Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 6: Echoes

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

Revisit the classic journey into some the history behind our fascination with derelict mental health hospitals. The same story you love, with modern narration and production, plus a new bonus story at the end. —————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com 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 hallways of the Overlook or the legend of Hell House without the dusty bones of the old Belasco house? And can anyone ever look at an old cabin in the woods without a chill running down their spine?

Not me, that's for sure. But 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 through the 1950s, asylums were a very different place. They were filled with sick people in need of help, but frequently they were only offered pain and suffering. When HP 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 a Batman universe, Arkham Asylum, is a blatant and direct callback to Lovecraft's invention. But Arkham was based on a real place, known as the Danvers State Hospital. In fact, the remains of it stand just a few miles from my front door. And even before construction began in 1874, the hospital 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. And 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, more humane way of caring for these individuals,

and those conversations led to the establishment of a new state-of-the-art mental hospital. Plan 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

distance himself from that reputation. 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 illnesses 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, the place was amazing. The ornate interiors, private rooms, and sunny corridors all connected to the central Kirkbride building. 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 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 for easy movement during harsh New England winters. But 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 entire 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 of 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. Straight jackets, 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 the story. First 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. But the results were mixed. Some patients died as a result of the procedure, while others would go on to take their own lives.

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 patient's brains through their eye sockets. Working without drilling or cutting presented an opportunity that Freeman simply could not 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 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, he said. By inserting the ice pick into the inner corner of the 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. And while he was there, he would perform as many lobotomies as they needed for the low, low cost of just $25 per patient. It might sound like Freeman was delivering a 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 that 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 pit 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 he performed in 23 states, 19 of those patients were miners,

one of them a 4-year-old child. And 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. The nightmare, though, never really stopped at Danvers State Hospital. 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. Massive budget cuts, building closings, and structural damage had all conspired to slowly push the doors closed. I've also heard rumors about teenage patients who went missing during the 1980s. One account I read put the number at over 100 patients in the space of about three months. The hospital never spoke about it publicly because the closure of their facility was already looming on the horizon, but they knew it was happening. According to this legend, when the staff was questioned about the disappearances, 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, but then vanished. It's also rumored that scraps of papers were found in several of the patients' rooms that mentioned a tall man and the woods. Some have speculated that this doctor had been taking patients outside the building, for unknown reasons. Conveniently, this doctor was never found or identified.

But again, these rumors may very well just be a product of decades of dark reputation, and I haven't found definitive proof that any of it actually happened. What is clear, though, is just how powerful of a pull the old hospital's past has on the imaginations of the curious, even today. What we do know, though, is that by 1985 nearly every building on the campus had been abandoned. The main Kirkbride administrative building itself closed down four years later. The last remaining patients were moved to another medical building on site, but were all eventually transported to other facilities elsewhere.

They say it took the National Guard and 80 ambulances to do it. 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 the mindless victims of Dr. Freeman and his ice pick became a dwelling 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. 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 those 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 of 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, has become 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. But death 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. 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 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 upon it, and there are hundreds of them. Even looking for the cemetery today will know they found it when they see the large boulder that marks the entrance. It was placed there, in recent past, to explain why all those square stones are there. But it's the message engraved upon it, and not the grave markers themselves, that communicates

everything we need to know. It simply reads, The Echoes, They Left Behind. Humans are relentlessly curious, and that's often a good thing leading to many breakthroughs. But as we just learned in places like the Danvers State Hospital, that desire to learn and experiment also led to a lot of pain and suffering. And there are more examples of the same. In fact, I've tracked down one more tale at the intersection of science and human suffering

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Our net zero plan is in motion, and we're making progress on multiple pathways. See our plan in action at PathwaysAlliance.ca. Many places in our world have a heart that drives the life of the community there. London has long had banking and financing at its core. Los Angeles has made the entertainment industry their soul for the past century. These are the things that drive the economy, and inhabit the minds of many of the people who live there. Way up in the northern parts of Michigan, though, away from the hustle and bustle of

urban life, Mackinac Island used to march by the beat of its own drum. The fur trade. From its earliest days as a French outpost up through the French and Indian War and beyond, there had been a strong population of fur traders there. Which is why in June of 1822, it wasn't unusual in the least that there were more than a few hunters out at the same time, checking traps and tracking their next kill. Mackinac Island has never been large, but it was heavily wooded back then and sits in the middle of a straight.

There always seemed to be something out there for trappers to capture. On June 6th of that year, though, two hunters passed a bit too close to each other. One man fired his musket at an animal and missed his target. Instead, his shot struck another trader in the side. Thankfully, the first man rescued the injured trader and brought him back to town for medical care. The man, Alexis St. Martin, was bleeding from his abdomen, where the other hunter's musket had ripped through the muscle and tissue there, making a hole in St. Martin's stomach.

The physician who attended him, a man named Dr. William Beaumont, did his best, though, and stopped the bleeding. When he was finished, he had a problem. He hadn't been able to sew the wound entirely shut. There was a hole in St. Martin's side that led directly into his stomach, like an open window in the side of a submarine. But Dr. Beaumont had an idea that he wanted to run by St. Martin. This was a rare opportunity, he told the trader.

Dr. Beaumont asked the man if he would be willing to allow himself to be studied for a while. He wanted to use this chance to study the human digestive system in a way that had never been done before. To help ease St. Martin's mind, he even drew up a contract for their arrangement. And amazingly, the injured trapper signed it. Life for Alexis St. Martin was unique after that moment. He would do chores and hard labor for the doctor, but occasionally had to set all that

aside and let his wound be explored and experimented upon. Dr. Beaumont would take pieces of food that he had tied to the ends of strings, insert them into St. Martin's stomach through the hole, and then pull them out later. And before we continue, can we be clear and just declare right now how weird this was? It was an arrangement that seemed pulled out of a 19th century Gothic horror novel, and yet it was happening in real life. St. Martin had become a guinea pig under the care of a man who was desperate for knowledge, and it had to have felt more than a little strange.

And yet, well, this experimentation went on for a long time. Not weeks or months. No, this went on for years. Eleven, in fact. It wasn't until 1833 that the agreement came to an end. Dr. Beaumont had an opportunity farther south in St. Louis and left town. But as soon as he was settled there, he began to write to St. Martin, begging him to come join him so the studies could continue.

St. Martin, though, politely declined. Beaumont went on to publish his research and earn a bit of fame from it all, while St. Martin moved on and tried to live a normal life. He got married, had a family, and eventually moved back to Quebec where he had been born. He died after a long and fulfilling life at the ripe old age of 80. According to the legend, though, St. Martin's family was left with a bit of a problem. Fearing that the medical community might come and take his body away for further experimentation, they decided to let St. Martin decompose before burial.

Then, with a coffin ready to be buried, they dug the grave extra deep, at least eight feet down, they say, with the hope that any would-be grave robber would fail. And honestly, I hope it worked. This episode of lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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