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thedarksiren2so, in my bored-as-f00k state this evening, I've decided to hunt down any and all info pretaining to the hauntings and various weirdness here in good ol' Athens OH.
For those who aren't aware, it's the oldest university in OH.
Second, the area called The Ridges, which is only about a ten minute bike-ride from me btw, is home to the old mental hospital and sanitarium/ TB hospital. I came upon this site c/o![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bindrune a few months back, and have only recently been able to find it again. Here is some of what it had to say about...
At one time there were large public mental institutions serving every part of the state of Ohio. Asylums existed in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo, Akron, and Dayton. Southeastern Ohio's hospital was established in Athens, near the campus of Ohio University. Today the only one of the Ohio mental hospitals which still stands in anything resembling original condition is the Athens Mental Health Center--also known as The Ridges.
This of course leaves out any extra cruelties which might have been given without the justification of therapy. Patients were often restrained and were forced to sleep in group bunks in rooms intended for one person. One nurse was sometimes responsible for as many as fifty patients.
The 1960s brought about a new emphasis on the humanity of mental patients. The lobotomy was condemned as barbaric, and psychotropic drugs such as Thorazine replaced it. Although the heavy drugs administered in hospitals at this time weren't perfect (the "Thorazine shuffle" was a term used to describe the way people move around when they're on it) they were far more humane than electric shock or radical brain surgery, and they led to recovery for a greater number of people. Mental retardation received more specialized care. Drug rehabilitation and geriatrics programs were also added in the 1960s.
Originally monikered the Athens Asylum for the Insane, this massive institution first opened its doors on January 9, 1874. The state and federal government had purchased the more than 1000 acres of land from the Coates family, whose farm had previously occupied the spot, and spent six years building the hospital. Giant asylums in the Kirkbride style were going up all over America at this time because of the number of Civil War veterans suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. If you visit the cemeteries behind the building you will find a large number of the nameless graves marked with metal veterans' plaques from the Civil War.
This is where it starts getting interesting:
The first patient at the Ridges is believed to have been Thomas Armstrong from Belmont County, followed by Daniel Fremau. Fremau apparently thought he was the second coming of Jesus Christ.
The asylum itself was built from bricks which were fired on-site from clay dug on-site. Herman Haerlin, a student of Frederick Law Olmstead (the designer of Central Park), was responsible for the design of the hospital and its grounds. By the turn of the twentieth century, orchards and farmland were maintained on the property, tended to by hospital residents and employees. This made the hospital nearly self-sufficient. Nevertheless, at the time of its construction it was a major boon to the economy of the city of Athens, which was able to supply milk, eggs, linens, and other necessities. Local citizens made use of Haerlin's extensive grounds, which included landscaped hills and trees, a pond, a spring, and a creek with a falls. Apparently they were able to get past what was happening on the hill above them.
The building itself is gigantic. Thomas Story Kirkbride's designs centered around the idea that it was therapeutic for patients to be housed in a facility that resembled a home--a much more humane approach than bleeding, freezing, and kicks to the head, which were thought to be ways to "shock" the illness out of the brain. In a Kirkbride building the less disturbed patients were housed closer to the center, where the administrative offices and employee housing were. This encouraged them to socialize and become more accustomed to human contact. Violent patients were housed at the far end of either of the long wings--farthest away from the center, which was the only part of the building with convenient entry and exit.
The Athens building had 544 patient rooms. When it opened it housed around 200 patients. The more sedate among them participated in recreational activities like boating, painting, dances, and picnics. They were offered church services and plays, and were often free to roam the grounds. Some patients tended the farms and orchards. Nurses trained at the Athens State Hospital School of Nursing inside the hospital and were able to live there while they cared for its other inhabitants. The late nineteenth century was a good time for the mentally ill in America; progressive policies, modeled after European methods, gave people confidence in the way their loved ones were treated in the public asylums.
Umm, ok. let's just go and prove that now, right?
riiight.
The downside of the progress accomplished by the Kirkbride plan was the increasing popularity of the asylums. In Athens, as elsewhere, it was common for families to drop elderly relatives off at the hospital when they could no longer afford to care for them. Parents committed teenagers for insignificant acts of rebellion. The homeless would use the hospital for temporary shelter. The population of the Athens Asylum shot up from 200 to nearly 2000 in the early 1900s. Overcrowding led to the sharing of patient rooms and a severe decline in the quality of treatment administered by a staff which had barely been increased in size since 1874.
