Quote from Angela on April 3, 2021, 12:45 pm

This location was the inspiration for Batmans Arkham Asylum and now serves as a condominium complex.

However, the original Danvers State Hospital in Hawthorne Hill Massachusetts, also originally known as the State Lunatic Asylum, is known as one the most notorious institutions in American history.

It first opened its doors in 1878 and is known for its truly horrific reputation. Originally built by Boston architect Nathaniel Bradlee who specialised in gothic victorian construction and created this sites birds eye view to appear as a 'bat flying through the sky'. The hospital consisted of multiple sections with an integrated underground tunnel system. 

This asylum was the setting for the 2001 horror film 'Session 9' and was featured in the 1958 film 'Home Before Dark'. In the game 'Painkiller', the level called 'Asylum' is based on the hospitals actual administration wing.

Initially intended to treat a maximum of 500 patients, yet by the early 1900s this has spilled over to 2360 being administered treatment here. Procedures included agonising and often fatal lobotomies, electric shock therapy, water submersion and other despicable methods. Patients would walk the corridors naked frantically looking for a way out, they would be restrained and put in rooms to look at walls, and if they weren't mentally insane already, they would arrive there soon. Most disturbing of all is that there were children also treated here.

Known as the 'birthplace of the lobotomy' when in 1939 the hospital introduced the procedure as a 'psychosurgery cure for insanity'. Individuals were literally left brain dead after this procedure, walking zombies. In just one year alone a total of 278 patients died here. What was intended to be a place of dignified residential care evolved into the real stuff of nightmares. 

Rumours began to spread about the hospital being fraught with allegations of abuse and neglect. Authorities submitted appropriate lawsuits and eventually the hospital was closed down in 1992. Much of the building was demolished, yet sections of it were refurbished and converted into modern day community residential apartments.  

There is a cemetery just behind the site which houses thousands of victims of neglect. Many believe these spirits are, and always will, supernaturally claim these grounds. 

Would you live here?  Or would you rather not compete with the supernatural realm?