201 Comments Posted by MAX

I haven't used a rotary phone since my car broke down outside an old Armenian church about eight years ago!

I wouldn't touch it, there's probably all kinds of cultures living in the upholstery!

It looks almost like....an extraterrestrial forest!

I think it's cool the way one door is standing open. It's like death beckoning, saying, you're time shall come, my friend!

Oh sure, Motts, you're shrinking violet! LOL!

Silkster, LOL, you stole my pun!

I've lived in the area since 1993, the same year the hospital closed.
For years former mental patients drifted about the streets of Northampton. There are still some about, but their numbers have thinned in the past several years.
I know people who have gone poking around in the old buildings, but I always steered clear of the place. Structural frailties, collapsed floors, tunnels full of water, asbestos everywhere...NO THANKS!

"Served in Cans," oh the modern amenities!
Thirty-five cents for a can of Pepsi, I would estimate the year about 1978. I was just a kid, but I remember the price going up fro thirty to thirty-five cents about then. Of course, it could be much earlier. Stand-alone vending machines with no "competition" sometimes allow companies to jack the price up.
Chris, some supermarkets/dept. stores here in the U.S. vend their housebrands super-cheap on the premises.

Why do tattered curtains always look creepy? I guess they are a reminder of "home" amid neglect and decay.

Another cool play of light and shadow by Motts the marvelous photographer!

How far down is the drop from that catwalk?

This shot reminds me of Danvers.

I knew a woman who got sent to Pilgrim in the 1980s after a suicide attempt.
She had no money and no family to speak for her at the time, so she was just sent there, transfered in the middle of the night
She describes a feeling of stark terror on seeing this facade as the car escorting her entered the campus.
She was on one of the wards for about a month until being discharged upon case review.

It's the same old sun that warms the room today as fifty years ago!

I wonder if any of those nurses are still alive. The one standing foremost has an elderly posture, but a few of the seated ones look like they may have been rather youthful.

That's a cool shape for a tub. I'd like to have a bathtub like that, only I'd prefer porcelin!

Hydrotherapy is use of water to treat symptoms. In mental hospitals it was used to treat psychiatric symptoms.
Soaking the patient in a warm bath was thought to have calming effects. Wrapping a patient in cool, wet cloths or running cool water over pulse points (wrists and ankles) was believed to lower body temperature, calm nerves, and slow pulse rate. Things like that. These were palliative (symptom only ) treatments at best, and at worse were abused for punishment and deterrant. If you act up, you might get plunged into a tub of ice water again , and we wouldn't want that now would we?