Yesterday, I spent the afternoon in a meeting on the campus of the old Northern State Hospital, abandoned counterpart to Western State and Eastern State Hospitals, designed by the renown Olmsted Brothers. Until recently, I didnt even realize there had BEEN such a place, and I bet that most of you didnt, either! It housed mentally ill residents from 1912 - 1973, and has been closed since then, except for a couple of newer buildings currently continuing to operate for inpatient chemical dependency treatment, a National Guard vehicle shop, and a Job Corps site. Many of the remaining buildings, as you can see, are in various stages of (spooky) disrepair and decay, and a number have been torn down for safety reasons. At its height in the 1950s, it had 2200 residents and 415 staff on its 700+ acre campus, which was the largest mental health facility in the state, and included a large working dairy and farm for Occupational Therapy that allowed the facility to be self-supporting. The state Department of Enterprise Services currently maintains the grounds, and the old dairy is still part of a county park. Recently, Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here, and a local organization ran a very-successful Halloween haunted house on the grounds. There are over 1500 former residents buried in mostly-unmarked graves, with laudable recent refurbishment and attempts at identification of those buried here.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 16:28:31 +0000