Episode 06: Missing In Action

In this episode, Caitlin and Francesgrace wade through the absolute quagmire of Institutional Cemeteries in New England.

LINK TO SHOW NOTES

Season 1. Episode 6. Missing In Action.

Caitlin: Hello, and welcome to Grave Escapes, the podcast helps those who've died tell their stories once again.

INTRO MUSIC

Caitlin: Hey Frances. 

Frances: Hey. 

Caitlin: Have you ever come across a graveyard where you either didn't know you were in a graveyard, you were kinda like, whoa, surprise dead people! Or you had no idea who was buried there? 

Frances: Absolutely. 

Caitlin: So I have to talk about my first experience with this, which is actually the topic of today's episode.

Frances: Awesome. 
Caitlin: What do you know about the Danvers State Hospital? 

Frances: I know it's in Danvers. 

Caitlin: It is in Danvers. Danvers, Massachusetts. First and foremost, I have to tie it to our past episodes. It is rumored—I can't verify this, but it is rumored that the hospital…This is the hospital that inspired the Arkham Sanitarium, which is Lovecraft’s Arkham 

Frances: It’s all come in full circle! 

Caitlin: And this actually did go on to inspire the Batman franchise to adopt Arkham Asylum, which is where the villains are typically kept. 

Frances: Oh yeah! Joker for daaaays. 

Caitlin: According to Masshistory.org, Danvers State Hospital was also originally built on Hathorn Hill. 

Frances: Oh!

Caitlin: Yeah. Does that ring a bell to you?

Frances: Mmm-hmm.

Caitlin: So for those of you who don't know Hathorn Hill was, where the Salem Witch Trials judge—Judge John Hathorn—once lived. That's the dude who sen all the people to die. 

Frances: Party. Hardy. 
Caitlin: It's not actually a hospital hospital. I have to make that clear. It is a mental hospital. This is something hard for me to talk about because to be totally honest with you, I had a really bad experience in a museum as a kid finding out about mental hospitals, because I have anxiety. I have obsessive compulsive disorder. I was at this museum and I had this realization that like, if I had been born just a few decades before I was, I probably would have been. So these places don't have great history. 

Frances: No, they don't. 

Caitlin: No. We're gonna talk about that. The Danvers State Hospital was inspired by what's known as the Kirkbride Plan. So this is how mental, I guess, institutions were conceived. So think giant sprawling buildings. They're far from town, but close enough that there's roads. So families convince. There are other rules that these hospitals have to have. They have to have four season access. 

Frances: Okay. 

Caitlin: This is just so specific.

Frances: I mean, that makes sense in New England though, because they—you do have like three season rooms. 

Caitlin: Yeah. Yeah. So they wanted the patients to be out. The whole point was that this was going to be a revolutionary hospital because they weren't going to restrain the patients. They wanted to actually cure them.

Frances: Oh.

Caitlin: It was built by Boston architect, Nathaniel J Bradley. Construction begins in 1874, finishing four years later with a cost of 1.5 million. 

Frances: That's a lot of money in 1874… 

Caitlin: I want to…for those of you who've not been there. Obviously you're going to see pictures on our social media, but imagine the most horrific building you can imagine, the most intimidating building, and that's what we're looking at here. It is scary looking.

Frances: Great. 

Caitlin: It's beautiful. But it's, it's scary. The hospital has been built, so it can house a 450 patients. And it was originally opened with the name, the Danvers Lunatic Hospital. 

Frances: Oh, fun. 

Caitlin: Yeah, you can see why I like State Hospital better. So this hospital was meant to be one of a kind and, you know, like I said, not physical restraint, but curing mental illness and allowing these patients to be in a happy kind of healthy area. Things get out of hand quickly though. 

Frances: Yeah. 

Caitlin: Hospital was built to house that 450. 1881…Remember the hospitals barely been open two years. They're already at 626 patients. 

Frances: Yeah. Overcrowding as a whole. 

Caitlin: 1885, 788 patients. 

Frances: Okay. We're coming up on double. 

Caitlin: I will say that the name change does occur in 1909, but the overcrowding doesn't really stop. To its credit, Danvers does add something like a thousand beds. They keep building, they ended up adding something like 40 buildings to the initial plan. 