Now, don't get me wrong...I guess you could say this is "progress," as, even though the usage of institutions has lessened if not completely depleted in this context, people still drop off their family members and have little to nothing to do with them ever again. It's the side of direct care people don't see, the knowing about histories and why people are the way they are. I really could get on a soap-box about all this, but I'll spare you the blathering and keep on keeping-on with the interesting shtuff.
This decrease in individualized care and attention led to a renaissance of many of the primitive treatments of Colonial days--with a few new tortures thrown in for good measure. What sorts of things were done to human beings at the Ridges? Well, to name just a few...
1. Water Treatment: Patients were submerged in ice-cold water for extended periods of time. Sometimes they were wrapped in sheets which had been soaked in icewater and restrained.
2. Shock Therapy: Electric shocks were administered to patients submerged in water tanks or, more commonly, directly to the temples by the application of brine-soaked electrodes. A patient held a rubber piece in his mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue off during the convulsions which followed a treatment. (See One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for a painful example of electroshock therapy.)
3. Lobotomy (Original): Patients had their skulls opened and their neural passages separated midway through the brain. This difficult and arduous procedure killed many people, but those who survived did in fact forget many of their depressive or psychotic tendencies. They also forgot a lot of other things, like how not to shit down your leg at dinner time, but with such an abundance of patients the only thing most doctors worried about was how to streamline the process. Open-skull brain surgery is a tricky business no matter how you slice it.
4. Lobotomy (Trans-Orbital): Developed by Dr. Walter J. Freeman in the early 1950s, this simpler lobotomy became something of a craze in mental health circles up through the 60s. Dr. Freeman's method involved knocking the patient unconscious with electric shocks, then rolling an eyelid back and inserting a thin metal icepick-like instrument called a leucotome through a tear duct. A mallet was used to tap the instrument the proper depth into the brain. Next it was sawed back and forth to sever the neural receptors. Sometimes this was done in both eyes. There is some evidence that this method actually helped some people with very severe conditions, but much more often the patient had horrible side effects and in many cases ended up nearly catatonic. It also killed a whole bunch of people, too.
*shivers*
The world is so screw-headed sometimes...err, no pun intended! ACK!!!
Speaking of screw-headed, here's some perty skereh shtuffses here tho'...
In 1977 multiple personality rapist Billy Milligan was sent by a Franklin County judge to Athens for treatment after his insanity plea was accepted by prosecutors--a first in American history. Milligan had kidnapped and raped three women on campus at Ohio State but had been suffering from mutliple personality disorder from early childhood. His story was told in the book The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes (the author of Flowers for Algernon). Billy Milligan's stay at the Ridges was among the last ever. In 1972 the last patients were buried in the asylum cemetery; by 1981 the hospital housed fewer than 300 patients. 344 acres of land were transferred to Ohio University.
Back in July, the Inhabitants of Jawndomay all decided to visit the TB ward
after hearing many a wondrous thing about it, hauntings-wise. One thing to keep in mind with the pics I am nabbing from this site is that it so doesn't represent the beauty that is Athens in so many ways, and especially the Ridges. Everything is SOO GREEEN!!! It's beautiful, and the clouds are some of the most fluffy, billowy bastages you'll ever know.
We drove up to the condemned building and parked Fairuza in the back where no one would see us so easily:
See that little window in the corner on the second floor in the second pic? I swear I saw a face in it every time I looked. It was pretty darn spooky.
Anyway...we walked around front, and had a conversation with one of the most adorable li'l bunnies ever! Of course, that was quickly done, since the bunny didn't speak the language of Jawndomay *smirks* andbindrune's curiosity was nagging at her noodle.
There was a stairway leading up the front to our left, but it didn't interest me as much as it didbindrune. She walked up the stairs, while I walked on and came upon this stairway on the other side...
Upon looking up from below, I noticed an opening. Being the fairly superstitious person that I am, I just so happened to have grabbed three pennies from my car before we started our adventure, just as an offering to who/ whatever might be lurking about the building, should we actually get the chance to go inside. Well, here was our chance - a large hole was cut into the fencing/ wire around the one door. I walked to the edge of the stairs and placed my three pennies on the first step, and then we all agreed it was time to explore.
We entered into the room numbered 13 - yes, I am serious.~8) We looked to our left, and then to the right, and all three of us had the very distinct notion that sticking to the left would be wise.
It was mostly visiting/ waiting rooms, nursing stations, and a few tiny rooms. I wasn't moved by much of it, althoughwraptboy got some cool pics in those shadowy areas. It wasn't until we got upstairs that I found my spookometer skyrocketing, but totally in a cool way.
