by Aaron Mahnke
All told, the hospital was designed to house five hundred patients, covering a wide spectrum of mental illness, who were served by a team of roughly a dozen staff. When the doors finally opened in 1878, it was called the State Lunatic Hospital, and there was no other place like it in the country. It was set up to be a leader in the humane treatment of patients, and became the model for countless other facilities like it.
Rightly so; this place was amazing. The ornate interiors, private rooms, and sunny corridors all connected to the central Kirkbride Building. The patients were encouraged to exercise and participate in the community gardens. The small farm there even produced enough food for the hospital kitchen to feed the patients home-grown meals.
Over time, though, the hospital expanded. There were separate tuberculosis buildings, housing for staff, a machine shop, a medical building, and a pump house to pull water from the reservoir. All of these locations were connected underground by a network of dark, brick-lined tunnels arranged in the shape of a wagon wheel to allow for easy movement during harsh New England winters.
But the hospital campus wasn’t the only thing that was expanding.
BREAKDOWN
As with all good things, the bright days of the Danvers State Hospital didn’t last long. More and more patients were admitted each year, and the staff struggled to keep up. Decreased state funding prevented them from hiring more help.
By the 1920s, the population had grown to over two thousand patients, four times what the facility was designed to hold. One eyewitness reported that in November 1945 the evening shift of the entire hospital consisted of nine people, and they were expected to care for the needs of more than twenty-three hundred patients.
You’ll have to pardon the expression, but things at the Danvers State Hospital had begun to get crazy. Patients were frequently sick and filthy. It was not uncommon for some to die unnoticed, only to be found days later. It was nearly impossible for the staff to manage so many patients, and so they turned to the accepted tools of their time.
Straitjackets, solitary confinement, and even restraints, however barbaric they might seem to us today, were mild compared to some of the other methods used by the staff. Patients were regularly subjected to hydrotherapy and electroshock therapy. And yet it somehow still managed to get worse.
That’s where the lobotomy enters this story.
First pioneered by Dr. Walter Freeman in 1936, the lobotomy was a complicated procedure. The surgeon would literally cut into the patient’s brain, severing the connection between the frontal lobes and the thalamus. The goal was to reduce symptoms and make the patient more manageable, but the results were mixed. Some patients died as a result of the procedure, while others would commit suicide later.
Freeman, though, quickly grew tired of how long it took to complete the procedure. He had heard of a doctor in Italy who was operating on his patients’ brains through their eye sockets. Working without drilling or cutting presented an opportunity that Freeman simply couldn’t pass up.
He called his new technique the transorbital lobotomy. It’s fairly easy to describe, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Freeman discovered that the only surgical tool he really needed was an icepick. According to his son Franklin Freeman in a PBS interview in 2008, those first icepicks came right out of their kitchen icebox, and “they worked like a charm.”
By inserting the icepick into the inner corner of a patient’s eye, Freeman could punch through the skull to reach the brain. Then he would essentially—um—stir the frontal lobe until it was no longer functional.
Oh, and one more thing: he did all of this without anesthetic.
And he got good at it. So good, in fact, that he took his show on the road. He literally toured the nation in a van that he called the Lobotomobile, stopping at mental institutions where he would train the staff in his technique. While he was there, he would perform as many lobotomies as they needed for the low, low cost of just $25 per patient.
It sounds like Freeman was delivering the solution to a desperate industry, but that was pretty far from the truth. His patients often lost the ability to feed themselves or use a bathroom unassisted, and those skills would have to be retaught, if indeed it was even possible. And about 15 percent died from the procedure. Also, relapses were common, and sometimes the lobotomy would have to be reattempted.
Once, in 1951 at Iowa’s Cherokee Mental Health Institute, Freeman stopped in the middle of a lobotomy, icepick clutched in his hand, so that he could pose for a photograph. The instrument penetrated a bit too far, and the patient died.
He never wore gloves. Or a mask. And he apparently had no limits. In fact, of the thirty-five hundred lobotomies that he performed in twenty-three states, nineteen of those patients were minors—one of them a four-year-old child.
Ironically, some people still don’t believe in monsters.
EMPTY NEST
The horror of institutional lobotomy ended in 1954 when a new drug was brought to the market. Thorazine was marketed as a “chemical lobotomy,” and the need for the surgical procedure dropped dramatically. The drug worked as promised, and by the 1960s there was less and less need for massive facilities like the Danvers State Hospital.
Massive budget cuts, building closings, and structural damage had all conspired to slowly push the institution’s doors closed. By 1985, nearly every building on the campus was abandoned, and the Kirkbride administrative building itself closed down in 1989. The last remaining patients were moved to the medical building on the site, but were all eventually transferred to other facilities with the help of the National Guard and eighty ambulances.