Frances: Oh! Wait, wait 4-0? Forty?

Caitlin:  Yeah. Four zero. 

Frances: That's a lot. 

Caitlin: It's a huge campus. I mean, this is overall, this is over many different years, but the thing to think of is that they were still taking the patients into account.They wanted them to be okay. 

Frances: Okay. 

Caitlin: It’s still far too many people there, but it is what it is. 1930… Just to give you an example, there were 2.5 K there. So the actual number is like 2,400ish and they had added a thousand beds at that point. So we're still looking at like 14-1500 beds for almost 2,500 people.

Frances: Where was everybody else sleeping? 

Caitlin: So they did have long-term wards. So I will tell you that they had built long-term wards for tuberculosis patients. And those patients had mostly, you know, died of tuberculosis. You know, that wasn't really a thing by the time they were working in the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties.

Frances: Okay. 

Caitlin: In 1939, at least 278 people died at the hospital. 

Frances: That's a lot of people for a single year. 

Caitlin: Right? So I want to talk about this first because I'm kind of confused by it, to be honest with you. So it is a hospital it's, you know, not cardiac arrest, things like that, but it is an active hospital for people who are dealing with a lot of health issues, not just mental illness, and also those who are suicidal and having issues there as well.

Frances: Still a lot of people, 

Caitlin: But yeah, right? It’s still like a lot of people. I don't know. They did also house elderly patients with mental illness. So this was kind of the place where you'd send grandma to a home and then just kinda forget she's there. But here's where this gets weird. I first came to Danvers because I had heard about all these horrific things that happened. 

Frances: Oh, yeah.

Caitlin: I can't find them. 

Frances: Wait, what? 

Caitlin: Yeah. I've, I've been doing some deep dives here to figure out what is true and what is false about Danvers. And to be quite honest with you, everyone, I can't find all the bad things. 

Frances: Now that you were saying that, it makes me think of an episode of a podcast I listened to that, I think, might've been about Danvers. 

Caitlin: I was actually going to talk about a podcast I listened to that was about Danvers. I don't want to say the name of the podcast because I truly love this podcast. I still listen to it regularly. 

Frances: Yeah. 

Caitlin: I think it's a fantastic podcast, but one of the episodes is about Danvers and it actually seems that that episode has been debunked by a number of people, including a bunch of people on Reddit—Take that how you will ladies and gentlemen—But I will say this in the efforts to disprove this episode, I will admit before I even got to that point, I was…I couldn't find the bad shit. 

Frances: Okay. 

Caitlin: I have been able to find a couple of newspaper articles about Danvers and there are some terrible things that did happen, but it's not like as egregious as it makes it sound. There's no like ghost trying kill people, or, you know, the warden is not some crazy dude. In fact, he had a building named after him. 

Frances: This isn't Arkham Asylum. 

Caitlin: No, it doesn't seem to be honestly, I'm honestly wondering if it's just the architecture. Cause you know, like I said, this building is terrifying, looking.

So, but here's some example of the things I have been able to actively document and prove a woman wanders off. They believe she is lost. She's found in another ward. 

Frances: Oh, yikes. 

Caitlin: Two patients die after eating food that had been accidentally poisoned with like a grass chemical. 

Frances: Oh…

Caitlin: I know, I like that sounds super suspicious, but I actually think this was more like a: oh shit, we mixed up the chemicals and the salt again vs I want to kill everyone. 

Frances: I mean, if it was, I want to kill everyone, they didn't succeed very well if they only killed two people. 

Caitlin: Right. And I mean, I don't want to make light of those two people's lives like that does that's horrible, but it's not what it could have been. A woman also does get past the guard, steal some matches and lights, a fire to her mattress.

Frances: Okay. Hmm. 

Caitlin: Don't hate that one. 

Frances: Does anybody get hurt in the fire? 

Caitlin: I don't believe so, but fire is actually a commonality throughout Danvers history. In fact, there's one fire that actually causes the biggest traffic jam in basically all of Massachusetts history because people were trying to get to the hospital to watch the fire.

Frances: What?!?

Caitlin: Yeah. 

Frances: Oh, Massachusetts. 

