My family has alot of history with Taunton insane asylums. My mothers cousin (Ted Strony) was the former mayor of Taunton, one uncle used to own the airport (the Kings), her aunt worked at Devers in the cafeteria building and her father built one of the buildings (nurses dorms?) there as well.

My mother used to work at this place when she was in nursing school for six months (the early 70's I think). She said that there were shackles built into the walls of the basement/tunnels that they used to (on occasion) chain the patients up to when transporting them. She claimed there was an electric shock room off of a tunnel or a room in the basment but I forget exactly where and have never seen it.
Her first day there she moved into some dormatory for the nurses and was almost immediatly met by some insane man (who came to her window if I recall corectly) with a maxi-pad covered in ketchup on his forhead, making it look like he was hurt. The whole staff knew the guy, as he liked to scare the new nurses. After a few months there, she was in one of the dayrooms, standing with a fellow nursing student when a random patient walked up and knocked out the other nurse. Apparently she was left with a nasty black eye. She also told me a few stories about some of the orderlies taking advantage of this one permiscuos (and very young) patient.

I just thought someone might find all that interesting