Session 9, Danver's State Hospital

by **Ted the dog** » Tue May 02, 2006 9:58 pm

I just rented the movie Session 9 today after not having seen it in a few years. I had forgotten that the hospital is (or was) a real place. I did a google search and found this site: <a href="http://ramseursdanversstatehosp.com/">ramseursdanversstatehosp.com/</a> From the artist/author of the site: For the past fourteen years I have been obsessed with an abandoned lunatic hospital perched on a hill north of Danvers, Massachusetts, on New England Interstate 95. From the highway, automobile occupants can look up at the foreboding tree-shrouded silhouette of Danvers State, one of the most mysterious landmarks in our region. I first saw it from a moving vehicle sixteen years ago. The sight of this strange pointed beast of a structure rising before me as I sped past raised many only partly articulated questions: Is that really an asylum? Do inmates still live there? How old is that place? Who built it? I believe many have asked similar questions as they passed the former Danvers State Hospital. I have learned that it was standard practice for parents to threaten disobedient children with a corrective trip up the hill to "The Witches' Castle." For understandable reasons, this threat tended to produce the desired result with children. The connection between Danvers and witches--while at first appearing to be misleading--does in fact have some basis to it. As a result of diligent research by local historians who have visited this site, I have been illuminated by the following information. The witch trials did not occur in Salem, but in Salem Village, or present-day Danvers. The Salem witch hysteria and trial began at a church on Centre Street before the trial moved to a larger building in Salem. The mother of one of the young accusers lived on what is now hospital grounds. More significantly, the most fanatical judge of the witch trials, Johnathan Hathorne, lived in a house built by his father in 1646 at the top of the hill--in the exact location on which the hospital was later constructed. As one person stated: "The witch hysteria occured in Danvers, not in Salem..so the Witches Castle reference is eerily accurate." It is not coincidental that, by at least one report, Danvers provided the inspiration for writer H. P. Lovecraft's fictional Arkham Sanitarium (Morales, Historic Asylums of America Web site). Being a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, I searched for the Arkham Sanitarium in his writing but was unable to find it. However, with the invaluable assistance from Lovecraft scholar, Donovan K. Loucks, I have learned of two references by Lovecraft to Arkham Sanitarium, both found in the story, "The Thing on the Doorstep: "At first I shall be called a madman--madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium," and "The spasms that resulted from the first questions were violent and pitiable--and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium" (Lovecraft 1982, 225 and 241). I also found references to Arkham, which resembles the Danvers-Salem area of Massachusetts. In his tale, "The Silver Key," Lovecraft wrote: "Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs . . ." (Lovecraft 1982, 62). In "The Haunter of the Dark," Lovecraft described a scene that has presented itself many times as I have driven by Danvers: "On the far horizon were the open countryside's purple slopes. Against these . . . rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish as in a dream. . . . Now and then he would train his field-glasses on that spectral unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house" (Lovecraft 1982, 208-209). Lovecraft also referred to the asylum on the hill directly by name. In his story, "Pickman's Model," he wrote, "Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum." In "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," he scribed, "I've heard personally of more'n one business or government man that's disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now" (Lovecraft 1982, 250). I first encountered Danvers State Hospital on a hot and sultry evening in the summer of 1986. As a part of my job as residential counselor in a Haverhill, Massachusetts, group home, I was driving a van, returning a resident who had been out on a pass. The sun had not yet set, and the main hospital building, which had been shut down for four years, cast its dark shadow across the curving brick driveways and the burned-grass campus. While another staff person brought the client into a relatively new building that now served as the state hospital, I sat in the van staring at "the Castle," a massive red and maroon presence in the fading light, the blue sockets of its turret windows catching a flicker of reflected sun. Gothic arches were etched repeatedly, and in retrospect, it seems compulsively, into the warp and woof of the building's design. I could imagine a sound--a bizarre musical tone--emanating from the strange nineteenth-century asylum. It created a sensation of displaced time. I was witness to an atavistic form existing within my own era; I was being presented with an ancient mystery. As I sat transfixed by the strange scene before me, a man's head suddenly appeared in the car's passenger window. His face was taut with anxiety, his voice beseeching as he asked, "I'm not going to die, am I?" He repeated the question several times, his visage contorted with despair and what I would characterize as an existential angst--although this could well have been my own anxiety projected onto him. "I'm not going to die, am I?" was the crucial question. . Thirteen years after that patient asked the question, it still resonates, reverberates. I lied to him of course, telling him no, he wasn't going to die, and apparently that was good enough for him, because he then wandered off. But his question haunts me now more than ever.

Session 9, Danver's State Hospital

Session 9, Danver's State Hospital

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