This is the last time I ever let someone convince me that I'm mistaken what I say bugs like my blood better than most people. Anyway, we had quite a little hike to get where we were going. Here's where we started, and a friend we made along the way.
When we finally reached the campus, we were greeted with razor wire.
Once upon a time, if you couldn't care for a mentally ill person, you could dump them at a state-run asylum like this one. There they would ostensibly get the food, shelter, and care that they needed to survive, but sometimes they also got abuse of every sort from staff that were undersupervised and undertrained. Naturally, these places needed more money, and better people to manage its spending. Thanks to Reaganomics, they got the opposite.
Because of the drastic budget cuts put in place by the Reagan administration, abuse and neglect went from being occasional problems brought about by bad actors to systemic realities brought about by the institutions themselves not being able afford to hire adequate staff. Naturally, this was used as an excuse to shutter the institutions entirely.
As a result of every government run asylum in America getting shut down in the 80s, the country is dotted with abandoned campuses just like this one. And as for the patients that lived in these places, well, after the asylums closed down, suddenly there were homeless people everywhere.
THE BATH
sorry i had to
Nice little Silence of the Lambs quote:
Contemporary articles on the horrible mistreatment that took place in this facility's waning days mention this room, where diapered invalids were left to lay in their own filth for hours and hours at a time because staff was spread too thin to properly care for anyone.
Flickr Album And that's where my spare camera battery ran out. We explored less than half of the campus on this day, and we ran into 3 other urbex groups while we were out and about. I'll add this to the growing list of places I might have to return to in the future. With bug spray. Lots of bug spray. And more batteries. And a dust mask.