Caitlin: Rubbernecking anyway. So, I'm not saying that Danvers is a great place. I'm just saying that I cannot find all of the horrible things that have happened that are kind of in legend and lore. If you go searching for this hospital online, you're going to find a lot of blog posts that are basically like: Ghosts ghosts. Did you hear about this ghost and shit like that? That's not really what we're talking about here. We're looking for the actual history and there's not a lot, but I do also have to say that. There is a website is Danvershospital.org. They do mention any time that there has been abuse from the warden or staff, and there's only one really documented case and it actually happened right before the hospital closes. 

Frances: Okay. 

Caitlin: That's not why it closed, but it was reported like it went to the state. 

Frances: I mean, that's a significantly better record than every other mental institution that I've encountered that closed sometime before 1985. 

Caitlin: Right? So this is the thing to know. And Hey, this is a weird one to say, cause like, I don't know, I think this is a bit suspicious, but with this place, there's not a lot of sources. There's not a lot of things that can be verified, but I will tell you that on that same website, Danvershospital.org, the person who runs a website, interviewed someone that they are crediting as Preston.

They do not give his last name. 

Frances: Okay. 

Caitlin: This person worked at Danvers up until it closed and they are asking him, what are the worst things that you've seen? And he graphically describes a 15 year old boy who crawled into the duct work and they didn't find him for three weeks. 

Frances: Oh…Wait. He crawled into the duct work and then just stayed there?

Caitlin: No, he died. Apparently what happened is like the heat came on. 

Frances: Oooh…

Caitlin: Yeah. Yeah. I was going to try not to get into it, but… 

Frances: Oh, that’s…okay. 

Caitlin: Yeah. It's not, it's not great. But all of the legends I've heard about Danvers is that this was like a daily thing and it doesn't seem to be, but like that story, I could not find in a newspaper. So. What's happening here? 

Frances: Yeah… 

Caitlin: I dunno. Anyway, the hospital is known for, and I cannot verify this, but they have been rumored to be the first hospital to use the procedure of.

Frances: What year? 

Caitlin: 1948. 

Frances: I don't think that's true. 

Caitlin: Good. I'm glad, but still not a great thing to do to your patient. 

Frances: Oh no. 

Caitlin: They also did introduce electric shock in 1950. No longer using the like caring, fresh air approach, which, I mean, this is the part that bums me out because like, this is the part I think, of mental health history. That is just so, so shitty. Right? It's it's all these people who are basically have a piece of their brain removed or who are maybe given shock therapy when they didn't need it. And what happened to them? You know, I can't find that. I can't find like, was this a good place to have this happen? The podcast in question that led me to this place actually that, you know, everyone was just lobotomized and drooling on themselves, but it doesn't actually seem that that's the case.

Frances: Well, it's better, I guess. 

Caitlin: I mean, still not great. It was mental institution, but…Let's keep moving on. The hospital is closed. They announced that it's going to close in 1989. It is officially locked and its final patients are being transferred to another hospital in 1992. But why is this on grave escapes? 

Frances: Good question. 

Caitlin: Well, on the properties multiple properties, remember this kept expanding… There are two cemeteries. One on the main campus and one on the Middletown campus. When the hospital closed, the building was actually abandoned and sat abandoned for quite some time, but before that, the cemetery has had just kind of been left there. They were no longer taken care of. And essentially they were abandoned as well. They were overgrown and there is a misconception out there that they were just…Mass graves, unmarked. They were marked and they were marked with numbers.

Frances: That's common. 

Caitlin: And I mean, you have to also think about this too, because it was a privacy thing. Like these are patients who have had mental illness who have to be buried. You can't really put their first and last name on it. 

Frances: Right. 

Caitlin: But in 1997, a woman named Pat Deegan was wandering the area and she actually found the graves.

Frances: Oh! 

Caitlin: So the cemetery had actually been lost. We didn't know where it was for some time. So you remember it closed in 1992 and they didn't actually know where it was until 1997. 

Frances: That's a long time to have lost a cemetery. 

Caitlin: And I'm pretty sure it was going on before that she says it was overgrown. It was really not taken care of. And like the numbers have been marked over and strewn about, and it wasn't great. So she actually decided to change. 

Frances: Oh, cool. 

Caitlin: Yeah, this is so cool. She formed a committee of patients, um, literal people who had been at Danvers, who used to be staying there, used to visit there, whatever was in their history.

