ASYLUMS
Rocklands Psychiatric Centre-Childrens Block
This is the kids block of this gargantuan site.
It got to the stage where I couldn’t face any more rooms rammed full of surreal toys (note the weird pumpkin stack toy – that was freaky) and sinister decay. It went on for ages and simply had room after room of treats. As the sun was starting to set we went down into the basement via stairway right next to the entry point. There was a huge room full of antique rotting chairs and an old fashion sign marking ‘main tunnel’ we shone our torch down the way and couldn’t see the end. It would take a week to even give a cursory superficial sweep of this place. It just confirmed to me that the USA is an exploring heaven.
I don’t think I will ever need to see an abandoned nursery/school/kids psychi unit ever again as this completely over did that whole thing-complete saturation. I don’t think you will either, after scrolling through my pictures!
Springfield Asylum
This was a long time in the coming for me. I have been eyeballing it for several years and never really been able to crack it although attempts have all been half-hearted. Main issue is that most of the hospital remains active.
This was described to me as “a little bit pigeony” - an understatement of grand proportions - I chuckled at this comment every time I stepped on another carcass.
Was quite an interesting access in the end having to traverse most of the scaffolding.
It's been a while since I have seen anything like this and was very enjoyable pretty much a decade since starting this crazy hobby with a trip to West Park Hospital. I finally feel relieved, like a massive itch has been scratched,
Main Highlights-
1 Ward of Beds
2 Super peely paint in parts
3 Hall
4 Bizarre pictures to please the patients
5 Fire damaged areas
6 Lots of dead birds
Hellingly Asylum
This one was pretty destroyed by the time I got there.
I was obsessed with this room with the bathtub.
The undulating multicoloured floor tiles were spectacular and the one peely blue door into the room was beautiful.
This place housed 10,000 inmates at its best. A fully working.self sustaining village for the outcasts and unwanted.
Rocklands Psychiatric Centre-Adult Block
Yes, another NY Mental Institution. Very edgy explore. Amazing things to see.
Huge site in which a) I saw only a small segment b) got completely lost several times.
Found the utility area between 4 wings of wards that contained the pen construction area. Also lots of copies of the BFG (required inmate reading or another quality product?)
Not very happy with shots – no tripod – generally a bad idea in the USofA it seems.
Despite many hours there, we barely scratched the surface. I think we probably just looked at 20% of the ward space and didn’t touch all the servicy bits such as hall/power plant etc.
Note the anti-suicide stair cages.
It has the usual dodgy documented history-
click here to read more
The Asylum Of Casual Electroconvulsive Therapy
Closed down after being found to have a too flippant approach to ECT. It was dingy, dark, grey, and simply beautiful.
Letchworth Imbecile Colony
Another dark American treat. This place housed people with various physical and mental disabilites. The stuff lying around was ridiculous. I always love a bit of fire damage, and there was plenty here. It is also nice to find some photos of the flames in action. The place has the usual dark history of abuse and chaos. There is so much unfinished business for me here-it got dark and so I couldnt visit all f the buildings, and my photos were terrible this time. I’ll be back looking for the mortuary and unnamed graveyard.
Harpersbury Asylum
North London mental hospital.
One of the last remaining padded cells, this one a lurid green.
It was sweaty and moist, hidden in the darkness and so looked pretty striking in the torch light. Spent a few moment alone in there in the silence and dark imagining the things that had happened there in the past.
Pilgrim Psychiatric Hospital-Water Tower&Power Station – New York
Incredible buildings supporting this huge asylum that once housed approximately 10,000 inmates. Not my best photos because I was without tripod and was slightly on edge, given being spotted here =bullet in back or prison and people tend to carry knives in these places over here. You just can’t appreciate the scale of these monsters in these photos. Bit gutted the innards had been stripped from the water tower as I was excited for a pigeon infested climb up.
West Park Mental Hospital Pt I
The best UK Asylum that was open to visitors in the last decade. I spent 3 whole days here frantically trying to cover it all but still didn’t manage to see it all.
Really nice retro padded cell in this one.
As far as I know, there have been only 3 remaining derelict padded cells in existence in the UK since I started exploring this kind of site. Two I have visited and have since been torn down, One remains in-situ and I have not managed to get in yet.These little rooms are interesting to visit, and it makes you wonder what has happened in them. One of these cells was of the old fashioned horse-hair Pocock variety in West Park Asylum and the other was a more modern affair in the Harperbury Asylum.
West Park Mental Hospital Pt II
Part 2 of this incredible site
Here we visit the kitchen, the canteen, the dentist, the art therapy ward and various other delights.
Lots of burnt out areas here which I personally like. Love how the products of combustion - water and carbon create eerie streaks on the walls coming down from the ceilings.
The Asylum Of Corridors
Didn’t get to see all of this asylum, one of the largest in the country. Was rudely interrupted by Mr Security who had been stalking us ever since we got over the palisade fence grrrrr. Not much left in the way of objet d’Art but lots of incredible endless corridors and a good smattering of peeling paint to fulfill my needs.
Would have loved to climb up the tower for a birdseye view pf the place but alas I was caught with red hand before this.
Voghera Asylum, Italy
Like many of the asylums in Italy, the Manicomio of Voghera has an awful history of hardship amongst its patients. The ‘inmates’ were in the asylum to be hidden away from society, considered an object of shame.
