3,287 Comments for Danvers State Hospital

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.

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.

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.

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.

thats soo funny my friend spaz has his name oin the wall lmao thats wen i went there ; )

or should we say a shocked yankess fan

yes..but most of the patients there wernt even insane or crazy they were put in ther correct?

lol...this is real freeky i couldnt imagine what happened or how they did this to people..insane or not it was worng!!! lol

I snuck in there the other night. The gates on the main road were closed, so I was hoping that meant there wouldn't be any cops coming through. I carefully hid in the brush and when I felt safe would cross the narrow roads, going up the hill. Got up the main building, but all the doors I tried were locked. As I walked around the other side of the building (south side), I saw headlights coming up the road! I don't think they saw me, and I bolted back in the direction I came. I crouched in the brush between the roads as another car (or the same one) quietly cruised by. I don't know if they saw me, or were just patrolling. As I came to the last stretch of road near the gates, I saw two figures standing there. I was convinced it was security, and they definitely saw me. I thought I was busted, but I guess they were just trespassers like myself, as they were kind of nervously laughing, and we kind of called out a ''hey'' to eachother. I didn't stick around to talk, but in hindsight I should have told them that securtiy was about. Do they have security on the grounds 24/7 even when the gates are closed?

nice pics bro..i like the site,im still interested in the place and ive been there a few times but still want to learn more..keep it up ; )

This is why they want you to stay the hell out of there.

Its to bad they wont let Ghost Hunters do a show in there.

welll JESSIKA SCARLETT seeems like u really like the place i wen there 2night very scary but i only got to go up to the water tower its very hard lots of securtiy everywhere in pick trucks