Danvers State Hospital
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Template:ImageStackRight Danvers State Hospital, officially known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers[citation needed], was a psychiatric hospital located in Danvers, Massachusetts.
It was built in 1878 and opened in the spring of that year under the supervision of prominent Boston architect Nathaniel Jeremiah Bradlee, on an isolated site in rural Massachusetts. It was a multi-acre, self-contained psychiatric hospital designed and built according to the Kirkbride Plan.
History
Constructed at a cost of $1.5 million, with the estimated yearly per capita cost of patients being $3,000 the hospital originally consisted of two main center buildings, housing the administration, with four radiating wings. The administration building measured 90 by 60 feet (18 m), with a tower 130 feet (40 m) in height. Connected in the rear was a building 180 by 60 feet (18 m), in which the kitchens, laundries, chapel, and dormitories for the attendants. In the rear is the boiler house of 70 feet (21 m) square, with boilers 450 horsepower (340 kW), used for heating and ventilation. Water was pumped from Middleton Pond. On each side of the main building are the wings, for male and female patients respectively, connected by small square towers, with the exception of the last ones on each side, which are joined by octagonal towers. The former measured 10 feet (3.0 m) square, and were used to separate the buildings. The original plan was designed to house 500 patients, with 100 more possible to accommodate in the attic. However, by the late 1930s and 1940s, over 2,000 patients were being housed, and overcrowding was severe.
While the hospital was originally established to provide residential treatment and care to the mentally ill, its functions expanded to include a training program for nurses in 1889 and a pathological research laboratory in 1895. In the 1890s, Dr. Charles Page, the superintendent, declared mechanical restraint unnecessary and harmful in cases of mental illness. By the 1920s the hospital was operating school clinics to help determine mental deficiency in children. During the 1960s as a result of increased emphasis on alternative methods of treatment, deinstutionalization, and community-based mental health care, the inpatient population started to decrease.
Due to budget cuts within the mental health system the hospital was closed in June 1992.
Demolition
In December 2005, the property was sold to Avalon Bay Development. To some public outcry, demolition of most of the buildings began in January 2006, with the intent to build 497 apartments on the 77-acre (310,000 m2) site. By June 2006, all of the Danvers State Hospital buildings that were marked for demolition had been torn down, including all of the buildings on the lower grounds and all of the buildings on the hill- a center section of the Kirkbride building was reused, consisting of the old admin, and a ward on each side of it. However only the outermost brick shell of this section was saved, the facade was propped up while a new building was essentially constructed inside of the shell. A replica of the original tower/steeple on the Kirkbride was built to duplicate what was removed around 1970 due to structural issues. Avalon Bay predicted that they would have properties available for rent/sale by Fall 2007.
However, on April 7, 2007, four of the new apartment complex buildings and four of Avalon bay's construction trailers burned down in a large fire visible from Boston, some seventeen miles (27 km) away. The fire was confined mostly to the buildings under construction on the eastern end, and the damage to the remaining Kirkbride spires slightly catching fire due to excessive heat. An investigation is underway concerning the cause of the fire. Avalon Bay provided a live webcam of the construction at the old site of the hospital at their website; however, the pictures cut out at approximately 2:03 AM the night of the fire, and the webcam was disabled, possibly due to the fire.
In popular culture
- The hospital was the setting for the 2001 horror film Session 9, and 1958's Home Before Dark.
- The Danvers State Insane Asylum may have been the inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's Arkham Sanitarium, which in turn was the inspiration for Arkham Asylum in the Batman comic book series. Danvers also appears in H. P. Lovecraft's short stories "Pickman's Model" , "Herbert West Reanimator" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".
- In the game Painkiller, one of the levels, called Asylum, is based on the central administration section. While the outside is a faithful reproduction, the inside is not.
- In the book Project 17 by Laurie Faria Stolarz, the plot theme is 6 teens breaking into Danvers, to investigate the allegedly haunted asylum.
- In the tabletop RPG Mage: The Awakening, the hospital's reflection in the World of Darkness was administrated by soul-stealing Tremere liches, who fed upon their patients.
- The abandoned asylum was explored on the paranormal investigation/urban exploration series, SCARED! in 2004 and again shortly before its demolition in 2006.
Trivia
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- Most of the buildings on campus were connected by a labyrinth of underground tunnels. There was a tunnel that ran from a steam/power generating plant (which still exists to provide service to the Hogan Regional Center) located at the bottom of the hill running up to the hospital, along with tunnels that connected the Male and Female Nurses Homes, "Gray Gables", Bonner Medical Building, Machine Shops, Pump House, and a few others. A system of tunnels also branched off like spokes from a central hub behind the Kirbride building (in the vicinity of the old gymnasium) leading to different wards of the hospital. They emerged up into the basement in different areas. This hub was also an underground maintenance area of sorts- some urban explorers nicknamed it "The Wagon Wheel".
- Danvers State Hospital was almost located in Winthrop, Massachusetts under the name "Massachusetts State Hospital", however it was decided that the Danvers location was better suited for the needs of the state.
- The glacial drumlin the asylum sat on once was the site of the home of John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials. (Danvers was known as Salem Village at the time, and it was the site of the trials.) Today the part of Danvers where the hospital was located is called Hathorne.
- Apparently much of the witch trial incidents occurred in vicinity of the hill. It is widely believed that ergot poisoning caused by fungus contaminated bread may have caused hallucinations that led to the witch phenomena, and it is quite possible that said contaminated crops were grown around this hill as well.
- Danvers is not the only Massachusetts state mental hospital to be struck by fire. The Taunton State Hospital also caught fire on March 19, 2006, damaging many of the long-vacant buildings. Worcester State Hospital, a Kirkbride Plan asylum in Worcester, MA, suffered a catastrophic fire in 1991 that obliterated significant portions of the historic main building.
See also
References
- Tracy, Cyrus M. (1878) History of Essex County, Mass.
- The American Historical Society Inc. (1935) The Story of Essex County
- "Four-alarm fire ravages former state mental hospital," Boston Globe, 7 April 2007.
- Citro, Joseph A. Weird New England: Your Travel Guide to New England's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2005, pp. 240-243.