So, we wandered the halls, looking into the small rooms which housed the patients there. This is what the website had to say:
The main hall is lined with rooms, each of them used by a mental patient who also happened to have tuberculosis and consequently had to be isolated from the others. This is why the TB building is located so far away from the rest of the hospital. Early in the twentieth century tuberculosis became such a problem in the United States that special hospitals for its treatment were common.
The room we eventually came to was the most interesting part of the exploration, imo. It was a large room, one we thought was merely a rec room or something.
There wasn't a better pic of the room available for me to use, but as you can see, there were stickers on the doors, the room itself falling apart (look at the ceiling). There were circles still drawn, as if they used to play marbles :::fights urge to make jokes about losing one's marbles:::, and, as is evident in the pic above, a piano, the only one remaining of a proposed three that once graced the TB ward.
The one thing I remember most about the room is the sense of sadness about it. There was no anger or anything hostile-feeling, but such a great sadness. I walked the expanse of the room slowly, as did my two comrades. Eventually I came back around to the piano and had the most intesne urge to play it. Something inside me said I should try to make a song, a lullaby or something. I tried several keys, but none worked. Finally I came to a key...I believe it was a D...that would play a very out-of-tune sound. I hit this key several times before I heardwraptboy yelling for me down the hall - in my focusing on the piano, it turned out my friends had moved along while I tried to play. It also scared the tarnation out of wraptboy, if I recall correctly. *grins*
We all knew when our time was up, and left the building as we'd found it, only plus three pennies now.
I will leave you all with one of the most ironic anf fuzzucked-up peekchurrz on the website. It turns out that, since the days of the TB ward shutting down, the building was temporarily used as a daycare. Here is a pic showing the remnants of those days:
Fun indeed.
*shivers*
For some reason, this pic reminds me of Martha Dumptruck in Heathers...something about the pitiful nature of the pic and the use of the word "FUN," much like Martha's shirt, "BIG FUN."
meh.
I will update more about this place as I am able to. I figure this was a big enough monster for now. Hope everyone enjoyed their li'l history lesson a la Dawndom.~8)
Now, to see if this will actually post for me...~;P
For those who aren't aware, it's the oldest university in OH.
Second, the area called The Ridges, which is only about a ten minute bike-ride from me btw, is home to the old mental hospital and sanitarium/ TB hospital. I came upon this site c/o
bindrune a few months back, and have only recently been able to find it again. Here is some of what it had to say about...At one time there were large public mental institutions serving every part of the state of Ohio. Asylums existed in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo, Akron, and Dayton. Southeastern Ohio's hospital was established in Athens, near the campus of Ohio University. Today the only one of the Ohio mental hospitals which still stands in anything resembling original condition is the Athens Mental Health Center--also known as The Ridges.
This of course leaves out any extra cruelties which might have been given without the justification of therapy. Patients were often restrained and were forced to sleep in group bunks in rooms intended for one person. One nurse was sometimes responsible for as many as fifty patients.
The 1960s brought about a new emphasis on the humanity of mental patients. The lobotomy was condemned as barbaric, and psychotropic drugs such as Thorazine replaced it. Although the heavy drugs administered in hospitals at this time weren't perfect (the "Thorazine shuffle" was a term used to describe the way people move around when they're on it) they were far more humane than electric shock or radical brain surgery, and they led to recovery for a greater number of people. Mental retardation received more specialized care. Drug rehabilitation and geriatrics programs were also added in the 1960s.
Originally monikered the Athens Asylum for the Insane, this massive institution first opened its doors on January 9, 1874. The state and federal government had purchased the more than 1000 acres of land from the Coates family, whose farm had previously occupied the spot, and spent six years building the hospital. Giant asylums in the Kirkbride style were going up all over America at this time because of the number of Civil War veterans suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. If you visit the cemeteries behind the building you will find a large number of the nameless graves marked with metal veterans' plaques from the Civil War.
This is where it starts getting interesting:
The building itself is gigantic. Thomas Story Kirkbride's designs centered around the idea that it was therapeutic for patients to be housed in a facility that resembled a home--a much more humane approach than bleeding, freezing, and kicks to the head, which were thought to be ways to "shock" the illness out of the brain. In a Kirkbride building the less disturbed patients were housed closer to the center, where the administrative offices and employee housing were. This encouraged them to socialize and become more accustomed to human contact. Violent patients were housed at the far end of either of the long wings--farthest away from the center, which was the only part of the building with convenient entry and exit.
