An old mental
asylumhas a dark and hidden past, with corpses of patients once said to have been left to rot making it a "mecca for paranormal enthusiasts."
A haunted history, Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts was built in 1874 on the site where Salem Witch Trials judge John Hathorne once lived.
With questionable treatment of people plaguing its past, it saw its first lobotomy there in 1948, while electric shock therapy began to be introduced the 1950s.
The huge Danvers building, meanwhile, was once extremely overcrowded, with the large space originally intended to house only 450 patients. By the early 1880s, over 600 patients were present at the facility, before a concerning increase to 1,137 in 1901.
Order of the Good Death reports: "Danvers quickly became notorious for its overcrowding, with almost four times as many patients as the hospital was designed to house. Patients sometimes died out of sight of the staff and their bodies decomposed for days before they were noticed."
A lack of funding and staff meant that by 1926, there was a population of over 2,000 causing "special garments" to be used to control patients.
The History of Massachusetts website believes this likely means "presumably straitjackets, as a means of control."
One of the worst recorded cases at the frequently underfunded site was when in 1987, patient Ann Houghton walked out of the hospital only to be found dead the next day from a heart attack.
Despite being considered a leading and modern facility when it was first opened, understanding of mental illnesses was not nearly as advanced as it is today. Reports say that those with intellectual disabilities were mixed with those who instead had psychiatric illnesses. This is believed to have been the case right up until 1980.
It is worth noting that some histories of the place do not record patients being left to rot, but other asylums in the US have recorded similarly grim cases.
Athens Lunatic Asylum in Ohio became known for the case of Magaret Schilling in 1979.
In December 1978, the 53-year-old mum of two was reported missing by the hospital, but she was eventually found over one month later when she was discovered in a barely used room.
Her grisly end was put down to heart failure from cold temperatures, but even more grim was the fact staff were unable to remove the stain of her rotting corpse.
A study in 2007 put this down to a bizarre phenomenon in which her body had gone through a process called 'adipocere', in which her flesh had essentially turned into soap.
