A late night expedition to a former insane asylum became a night of terror for both my daughters and myself. Care to join us?
By Susan Creamer Joy - Thursday 20 Oct 2011
It was a dark and stormy night.
Alright. It was dark.
The humidity was at 45% with a dew point of 56.8 F; barometric pressure at 30.9 and falling with variable wind speeds gusting up to 20 mph. and a 70% chance of precipitation.
But it was dark.
The late October night air had that crisp edge of descending frost that thrilled us with the promise of winter. This was one of the reasons we moved from Arizona to the Midwest: The change of seasons. And here it was, the shift from balmy summer to brisk fall replete with brittle, orange and yellow leaves whirling in an invisible night wind. It was ideal.
However, we were bored. My two daughters and I had taken this particular Saturday in independent bites. I spent my day reorganizing my bedroom closet and each of the girls had meandered through theirs in the aimless but profligate way only teenagers can do: They spent it shopping.
Halloween was closing in which meant that the city paper was rife with stories of local, haunted hot spots, from the old Union Hill Cemetery where filmy spirits in Civil War regalia are routinely encountered by both skeptics and non, to the third floor of a nearby mansion formerly used as a nursery for orphaned infants in the mid 1800s whose walls still echo the small, inconsolable cries of ghostly foundlings; victims of an age when for women, childbirth and death were often synonymous.
So when my eldest daughter began reading for us the story of a local building under reconstruction that was beset with unusual calamities of inexplicable origin, my younger daughter and I embraced the details in the spirit of the season and inclined our ears in ghoulish delight.
The project in question was not far from us in midtown and involved the renovation of the Christian Church Hospital. Built originally as a charity hospital, the facility also served the many wounded veterans returning from WWI. Officially, the doors were opened for business on October 31st, 1916. Halloween Day. Gulp.
From its inception the hospital adapted to the needs of the community through the years. In 1919 it was well regarded for its exceptional care in treating victims of the great flu pandemic of that year. Unfortunately, because of the limited medical knowledge at the time, more people were lost than were able to be saved.
In 1927 the facility was sold to Dr. G. Wilse Robinson, a well respected neurologist whose accepted cures for mental and emotional disorders included the use of wet sheets, beatings, cages, chains and the cutting edge procedure at the time: the ice-pick lobotomy. His successor, Dr. Patterson, kept these methods in use for the next 30 years until succumbing to insanity himself in 1957, at which time his staff applied to him those same cures ultimately resulting in his death.
The building was then purchased by the city and used to house the criminally insane until 1973 after which it stood abandoned until 2005 when work began on the renovation that would transform the structure into affordable housing for senior citizens.
The newspaper article went on to relate accounts of the accidents and incidents the construction crew had encountered with alarming regularity throughout the six months since reconstruction began. These included the opening and closing of doors, tools being both hidden from and occasionally thrown at the workers and disembodied voices threatening harm. Apparently, several of the workers had walked off the job in midday vowing never to return.
The article also stated that photographs taken on site revealed hundreds of light orbs circling the grounds and in some instances, photographs at night revealed dark and demonic figures standing at the windows, including the ghost of Dr. Patterson himself.
It took no more than a collusive glance between my daughters and myself before we were heading to the car, camera in hand, to make the short drive to the site.
Now, I take these things seriously having spent the entirety of my life immersed by heredity in the culture of the unseen and fully respect both planes of existence. While my head is thoroughly vested in reality, my soul recognizes the overriding truth that we operate from a very limited perspective and that there are elements between sentiency and the cosmos that we can neither readily see nor fully understand. But that does not mean they do not exist.
As practical as I am, the first thing I did after moving into the ninety-year old home we now occupy was to bless each room with a prayer and holy water and to seal the property by prayerfully burying blessed stones at the four corners. From past experience, I’ve learned to take no chances.
We located the facility easily enough (aided by the extrasensory divination of Google Maps) and it was impressive. Its massive stone facade was done in the Classic Revival style common at the turn of the 19th century and stood in perfect accord with the dense and dark sheath of night sky that loomed above it.
In various stages of deconstruction the entire building was cordoned off by a chain link fence posted at ten-foot intervals with warning signs about the consequences of trespassing, and although several of the windows were illumined by the bare bulbed workmen’s lights, clearly they were lit solely for security measures and not as an invitation to peruse the interior.
