42 Comments Posted by lithium

State laws require embalming, except for certain religious groups which bury their dead within 48 hrs. Who knows if anyone bothered to embalm these unfortunates? When everything was done 'in house', the odds are that corners got cut and the dead just got plunked down on a layer of cheap, absorbent straw.

An "accident" occurs, you quickly and quietly whisk the memory of it away, throw it in a box, and bury it out back. No different than many prisons of the period. Had cremation been a more common practice then, nobody would know where the ashes went or who they once were.

"Another job for Mr Clean"? I remember the old labels on bottles of Mr Clean used to say "Keep Mr Clean away from children"!

These kids were trapped and knew they were trapped. Every passage becomes a dark passage because you know that even if you escape, your playmates and friends won't. This picture encapsulates everything Pennhurst couldn't achieve.

People like Phantom make me laugh. His 'new' suction machine, taken out of that place is like any other old suction machine. The sign pictured above, however, is priceless!

I've always thought that that piping around those sinks and other fixtures were more about preventing a patient from damaging or ripping out a sink than for their ease of movement. I just don't see a viable handhold here or anything that improves mobility.

In any context, a mural such as this seems sad and aspirational. How were those kids supposed to connect with this image? It seems cruelly mocking to surround those who suffer with idealized imagos.

"...and when she saw that she was through, she gave the sofa forty two."

This looks like where you go after attacking staff. I bet a few who went in here left as a corpse.

It's like trying to paint over a bloodstain and the stain keeps reemerging. All that peeling paint takes you back to that moment.

What happened behind this door? Do people really just walk away from this world and remain silent? The doors were really there to keep the narrative from escaping.

This shot's a knockout. As these buildings melt down, they reveal so many new layers. So many layers of information added by Motts as well. I'm listening to Harold budd as I scroll through these...and It's beyond riveting.