And it took years. It took almost half a decade, but they were able to identify and get stones for 542 of the 667. 

Frances: There are only 667 people buried in the cemetery? 

Caitlin: So there's two cemeteries that remember. 

Frances: Okay, is the other one large? 

Caitlin: It's not terribly orange. They have 93

Frances: That’s…not a lot of people. 

Caitlin: And I will also say that I did see a number somewhere else that's reporting that the number was 750. 

Frances: Still not a lot of people considering they were open from 1878.

Caitlin: Yeah. So they, they have been able to identify 354 of those graves and they have gotten them stones. 

Frances: That’s awesome!

Caitlin: And I will tell you, the second cemetery as well, there are 93 graves, 84 of them have been identified, but they cannot identify who is buried where. 

Frances: Yeah. That makes sense.

Caitlin: And that is also by like the women's long-term ward. And the tuberculosis wards, if you go to the cemetery. Do you want to know a Danvers State Hospital currently is? Any guesses, Frances? 

Frances: In Danvers? 

Caitlin: No, but like, what is it now? 

Frances: Oh, it's in use? Is…please tell me it's not an apartment building?

Caitlin: It's an apartment building. 

Frances: That's terrifying. 

Caitlin: They've torn down most of it, which I will tell you, there is another urban legend because when they were tearing it down, there was a fire. And so people were like, oh, the ghosts were pissed. 

Frances: Okay. 

Caitlin: Sure. Or, you know, there's was a fire 

Frances: Or it was old and had old wiring.

Caitlin: But so the main building—the terrifying, kinda want to crap my pants, facade building—is still there. It’s the administration building for the apartment complex 

Frances: Who—okay…Okay. But like…who—who looks at a defunct insane asylum and thinks: yeah, I want to live there. 

Caitlin: I mean, Capitalism. Yeah. 

Frances: *Sigh*

Caitlin: So most of the original hospital's gone. Like seriously, almost all of it. It's pretty much just that one building, but so this means for anyone who's trying to get over there, the location is public, but it is on private property. Be aware. 

So when I went there, not that I went there, trespassing or anything, which I don't think it's actually like a thing, because it is a literal cemetery. You know, imagine if you were paying your respects to your family. It is nowhere near where you think it is. It is a hike to get there and it's truly…you walk into a wooded area. I don't know how to explain it. It's creepy. It is really actually probably one of the creepiest cemeteries I've been to just because of how hidden it is.

Frances: Okay. 

Caitlin: But as you walk in, so there are no stones upright. They are all interred in the ground. 

Frances: Okay.

Caitlin: So I will warn you all right now, if you're just like walking straight forward, you're stepping on someone at the entrance. 

Frances: Yikes.

Caitlin: There were two things I want to point out. One: there is a giant boulder-esque stone, and this was put there by that committee who identified those graves and the stone says “the Danvers State Hospital Cemetery. The echos they left behind.”

Frances: Oh..

Caitlin: Yeah. It's actually…I know it's sad and beautiful at the same time. 

Frances: Yeah. 

Caitlin: There is a Memorial Wall as well, where they have named everyone who they have been able to find who was buried. And there is another Memorial. Frances and I have kind of debated about this. As much as I don't tell her anything, before I get on to talk about what I found, I did check in with her about one specific thing. And we've decided not to say this person's name. 

They died in 1999. And it is a policy that we have that we don't mention private individuals—so non-celebrities—on this podcast until at least 25 years has passed from their death out of respect for any family members who may still be living. That being said, if you do want to go pay respects or find out who this is, you can find it pretty easily.

So this person left a Memorial behind that is at the entrance to the cemetery. She was a patient at Danvers and she had a very, very rough childhood. She developed severe anxiety and what they were calling psychotic depression, but essentially major depressive disorder. And she was admitted to Danvers. This doesn't look great for Danvers, This next thing. They misdiagnosed her as being schizophrenic. 

Frances: I feel like in ye olde-ish days, mental health diagnoses were all wrong most of the time, so…

Caitlin: Yeah, that's true. So shout out to everyone else who just got diagnosed with ADHD. 

Frances: Word! 

