Lore - Episode 6: Echoes

Episode Date: May 18, 2015

Settings are often just as important to a story as the tale itself. The Shining had the Overlook. The Legend of Hell House had the Belasco. We fear cabins in the woods and even our own basements. But the mother of all horror settings is the asylum, with a dark pedigree unlike any other. ———————————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Lore News: www.theworldoflore.com/now  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The setting of a story is everything. It creates mood and atmosphere. It triggers memories and helps our minds fill in the blanks, adding tension and suspense where there was only words and images. What would the shining be like without the long, hotel hallways of the Overlook? Or the legend of Hell House without the dusty bones of the old Belasco House? And how can anyone ever look at an old cabin in the woods without a chill running down their spine?

Not me, that's for sure. One of the most iconic and most visceral settings from any horror story, without question, has always been the insane asylum. These days we refer to the institutions that treat mental disorders as psychiatric hospitals. They're hard places to work. I know this firsthand thanks to a colorful college internship that featured a double amputee who enjoyed streaking down the hallway on his knees. Mental health professionals do amazing work.

But a lot more than just the name has changed for these hospitals of the mind. In the late 1800s and through to the 1950s, asylums were a very different place. They were filled with sick people in need of help. And frequently they were only offered pain and suffering. When H.P. Lovecraft wrote The Thing on the Doorstep in 1933, he imagined a place that he called Arkham Sanitarium. Arkham is the seed, it's the first of its kind. Through it Lovecraft brought the asylum into the horror genre, and others quickly caught

on. The famous super-prison and mental hospital of the Batman universe, Arkham Asylum, is a blatant and direct callback to Lovecraft's invention. Arkham was a real place, though, known as the Danvers State Hospital. In fact, the remains of it stand just eight miles from my front door. And even before construction began in 1874, the hospital's story was already one of fear and suffering, a theme that continued unchecked well into the 20th century. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Before the days of institutional care for the mentally ill, the job was left largely to independent contractors, people who were hired by the state to look after others. But that was a system with far too many opportunities for failure. Patients were routinely placed in cages or stalls, and they were chained and beaten into submission. Violence, rape, and death were everyday occurrences. Thankfully, people began to look for a better way, a more humane way of caring for these individuals, and those conversations led to the establishment of a new state-of-the-art

mental hospital. Plans started off on the wrong foot, though. The site that was chosen for the construction was the former homestead of John Hawthorne, one of the nine magistrates who oversaw the witch trials of Salem in 1692. Hawthorne was known for his vicious, harsh attitude toward those who were accused of witchcraft, and he pushed hard for their execution. He was so well known for his violent, hateful personality that his great-great-grandson, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, changed the spelling of his last name, adding the W, to

the distance himself, from that reputation, and it was there on Hawthorne Hill that the foundations of the hospital were laid. The chances are pretty high that no one made the comparisons at the time, but hindsight is always 20-20, and looking back over the last century and a half, it's clear that Hawthorne's legacy lived on, atop that hill. The Danvers State Hospital was actually intended to be a beacon of hope. There was a specific plan behind its design, one that was based on the work of Dr. Thomas Kirkbride.

He designed the building with four radiating wings on each side of a central structure. His reason was simple. With more of the rooms exposed to sunlight and proper ventilation, more of the patients would experience recovery. All told, the hospital was designed to house 500 patients covering a wide spectrum of mental illness, who were served by a team of roughly one dozen staff. When the doors finally opened in 1878, it was originally 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. And rightly so, this place was amazing. The ornate interiors, private rooms, sunny corridors, they all connected to the central Kirkbride building. The patients were encouraged to exercise and participate in the community gardens outside. The small farm there even produced enough food for the hospital kitchen to feed the patients homegrown 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 brickline tunnels, arranged in the shape of a wagon wheel to allow easy movement during the harsh New England winters. The hospital campus wasn't the only thing that was expanding. 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 continued to struggle

with keeping up. In addition, decreased state funding prevented them from hiring more help. By the 1920s, the population had grown to over 2,000 patients, four times what the facility was designed to hold. One eyewitness reported that in November of 1945, the evening shift of the hospital consisted of nine people, and they were expected to care for the needs of more than 2,300 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 acceptable tools of their time. Straight jackets, solitary confinement, 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.

