For the Haunted Places Challenge:
In November of 2010, my wife and I went for a drive through the mostly-deserted Pilgrim State Hospital grounds.
My wife is a social worker who works with the developmentally disabled. Because of this, she is particularly sensitive to the kind of horror that went on in this place.
When Pilgrim State Hospital opened in 1931, it was the largest hospital in the world. Built to take the overflow of New York City’s overcrowded psychiatric hospitals, this hospital had its own police station, fire station, cemetery, post office, and farm. Underground tunnels connected the buildings. It had over thirteen thousand patients.
Psychiatric treatment at the time was a horrible thing. Electro-shock therapy was routinely practiced on the patients institutionalized there. Two thousand patients were lobotomized–1 in every 25 lobotomies performed in the United States was performed at Pilgrim State. Many were plunged into icy baths as “therapy.” According to one source, as patient population stretched the hospital’s limits, doctors resorted to more aggressive forms of treatment to “cure the insane,” including “using large doses of insulin and metrozol to drive patients into a violent coma”. There are many other stories of human rights violations and patient mistreatment/neglect at this asylum.
In the hospital morgue, painted on the wall, ran a quotation: “Let conversations cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living.”
Scandals broke about patient treatment at Pilgrim in 1987, 1996, and finally in 2000–beginning around the time when public outcry led to the closing of the Willowbrook State School for similar reasons. By then, however, the hospital had already begun to downsize. Some of the hospital grounds have now become the campus of Suffolk County Community College, and on a very small portion of the grounds a much-reduced 500-bed Pilgrim Psychiatric Center still operates. A good portion of the grounds, however, were simply abandoned.
Today, if you drive through the Pilgrim State Hospital grounds, you can still see many of the old buildings: wards, pharmacies, the water tower, the morgue. They are shells of their former selves, on their way to ruins–cracked bricks, broken windows, peeling paint.
The doors are supposed to be locked, but urban spelunkers and curious teenagers have a habit of breaking in, and often times, the doorways yawn open like gaping mouths.
There is little inside. Everything is stripped bare, except for a few bed frames or a hook used for pulling morgue drawers open.
Local legend says that if you drive through at night, you will hear screams, and see flickering lights in the broken windows.
Others have reported doors slamming randomly while they explored the gutted hallways, or whispered voices on the edge of hearing.
Some of the nursing students who work at the modern Pilgrim Psychiatric Center refuse to come back here after dark.
I, for one, don’t blame them.
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