WARNING: The following are true accounts of abuse of children and the mentally ill. These accounts are graphic and highly disturbing as well as are some of the accompanying photos. These accounts are profoundly disturbing and can trigger strong reaction from readers.
Primary source: Six Abandoned Asylums with Genuinely Chilling Backstories by
Lauren Davis Filed to 6/09/13 10:00 am.
Sammy and Dean confronted the victims of extreme abuse in an abandoned asylum and suffered dire consequences in episode ASYLUM 1:10. The following review of actual abuse sets the tone and depth of the consequences of such depravity on the Winchester brothers.
Sanatoriums:
Promised recover often remains but a promise. Often the weakest, most helpless and tragic among us are neglected, prisoners, poor and racially outcast were often the target but not always. When mistreatment is not the norm, the battle to maintain standards is unending. It is not said in vain, “There go I, but for the grace of God.”
Five abandoned asylums have earned the rank as dwellings of monsters.
Trenton Psychiatric Hospital:
Fact or fiction? Can you tell the difference? Well documented of barbaric instances are reported in articles, books, histories to make the place rotten turning the mere name into urban lore, and one of TV ghost hunter’s favorite haunts.
Ice-pick lobotomy ground work advanced the procedure, experimentation over subject was a given, the goal to solve mental aberrations creating imbeciles instead of cures, one plus was patients were now quieter in the halls and decreased the nurses’ work load.
Dr. Cotton in 1907 instituted therapy programs and eliminated mechanical restraints. Such improvements were over shadowed by dragging patients against their will for unnecessary operations. Dr. Cotton believed infections were the root of mental illness. He removed teeth, gallbladders, stomachs, colons, testicles, ovaries. Of particular attention was the right side of the hind gut he believed was the source of depraved impulses. Dr. Cotton died in 1933 but his practices continued well into the twentieth century.
Metropolitan State Hospital:
Dating from the 1930s the hospital had on the grounds Gaebler Children’s Hospital. Better called a prison, strictly disciplined, and use of sedatives common.
Known as “The Hospital of Seven Teeth” in1978 patient Anne Marie Davee went for a walk and disappeared. In 1980 her killer, fellow patient Melvin Wilson was discovered to have murdered her, cut her up and buried her remains in 3 graves. Seven teeth keep in the sanatorium provided a souvenir keepsake for the maniac.
How was a hacker allowed on the grounds to stalk his victim? Had he persuaded psychiatrists he was cured and allowed to walk outside as a privilege? Did he escape from the facility and stalked his prey? Was there any reason 3 years passed before 3 graves were located? Where did Eilson get his equipment and find a place to practice his craft? How did he remove the gore from his body and clothing to escape attraction?
One wonders who else was roving the grounds.
State Lunatic Hospital at Danver:
This facility inspired Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The hospital was used for filming Session 9 and the exterior appeared the Asylum lever of the game Painkiller.
What started off in 1887 as a model of compassion with private halls and windows allowing in sunlight changed. By 1939 the hospital designed for 600 housed 2,360 patients. Patients who died out of caretakers’ sight were located by the stink of their rotting flesh after being abandoned in some forgotten room. Solitary confinement, strait jackets, electric shock treatment was common. Need a cure for daydreaming or backaches or delusions or depressions? Medical professionals recommend lobotomy. The miracle treatment relieved many problems, but the miracle cure resulted in vacant patients wondering the halls and staring at walls. However, such results did decrease the problems of overcrowding and chronic understaffing while quieting the patient releasing them of distressing systems of mental illness.
Topeka State Hospital:
Like a Borch painting of Hell, patients were strapped down so long their skin began to grow over the restrains. Others were chained naked for months.
Like Crowley’s social changes in Hell where the Damned stood in endless, creeping lines, boredom was a hell at Topeka. Hours, days, months, years of rocking in a rocker, staring, unaware of what happened in the halls was considered normal. New arrivals mixed in with the residence without evaluation and soon joined the rhythm of the rock.
One of the tortures common to dungeons is the lack of color. Color never came to Topeka State Hospital unless it was the red of blood.
Massachusetts School for Idotic Children and Feeble-Minded Youth:
When Walter E. Fernald, the school’s first superintendent in 1909 began his practice he understood the value of eugenics ahead of his time although he reframed from practicing sterilization of inferior DNA pools because he believed neutering lead to promiscuity. Boys of low intelligence, or any surplus boys to be cast off from society were dumped at the school turning the campus into a prison. With the influx of unscheduled boys over-crowding was constant. A solution was housing 36 boys to a room. Cheery Red Day was celebrated by selecting a boy at random, pulling his down his pants and beaten him on his buttocks until they were cherry red.
The Quaker Oats radiation experiments in the 1950s provided studies on how the body absorbed calcium and iron. To discovery how this process worked selected boys were feed cereal laced with radioactive tracers. The lucky lads belonged to the “science club.” In 1998 MIT and the Quaker Oat Company agreed to pay $1.85 million dollars to the members of this privileged club. One wonders what Quaker William Penn represented on the oatmeal box would have thought about such procedures.
Written By: Southeast
Published By: Bella
A Blog devoted to J2 and Friends! 