"...the memory of a blue door with a small wired glass..."
April 15, 2013 11:15 AM   Subscribe

"Two years ago, I wrote a post about Rockland County Psychiatric Center, an abandoned insane asylum complex that is easily one of the most haunting places I’ve ever scouted. To my amazement, more than 250 comments have since been left by former patients, doctors and nurses, and residents ... I wanted to share a selection of these with you, to allow those who knew Rockland Psych firsthand to tell its story." (Scouting NY, previously)
posted by griphus (19 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite
 
A friend of mine describes the spooky old Asylum she grew up near. The place closed down in the early 2000s after years of being all but closed bar the secure wing. I had a poke around it with my folks and another friend after it was closed and it was like being in a live action Japanese Survival Horror game, minus any actual monsters. Sadly I no longer have the pictures...

Mostly if you end up having a hospital stay for mental health reasons under the NHS you just end up at some drab 60s built place.
posted by Artw at 11:21 AM on April 15, 2013


There are worse things than dying.
posted by digitalprimate at 11:30 AM on April 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Since I can remember, I've had a fascination with the "insane asylum". I expect it's due to the the idea/fantasy that one day, I too could live in a "place like that". When I was very young, institutionalization was a threat and in many ways I suppose, I romanticized the thrashing and screaming, the haunts of the "insane" as a coping mechanism.

Interesting to read accounts of having actually lived near or in a psych hospital.
posted by Sophie1 at 11:51 AM on April 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


We seem to have destroyed the third link.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:54 AM on April 15, 2013


My high school was just down the road from Spring Grove hospital, which is still in operation today. I remember one particularly glorious spring day when we were walking down on the track and spotted a gentleman splayed out on the grass wearing nothing but Speedos (it couldn't have been more than 60 at the time) and we all understood that he was probably from Spring Grove. We weren't scared or concerned, just understood that he appreciated the fine day as much as we did.

In this day and age it would probably be exceedingly difficult to locate a psych facility within walking distance of a school, but I'm glad that we had Spring Grove nearby.
posted by Leezie at 11:54 AM on April 15, 2013


Fascinating and haunting post. Thanks griphus.
posted by nickyskye at 12:01 PM on April 15, 2013


This is awesome. I grew up pretty much down the road from the Psych Center, so these pictures all look insanely familiar to me.
posted by invitapriore at 12:07 PM on April 15, 2013


Also I always wondered, from having read Lou Reed's interview in Please Kill Me, whether this was the place where he was administered ECT to "cure" his bisexuality.
posted by invitapriore at 12:11 PM on April 15, 2013


Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

Allen Ginsberg - Howl
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:30 PM on April 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


I live a half mile away from that place, and the spook surrounding it is more than palpable.
posted by dbiedny at 12:44 PM on April 15, 2013


Are the stories about escapee's murdering local residents true or just another batch of urban legends? I am on getting stories of murders between patients/staff through a cursory googling.
posted by saucysault at 12:47 PM on April 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


I find hearing the full poem "Howl" read by Ginsberg to be really moving, if you've never heard it before, and the "I'm with you in Rockland" section starts in this video around 21:00. I saw the word "Rockland" and immediately flashed back to the first time I heard Allen Ginsberg read it, in a college 20th century humanities class.
posted by town of cats at 12:53 PM on April 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


I tried to look at the front door in google maps and there is a huge empty zone around the thing where the google cam car never went. It is almost like the Impossible Mission Force is refusing to acknowledge any knowledge of their action.
posted by bukvich at 1:35 PM on April 15, 2013


When I see that forbidding gate filling the image I almost shout out:

XANADU! Cost: no man can say!

But not too loudly, as one wishes not to get sent to such a place.
posted by JHarris at 2:08 PM on April 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


I worked at RPC from 1970-1991 as a psychologist, in many of those buildings…I rescued a patient who had just hanged herself in one of those windows, and a year later I discovered (too late) that same patient in the act of strangling to death another patient.

God.

A friend and I were playing at the nearby reservoir and stopped some kid that lived there from drowning himself. He jumped in because we were swimming..but he didn’t know how to swim!! We threw him a rope that we used to swing on.

Take a moment from your concerns and put yourself in the place of the person jumping into that water. What drove him to do it? Nihilism? Ignorance? A desperate attempt to belong?

I was only 18 at the time and had never seen mentally ill patients. It was there that I learned deep compassion for the human condition and spirit.

It's amazing how many people never pick this up. Sometimes I think that, itself, might be a sign of insanity, or it might as well be, considering the lack of importance our culture places on it.

One big legend about the place was that one of abandoned roads lead into the forest that would lead into an alternate dimension.

If there is an afterlife, and if it somehow has an internet connection, can't you just imagine H.P. Lovecraft reading these pages with interest, his fingers clacking away on an old Underwood?

I am sure for every nurse Ratchett there were numerous Florence Nightingales and for every lobotomy there were numerous patients who were treated differently.

Undoubtedly. But do a hundred good outcomes make up for an infinitely terrible one? I'm glad those treatments are discredited.

Reading the stories here tugs at the heart and mind. Probably not the best primer for a shift at the pizza mines, but then, most employment is like that. I think most people submerge themselves in thier work partly so they won't have contact with the deep reality, the real reality, the cold skeleton beneath the skin, that grotesque framework that sometimes surfaces in places like prisons and psychiatric hospitals, butcher's shops and funeral homes.
posted by JHarris at 2:30 PM on April 15, 2013


Are the stories about escapee's murdering local residents true or just another batch of urban legends?

I've been looking through the google news archives and so far I don't see any murders. There were a number of escapes and in 1953 two little girls were murdered nearby and an escapee was suspected but later a schoolmate of the girls was arrested instead. I also found a news article from 1969 about a grand jury investigation which mentions prostitution, narcotics, embezzling and lax security, but no murders. You would think if there was a murder the grand jury would have mentioned it.
posted by interplanetjanet at 2:42 PM on April 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Are the stories about escapee's murdering local residents true or just another batch of urban legends?

There is a creepy but good documentary on a local urban legend about just this thing called Cropsey. I grew up in the Hudson Valley, which includes Rockland County, and legends about escaped killers creeped out thousands of kids. And here is a story about someone who lived in an abandoned asylum and was convicted of murdering several children.

It made me feel like a kid camping and about to wet myself with terror. Good times.
posted by munchingzombie at 4:05 PM on April 15, 2013 [3 favorites]


My father’s family had been living in the area for a very long time, and my aunt knew the director of the place very well. Whenever she wasn’t happy with how I talked or behaved she would tell me how easy it would be for her to call him on the telephone and have me disappear forever.
I sometimes just don't understand people.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:36 PM on April 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


When my dad was a kid in Phoenix, Winnie Ruth Judd, known as the Trunk Murderess, was at the state hospital. She escaped frequently, and was used as a boogeyman by locals. But they generally rounded her up pretty quickly and it turns out that in hindsight she probably wasn't much of a threat to anyone. She did once manage to live under an assumed name in California for several years; that was probably a pretty exciting time to be a kid in Phoenix, boogeypersonwise.
posted by padraigin at 5:48 PM on April 15, 2013


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