpiece was aptly named The State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers. Guess they just came right out and called 'em what they were back in those days...ha! The building itself is called the Kirkbride building, named after Dr. Thomas Kirkbride. And it is built in the shape of a bat, with two wings extending out to each side where the males and females were housed respectively. The farthest ends of each of those wings were called the 'wing tips' or A and J wards, and they were reserved for the worst of the 'criminally insane'! (I would NOT have wanted to work on those wards.) The facility was built to accommodate about 600 patients and was likened to a small city because it was almost completely self-contained. And in the beginning, it had a great reputation. The Asylum even had its own morgue and burial grounds on site.
But in the 40's - 50's, state budget cuts ensued and overcrowding began to plague the beleaguered hospital whose population had swelled to over 1200. The condition of the building and the patients began to deteriorate rapidly. Reportedly, as a desperate means to control the burgeoning population, the doctors began employing horrific treatments that were used in that era such as Full Frontal Lobotomies, Experimental Drugs, Hydrotherapy and Shock Treatment. This allowed them to keep their mentally insane patients subdued, but with sometimes adverse and even fatal consequences. "Poorly clothed and sometimes naked, these legions of lost souls were shown pacing aimlessly on the wards, lying on the filthy cement floors, or sitting head in hand against the pock-marked walls." (Deutsch 1948)
Eventually in 1992, Danvers State Mental Hospital shut its deteriorating doors for good, and the building itself sat silent for 14 years. The building was considered extremely dangerous with rotting floors falling through in certain wards, so full time security was placed on site to apprehend would-be ghost hunters, urban explorers and thrill seeking teenagers. But the general consensus of psychics and paranormal investigators who've been fortunate enough to visit during that time....is that the place was extremely haunted with lots of residual negative energy from those tortured souls who'd been housed there and experimented on over all those years. There have been many reports of apparitions and orbs and cold spots by those who were able to get inside its rotting walls. And the decaying institution was also the perfectly haunting location in which to film the horror movie, Session 9, in 2001. It was also believed to be the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham Sanatorium in "The Thing on the Doorstep".

I longed to go there and photograph the beautifully creepy Gothic architecture. But alas, I had no idea that the site was literally minutes from our hotel in Peabody all these years. Thank you GPS and iPhone for finding this place for me this Autumn! So we searched it out on our last day in New England this month. Unfortunately, the eerie, haunted, dilapidated structure had been purchased in 2005 and turned into an apartment building (Avalon Danvers) up on Hawthorne Hill! This haunted hill with so much history, albeit somewhat negative....was now a nice clean apartment complex. Luckily, they did keep the main center part of the building in tact and refurbished it to its former grandeur on the outside, but the long bat wing wards were demolished to make way for progress.
I would have preferred to see it in its dilapidated state, as it makes for far spookier photographs. However, the day we went, the skies were very overcast and cloudy as a cold front was making its way in. And those clouds and bare branches on the trees in front of the Gothic facade still allowed me to work a little photo magic to recreate the Haunted Insane Asylum on the hill, as I had read about it and envisioned it in my spooky lil' mind! It does beg the question....does a building retain the horrors and negative energy of its former dwellers? And does bulldozing this place down to create new apartments somehow cleanse the space of said negative energy....or do those lost souls still dwell there? Photos 1,2,6 © 2011 Wendy A. (All Rights Reserved) Could not find copyright info on the other photos.