1,320 Comments for Undercliff State Hospital

It is perfect; just love this picture! Yes, perfect decay. Be well and stay in ...

I would give ANYTHING to read these. these people are (sadly) long and forgotten. i want to see how these people were treated. how they made files back then and wondering.. why werent they destroyed?

"Sun 02-26-2006 By: scott
collection cases from 1999 probably wouldn't have any educational value. also, hospitals, companies, and governmental agencies are required to retain records for certain periods, varying depending on the type of document. documents are destroyed to protect the company, hospital, agency, not the patient. the "destroy date" is the date that the files must be kept for, not the date they must be destroyed." In revisiting this wonderful site after years have passed, and reading comments since my last visit, I look at the picture again and see what Scott and other's wrote, these probably are just billing records and such that don't reveal any medical details. Any place that essentially quit majorly serving the mental health community before 2000 didn't either have to deal with HIIPA or didn't have the ability to deal with decades of forgotten records if anything medical related was left. I still maintain the records would be interesting to read for a historical account as so many people's lives were destroyed and forgotten undeservedly.

my bestfriends great grandmother died there she was treated very bad and had died from being given the wrong medicine its pretty sad what these people went through..

If I were going to paint with poop, I'd at least use a brush!

Even the most holy will fall at some point...

I love the lit-up EXIT sign, it adds colour to the blandness of the hall.

That orange is quite a hostile colour. I am surprised they chose such a foul colour for a day room, especially for mentally ill patients. sad.

1131 Mt Taylor apt 308
Grants NM 87020

Thats not even cool.

Hey, I hope everybody went back to Lynne's comment and looked at those great pictures of Motts. He is so tidy.

Heavens to murgatroid! (sp?) Exit, stage right, even!

(By the way; William is not my real name. I still trying to keep the skeleton of my past in the closet)

As a person who spent most of his young life in mental facilities I can tell you we (as a society) still do lock people up "and throw away the key." It is very, very easy to get anyone committed, all you have to do is prove that they are a danger to themselves or others; then once the person has any kind of history of mental problems you can have them committed at the drop of a hat. As I became older I worked as a commercial plumber on quite a few remodel jobs at several hospitals including a some very, very old ones (100+ years). One such hospital is located in Washington, DC; during the remodel there I can across old storage rooms in areas that had been closed for asbestos issues, where I found many, many boxes of records. Also in the basement of one of the sealed building were flooded tunnels that when pumped dry revealed a large room with a dirt floor that had graves in it. It was later found out that during the civil war that one of the hospital graveyards was moved due to several high ranking officials and high ranking prisoners being buried there. It was originally intended that the bodies just be stored until such time as they can be returned to their final resting place. The reason they were buried was to keep down on the spread of scavenging animals and the smell. each grave was marked with a simple cross and a small brass plate with a number fastened to it. The numbers were then supposed to correspond with the name of an individual written down in a ledger. Unfortunately like most treasure in history, the ledger was lost or destroyed, nobody no for sure but it was rumored to have been lost in a fire; it was also rumored that some of the people buried there were famous leaders and the government has covered up the loss of their bodies with fake graves. (I will not state what leaders i have heard that were buried there, but needless to say it's unbelievable if the rumor is true.) Anyway back to the topic of the age of the records in the boxes in this picture; I'm 35 so the woman that said that all these patients were probably dead, your probably wrong. The mental hospital I was at when I was younger was opened in 1850 and is still operating to this day in North Carolina. I left that hospital in 1995 and my files were closed in 1997. So yes there is a very REAL possibility that the patients whose histories are in this photo are still alive and well.

(By the way; William is not my real name. I still trying to keep the skeleton of my past in the closet)

As a person who spent most of his young life in mental facilities I can tell you we (as a society) still do lock people up "and throw away the key." It is very, very easy to get anyone committed, all you have to do is prove that they are a danger to themselves or others; then once the person has any kind of history of mental problems you can have them committed at the drop of a hat. As I became older I worked as a commercial plumber on quite a few remodel jobs at several hospitals including a some very, very old ones (100+ years). One such hospital is located in Washington, DC; during the remodel there I can across old storage rooms in areas that had been closed for asbestos issues, where I found many, many boxes of records. Also in the basement of one of the sealed building were flooded tunnels that when pumped dry revealed a large room with a dirt floor that had graves in it. It was later found out that during the civil war that one of the hospital graveyards was moved due to several high ranking officials and high ranking prisoners being buried there. It was originally intended that the bodies just be stored until such time as they can be returned to their final resting place. The reason they were buried was to keep down on the spread of scavenging animals and the smell. each grave was marked with a simple cross and a small brass plate with a number fastened to it. The numbers were then supposed to correspond with the name of an individual written down in a ledger. Unfortunately like most treasure in history, the ledger was lost or destroyed, nobody no for sure but it was rumored to have been lost in a fire; it was also rumored that some of the people buried there were famous leaders and the government has covered up the loss of their bodies with fake graves. (I will not state what leaders i have heard that were buried there, but needless to say it's unbelievable if the rumor is true.) Anyway back to the topic of the age of the records in the boxes in this picture; I'm 35 so the woman that said that all these patients were probably dead, your probably wrong. The mental hospital I was at when I was younger was opened in 1850 and is still operating to this day in North Carolina. I left that hospital in 1995 and my files were closed in 1997. So yes there is a very REAL possibility that the patients whose histories are in this photo are still alive and well.

Please do not destroy these records. I have so many questions about a
GreatGrand Mother who fell out of sight in the 1890s. She died
as a pt. in 1924. If there is any clue as to what happened to her or where she came from in Ireland it would be of great interest to her family.