Caitlin: Anyway. So one of the things I want to point out here is that:  She is there and she's on an experimental anti-psychotic drug, which made her worse. 

Frances: Oo.

Caitlin: So then she actually gets paced on the correct medication. 

Frances: Nice. 

Caitlin: And she ends up getting discharged. 

Frances: That's awesome. 

Caitlin: She gets married and she actually then goes to school, gets a master's degree from Harvard… 

Frances: Oh, nice. 

Caitlin: And returns to Danvers to be an employee who works with the mentally ill.

Frances: That's fantastic. 

Caitlin: So she has written a book about this. It's just seems to be a really, really wonderful person. There was also a made for TV movie in 1986. But this person, just what she did was she decided to take all of these horrible things that have been handed to her and make a better life for those that she could.

So when you walk into the cemetery, there is a beautiful little area that that just has her name on it and a Memorial to her and the work that she did. 

Frances: That's awesome. 

Caitlin: Yeah. But so what this comes down to is that we have unmarked cemeteries. We have cemeteries that people are buried in mass or people are institutionalized and lose their names.

And I think this is one of the best examples that I can give of someone who saw this error in human history, in our history and righted it. So now we know who's buried there and I will say they did also discover some of the records are lost and we will never know. 

Frances: Yeah. 

Caitlin: But it's still great, you know?

Frances: Yeah. That's way more than we knew before. 

Caitlin:  But Danvers State Hospital, AKA, you can go rent a two bed, two bath there, anytime you want to. 

Frances: Terrifying. 

Caitlin: So where are we heading for you today, Frances? 

Frances: So I have a similar story with a less awesome outcome. 

Caitlin: Oh!

Frances: And by less than some, I mean, significantly worse. 

Caitlin: Like they didn't find the names of the graves.

Frances: Oh, worse than that. 

Caitlin: Oh, great. Cool. So we're just going to end with depression tonight. Cool. I'll let you, I'm gonna let you finish. Go ahead. 

Frances: All right. So today I'm going to be talking about…It's a system of, I guess, the 1800s equivalent of a social safety net. So I'm going to be talking about the Ladd School, the…wait a sec, there's a whole complex, the Ladd school, the Rhode Island State Farm, the Rhode Island State Alms House, the Workhouse, the Rhode Island House of Corrections and the Rhode Island State Asylum for the Incurable Insane. And the Sockanossett School for Boys/Oaklawn School for Girls. 

Caitlin: So none of those sound like they're good places. 

Frances: None of them are…Well, okay. The farm was actually not great. Um, the sock and also at school for boys in the early 1900s was actually an excellent vocational school for a 15 year period. So Oaklawn/Sockanosset was awesome for a very short period of its history. The rest of its history, it sucked. 

Caitlin: Okay. I will let you take it away, though I'm now scared. 

Frances: Yeah. So, all right. So let me explain what these sort of what our timeline is and what these things were. So the oldest of the bunch actually is the…it's called the Rhode Island State Farm and I realize that's an insurance company, but a state farm was actually like, uh, it was like the evolution of a poor house kind of thing. It was where the state government sent impoverished people who otherwise would have been sent to a poor house. So it was considered like a better alternative because it was a farm. And I mean that literally it was a working dairy farm. I think it was one in Providence. It was a dairy farm. I think the state farm in Cranston was also a dairy farm. So these people…they were given like a place to stay and food that they grew themselves, but they were also forced to labor on a farm, like they were farm hands ostensibly. 

TBC…

OUTRO MUSIC

Caitlin: Grave Escapes is hosted, written and produced by Caitlin Howle and Francesgrace Ferland and is produced and edited by Jesse D. Crichton. The music is melancholy after sound by Kai Engel. Follow us on social media to see images of today's graves and more about us. Our social handle is Grave Escapes. For a transcript, show notes, and land acknowledgement, visit us online at www.graveescapes.com We'll see you in the cemetery.

Frances: We’d like to acknowledge that we recorded this podcast on the traditional lands of the Wampanoag, Pokanoket, and Narragansett peoples. Here in the Northeast and all across the country, native peoples are still here and thriving. For more information about indigenous history, we’ve added a link in the show notes to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States as a place to begin. For ways to support native leaders and communities, we’ve added links to both the North American Indian Center of Boston and Native Land Conservancy.