The Athens building had 544 patient rooms. When it opened it housed around 200 patients. The more sedate among them participated in recreational activities like boating, painting, dances, and picnics. They were offered church services and plays, and were often free to roam the grounds. Some patients tended the farms and orchards. Nurses trained at the Athens State Hospital School of Nursing inside the hospital and were able to live there while they cared for its other inhabitants. The late nineteenth century was a good time for the mentally ill in America; progressive policies, modeled after European methods, gave people confidence in the way their loved ones were treated in the public asylums.
Umm, ok. let's just go and prove that now, right?
riiight.
Now, don't get me wrong...I guess you could say this is "progress," as, even though the usage of institutions has lessened if not completely depleted in this context, people still drop off their family members and have little to nothing to do with them ever again. It's the side of direct care people don't see, the knowing about histories and why people are the way they are. I really could get on a soap-box about all this, but I'll spare you the blathering and keep on keeping-on with the interesting shtuff.
1. Water Treatment: Patients were submerged in ice-cold water for extended periods of time. Sometimes they were wrapped in sheets which had been soaked in icewater and restrained.
2. Shock Therapy: Electric shocks were administered to patients submerged in water tanks or, more commonly, directly to the temples by the application of brine-soaked electrodes. A patient held a rubber piece in his mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue off during the convulsions which followed a treatment. (See One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for a painful example of electroshock therapy.)
3. Lobotomy (Original): Patients had their skulls opened and their neural passages separated midway through the brain. This difficult and arduous procedure killed many people, but those who survived did in fact forget many of their depressive or psychotic tendencies. They also forgot a lot of other things, like how not to shit down your leg at dinner time, but with such an abundance of patients the only thing most doctors worried about was how to streamline the process. Open-skull brain surgery is a tricky business no matter how you slice it.
4. Lobotomy (Trans-Orbital): Developed by Dr. Walter J. Freeman in the early 1950s, this simpler lobotomy became something of a craze in mental health circles up through the 60s. Dr. Freeman's method involved knocking the patient unconscious with electric shocks, then rolling an eyelid back and inserting a thin metal icepick-like instrument called a leucotome through a tear duct. A mallet was used to tap the instrument the proper depth into the brain. Next it was sawed back and forth to sever the neural receptors. Sometimes this was done in both eyes. There is some evidence that this method actually helped some people with very severe conditions, but much more often the patient had horrible side effects and in many cases ended up nearly catatonic. It also killed a whole bunch of people, too.
*shivers*
The world is so screw-headed sometimes...err, no pun intended! ACK!!!
Speaking of screw-headed, here's some perty skereh shtuffses here tho'...
Back in July, the Inhabitants of Jawndomay all decided to visit the TB ward
after hearing many a wondrous thing about it, hauntings-wise. One thing to keep in mind with the pics I am nabbing from this site is that it so doesn't represent the beauty that is Athens in so many ways, and especially the Ridges. Everything is SOO GREEEN!!! It's beautiful, and the clouds are some of the most fluffy, billowy bastages you'll ever know.
We drove up to the condemned building and parked Fairuza in the back where no one would see us so easily:
See that little window in the corner on the second floor in the second pic? I swear I saw a face in it every time I looked. It was pretty darn spooky.
Anyway...we walked around front, and had a conversation with one of the most adorable li'l bunnies ever! Of course, that was quickly done, since the bunny didn't speak the language of Jawndomay *smirks* and
bindrune's curiosity was nagging at her noodle.There was a stairway leading up the front to our left, but it didn't interest me as much as it did
bindrune. She walked up the stairs, while I walked on and came upon this stairway on the other side...Upon looking up from below, I noticed an opening. Being the fairly superstitious person that I am, I just so happened to have grabbed three pennies from my car before we started our adventure, just as an offering to who/ whatever might be lurking about the building, should we actually get the chance to go inside. Well, here was our chance - a large hole was cut into the fencing/ wire around the one door. I walked to the edge of the stairs and placed my three pennies on the first step, and then we all agreed it was time to explore.
We entered into the room numbered 13 - yes, I am serious.~8) We looked to our left, and then to the right, and all three of us had the very distinct notion that sticking to the left would be wise.
It was mostly visiting/ waiting rooms, nursing stations, and a few tiny rooms. I wasn't moved by much of it, although
wraptboy got some cool pics in those shadowy areas. It wasn't until we got upstairs that I found my spookometer skyrocketing, but totally in a cool way.So, we wandered the halls, looking into the small rooms which housed the patients there. This is what the website had to say:
The room we eventually came to was the most interesting part of the exploration, imo. It was a large room, one we thought was merely a rec room or something.
