He said, "Not a ghost story, but scary stuff nonetheless..."
and I couldn't agree more.
*****
Halloween at Danvers State
Danvers State Hospital stood high atop Hathorne Hill in Danvers, Massachusetts. There were seventeen gothic buildings, on 600 acres of land, complete with towers and underground tunnels. From the towers you could see the Boston skyline, the Atlantic Ocean and on a clear day, the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
When it opened in 1878, it was an enlightened attempt to bring insane people out of their delusions in a peaceful setting. Instead it became the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy and a testing ground for electroshock therapy and experimental drugs.
I had a neighbor who worked there and offered to get me a job in the kitchen. They paid a dollar an hour more than the $1.75 my friends were making washing dishes in restaurants and I could ride my bike to work. I sold my paper route to my brother and spent the next three years working in a place that most people were afraid to even drive by.
My job consisted of cleaning pots and pans bigger than I was, racking and unracking in the dish room, sweeping, mopping and trying to avoid the grouchy old cooks, mostly retired military guys with anchors and eagles tattooed on their biceps. We served thousands of meals a day. Several hundred patients were brought down to a huge cafeteria three times a day. Hundreds more were served meals on their wards.
To get the food to the wards required pushing carts loaded with food through a maze of underground tunnels connecting the buildings of the insane asylum. The tunnels were dark, dirty and frequented by mental patients with ground privileges. A fully loaded food truck weighed more than me and the lure of cheap labor was too much to resist. I paid the patients a nickel or a cigarette per truck to push the trucks for me, but still had to walk along side and bring the trucks up and down the elevators myself.
The tunnels were dimly lit and stunk of urine, feces and cigarette smoke. Every inch of the walls was covered with pornographic drawings and the twisted writings of schizoid poets. Creepy guys lurked behind corners and in the dark doorways of the tunnels. Like subterranean rats, they rarely saw the light of day. Fecal painters smeared the doors of the elevators while we were upstairs delivering the food. Cockroaches and rats looked at me like the trespasser I was. Every twist and turn of the tunnel brought me face to face with drugged out zombie freaks, brains fried with 700 volts of electricity. Everyday was Halloween at Danvers State.
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