Asylums and institutions have long been a source of fear and curiosity. Asylums, along with other institutions such as soldiers’ homes and prisons, were common tourist attractions in the 19th century, mostly for their beautiful grounds and architecture but also for able-bodied visitors to catch a glimpse of the patients. More recently, asylums entered into pop culture as a setting for scary movies and television shows, including the successful American Horror Story: Asylum. A new development includes using the asylum as a form of haunted house attraction during the Halloween season. Buffalo’s own Fright World features an “Eerie State Asylum” attraction this year, which challenges guests to “escape from the lunatics” and survive the attack of “demented doctors and patients.”
A particularly controversial haunted house, Pennhurst Asylum, opened in 2010, when Philadelphia’s Pennhurst Hospital — formerly the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic — was purchased by real estate developer Richard Chakejian. Pennhurst had a checkered past. In its early years, the institution was a part of the effort to segregate developmentally disabled people and prevent them from reproducing, particularly “feeble-minded” women and girls, who they believed were “more of a menace to society than a feeble-minded boy” because they were capable of having numerous “defective” children. In 1968, a local NBC station ran an exposé series entitled “Suffer the Little Children,” which sought to make public the maltreatment at the hospital. Bill Baldini, creator of the series, discovered that the institutionalized children were being neglected and received little to no treatment or support, but were rather housed and restrained — worse, Baldini argued, than animals in a zoo. (As of 2012, the operators of the Pennhurst Asylum Haunted House were playing Baldini’s exposé for visitors while they waited in line for tours, along with a fictional movie that told an alternate history of the institution.1)
In 1974, a landmark law suit was filed against the institution’s administration, in which U.S. District Court Judge Raymond J. Broderick ruled that Pennhurst was overcrowded and poorly staffed, that patients were neglected and illegally controlled with mechanical and chemical restraints, and that institution staff violated patients’ Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth amendment rights. The hospital administration continually appealed the decision until its closure in 1987. Now, this institution, known for its inexcusable treatment of developmentally disabled children, operates as Pennhurst Asylum, a haunted house open Thursdays through Sundays in the fall, scaring visitors with the specter of the institutionalized and mental ill.