3,485 Comments for Philadelphia State Hospital (Byberry)

Nice Picture

Very Nice, I would love to explore this place.

ugh How pushy!!!... :-)

gotta love those damn nurses

Ahem .. Amanda .. I said that "apparently" this happened ... technically, I wasn't stating that it was a FACT .. just a cool story .. : )

can i just say that CJ fucking rules.. i would love nothing more than to tour the berry once again with him by my side telling me everything he can remember and painting vivid images in a place where everything is so dull and dead

This is where the nurses on our unit would lock themselves in at night, except they watched out the big windows in the front. Leaving the aides to deal with the patients. In the morning, they'd come out and turn on the lights; and go downstairs to pour meds before breakfast.

This is what the dormitories were like , with beds in each alcove formed by the walls. 80 women slept there when they could sleep, and weren't walking the floor or crying through the night. When the nurses went downstairs in the morning, and the patients escorted by aides to the group showers, 2 aides would strip the sheets from the beds and tie them into huge bundles for the laundry. Sometimes, a few patients would help.

Bed after bed was puddled with urine. The odor was choking. The mattresses had to be wiped down and sprayed with disinfectant. Clean sheets put on. Thin blankets were pulled up over the sheets, and a deodorizing disinfectant sprayed in the room. When all the bundles of dirty sheets were assembled, the aides had to pull them down the stairs. Two people had to handle each bundle, they were that heavy. Wet, stinking bundles.

Thank you for the detailed descriptions, it's difficult to imagine what life was really like inside these empty rooms.

This was like the dayroom in the unit I worked on as an aide. I was there from 1970-72. I went there believing everyone should spend two years in community service of some kind. C-9 comes to mind. Was that my unit? I can't remember. I do remember it was one of the last locked wards. The only other locked wards were the criminal wards, and the companion male ward to our female ward. Our patients were either civil court commitments because they were dangerous to themselves or others, or the adults who had physically grown up in state children's institutions and would live out their days at Byberry. One young woman in her twenties had learned to mimic autistic behavior because it frightened other patients and kept them from abusing her. She'd been placed in the children's facility at the age of 6 months because her mother said she couldn't cope with her. The mother was ill, in my opinion, much more so than the baby. But after 20 some years of institutionalization, who knows what life she might have had in other circumstances. We were told she had less than a year old mental ability, and only knew a handful of words. But it didn't take long before I found out by asking different aides and nurses who'd known her for years. that she only used four or five words to each person.. and never the same ones; so she had a fairly extensive vocabulary, but hid it. I was young, idealistic, and naïve. I spent every spare moment working with her, and in a couple of months, had her say, Angry! instead of flushing a soiled dress down the toilet when no one offered her a clean one in the morning. It solved the plumbing problem, and I had hopes of helping her begin to use enough of her words to communicate her basic needs instead of running around or pushing at people. I was transferred to work in other areas, because it wasn't my job to work with patients that way.

Aides and nurses had the keys to the doors on a length of window chain that went around their waist and clipped to itself.. with the keys hanging down a foot or so.. long enough that you could reach the keyhole without unclipping the chain from your waist. One young patient told me once, "The only difference between you and me is you got the keys."

I was phobic about roaches; and to reach the unit where I worked as an aide, I had to go through a tunnel like this. At the end, just before entering the ward unit, there was a section where flying red roaches swarmed. They were enormous, and it took every bit of strength I had to pass that gauntlet. Sometimes I couldn't help screaming when they flew around me.

Look at this photo, imagine a few more sets of windows like this extending down the room. The floor bare terrazzo. The walls all yellow tiles like those in the photo. The ends of the room on our unit had no windows. They were floor to ceiling tile with a steel door in the middle. Sometimes the walls were smeared with feces. The aides had to wash them down, and scrub the floors with huge mops. There was a mop room with wringer buckets on wheels, and 5 foot long mops, at least that's how I remember them. You'd swing them in an arc, side-to-side. Rinse the filth in the bucket of strong cleaning solution, wring it out, and do it again, over the whole room.

Add a row of heavy wooden chairs with arms; all along the window walls; and see the women sitting in them.. slumped, dazed with drugs or dementia, wearing cotton shifts with a slightly scooped neckline that had sort ties at the back of the neck for closures. They were in pastel shades of blue, green, pink, maybe yellow. Worn with many harsh launderings. Sometimes torn, sometimes, not enough to go around. Shoes were slip on type sneakers. It was hard to match up pairs. Harder to find pairs that fit the women. They often shuffled to keep over-sized shoes on their feet.. or kicked them off and walked around barefoot.

One of my jobs on rotation was to help with treatments. Not psychiatric, I don't think anyone got anything more than a drug prescription written in their chart for that. I'm not sure if the psychiatrist ever did more than repeat the drug unless the patient was acting out violently. Treatments were for injuries from fights, or from hurting themselves, or for the leg ulcers on the older women who sat in chairs all day, except when they walked to the dining room and back, and up and down the stairs to and from the dormitories. I cut away the soiled gauze from the day before, bathed their legs, soaked the dried seepage away, patted them dry, applied an ointment and wrapped them in gauze again.

Interesting... there aren't any handles on the inside of a morgue door, although I doubt anyone actually got locked in a freezer.

So the moral is, if you're in an abandoned morgue, alone, and decide to somehow push the tray inside with you laying in it, leave at least one door open.

My buddy Steve worked with the state crew to empty Byberry when it closed. There's a law in Philadelphia that states you must remove any/all refridgerator/freezer doors before disposal. I believe they were removed before it officially closed down.

And you know this how?