1,927 Comments for Pilgrim State Hospital

This is my grandmothers old house - she was the chief of medicine and surgery at PSH for something like 30 years. I spent a lot of time in this house from the late 70's to mid 80's. My Dad lived in the house during the summers during the 80's. They were nice, but "mansion" is not the word I would use to describe it. I never liked it in there.

I just went there 2 days ago (11/19/2009), and managed to get into the basement - my Dad pried off the board covering the outdoor basement stairs the last time he was there (he grew up in the house). It's in bad shape. I don't reccomend going in there - asbestos and crumbling buildings don't mix.

NickRuisi@gmail.com

it strikes me as odd they would elevate the coal damn near to the top of the building to transfer it into the building. The amount of energy to lift 100 tons of coal (I seem to recall that was the amount used on a daily basis at one point) must be considerable, rendering the process itself somewhat inefficient.

I imagine there were design issues involved where the plant might not have been laid out with the eventual volume of coal in mind when it was built. Maybe it _was_ that way from the start, who knows.

Eventually, the plant was converted to other fuel sources, rendering the coal loading process a moot point. However, the inefficiency might have played a part in the migration to a different fuel source.

Some companies subsidize the cost of the various sodas and other drinks offered on their premises for their employees -- such as MedicSpanker mentioned. I don't think that any true timeframe for the machine can really be established based on the price of soda on the machine. The machines themselves were designed to be adjustable as to the coin mechanism, allowing price increases over the years, of course.

I would hazard a guess the machine is from the later '60s or early '70s.

can people go i nhere and look around?

this place is def. spooky but i ve never had anything paranormal happen to me or anyone else i went there with. in my opinion if i was a patient and treated so badly , i sure wouldnt want to remain there after i died. i could see residual haunting going on though.

i ve been in this room, sat on the draws, layed on them took tons of pics and nothing.

There is currently no research that indicates that any form of mental illness is contagious, although there are some people I really wish I could say have driven me over the edge. :-)

Also:
http://en.wikipedia.or.../10%25_of_brain_myth

yeah its more like six a day during the peaks
i know because i get paid to put bodies in the fridge so yeah if it was only one death per day why would that mortuary be so big? also on average 2 to 3 thousand people per year. also its a great place to keep beer during summer

I live pretty damn close to that hospital. I've driven past it, through it, but never went in. Kings Park Psychiatric Center is another one that I would like to "Visit" one day.

I agree with Lynne and understand her frustration at society. However, I must also disagree with her and say that I do believe that insanity can, in fact , be contagious... through the power of suggestion, not by any physical means.

The human brain is a very powerful thing often taken for granted. It is amazing what it has the capacity to do and how it can effect the human body. Personally, I am much more terrified by my own brain and what it has the power to do to me than any other outside influence.

Remember folks, the average person only uses about 10% of their brain and the other 90% just lays there dormant. The power of suggestion is a very powerful tool indeed.

Thank you very much for all the PSH information, it's quite interesting!

The solariums were the smoking areas in wards of buildings 22 and 24 until OMH (The Office of Mental Health) banned smoking indoors in all of their buildings. Smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee were the two primary luxuries enjoyed by the patients. The Canteen was located across campus and sold cigarettes, loose tobacco and rolling papers. Chew was more of a Southern and rural "Upstate" New York thing. There was also Coffee, candy, burgers and icecream available for those with funds usually acquired from on campus jobs in various capacities from sheltered workshops to maintenance, food service, social work and clerical assistants. The folks fortunate enough to have a meager income from part-time on campus work would usually be pretty generous with their limited resources and help out the folks who had none with a cup of coffee and some smokes from time to time. There was no glass in the steel grates of these solariums so it was pretty cool in there during the winter.

Of all of the Grafitti on the walls and doors around the campus, the references "FATIMA" and the date were most prominent in and around building 23 during the 80's and into the 90's. Look up Fatima and Visions. I believe the date on all of these inscriptions was 1911 or 1918. I never found out who the patient was who kept reinscribing those messages everytime they were washed off or painted over. Eventually, I think Maintenance just left them there. They are cryptic references to visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima around the time of the First World War in Europe which ended in 1918. Those grafitti messages, very neatly inscribed showed up all over the campus, but most of them were in and around buildings 22 - 23 - 24 and in the tunnels below the buildings.