There wasn't a better pic of the room available for me to use, but as you can see, there were stickers on the doors, the room itself falling apart (look at the ceiling). There were circles still drawn, as if they used to play marbles :::fights urge to make jokes about losing one's marbles:::, and, as is evident in the pic above, a piano, the only one remaining of a proposed three that once graced the TB ward.
The one thing I remember most about the room is the sense of sadness about it. There was no anger or anything hostile-feeling, but such a great sadness. I walked the expanse of the room slowly, as did my two comrades. Eventually I came back around to the piano and had the most intesne urge to play it. Something inside me said I should try to make a song, a lullaby or something. I tried several keys, but none worked. Finally I came to a key...I believe it was a D...that would play a very out-of-tune sound. I hit this key several times before I heard
wraptboy yelling for me down the hall - in my focusing on the piano, it turned out my friends had moved along while I tried to play. It also scared the tarnation out of wraptboy, if I recall correctly. *grins*We all knew when our time was up, and left the building as we'd found it, only plus three pennies now.
I will leave you all with one of the most ironic anf fuzzucked-up peekchurrz on the website. It turns out that, since the days of the TB ward shutting down, the building was temporarily used as a daycare. Here is a pic showing the remnants of those days:
Fun indeed.
*shivers*
For some reason, this pic reminds me of Martha Dumptruck in Heathers...something about the pitiful nature of the pic and the use of the word "FUN," much like Martha's shirt, "BIG FUN."
meh.
I will update more about this place as I am able to. I figure this was a big enough monster for now. Hope everyone enjoyed their li'l history lesson a la Dawndom.~8)
Now, to see if this will actually post for me...~;P
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:35 am (UTC)The coolest thing is, if you're even remotely *aware* of this sort of energy, you'll notice that, at about twenty minutes after you've gotten onto Rt. 33, the air seems to change, like it's charged or something. Southern OH is just really fucking haunted and spooky. And then you add the podunk/ Gummo mentality, and shite gets incredibly freaky - people who spend that much of their lives sheltered away from the city and, for lack of a better term, civilization, are truly some of the wackiest people to run into!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:39 am (UTC)I say it so much...don't worry!
I just hope that *YOU* don't think less of me for my constant usage of the word. heh ~;)
no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:39 am (UTC)Hopefully
Just one more reason to come down...I seriously only live about a ten minute bike-ride from there. I'd gladly go through it again with someone! It was spooky as hell, but really fun!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:42 am (UTC)Makes me wish I'd been brave enough to visit the other side of the building. Then again, all three of us got this very strong sensation to not go to the other side (we only stuck to the eastern-most part of the building), so, who knows?
That'd be rad...staying overnight in a place like that...wow.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
When ya comin' out???
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 11:40 pm (UTC)Fantastic post - thanks for reminding me that I'm kinda into that stuffs!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:44 am (UTC)Things that make ya go, "Hmmm..."~;)
My pleasure! Hopefully I will get the chance to post something new and fascinating/ spooky at least once a week while I am here. I figure it'll be fun, what with Halloween on the way and shtuff!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 04:43 am (UTC)especially the part about lobotomies.
my eyes and skull actually HURT while reading it.
i hope i never have to get one of those :(
no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:45 am (UTC)Well, they're not so common these days, so I dobt you have much to worry about!~;)
Then again, there was this one guy that
no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 08:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:14 pm (UTC)~8D
DOOOOD!!!
Date: 2004-09-12 11:59 am (UTC)that was a very creepy post. i like it alot. i used to spend 90% of my time on http://deadohio.com looking up "haunted" places.
a few friends and i would go and visit places around ohio in the middle of the night just for a good scare and some laughs. saw some messed up stuff a couple of times. we never brought cameras though since we were "trespassing".
but yeah, YOU RAWK!!!
Re: DOOOOD!!!
Date: 2004-09-12 07:18 pm (UTC)I would sleep overnight in there though, with the right people and when the timing felt right and OK to do so.
I can, thankfully, say that I haven't had too many fucked-up experiences exploring. I have seen my share of weird shite, for sure, but nothing that I didn't get over in a day or so.
I'm pretty grounded, when it comes down to it. If I get scared or weirded out, I ask the spirits politely to leave me alone. If that doesn't work, it's all about those spiritual blockades.
I'm tellin' ya...this place is too cool for words!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-12 07:19 pm (UTC)Keep your eyes peeled for more in the weeks to come. There is a ton of history and spooky-shtuff 'round here!
No Way
Date: 2004-09-12 05:39 pm (UTC)Re: No Way
Date: 2004-09-12 07:20 pm (UTC)I think between the two of us we could spread enough joy to create a spiritual carnival for the sad ghosties that wander those halls...seriously.
~;)