The most we could do was to stand at the fence and snap a few photographs and given the late hour, the buildings location in a questionable part of town, as well as the fact that the previously tame October winds had suddenly turned colder and much more insistent, we did not linger long.
We had read that “As soon as anyone walks towards the site where the hospital once stood, they feel an overwhelming sense of death” and standing in the chilled night air scanning the massive facade, cast as it was in wavering shadows by flickering street lamps, it was not hard to feel or to imagine the lingering presence of it’s grizzly history. Pressed by these ominous musings and our unanimous trepidation about the glacial reception by scene and by senses, we climbed back into the car and headed home.
We had driven only about three hundred yards when there came a certain and distinct knocking on the back passenger-side door. All breathing ceased between us as we regarded one another with wide, startled eyes. Seeing the terror in my daughters' faces, I calmly told them, “I probably picked up a small tree branch that kicked up from the undercarriage of the car.”
My explanation satisfied them until the knocking came again seconds later; this time slightly louder, longer and was now audibly traced to the car roof. Clearly, this was no tree branch!
At this point my younger daughter, seated alone in the backseat, began to cry. As unnerved as I was, I did my best to appear as though this intrusion were no more of a problem than replacing a light bulb and gently instructed the girls to begin to pray the Rosary. This was not an entirely foreign request. When they were small and we’d take prolonged family trips somewhere in the car, I would sometimes initiate recital of at least a decade of the Rosary, perhaps, in part out of guilt over my own conflicted beliefs, but also to help them become comfortable in considering recourse to prayer in troubled times. I knew my daughters would take this suggestion in stride without being further alarmed.
The drive home took an interminable ten or twelve minutes with the knocking occurring in intervals of sixty-seconds or so and migrating from door to roof to hood to a different door for the entire ride, but I felt that if I could remain focused and return home to the sanctity of our property, whatever spectral jokester was harassing us would be forced to depart.
Fortunately, this was the case. Once we drove across the sidewalk separating our driveway from the street, the knocking abruptly ceased and has never returned.
The next morning I downloaded the photographs I had taken of the construction site the night before and found in each one streams of light all but obliterating the building itself as well as some ominous shapes we could not distinguish but were slightly alarmed by. You make the call.
By the way, the senior residential housing was completed in 2007 and is now serving the community. Oh, and I hear they have some vacancies!
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go. I hear a knock at my front door.
Alright. It was dark.
The humidity was at 45% with a dew point of 56.8 F; barometric pressure at 30.9 and falling with variable wind speeds gusting up to 20 mph. and a 70% chance of precipitation.
But it was dark.
The late October night air had that crisp edge of descending frost that thrilled us with the promise of winter. This was one of the reasons we moved from Arizona to the Midwest: The change of seasons. And here it was, the shift from balmy summer to brisk fall replete with brittle, orange and yellow leaves whirling in an invisible night wind. It was ideal.
However, we were bored. My two daughters and I had taken this particular Saturday in independent bites. I spent my day reorganizing my bedroom closet and each of the girls had meandered through theirs in the aimless but profligate way only teenagers can do: They spent it shopping.
Halloween was closing in which meant that the city paper was rife with stories of local, haunted hot spots, from the old Union Hill Cemetery where filmy spirits in Civil War regalia are routinely encountered by both skeptics and non, to the third floor of a nearby mansion formerly used as a nursery for orphaned infants in the mid 1800s whose walls still echo the small, inconsolable cries of ghostly foundlings; victims of an age when for women, childbirth and death were often synonymous.
So when my eldest daughter began reading for us the story of a local building under reconstruction that was beset with unusual calamities of inexplicable origin, my younger daughter and I embraced the details in the spirit of the season and inclined our ears in ghoulish delight.
The project in question was not far from us in midtown and involved the renovation of the Christian Church Hospital. Built originally as a charity hospital, the facility also served the many wounded veterans returning from WWI. Officially, the doors were opened for business on October 31st, 1916. Halloween Day. Gulp.
From its inception the hospital adapted to the needs of the community through the years. In 1919 it was well regarded for its exceptional care in treating victims of the great flu pandemic of that year. Unfortunately, because of the limited medical knowledge at the time, more people were lost than were able to be saved.
In 1927 the facility was sold to Dr. G. Wilse Robinson, a well respected neurologist whose accepted cures for mental and emotional disorders included the use of wet sheets, beatings, cages, chains and the cutting edge procedure at the time: the ice-pick lobotomy. His successor, Dr. Patterson, kept these methods in use for the next 30 years until succumbing to insanity himself in 1957, at which time his staff applied to him those same cures ultimately resulting in his death.