The tunnels were common in most of the psychiatric hospitals on Long Island and quite extensive. They existed so that large groups of patients could be moved from building to building securely when there were secutiry concerns or just to protect the patients from the weather. Pilgrim, Kings Park, Central Islip and the Vetrerans Hospital in Northport, just West of Kings Park, had extensive tunnel networks. The Veterans Hospital on Middleton Road is still quite active and the tunnels are in use now. The "ghost" stories about the tunnels are intriguing and as was pointed out, an awful lot of people died in these places over the past century, but you can see what they look like when they are maintained by visiting the Veteran's Hospital in Northport, NY which is just off of Rte 25A between Kings Park and the Village of Huntington. Perhpas you can call and ask if they need any volunteers. There is also a very nicely maintained 9 hole golf course for the vets as well.

I'm not sure which building this was shot at. In buildings 22 and 24 there were two wards per floor in each building and there were three floors. I would imagine that this would one of those wards. The central room of each ward was called the "ROTUNDA" and had platered domed ceilings. The Nursing Office, Dining Room, Ward Main Entrance (Locked) Door, the Bathroom/Shower/Laundry Room, the Dayroom and the Hallway to the Patient's Dormitory Area all ran off of this central "ROTUNDA" The Dormitroy Area contained two (2) rooms with simple metal frame beds, upon whidh were institutional matteresses. The beds were packed pretty tightly toghether. Most wards had about 35 patients (There were no bunkbeds only singles on the floor for safety). The photographs of the caged solariaums at the end of each floor are of these buildings. The caged solariums were smoking areas until OMH banned smoiking indoors in all of their buildings. The Dayrooms usually contained a bookshelf or two, a pool table, a ping pong table and a bunch of padded charrs with a few loveseats here and there. There were no fullsize sofas to prevent patients from sleeping all day long on the couches. Many of the patients were so sedated they could barely keep their eyes open, but they were not allowed to lay down during the day as the door to the dorm area was locked and the MHTA staff admonished them frequently for lying in "fetal positions" on the tiny loveseats. Sometimes there was a lively game of Spades, the Television was on constantly. Some of the patients with Honor Cards would take collections and orders from the other folks without privileges and make COFFEE and CIGARETTE RUNS to the Commissary on the other side of the campus. The Locked Door to the Unit(s) was opened with a huge skeleton type Key which fit all of the units in the building. I had a key in the 80;s and again later when I was Director of Recipient Affairs during the 90's. I had intended to report it "LOST" so I could keep it as a souvenir, but t urned it in to Facilities/Engineering over by the Power Plant when I left the job in 1996.

Building 25 was renovated in the mid 90's at the same time we were redoing 80-81-82. Building 25 was the Geriatric Building. It was called the Brill Pavillion. Named after a Dr. Brill. Historical references and a bust of him were in the lobby. The lower level was Physical and Occupational Therapy and Physiatry (Physiucal Rehab Medicine) The building had 9 floors. The wards were full of long term patients, some of whom had been there (Transferred in from Central Islip State Hospital or Kings Park State Hospital) since the turn of the 20th Century.. I used to transport patients in their "geri-charis" which were reclining, padded wheelchairs, to PT and OT for awhile back in the mid 80's. The patient's history summaries in the first few pages of their charts told of being admitted for such diagnoses as INVOLUTIONAL MELANCHOLIA and DEMTIA PRAECOX back in the days when William James was lecturing, BEFORE Freud visited America. After William James arranged for Freud to guest lecture in the US, Freud left America declaring that Americans were savages and barbarians. He returned to Switzerland and never came back to America again. Karl Jung, on the other hand, opened an office in New York City whiere it remains a going concern today. That is the Jungian Center. Many of the geriatric patients who spent there entire lives trapped in the mental health system were contemporaries of James, Jung and Freud. It was quite sad.

When we closed Central Islip (which was all geriatric in the 90's) we moved most of those patients here to this building which was renovated around 94 - 95. Some patients were transferred to other nursing homes in the area, but most came here.

There was a Physical Therapist who had worked there since the 70's. He was a former Marine who had been wounded in Nam. Shrapnel in both legs from a grenaded tossed into his night time listening post position. After many surgeries at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital and a whole lot of Physical Therapy he toured Europe with some buddies by Motorcycle, then came back to the US to become a Physical Therapist himself. I can't remember the names of all of the people in the department there but they were a really nice group of folks. Unfortunatley, there weren't many of the octogenarian and older patients who wer able to effectively communicate. Many had been lobotomized or had tardive dyskinesia which impaired their ability to speak clearly due to uncontrollable involuntary movements of the mouths and tongues. Most were there for so long they weren't interested in speaking to anyone at all. The higher functioning patients could communicate a great deal of information and were motivated to attend PT as it was the only thing they had to do besides sit in their "geri-chairs" all day.