77 Comments Posted by Jane

to make sure they are showering & not beating each other... ok, bad choice of words, but you know...

Sadly, having worked in a facility like this, it may not be such a bad choice of words at all. That is probably exactly why they would be monitoring the showers.

You know, they have straps like this on the gurneys in an ambulance too. They are only there to keep you from falling off the gurney during transport. Somehow I don't think this would be nearly enough to hold someone down if they didn't want to be held down. For one thing, there isn't anything to keep them from kicking. There aren't any leg or wrist restraints. I think just about anyone could get out of this pretty quickly if they really wanted too.

Its probably walnut. The grain is too fine to be oak. Walnut carves and turns easily too. Believe it or not, I've actually heard of someone who salvaged bit and pieces of mansions that were about to be torn down and used them to build a new house. He used whatever struck his fancy instead of just what he needed and had apparently many staircases in the house that he just couldn't bear to see destroyed.

how about Dust in the Wind?

lets not forget that Skinner kept his infant daughter in a box. A very cushy box, but a box nonetheless.

I'm guessing that this place might not have been able to comply with state codes for schools and that may have been the reason it closed. It is certainly lovely, but I don't know that I'd want my daughter living in that building. I would be praying every night that they wouldn't have a fire.

My mother lived in a lovely old dormitory at Millersville State College back in the sixties. It couldn't meet the state fire marshall's codes back then, so they turned off the mains at night to prevent fires. The following year they razed it and built new dorms.

okay, so I'm curious. I'm a great fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She talked about encountering people with consumption (the old name for TB, because of the way it consumed its victims) going west to take the Prairie Cure. So I wonder why there is a lack of TB hospitals out west. Does it mean that the dry air actually did cure the disease, or did they just die too quickly to need a hospital? Or maybe that predates the understanding of the nature of the disease and the need to isolate the victims to prevent the spread of the disease?

Since this was a TB hospital and not a mental hospital, I'm guessing that maybe those white doors were to allow cross ventilation into the patient rooms from the window on the opposite wall?

BALCONIES??? Thats no fair, where I went they didnt have balconies for us to have fresh air, they didnt let us out side ofr weeks!

Once again, TB hospital, not mental institution. Fresh air was the only cure they had before antibiotics.

i don't get it either and i've looked at nearly every picture on here. can someone please explain?

wow Motts, you managed to take all the things that people were reading into your photos and put them on film. Hats off!

Two questions, Motts. First, from your outside shots it looks like these tunnels are above ground. What is making them collapse. It is just the weight of the roof/snow? It doesn't look like there is any sideways pressure from soil or water.

Secondly, I wonder if these tunnels were used to prepare the troops for the rigors of trench warfare. Once they got "over there" they were confined to narrow trenches and tunnels for months. If they got claustrophobic and jumped out they wouldn't have lived more than a few seconds. Just a thought.

there is a link on that wikipedia site to the one I've been reading, Ron's Official Waverly Hills site. He is a security guard at the hospital and is doing a lot of research into its history. Its a very interesting read.

now i have a better understanding of how patient abuse became so easy in these places being self sufficient kept locals away no one to blow the whistle so to speak on the treatment of patients

Let us not forget that this was a tuberculosis sanitarium and not a mental hospital when it was built. I have never heard of patient abuse being common in TB hospitals. Or could it be that this disease has become so uncommon that some folks don't know what TB is? Its a highly contagious bacterial disease that primarily attacks the lungs but can settle in bones and in other organs and systems. These hospitals weren't located in remote areas so sadistic people could torture the patients. They were located remotely to help keep the disease from spreading in the days before antibiotics.

Lynne, I read somewhere that the reason for having housing on site was also that the disease was so highly contagious that it was not uncommon for the staff to contract the disease and become patients themselves. Keeping all staff on grounds was just another way to help keep the epidemic in check.

I used to live and work on the grounds of an abandoned TB hospital. My boss at the time leased some of the buildings. That hospital included, at the time, nearly every building that had every been built on site, including stately houses for the doctors, dormitories for the nurses and orderlies, hospital buildings from the WWi era (cottages), medical buildings from the 30's or 40's and from the 60's, power plant, a dairy barn, pig barns and housing for the maintenence workers and farm workers. It has since been turned into a life care center, but I haven't seen it in nearly 20 years.

There is a really cool website on an abandoned sanitarium in Louisville. If I knew how to import links, I'd post it. Unfortunately I'm nearly computer illiterate. I believe the hospital is called Waverly, if anyone wants to look for it.

I feel the need to jump in here. I have been looking at this site for some time, but have mostly refrained from joining the debate.

I think we need to remember that there are a lot of immature people looking at this site for a ghostly or romantic thrill, along with those of us who are looking at it for a love of architecture or an interest in the history of the medical field. They probably haven't been around long enough to look at what the media tells them with a critical eye.

That said, I agree totally with Lynne, Lyric and the rest of you who are in the field and standing up for your colleagues and profession.

I taught for three years in an alternative school that was housed on the grounds of a home for troubled youth (which is often a polite way of saying mentally ill). Three years was all the time that I could bear that heartache and my hat is off to those who show up for work in mental health day after day and year after year. It is really hard to keep showing up and putting in your best effort for people who aren't going to get better in a place with no funding in an environment of scrutiny and criticism. I too had to cut my hair, remove all jewelry for my own protection. I had to take Safe Physical Management every month to learn how to wrestle down a patient without harming them or myself. Several times a day I had to run to another room to help with a violent kid or call for backup myself. I've been spit on, had chairs and books aimed at my head and been threatened and sworn at daily. All the while, I had to deal with threats of lawsuits from parents (who had often abused their kids horribly).

Let us not forget that we are talking about people with mental illness. They did not ask for this illness and we would not wish it on them, but nevertheless, the illness is there. Wishful thinking will not make it go away. It is a terrible and cruel thing to have that type of illness, far more terrible than any cruelty perpetrated by some small number of the staff of these old hospitals. It is a terrible and frightening thing to be betrayed by your own brain. At the very least, these patients probably had little grasp of reality. They probably spent a lot of their time being confused, frustrated and unable to communicate their needs. They would have suffered confusion and frustration wherever they were, it is the nature of their disease, but they probably suffered far less within these familiar walls than they did when turned out into the streets to live as best they could in unfamiliar surroundings. Many of these folks have probably died since this building closed: victims of a cold snap or storm or heat wave when they refused to go to a shelter or couldn't find one that had room for them. Many are probably in prison for some petty crime or a threat that was taken seriously. Some are sleeping out in the cold tonight, maybe under a bridge or wrapped in newspapers on a park bench or sitting on a subway car muttering to themselves.

Some of these folks were probably violent. This probably wasn't how they chose to be, again it was the nature of their disease. Many are frightened and trying to protect themselves against something or someone they perceive as a threat, but that makes them dangerous nonetheless. Some have little "impulse control" which is a sanitized way of saying that they little control over their animal nature. The most primitive part of their brain is in control. Things that you and I can do at appropriate times and in appropriate ways are uncontrollable to them. That includes sexual behaviors and predatory behaviors. That lack of control quickly lands them in prison if they aren't in a place where they can't hurt someone. However bad this place may have been, I'm sure being here was preferable to being in prison.

So for those of you who feel the need to continually comment about how creepy, abusive, disturbing or frightening these hospitals may have been, lets not forget that they were home to a lot of frightened, confused people who were made homeless when they closed. Many of them have probably not had a decent meal since it closed.

And while you are talking about how abusive the staff was, let's not forget that most of this staff was decent and caring and endured much abuse and discomfort in order to take home what was probably a pretty meager paycheck.