From VOICES: Good Spirits by Libby Tucker

Volume 34
Spring-Summer
2008

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Each year on the anniversary of her death, according to the counselors, bubbles appear in the middle of the lake. Campers dare each other to go down to the lake late at night to see if the ghostly patient is sending bubbles up to the water’s surface.

Libby Tuckerteaches folklore at Binghamton University. Her most recent book, Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), investigates college ghost stories.

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Ghosts of Abandoned Hospitals by Libby Tucker

When I was a graduate student at Buffalo State College, I spent many hours admiring the architecture of a nearby building that once formed part of the Buffalo Psychiatric Center. Built in 1870 by H. H. Richardson, in collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted and Stanford White, this edifice brought to mind such characters as Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s unstable wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The building’s twin Romanesque towers, around which I walked while taking breaks from writing English papers, provided an ideal atmosphere for contemplation. Some of my fellow students told me that the hospital was haunted. Later, my folklore professor and friend Lydia Fish told me that a few Buffalo State students had sneaked into the abandoned building, seeking forbidden thrills. Accounts of their visit had encouraged other students to go on similar expeditions in search of supernatural phenomena.

Buffalo’s spooky nineteenth-century building is one of many relics of New York’s enormous state hospital system for people with psychiatric disabilities. Some of the most massive, imposing buildings were built in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century, New York had thirty state hospitals with more than 120,000 patients. In the 1970s, the development of antipsychotic drugs made such capacious hospitals unnecessary. One of New York State’s largest institutions was Willard Psychiatric Center, which closed in 1995. The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2008), by Darby Penney and Peter Stastny, offers important details about the life stories of ten Willard patients, based on artifacts, diaries, letters, and historical documents. This book and other recent studies provide insight into the harshness of early treatments for psychiatric illness, as well as the sadness caused by long years of isolation in state institutions.

Ghost stories offer another kind of insight into the suffering experienced by patients in psychiatric hospitals. Their dramatic portrayals of patients’ deaths, followed by haunting of the places where they died, make listeners shiver. Besides offering a good scare, these stories heighten listeners’ awareness of the isolation and severe treatment that made many patients’ lives miserable in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ghost stories about psychiatric hospital patients are commonly told at summer camp, which many children call “sleepaway camp.” Counselors may tell the children that their camp used to be a psychiatric hospital or explain that tragic events occurred at a hospital near the camp. Last spring a twenty-one–year-old college student told me that the scariest story at her camp in southern New York concerned a female patient who had one “major outbreak” each summer in a hospital where the camp now stands. Usually her doctor succeeded in calming the patient down with medications, but one year she became so agitated that she jumped out of the window of her room on the tenth floor. She landed in a four-foot-deep lake and died instantly. Each year on the anniversary of her death, according to the counselors, bubbles appear in the middle of the lake. Campers dare each other to go down to the lake late at night to see if the ghostly patient is sending bubbles up to the water’s surface. Of course, such ghost stories warn children to think carefully before leaving their tents or cabins late at night.

Similarly, on some college campuses, ghost stories warn students to stay away from abandoned buildings. Students at Ohio University in Athens tell stories about visits to a closed psychiatric hospital where a female patient died, leaving a dark stain that matched her body’s shape. No matter how hard hospital staff members scrubbed the stain, it would not go away. The patient’s ghost stayed in her room, waiting for students to make illicit visits to the building. One day, a female student dared to touch the dark stain; a few days later, she “went crazy” and died.

This story warns students to stay away from abandoned buildings, but it also suggests that a psychiatric patient’s ghost may contaminate anyone bold enough to touch the spot where she died. This focus on contamination fits Michel Foucault’s thesis in Madness and Civilization: insanity has replaced leprosy as a disease that Western culture defines as dangerous. The student from Ohio University risks her own safety by entering the abandoned building where physicians once treated mysterious maladies. As a punishment for breaking boundaries, she dies.

Other ghost stories that I have collected recently describe unauthorized visits to hospitals that closed a number of years ago. One popular destination for legend trips is Letchworth Village, built in 1911 in Haverstraw, New York. Most of this institution’s buildings have been closed since 1996, but curious teenagers have enjoyed removing boards from the main entrance so that they can sneak in. One twenty-two– year-old narrator explained that he and his friends once found clothes, fingerprint records, and broken televisions inside Letchworth’s main building. After bringing some fingerprint records down to the basement of one of their homes, the friends heard strange noises upstairs. When they tried to open the basement door, they discovered that it was locked. Had a ghost from Letchworth locked them in? Unsure of what had happened, they decided not to return to the abandoned institution.

Ghost stories about psychiatric hospitals remind us of patients’ suffering in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and push us to consider our culture’s definitions of sanity and insanity. Abandoned buildings offer an irresistible temptation to teenagers. While ghost stories warn young people to be careful, they also suggest that ghosts from past eras stay with us, encouraging us to question current concepts and institutions.

Libby Tucker’s Good Spirits column was published in Voices Vol. 34, Spring Summer 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.