The hospital was officially abandoned in the summer of 1992 and stood vacant and derelict for nearly a decade. The rooms that once played host to victims of Dr. Freeman and his icepick became shelter for homeless squatters. They built their lives around the decaying medical equipment, wheelchairs, and bed frames. It was probably the healthiest inmate population the building had known for decades.
In 2005 the property was purchased by a developer, and much of the campus was demolished to make way for a sprawling apartment complex. But they left the front façade of the Kirkbride Building, with its soaring gothic towers and intricate brickwork. The hospital didn’t go quietly, though.
In April 2007, four of the apartment buildings, as well as a handful of construction trailers, mysteriously burned down. It was a fire so big that it was visible from Boston, seventeen miles to the south. There was an investigation, but it turned up no evidence other than webcam footage of the construction site, which inexplicably cut out just before the fire began.
ALL THAT REMAINS
The image of an asylum will forever hold a place in our hearts as something to be feared and avoided. Whether new and sunny or ancient and decaying, the asylum is a setting that causes people to back away, a knot of terror in their stomachs.
But why? On a rational level, these were places of hope for many people. Still, the very concept of a residential hospital for the mentally ill, complete with nineteenth-century decor and equipment, is the stuff of nightmares.
Perhaps what we really fear is losing control over ourselves. Restraints, locked rooms, medication, and irreversible medical procedures represent, for many of us, the opposite of freedom. We fear losing our dignity, losing our well-being, losing our very minds.
Death, however, is chasing all of us. The curse of mortality is that we are already handing those things over, day by day, until the time when there is nothing left to give. Perhaps the stereotypical asylum simply reminds us of the inevitable truth that is our own death.
The Danvers State Hospital is nearly gone today, but reminders still linger of its presence. There is the brick façade of the Kirkbride Building, and one of the roads there is called Kirkbride Drive. The reservoir that provided the facility with its water can be found behin
d the apartment buildings. And that vast network of ancient tunnels is still there as well, snaking its way beneath the modern structures and the people who live inside them.
One final reminder awaits people who come for a visit, though: the old asylum cemetery. It’s where the staff buried patients who died and went unclaimed by family. There are no tall tombstones, though. Instead, each grave is marked by a small square stone with a number engraved on it. And there are hundreds of them.
Anyone looking for the cemetery will know they’ve found it when they see the large boulder that marks the entrance. It was placed there in the recent past to explain why all those small square stones are there. But it’s the message engraved on it, and not the grave markers themselves, that communicates everything we need to know.
It simply reads: THE ECHOES THEY LEFT BEHIND.
ASK ANYONE WHO’S explored the world of haunted houses for a list of their top ten, and almost all of them will include a plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana, known as the Myrtles. And rightly so, because the stories that surround the place are among the most detailed and enthralling on record.
The property—all six hundred acres of it—was first purchased in 1796 by David Bradford. He was one of the typical colonial American success stories. Born in the colonies to Irish immigrants, he climbed the social ladder quickly, working his way from simple independent attorney to deputy attorney general of his county in Pennsylvania.
But when he got on the wrong side of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, he had to flee. The fledgling U.S. government didn’t take kindly to people who encouraged tax evasion and arson—ironic, considering the roots of the new nation—and as a result, Bradford found himself in need of a new home.
Leaving his family behind, he traveled down the Mississippi and purchased land there. Four years later, when President John Adams pardoned him, he was able to return to Pennsylvania and pack up his family to come join him. After bringing them back to the Baton Rouge area, he set up shop as a teacher, offering classes in law.
One of his students, a man from Maine named Clark Woodruff, eventually married Bradford’s daughter, and over time the young couple assumed management of the huge estate. Like many plantation owners across the South, the Woodruffs used slave labor, and it was the intersection of those two social groups that brought on much of the legend of the Myrtles.
According to the stories that have been told for decades, Clark Woodruff had an affair with one of the slaves, a woman named Chloe. Some say it was mutual, while others describe how Woodruff coerced her into the arrangement. Either way, it put Chloe into a difficult position.
Eventually, though, the affair ended. In one version of the legend, it was because Chloe was caught listening at the door while Woodruff conducted business. Because of this, he had one of her ears cut off as punishment, and it is said that she wore a green turban to hide the injury.
Out of spite, Chloe brewed a syrup from oleander leaves, which are highly toxic, and included it in a birthday cake with the intent of poisoning Clark Woodruff. The plan backfired, though, and rather than killing him, it killed his wife, Sarah, and two of their young children.
When the other slaves found out what she had done, they took action before Woodruff himself could punish them all. Their justice was harsh, and it was swift. They waited until night and kidnapped Chloe while she slept. Then, under the cover of darkness, they dragged her outside, where she was hanged from one of the large oak trees on the property.
According to the story, her body was then cut down, weighted with stones, and thrown into the nearby Mississippi River. It’s said that her ghost haunts the property to this day, and that she’s even been captured in photographs. But what most people don’t know is that all of it—from the affair to the hanging—is one long string of lies.
