In addition, many mentally retarded persons wound up at the Castle. They were scattered throughout the hospital and mixed in with the general psychiatric population until approximately 1980, when they were moved to their own unit. One of the persons I interviewed--a former administrator at Danvers--discussed the challenges and rewards of working with this vulnerable population in the hospital setting. From his analysis, it became apparent to me that this special group of clients required sustained advocacy to receive proper treatment on the general psychiatric wards.

Danvers's annual reports remained informative and interesting up until 1930. I felt that they had been reflective of what had been transpiring on the hill--in mood and spirit, as well as actual data. For instance, it became apparent that the 1920s, with the hospital's overcrowded wards, had been one of the low points in the institution's history. It seemed as if a mutiny was at hand. The trustees wrote: "Seldom have there been seen so many instances of lack of interest and sympathy for the work, nor so many where this attitude developed into covert disloyalty and the rebellion against the rules"(Trustees 1923, 4). An empathic superintendent named John MacDonald had the misfortune to preside over this dark period in Danvers's history. Nowhere is his exasperation more evident than when he wrote about the "faith-cure artists" who must have been coming to Danvers during this strange period. In language more befitting a Shakespearean play than a clinical report, Dr. MacDonald wrote, "Benefactors of mankind! Artisans and actors! Every one of them operating in the guise and the name of science. Bottom and Quince, Snug the joiner, Starveling the tailor, Flute the bellows-mender, Snout the tinker. And a public enchanted like Titania, delighted in the felicity of being well-deceived!" (11-12).

The expressive--and at times, colorful--annual reports ended around 1930, when they became little more than statistical repositories supporting the rationale for the so-called "clinical triad": psychotherapy, hydrotherapy, and occupational therapy. Year after year, figures on such treatments as continuous baths, wet packs, occupational therapy, and physiotherapy dominated these reports, with little indication of restraint issues or what really was going on as the census went above two thousand. To the contrary, trustees praised administrators for "promoting the best medical care for the patients" (Trustees 1931, 2-3).

Hidden away among the occupational therapy reports and the picture of the patients being led from one therapy group to another was the total dissolution of moral treatment's tenets. Danvers had become just another "snake pit." Stated historian and Dorothea Dix biographer David Gollaher: "Dix's asylums had been constructed as symbols of hope and progress. Yet in the last quarter of the century, their reputations had become badly tarnished. Popular fiction represented them as hell-holes…...As time passed, few superintendants could avoid a growing despair about the value of their work and a disturbing sense of how inadequate their institutions were as a response to the intolerable problem of mental disease" (Gollaher 1995, 440). By the early twentieth century, any resemblance between the hospital and the golden years of moral treatment was purely coincidental.

Danvers's superintendents saw this sad state of affairs well in advance and repeatedly referred to "the evils of overcrowding" as the main culprit in both their reports and their frequently rejected requests for state funding. By the 1940s and 1950s, Danvers held up to twenty-six hundred patients and was relying on such medical interventions as shock treatment, hydotherapy--including "continuous baths"--insulin shock therapy, psychosurgery, and industrial therapy to keep its burgeoning census under control. My research on Danvers concluded that it had become essentially no different from the infamous facilities documented by the investigator, Albert Deutsch, in his searing indictment of the 1940s state hospital system, Shame of the States. Danvers had been as overcrowded, understaffed, with as deteriorated a physical plant as Byberry of Philadelphia--a hell-hole likened by Deutsch to the German death camps and to Dante's Inferno (Deutsch 1948, 41, 49). Deutsch published photographs of the interiors of some of the institutions he was condemning. Some of these images, such as those from the male incontinent wards at Byberry, are horrifying. In these photographs, I saw the same deteriorated physical spaces as at Danvers--the crumbling plaster, the wall stains, the holes, and the general sense of physical decay. Only, as opposed to the abandoned spaces I had been drawing at Danvers, Deutsch's scenes were filled with patients, patients who were haggard and ghostly, often peering blankly into space but sometimes staring penetratingly into the camera. Poorly clothed and sometimes naked, these legions of lost souls were shown pacing aimlessy on the wards, lying on the filthy cement floors, or sitting head in hand against the pock-marked walls.



Despite the hard work of clinicians and administrators in the seventies and eighties, Danvers never escaped the public perception of a snake pit. It was not alone, for other facilities built in the same era also began to crumble. Spurred by the development of powerful neuroleptics such as Thorazine and Stellazine, the movement to serve clients in the community became the accepted treatment. Deinstitutionalization had spelled the end of the decrepit state hospital system and with that, the practice of locking up patients "and throwing away the key." The census in the state hospitals declined nationally from 559,000 in 1955 to 339,000 in 1970 and finally to 130,000 in 1980 (Isaac and Armat 1990, 139). Danvers continued its downward spiral until it was shut down in the summer of 1992. It was closed in response to the tireless efforts of the patient advocacy group, Alliance of the Mentally Ill. AMI had hired a high-profile legal team during the 1980s and gone after the state for numerous human rights violations in its hospitals. Their allegations included overcrowding, abuse, and neglect, and they had expertly employed the media in their attempt to shine the light of public scrutiny into the dark spaces of the state hospital system in its death throes.

Despite the best of efforts, Danvers followed the decline of Metropolitan State and other state hospitals. In my research I spoke with administrators who had worked at Danvers during its final years. Though I do not have their permission to publish what they told me, their accomplishments were notable. Each one was creative and dedicated in an effort to bring the best possible treatment to the patients, under deplorable circumstances. The issue of money--the bottom line--was always paramount. Hamstrung by financial austerity measures and bureaucratic rigidities, these administrators nevertheless created programs that reflected the humanistic values initially espoused in the asylums. They were among many caretakers who worked tirelessly under the most difficult of circumstances.

