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Old state Hospital
by Lee
wastler
History
The old hospital was an
insane asylum built in the year 1919. It was built by Mrs. Torrance, the
wife of the founder of the town. On November 25, 1919 the asylum opened
for business. Only five patients started the hospital and had to be
transferred from Danville State Hospital. During this time period the
chronically ill had no hope, the human race did not think highly of the special
needs or maybe even those who were taken over by some other spirit. We as
a race did not even have the knowledge or ability to deal or understand the
mentally ill patients.
Steadily over the years the asylum began to grow larger. Taking new
patients, up to over 3000 into the late 1960's. By that time the hospital
was a very cruel place to be. being run by five doctors, over seeing the
patients welfare and countless others employed at the hospital. Rumors
from the town people started all over the area. The people from town were
admitting that the patients were escaping, patients were hung, patients being
burned, patients suffocating, tortures, deaths, beatings and other horrific
events.
Treatment procedures at the hospital followed the development of psychiatry
shock therapy, psycho-surgery, psychotherapy and chemotherapy. By 1960's
treatments of the patients was being looked at a lot by the state and federal
government. In 1966, the passing of the legislation started the community
based mental health system. This was called the De-institutionalization
movement. (In other words, to get better and go home.) The movement found
the hospital to be unsafe and inhumane to remain open. Instead of closing
all together they built a new hospital and decreased the number of patients at
any given time. The old buildings were closed in 1967 and were used for
storage until deemed unsafe.
The old hospital sits in about a 100 acre area. Some of the buildings are
gone and now are fields. Surrounding the old hospital are huge wide-open
fields, which made it easier for spotting and catching escapees.
Inside the building there are long and high rooms and hallways. Some of
the rooms are 50 by 100 or so feet. There are others that are 15 by 15
confinement cells or rooms. On the second floor it was deemed unsafe.
The basement Is like a maze. Long hallways, storage rooms and a boiler
room. They say there were tunnels leading to other buildings, but they
were never found.
Investigation #1
Dave and I arrived at the old Asylum and at first we had to find a safe place to
park. We gathered all the equipment from the back of my car. We
grabbed two voice recorders, two digital camera's, three flashlights and my
night-shot video camera. As we were getting ready to walk towards the old
building a car pulled up next to mine. There were two people in the car.
It was a male and a female and they were a couple. They got out of there
car and walked over to Dave and I. As we talked to them, we told them that
we were ghost hunters and if they wanted to go in the old building with us
they could. They seemed very happy about being there with us and they
agreed to go in with us.
Dave and I explained how we do our investigations while we walked into the old
Asylum's front door. As we entered the old Asylum you could see that
people already messed up the entire place. There was graffiti all over the
walls through out the building. The first room we entered was a decent
size room. We walked slowly down the hallway and started asking
questions. The ceilings had holes in them so we new that we had
to be careful. We made another left into another hallway that had a lot of
small rooms along the hallway. We shined our flashlights into each room
that we saw, to see what was in all of them. As we moved through each
room, Dave called to me and told me that he did feel more than one spirit in the
building. I kept on asking questions as we walked to the end of the
hallway. We entered a large room and Dave started moving through the room
so he could get a feeling of it. The two people that were with us told
Dave and I that there were three wings to the Asylum. He told us that we
could get to two of them on this floor, but to get to the third one, we had to
go through the basement. Dave thought it would be a good idea to go down
to the basement. They showed us where the stairs were and we all walked
down. This was a very creepy looking building. As soon as we got
down to the basement, Dave started wondering around. You had to be care
though because there were holes in the floor and crap laying everywhere. I
followed Dave as he said there was a spirit down here with us. I
definitely could feel that there was something down here with us. I again
started to ask questions, "Is there anyone here with us?" After each
question I would pose so that if they answer it gives them time. The
basement was pretty large. I was kind of happy that there was four of us.
I could only imagine if one of us got lost. Dave told me that there was
one moving up stairs, so we all walked down the hallway and stood at the bottom
of the stairs. Dave and the others saw a ball of light go up the stairway.
I tried to get there fast enough so I could catch it on film, but of course I
didn't. We all ran up the stairs and looked around as Dave wondered
off to find it. The guy that was with us said he thought he could hear
music. We all got very quiet and listened. Dave saw where it was, so
we walked back into the larger room and walked into a very small room.
Dave told us that he felt this was a solitary room. We all walked into the
room and stood quietly. With all of us in there, we filled the entire
room. Dave told us to turn off all the lights and told us not to speak.
He said there was a spirit right outside of the room. The strange thing
was I could feel the energy in the room rising. We could not see the
spirit, but we new it was there somewhere. After that we left the room and
moved to the front door to the building. I thought we had a lot of audio
and video to go over, so I ended the investigation.
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