The building was then purchased by the city and used to house the criminally insane until 1973 after which it stood abandoned until 2005 when work began on the renovation that would transform the structure into affordable housing for senior citizens.
The newspaper article went on to relate accounts of the accidents and incidents the construction crew had encountered with alarming regularity throughout the six months since reconstruction began. These included the opening and closing of doors, tools being both hidden from and occasionally thrown at the workers and disembodied voices threatening harm. Apparently, several of the workers had walked off the job in midday vowing never to return.
The article also stated that photographs taken on site revealed hundreds of light orbs circling the grounds and in some instances, photographs at night revealed dark and demonic figures standing at the windows, including the ghost of Dr. Patterson himself.
It took no more than a collusive glance between my daughters and myself before we were heading to the car, camera in hand, to make the short drive to the site.
Now, I take these things seriously having spent the entirety of my life immersed by heredity in the culture of the unseen and fully respect both planes of existence. While my head is thoroughly vested in reality, my soul recognizes the overriding truth that we operate from a very limited perspective and that there are elements between sentiency and the cosmos that we can neither readily see nor fully understand. But that does not mean they do not exist.
As practical as I am, the first thing I did after moving into the ninety-year old home we now occupy was to bless each room with a prayer and holy water and to seal the property by prayerfully burying blessed stones at the four corners. From past experience, I’ve learned to take no chances.
We located the facility easily enough (aided by the extrasensory divination of Google Maps) and it was impressive. Its massive stone facade was done in the Classic Revival style common at the turn of the 19th century and stood in perfect accord with the dense and dark sheath of night sky that loomed above it.
In various stages of deconstruction the entire building was cordoned off by a chain link fence posted at ten-foot intervals with warning signs about the consequences of trespassing, and although several of the windows were illumined by the bare bulbed workmen’s lights, clearly they were lit solely for security measures and not as an invitation to peruse the interior.
The most we could do was to stand at the fence and snap a few photographs and given the late hour, the buildings location in a questionable part of town, as well as the fact that the previously tame October winds had suddenly turned colder and much more insistent, we did not linger long.
We had read that “As soon as anyone walks towards the site where the hospital once stood, they feel an overwhelming sense of death” and standing in the chilled night air scanning the massive facade, cast as it was in wavering shadows by flickering street lamps, it was not hard to feel or to imagine the lingering presence of it’s grizzly history. Pressed by these ominous musings and our unanimous trepidation about the glacial reception by scene and by senses, we climbed back into the car and headed home.
We had driven only about three hundred yards when there came a certain and distinct knocking on the back passenger-side door. All breathing ceased between us as we regarded one another with wide, startled eyes. Seeing the terror in my daughters' faces, I calmly told them, “I probably picked up a small tree branch that kicked up from the undercarriage of the car.”
My explanation satisfied them until the knocking came again seconds later; this time slightly louder, longer and was now audibly traced to the car roof. Clearly, this was no tree branch!
At this point my younger daughter, seated alone in the backseat, began to cry. As unnerved as I was, I did my best to appear as though this intrusion were no more of a problem than replacing a light bulb and gently instructed the girls to begin to pray the Rosary. This was not an entirely foreign request. When they were small and we’d take prolonged family trips somewhere in the car, I would sometimes initiate recital of at least a decade of the Rosary, perhaps, in part out of guilt over my own conflicted beliefs, but also to help them become comfortable in considering recourse to prayer in troubled times. I knew my daughters would take this suggestion in stride without being further alarmed.
The drive home took an interminable ten or twelve minutes with the knocking occurring in intervals of sixty-seconds or so and migrating from door to roof to hood to a different door for the entire ride, but I felt that if I could remain focused and return home to the sanctity of our property, whatever spectral jokester was harassing us would be forced to depart.
Fortunately, this was the case. Once we drove across the sidewalk separating our driveway from the street, the knocking abruptly ceased and has never returned.
The next morning I downloaded the photographs I had taken of the construction site the night before and found in each one streams of light all but obliterating the building itself as well as some ominous shapes we could not distinguish but were slightly alarmed by. You make the call.
By the way, the senior residential housing was completed in 2007 and is now serving the community. Oh, and I hear they have some vacancies!
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go. I hear a knock at my front door.