Danvers State Hospital

With it's overwhelming immensity and distinct characteristics, the Danvers State Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts was home to thousands of mentally ill patients.  It was built in 1874 to relieve other asylums of their overcrowded populations in Boston.  The new hospital was built on a site known as Hawthorne Hill and was chosen for the new psychiatric hospital for it's scenic beauty and vast acreage. It was thought that a welcoming and fresh environment would be the most therapeutic treatment to cure insanity. The creation of the hospital sparked some controversy with the public because of its magnitude and cost.  The 70,000 square foot building cost $1.5 million.

Like most mental hospitals during the 1800 and 1900s, Danvers faced overcrowding, limited funding and staff shortages.  At its inception, it was meant to hold only 500 patients but the hospital faced over 2,000 residents by the 1930s.  Patients began to receive lower levels of care and endured a plethora of new treatment techniques being administered as ways of therapy in psychiatric hospitals across the world.  These treatments were used to restrict and control any unruly patients and included the lobotomy, electroshock therapy, insulin shock therapy, and drug therapy.   These harmful and abolishing treatments were created to subdue difficult patients.  After initial research on animals, the lobotomy became a popular way to make patients more calm.  In order to do so, the nerves running from the frontal cortex to the thalamus needed to be cut and removed from the brain. As said by Walter Freeman, an American physician, it would be a procedure recommended "for everything from psychosis to depression to neurosis to criminality." It was also considered to "short-circuit" the problem psychotic patients faced such as repetitive thoughts.
Danvers underwent the deinstitutionalization process in the 1960s, and patients were transfered to community-based group homes and other mental hospitals in Massachusetts. In the mid-1980s the farthest wings of the building were closed and the entire building was shuttered in 1989.  The entire facility was closed in June of 1992.

Although the hospital closed, it faced it's debut in 2001.  It was the filming site for a movie called Session 9.

The horror thriller highlighted an asbestos cleaning crew within an abandoned mental hospital who witnessed the hospital's past coming back to haunt them.  It was also the site for another film called Home Before Dark in 1958.  It included footage of the hospital during it's operation.
Since its closure the site has drawn photographers and ghost hunters alike, causing the arrest of over 120 people for trespassing.  These thrill seekers believe the assumption that the building still remains home to the once disturbed and troubled spirits of the patients that lived there. The original building as well as 2 other wings, were later turned into a residential community called Avalon Ban Danvers with 500 apartments and condominiums.  Although it's true form was altered, the beauty and sheer vastness of Danvers State Hospital along with it's history will always remain.

 Resources:
http://www.opacity.us/site22_danvers_state_hospital.htm
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/lobotomy.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0261983/
http://www.opacity.us/article9_all_souls_that_haunt_this_site_can_expect_arrest.htm