Abandoned Hospitals

It seems peculiar that hospitals—places where people’s lives are saved—can be downright creepy once they’re abandoned. Leftover medical instruments, stained walls, and mysterious sounds all contribute to the unsettling feeling one gets once inside. Luckily, readers won’t have to travel to deserted hospitals around the world. They can tour them in the pages of this hair-raising volume. They’ll visit the Taunton State Hospital in Massachusetts, Old Changi Hospital in Singapore, and others. Plenty of history is mixed in with the odd anecdotes connected with each, and a chilling design and images add to the eerie ambience.

It seems peculiar that hospitals—places where people’s lives are saved—can be downright creepy once they’re abandoned. Leftover medical instruments, stained walls, and mysterious sounds all contribute to the unsettling feeling one gets once inside. Luckily, readers won’t have to travel to deserted hospitals around the world. They can tour them in the pages of this hair-raising volume. They’ll visit the Taunton State Hospital in Massachusetts, Old Changi Hospital in Singapore, and others. Plenty of history is mixed in with the odd anecdotes connected with each, and a chilling design and images add to the eerie ambience.

Abandoned Asylums takes readers on an unrestricted visual journey inside America's abandoned state hospitals, asylums, and psychiatric facilities, the institutions where countless stories and personal dramas played out behind locked doors and out of public sight. The images captured by photographer Matt Van der Velde are powerful, haunting and emotive. A sad and tragic reality that these once glorious historical institutions now sit vacant and forgotten as their futures are uncertain and threatened with the wrecking ball. Explore a private mental hospital that treated Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities seeking safe haven. Or look inside the seclusion cells at an asylum that once incarcerated the now-infamous Charles Manson. Or see the autopsy theater at a Government Hospital for the Insane that was the scene for some of America's very first lobotomy procedures. With a foreward by renowned expert Carla Yanni examining their evolution and subsequent fall from grace, accompanying writings by Matt Van der Velde detailing their respective histories, Abandoned Asylums will shine some light on the glorious, and sometimes infamous institutions that have for so long been shrouded in darkness.

What secrets are buried within the crumbling walls of old asylums for the insane? Readers will get a glimpse of what these nightmare facilities were like before the dawn of the modern era. From the wretched overcrowding of London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital (which inspired the English word bedlam), where citizens could pay a penny for the pleasure of poking “lunatics” through the hospital’s bars with sticks, to Christian Church Hospital in Kansas City where Dr. Robert Patterson beat and chained patients and performed ice-pick lobotomies—this scary book will rivet young readers while also giving them an understanding of how far mental health care has come. Eleven asylums are explored, with tales of not only what they were like but of the spirits said to still haunt them. Abandoned Insane Asylums is part of Bearport’s Scary Places series.

Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals. For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings—and the patients who lived in them—neglected and abandoned. Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors—chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”

It seems peculiar that hospitals—places where people’s lives are saved—can be downright creepy once they’re abandoned. Leftover medical instruments, stained walls, and mysterious sounds all contribute to the unsettling feeling one gets once inside. Luckily, readers won’t have to travel to deserted hospitals around the world. They can tour them in the pages of this hair-raising volume. They’ll visit the Taunton State Hospital in Massachusetts, Old Changi Hospital in Singapore, and others. Plenty of history is mixed in with the odd anecdotes connected with each, and a chilling design and images add to the eerie ambience.