On my visits to the hill following the hospital's closing, I had several opportunities to study this gargantuan wreck of a social experiment. "A" wing on the eastern side continually drew my attention and epitomized the snake pit. It was a ghostly section of the Castle that always hummed in a black, melancholic chord to me. The wing was located next to a beautiful field with high grass (which, according to my interviewees, used to supply cover for patients having sex), colorful flowers, and several majestic, gnarled trees with branēches beckoning with handlike gestures to the open sky. Out of the bucolic splendor rose dark and stained turrets, complete with forlorn barred windows. In particular, one arched attic window was set so alone into the ravaged section of the slate roof. On a late afternoon visit, I watched the sun's rays reflect from the remains of its glass. Sinewy tendrils of ivy crept inside the window from their purchase on the brick wall beneath, disappearing into the inky depths. I wondered, what energy dwelt in that forgotten part of the world? Who once inhabited that remote room?

The "A" and "J" wings contain the severest structures of the institution--ancient fortresses besmirched with dirt and age. Ordered rows of small, barred windows, each covered with rusted mesh grills that have left stains of rust running down the brick, create a desperately sad, tearstained scene consistent with the picture of social neglect. A weather-beaten veranda on one side brings to mind past gatherings of patients. Now, there is just silence and a nagging feeling, when I have been there by myself, that I am not alone.

For years I went up the hill to draw Danvers, relying on the interest and support of the security staff. Then I became accustomed to drawing from the many photographs I had taken, both inside and outside the Castle. My wife Faris and I were given several tours of the inside of the building by kind security officers before the entire facility was closed down and its operations moved to Tewksbury in the summer of 1992. Some of the drawings I did of Faris are haunting in that I was drawing from a picture of four or five years previous, and her image is stuck in time inside that brick and asbestos nightmare.

I glimpsed the depth of Danvers's tragedy during another visit to this eerie place on a frigid day in January of 1994. I had gone up the hill to take some snapshots. The snow was piled several feet deep on the ground and had clung to the dilapidated slate roofs so that their white shapes stood out starkly against the leaden-grey winter sky. I took pictures of the massive asylum's facade, beginning with the truncated rise of the admissions building, which once possessed the largest of Danvers's spires. I ran excitedly, covering as best as I could all the angles of the structure from the entrance to the wing. I was aware that my expansive mood was fueled both by adrenaline and the need to keep warm. However, something else, another feeling altogether, propelled me into a state of constant motion. Looking back, I'm reminded of those words from Poe's masterpiece, the "Fall of the House of Usher":

In my frantic scurry around the front of the building I was struck by the sight of one particular window. It rose as a small point directly behind the rectangular addition that had been grafted onto the original facility in 1920 as a dayroom. It reminded me of a cloister with an arched lintel, the granite defining the edges of its triangular shape. It was not a prominent window, but I remember it held a human scale. It was small, not high off the ground, and the frozen snow provided me with a base on which to stand and look inside. This window stopped me in my tracks. It was like an eye--one of the many eyes of Danvers--an eye with a festering sore looking out from the heavily rusted iron bars and screen mesh that covered the filthy glass. I felt as if I were peering into the soul of Danvers. What a place this must have been in its heyday--the lunatic asylum filled beyond its capacity.

I felt very small and solitary standing in front of this beast as it slithered its way from one side of the hill to the other. This had been a Castle of such size that it had housed nearly twenty-four hundred patients, yet now was home to nothing more than the local population of crows, rats, and raccoons. Now and then as the windows would catch the subtle changes in the subdued light, imitating movement from inside the windows, I could easily imagine patients staring back at me through those barred windows and rooms, so brutally excoriated by time. How easy to imagine the sounds of patients' screams, shouts, and rantings coming from the now silent windows. How lonely some of those poor souls must have been after years of isolation. I imagined their screams for help. Pleas for someone--a husband, parent, or doctor who had locked them up in this dungeon--to hear. The snow-covered landscape became filled with the voices of the past.

As I studied this powerful, twisting edifice with its turrets and steeples draped in frozen snow, I contemplated the range of stories that would comprise the history of this institution. The myriad of tragedies, fears, hopes, and dreams, all contained within the Castle's walls as memories. I continued to fantasize as I stared at the small window, wondering how patients had survived in their rooms during such bitter cold--or in summers, during blazing heat. Deep in reverie, I thought I saw the window wink at me. It did wink. It had been as clear as day. Changing light, a moving reflection? The joke was on me. The building was telling me that I could never understand what had happened inside over the years and that there was no way I could describe it. The impact of that connection with Danvers will always be with me. My eyes moved from the window to the rest of the Castle, brick after time-stained brick, roof after roof, turret after turret, window after window, some with torn and grimy curtains hanging out of the gaping holes--all eloquent symbols for the passage of time and the stigmatized history of Danvers State Hospital. I had looked into the eye of Danvers, and it had winked to let me know once and for all the folly of wishing to comprehend that degree of bedlam.

In an effort to understand the bedlam, I interviewed a number of ex-employees and ex-patients. From both research and interviews the one irrefutable conclusion I have come to regarding Danvers is that people either loved or despised it. Both points of view were held with equal passion. On the same day that one person would tell me "Danvers was a beautiful place, so peaceful, and what a view!" another would say, "That place is the Witch's Castle--right out of Edgar Allen Poe. There were maggots in the food there!" To understand such a place one has to accept that both points of view are valid. Danvers was a home that degenerated into a nightmare.

 

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