Built in a neoclassical style in 1876, featuring impressive Italian gardens around the exterior. Nicknamed the Painful City, the hospital was a huge complex who’s patients were rarely released back into society. This was in no small part due to the ruthless treatment bestowed by the founder, Cesare Lombroso, an alienist (psychiatrist) who rejected most classical trains of thought on psychology.
With no real external governance, the patients became lab rats for Lombroso’s experiments, suffering all kinds of abuse. Many died from the experiments or the hardships of asylum life.
Upon arrival, new patients were immediately deprived of all their possessions and were placed in observation for a period of 28 days. After that time, a doctor made a decision as to which area of segregation they would be placed, dependant on their mental disorder – the “quiet”, the “almost quiet”, the “dirty and lame”, the “agitated” or the “sick and weak”. As for the treatment, until the early 1950s, the only methods of “care” were diabetic coma, electroshock and lobotomy. Generally, symptoms only worsened over time, recoveries were rare.
The patients were free to socialise with each other in common areas, until the moment they show excessively violent attitudes or pose a danger to any of the hospital’s 300 staff members. Such cases were locked away in a circular area of cells knows as the rotunda. The circular cells arranged around a semi-circular corridor had no corners and the beds were fastened to the ground.
Initially the hospital was split between into two, with half for male patients and the other for females. During the second half of the twentieth century, the distinction between sexes was removed. This led to the emergence of relationships between patients, including that of Luigina and Mario, who shared the same room. By the 1970s the treatment of patients was reformed. The asylum was eventually closed in 1998.
Childrens Ward On The Asylum
The UKs answer to the Rockland
This was a solo explore, and the peeling kids toys and jolly murals were very creepy.
This was my last trip to this amazing village of decay and within the next few months the bulldozers had moved in and flattened the place.
WP Asylum Mortuary & Path Lab
Whats not to like?
1950s Brain blocks from the patients of the asylum
Body fridges
Mummified Rats
1950’s lab furniture.
This was one of those small but perfectly formed places that kept me happy on a few visits.
Just loved how this sat rotting, with its contents, on the edge of the swanky new housing estate.
Jungle Asylum, Italy
This old favourite sits within a high wall surrounding a very overgrown mini town of rotten buildings once supporting and containing many patients.
Highlights included the patient theatre, grey dark seclusion cells and a random body trolley in the corridor.
Built in the 1930s, Vercelli Lunatic Asylum was closed in 1978 after the Basaglia Law –the one that abolished mental hospitals in Italy. Of its 21 buildings, scattered over an area of 25,000 sqm, only one is still in use and it hosts the office of the environmental association ARPA, while the local health authority, which officially still manages the complex, left the area during the 1990s. This place is well known for the massacre of a group of fascist soldiers that happened in 1945 as retaliation by partisans.
Asylum Mala Valera - Italy
Another Italian House for the insane.
This one was hot and sticky.
A few interesting relics left around.
Xray department, dentist and mortuary were all well worth the visit despite the whole place falling apart under foot.
Manicomio di Racconigi is an abandoned asylum in Italy. Built in 1871 the hospital was a transformation of other buildings that were originally a hospital of charitable institutions, and later a military college. The hospital was used to treat the mentally ill, and electroshock therapy was used extensively here, along with experimental operations on the nervous system. Facilities included a laboratory of clinical research, one of pathology, one radiology, one of electrotherapy and an operating room for intervention to the nervous system.
The asylum closed down in the early 1980s and has been abandoned ever since.
Talgarth Asylum
The welsh can do it as well
This tumble down asylum was a maze of tunnels and corridors. It is one of the last remaining UK standing (just about) at the time of writing.
The main hall was very interesting with half decayed and the other half in good condition.
New York Farm Colony- Abuse of the paupers and home to the killer ‘Cropsey’
Abandoned for over 40 years, the Staten Island Farm Colony today is a creepy memento of its dark and troubled past. Situated in the center of Greenbelt’s lush forest, the Farm Colony’s decrepit structures are enveloped in trees and vines, and are only visible from November-May.
Throughout its history, the grounds of the Farm Colony were often associated with society’s ‘unwanted’. The colonial farm era in the 19th century witnessed a bout of construction developments catered to housing the poor, infirm, mentally ill and developmentally disabled. Initially, the Farm Colony housed a collective of farmhouses that rehabilitated New York City’s ageing poor, until they were replaced by the dormitory structures we see today. Not only where these facilities overcrowded, the employees and staff that worked on the Farm Colony were habitually intoxicated; which means not much work was getting done. Defamatory graffiti scrawled on walls, collapsed ceilings and strewn rubble.
A 1920s abduction and murder of a seven-year-old boy occurred on the Farm Colony’s grounds. The Farm Colony community claimed they saw an old man and young boy walking in the woods on the day the child went missing, and fingers pointed to legendary serial killer Cropsey as the one to blame. Another incident at the nearby Willowbrook State School fueled the area’s murderous tendencies. Andre Rand, a man who allegedly lived in the tunnels underneath the abandoned site, was responsible for a string of child murders during the 70’s and 80’s. In 1987 the body of Jennifer Shwweiger was found not far from where he set up camp.