PHILADELPHIA — Every Halloween, the Pennhurst Asylum draws large crowds seeking a thrill at the former institution for people with disabilities turned haunted house.
Also every year, critics admonish the attraction as profiteering from the suffering of about 10,600 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities who were institutionalized at Pennhurst over nearly eight decades. Transforming the facility into an entertainment attraction a decade ago makes light of the true terror people experienced there.
But those who work at the haunted house say there is another side to the story — a community of people with disabilities who participate in the show because they feel it is empowering and preserves Pennhurst's history.
"I'm scaring people. I'm in a position of power," said Autumn Werner, a 21-year-old psychology student at West Chester University who is running the show this year.
Werner has a rare connective tissue disorder that makes her skin and joints overly flexible, which allows her to be a contortionist. Outside of the haunted house community, she feels commodified and sexualized. But not when she performs here.
She said that most of the cast has a physical or mental disability, or both. One actor with autism performs with noise canceling headphones. Another has a great-aunt who survived the institution.
Werner, who has two sisters on the autism spectrum, feels conflicted about the seasonal attraction. She hates what Pennhurst was and wants more people to learn about it. But without the haunted attraction, Pennhurst — and its history — may have been demolished long ago, she said.
"It's kind of like a necessary evil, and my goal has been to make it the least evil thing we can," she said.
The Pennhurst State School and Hospital opened in 1908 as a part of a state-funded effort to segregate people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It was never an asylum or a psychiatric hospital, but it warehoused in crowded conditions thousands of people — called inmates, not residents or patients.
Pennhurst closed in 1987, after its deplorable conditions and patient abuse in the 1960s was exposed in a series on WCAU (Channel 10), followed by patient-rights lawsuits. The sprawling 100-acre property in Chester County remained vacant for two decades, until the state sold it in 2008. The new owners seized on its history, which included legends of paranormal activity and hauntings, and turned Pennhurst into a Halloween attraction in 2010.
Ever since then, the Arc of Chester County, a local affiliate of an advocacy organization for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, has been trying to get the property owner to stop the attraction. In an email, the organization's chief executive, Jeanne Meikrantz, called the existence of the haunted house "horrible and traumatic."
Initially, the haunted house used original artifacts from Pennhurst, such as restraining jackets and wheelchairs, and actors pretended to be mentally ill or people with intellectual disabilities — speaking to themselves or rocking back and forth. Cribs with abandoned babies lined a wall, said James Conroy, a medical sociologist and the co-president of the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance, recalling his visit on opening night in 2010.
"It was sickening," he said.
Liz Spikol, a Philadelphia-based writer, visited the haunted house in 2017, about two decades after her last stay at a psychiatric ward for severe mental illness. She felt disheartened seeing so many people entertained by an act lampooning mental illness.
"To see actors playing 'crazy,' I felt like 'Oh my gosh, they're playing me,' " she said.
Ownership changed in 2016 and Autumn's father, Jim Werner, today runs the property as the operations manager. He said the attraction is now "fantastical, ... a comic book movie come to life" and not a representation of history.
In recent years, Nathan Stenberg, a Pennhurst researcher living with cerebral palsy, has led trainings on the history of Pennhurst for the actors. He also recommended changes to the act itself to make it less problematic, such as not including the depiction of disability and mental illness, or restrained patients.
The tour is still set in a medical asylum, but actors' makeup and costumes are fictional and exaggerated — an axe-wielding giant with a skull face, medical staff and guards with alien and robot costumes.
Artifacts are now displayed in a dedicated Pennhurst history museum elsewhere on the property, with tours every Saturday that sell out ahead of Halloween.
Knowing the history of institutions like Pennhurst is especially important since people with disabilities — particularly people of color and those who can't afford private institutions — even today can still end up in abusive settings, said Natalie Chin, an associate professor of law at the City University of New York and co-director of the Disability and Aging Justice Clinic.
But she isn't sure it's possible to educate with a museum in one building while commodifying with a haunted house in another.
"Can you really do both?" she asked.
"As a person with disability, I find it cathartic," said Emily Wunder, a 21-year-old student who works as an actor trainer at the haunted house and a historian at the museum.
She embraces the complexity, noting that the actors at the haunted house undergo mandatory sensitivity training and mandatory history training.
"If you're ever going to have a haunted house in that environment, have it disability-run," she said.
This story was updated to include a comment from The Arc of Chester County, a local affiliate of an advocacy organization for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