And that's where the lobotomy enters this story. As pioneered by Dr. Walter Freeman in 1936, the lobotomy was a complicated procedure. The surgeon would literally cut 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. 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 heard of a doctor in Italy who had operated on his patients through their eye sockets. Working without drilling or cutting presented an opportunity that Freeman simply couldn't pass up. He called his 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 ice pick. According to his son, Franklin Freeman, in a PBS interview in 2008, those first ice picks came right out of their kitchen ice box, and they worked like a charm.

By inserting the ice pick into the inner corner of a patient's eye, Freeman could punch through the skull to reach the brain. Then he would essentially 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 educate and train the staff in his own 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 the bathroom unassisted, and those skills would have to be retaught if it was even possible. And while many patients recovered, about 15% died from the procedure. 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, ice pick 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 3,500 lobotomies that he performed in 23 states, 19 of those patients were minors. One of them, a four-year-old child. Ironically, some people still don't believe in monsters. 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. But the nightmare never really stopped at Danvers State Hospital. During the 1980s, reports began to filter out about missing teenage patients. One account I managed to find said that upwards of 115 patients had disappeared in the space of about three months. The hospital never spoke about it publicly because their closure was already looming

on the horizon, but they knew that it was happening. When the staff was questioned, they all pointed to a new doctor on staff. In each case, they said these patients had been assigned to this new doctor upon admission and then vanished. Scraps of paper were found in several of the patient's rooms that mentioned a tall man and the woods. Some were drawings of the man, and some were simply too illegible to make out at all. As the pieces were slowly put together, it became clear that this doctor had been taking

patients outside of the building without permission for unknown reasons. Eventually, the police were called, and when they arrived to take the man into custody, they found that he too was gone, and his patients were never found. But this was just one more tragedy in a long string of bad news that had wrapped itself around the Danvers State Hospital beginning in the 1960s. The massive budget cuts, building closings, and structural damage had all conspired to slowly push the doors closed. By 1985, nearly every building on campus was abandoned, and the Kirkbride administrative

building itself even closed in 1989. The last remaining patients were moved to the medical building on site, but were all eventually moved to other facilities with the help of the National Guard and 80 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 mindless victims of Dr. Freeman and his ice pick became the home of homeless squatters. They built their lives around the decaying medical equipment, the wheelchairs, the 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 facade of the Kirkbride building, with its soaring gothic towers and intricate brickwork. But the hospital didn't go quietly. In April of 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, 17 miles to the south. There was an investigation, but it turned up no evidence, other than webcam footage from the construction site, which inexplicably cut out just before the fire began. 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 ball of terror rising 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 19th 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. A curse of mortality is that we are already handing those things over, day by day, until the time when there's 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. Besides the brick facade of the Kirkbride building, one of the roads there is even called Kirkbride Drive.

The reservoir that provided the facility with its water can be found behind 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 that they found it when they see a large boulder that marks the entrance. It was placed there in recent past to explain why all those small square stones are there. But it's the message engraved on it that not the grave markers themselves that communicates everything we need to know. It simply reads, the echoes they left behind. Take pride in your home with the new Swiffer Power Mop.

The new Swiffer Power Mop gives you a mop and bucket clean in just half the time, leaving you more time to enjoy your home with the ones you love most. Swiffer is proud to sponsor I Heart Radio's Can't Cancel Pride 2023, an evening honoring the LGBTQ Plus community and celebrating organizations creating a more inclusive and equal world. Learn more at Can'tCancelPride.com. This episode of lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey. Lore is much more than a podcast, there's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.