Historians researching the plantation and events of the last two centuries have been able to prove that the Woodruffs never owned a slave named Chloe (or even Cleo, as her name is sometimes mistakenly given). And although Clark Woodruff’s wife, son, and daughter did all die tragically within months of each other, it was yellow fever that ended their lives, not birthday cake laced with oleander poison.
The root of these tall tales, according to researchers, was Marjorie Munson, a woman who owned the property in the 1950s. She apparently noticed strange things—such as the vision of a black woman in a green turban—and the stories were created to help explain what she saw.
That hasn’t stopped visitors from reporting strange phenomena, though, no matter what the underlying truth might be. From Robert Stack and the Unsolved Mysteries production crew to modern tourists who wander through the property, the Myrtles have left an impression that something supernatural is at work there.
Some have reported seeing children playing out on the wide veranda, or in the halls and rooms of the house itself. The children are described as being a small boy and a similarly young girl. Perhaps these visions are of the Woodruff children—lives ended too short by illness, not poison, mind you.
Others have seen a young girl with curly blond hair who floats outside the window that looks into the game room. Witnesses say she cups her hands and peers inside, all while hovering in the air in a pale dress. Who she might be, though, is difficult to guess.
There’s even a grand piano that has been known to play music on its own. Sometimes it happens in the light of day, and other times during the dead of night. Those who have entered the room to check have found only an empty room, with nothing but the echo of the last notes still lingering in the air.
Nothing matches the eerie tale told by one former gatekeeper of the house. While manning his post at the main gate one day, this man claimed that a woman in a pale, old-fashioned dress walked past him and through the open gate without speaking a word. He watched her pass, struck mute by the impression that all was not as it seemed. After traveling up the drive, this woman approached the front door of the house and then stepped inside.
The door, however, never opened.
GUESTS WHO VISITED 1140 Royal Street in the 1830s dined off the most exquisite china available. They sat next to social elites from all across the city. There was polite laughter, and the gentle ring of sterling silver flatware as it tapped against the delicate plates. But nothing could top the hostess herself, who presided over these gatherings.
Delphine LaLaurie was beautiful, intelligent, successful, and powerful. Her daughters wore only the best dresses from European cities like Paris. Dresses that had been carefully packaged up and placed on a ship, and then brought across the Atlantic, around the coast of Florida, and up to the Mississippi Delta.
Delphine’s husband was a prominent surgeon, and she had wealthy French family roots. They had arrived in New Orleans to an almost immediate show of respect, awe, and power. And we shouldn’t forget that this couple was among the wealthy elite in the pre–Civil War South. Their social gatherings, their extravagant meals, and the operations of their stately mansion were all powered by slaves. Dozens and dozens of them, forced to work against their will.
It was a beautiful façade hiding a darker truth, and sometime shortly after their arrival in New Orleans, that façade showed its first crack. According to the local legend, Madame LaLaurie was having her hair brushed one evening by a young slave girl named Leah. Everything was going well enough, the story goes, until Leah hit a tangle in the woman’s hair.
Delphine let out a cry of pain, and then spun around on the girl. She beat her right there in the room, they say, so viciously that Leah, despite her upbringing as a slave, turned and dashed out the door. Delphine gave chase, some say with a whip, and the girl ran all the way to the third floor of the mansion. Cornered in a room, the girl climbed out onto the balcony, slipped, and plummeted to her death on the pavement below.
That sort of tragedy attracts attention, but Madame LaLaurie managed to talk her way out of the situation with noth
ing more than a $300 fine. Her reputation, though, was stained.
In April 1834, just two years after their spectacular arrival in New Orleans, a fire broke out in the mansion. Neighbors called the firefighters, who entered the house to battle the blaze. Searching for the source of the smoke, they entered the kitchen and then stopped. There was a woman chained to the stove.
She was bloody, with cuts all over her body, and she was slumped on the floor as if dead or unconscious. When they released her from the chains, she told them her story. She had upset the LaLauries that morning, and after brutally beating her, they had locked her to the stove. Out of desperation, the slave woman had lit the house on fire in the hopes of killing herself and destroying the mansion. But she’d failed.
Not entirely, though. In fact, she still managed to bring the mansion down around her owners, if only in a figurative way. She told the firemen of a room on the third floor where other slaves had been taken after disagreements with the LaLauries—slaves who had never returned.
The men went looking for this room, but when they found it, the door was locked, bolted shut from the outside. Beyond the door, though, they could hear sounds. Cries for help. Moans of pain. The rattle of chains.
Armed with axes and pry bars, they tore the lock off the door and pulled it open. I’m not sure what they had expected to find. I think we tend to hope for the best, in general, and maybe that’s what they had done. But when the overwhelming smell of decay and rot and death washed over them from the open doorway, they stumbled back. Some of them vomited right there in the hall. Others muttered prayers or curses.