Comments

oldecay@yahoo.com There ya go thinking like the rest of the knuckle heads. I cant stand when people just want to throw away our history. These places are important.

As far as the picture goes it kinda looks like all the paper blew off my desk.

Great shot. But I cant imagine having patient in a room with windows like that.

Andrew, These building are not standing so you and your buddies can go in and break everything. You are more likely to get caught 'cause of all the noise you were making.
I was young once, and one of the two times I got caught was because my friends started smashing stuff in an abandoned trailer.
And the other time I got caught? What I thought was an abandoned junkyard, was actually somebody's yard. (I still find it hard to believe somebody would have cars piled up on top of eachother in their yard) While exploring, this old guy came up and pointed a rifle at me. I never did see a house in there. I think the old guy was living in one of the cars. (LOL)

At its prime IM sure it was beautiful stair well and bannister. Now it is slowly dieing.
As far as the vandals and the graffiti goes I have no respect for people who bust in to places and trash them just for something to do. What in the hell possess a person to do this? I don't know? What kind of enjoyment can be had from destroying a building like this? If you got this kind of energy to do this then get a job with a demolition company. IMHO if they catch someone painting a building or destroying it they should be made to fix it, repair it, and clean it up. And as far as cleaning the paint off the wall, they can use there tounge.

Wade, are you the Wade Williams of Ed Wood fame?

Ditto, Lyric. :-(

The terms "insane" and "crazy" don't mean much any more. Did most of the people who were sent to live here have "problems in living"? Yes. Were they all mentally ill? No. What per cent were? Hard to say, as the definition of mental illness fluctuates with the culture. It is culture (that's us - you and me) that determines which behaviors are "too far out" and who "may" walk the streets freely. In some eras the culture dictates some pretty tight rules; in other eras almost "anything goes."

Absolutely beautiful.

Thick glass or plexiglas and mesh screen are your usual giveaways. They need to withstand the violence of having furniture and bodies tossed against them if the person is not in control of themself at the time.

RefLib,

"Cold pack" is not the same as "continuous water hydrotherapy" in a tub. Cold pack consisted of very cold, wet sheets wrapped around a person which they were kept in for hours at a time; usually either until they warmed the sheets up or until they quieted down. The theory behind the technique was to cool the person off because they were thought to be overly agitated, and the coldness of the sheets was to "counteract" the believed hotness of the blood, which supposedly caused the agitation.

The tubs were not cold; the sheets were cold. Both "therapies" had the same name, so people get confused and think the tubs were cold. If anyone ever used an ice cold tub full of water to immerse a patient they were not doing it to be therapeutic. If you are at all familiar with how much temperature variation a body can stand, you will quickly figure out that to put someone in a tub full of very cold water for any longer than a short period of time is fatal. If you killed off too many of your patients, even back in the "dark ages" of 50 years ago, you would quickly be investigated.

Regardless, the idea was not to torture people; there was a true belief that this technique helped people. The stats weren't that bad when there were NO other interventions that worked. And yes, you had nuts and sadists and torturers back then, just like you do now, who, when they were underfunded and stressed out, did pretty nasty things to people. Sort of like what that jerk who lives down the street from us does to his or her child and yet most of us still won't "get involved" for fear of a lawsuit or a violent confrontation.

In hindsight it is easy to be critical of what happened 50 to 75 years ago when there were no ways of treating people other than locking them up. The way we got to the few treatments we have today was by trying out new ideas and keeping the ones that worked. That is called science. Cures and interventions don't spontaneously generate. Hypotheses are formulated, techniques are tried, and if they don't work, you go back to the drawing board. I can't be horribly critical of people for what they didn't know at the time, but at least they were trying something.

Jessica, Mr. Covenant was a thorn in all of our sides. Motts lets us interpret however we please, and there is nothing wrong with how you see things. I hope Covenant's B.S. doesn't deter you from enjoying Motts' site.

We are lucky indeed. So lucky that we named a dead bird after him. (LOL)

"comment deleted by it's owner due to the sarcastic comment regarding the intelligence of the previous commenter"

The Silo is still there, its across the street, There is another complex similiar to this one about 20 miles away from the other end of waldorf. Ive driven by and stopped at the second site, but have yet to explore it..

lol...i was there yesterday....i was on the first floor by the lil staircase...that door wudnt break at all...me n my friends threw whatever we cud at it..it wudnt shatter...its like tempered glass...it was awesome!