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Genevieve Manion
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I'm your host Genevieve Manion, and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me there's just something especially intriguing, creepy, and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century. So listener discretion is advised. Hello friends and welcome to this, my 28th episode. I hope that you had a wonderful week. Mine was a little wild. First of all, hello to all of my new Apple Podcast listeners. Out of nowhere, eliciting listener brought to my attention that I was number 12 in Apple Podcasts Top Podcasts. Like I was ahead of Jon Stewart Show. It was crazy. I looked at my analytics and it was like an explosion, which was really nice. I mean it didn't last though. I was only there for like two days. Then I got sandwiched between Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens and I got very uncomfortable in there. There must be a conservative slant to Apple podcast listenership, I think. I apparently made some people very angry after being feature. One guy who once starred my show said I shouldn't piss off 75 million voters, which I am flattered that he believed my listenership was that high. I also got called a shrieking blue hair type, which yes, I did have blue hair once. I was 16. But like shrieking? Not so much. I have smoked far too many clove cigarettes to shriek without coughing even if I wanted to. But I also got some really, really lovely comments and ratings from some very sweet people there too. So thank you for those. If you kind folks would rate the podcast on that platform, if you haven't already, it would mean a lot to me. Especially now. Okay, today for you, dear listener, I have some truly awful things that I cannot wait to tell you. On today's episode, we are taking a trip to the Victorian lunatic asylum. My main, main references were a science museum.org article, an Atlantic article, and an article from cpp-college.netlify written by Isabel Dubois. All of my other references can be found in the show notes. One billion years ago in the 90s, when a young goth Genevieve was starting to study film. Because obviously that's just what goth girls did back then. I wonder if they still do that. With a clove cigarette hanging out of her mouth, she gathered all of her courage and her crappy little Super 8 camera and made a trip with friends to the abandoned Overbrook Asylum in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. I read about it in a zine called Weird New Jersey, which was awesome. And literally every single one of my nightmares takes place in this place to this day. It was built in 1896 as Newark Hospital was becoming overcrowded. Like many asylums in the country at that time time, this one was built to take in patients from that hospital. But by 1917, the hospital was becoming overcrowded itself. And one winter, the heating boilers failed during freezing cold weather, which resulted in the deaths of 24 patients who froze to death in their beds. It became less and less operational over the years, but still housed patients until the 70s. In the 70s, though, patient escapes were very common. There were over 150 incidents of escaped patients. One wandered off, broke into a nearby home with a hammer, took a carving knife and tried to abduct a woman while stealing her car. When I got there, what really, really freaked me out straight away was all of the windows were broken because all of the beds and furniture had been thrown out of them and were in mangled, rusting piles on the ground outside. It was so creepy. It just like sent chills down my spine. It was easy to break into. There was just like a single rusty chain on the door that had already been broken by other bad children like me. And when we made our way in, my chest, it just felt like it collapsed. There was a bad, bad energy in that place. There were still filing cabinets full of files from the 1970s patients AWOL papers that I remember with details about when the patients escaped and were recaptured. It made me so sad that those weren't destroyed when the place was closed. Another really terrifying thing was that there was basically just a massive labyrinth of tunnels beneath it and I wasn't actually brave enough to go inside. But my much braver friends went down into one of them and one of them just kicked through one of the walls into another tunnel and found rooms still filled with examination tables and medical equipment from like the 40s or 50s, just all rotting and decaying. Sadly, very sadly. I don't still have that footage that I took of that place. But you can find plenty of pictures on the good old Internet and I'll put a few on the Instagram too. So that's my own personal experience with breaking into an asylum. But let's talk a little bit about the history of the lunatic asylum of the 19th century. What they were like, how they changed over time, and why they are considered to be some of the most horrifying places to ever have existed in human history. When I think of these Victorian equivalents of today's psychiatric hospitals, certain Hollywood representations come to mind. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, for example, my very favorite movie, an insect eating Tumwaites is restrained in a straight jacket and tied to bars. He has devices locked on his hands to prevent him from scratching, and he's held in a small dark cell where he and other inmates are blasted with water to contain or control them. Incidentally, Bedlam, where that scene takes place, is one of the very oldest mental institutions in the world. The institution first began operations in 1247. This assigned asylum was so notorious for mayhem that the name of the asylum, Bedlam, has come to mean insanity itself. As in a sentence like it was absolute bedlam in the courtroom or attempting to put my cat in a carrier is pure bedlam. Originally though, this institution wasn't meant to have anything to do with offering mental health care or anything like was created for the purpose of collecting alms to support the Crusades and link England to the Holy Land. It's actually unclear exactly when this asylum began operating as an institution to house the mentally ill, but it's believed that this was around 1400. Another example of a Hollywood depiction of an insane asylum that you may be familiar with is in the film Amadeus. Antonio Salieri has a very comfortable private room in a lunatic asylum. In the film, a priest comes to visit him after he slits his own throat and was committed. And the priest is greeted at the door by naked men being beaten with whips, men in Napoleon style hats bowing to him, men with chains around their necks locking them to the walls. He's ushered past these men to a special area where the no doubt wealthy unwell are granted private rooms. And one more example, the film Stonehearst Asylum depicts A Victorian era asylum where the mentally ill lock up the doctors and take over the building. This was actually loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's the system of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fetter. We see electroshock devices and other torturous means of therapy of the age that patients use on the doctors. Interesting note, electroshock therapy wasn't used in asylums until the 1930s. So when you see that in older depictions of asylums, it is not accurate. Virtually every depiction of an asylum of this era is horrific. They show the inhumane treatment of patients, the sadistic nature of doctors, nurses, orderlies. Essentially these places are painted as living hells on earth. So you may be surprised to know that in the Beginning of the 1800s, these places were not at all like any of these examples. In the beginning of the century, the first large asylums for the mentally ill were created to offer much more humane, caring and compassionate care than was ever offered to these people in the past. Pre1800- mentally ill people were treated much more like animals than human beings in charity run institutions. Before these institutions existed, it was the obligation of families of the mentally ill or disabled to care for for them. Those who did not have willing or able families often ended up destitute, as beggars, or they were simply left to perish. By the 1700s, there were more established institutions for the mentally ill and disabled. But these were mostly private institutions where only the very wealthy would be able to afford sending their again, quote, unquote, unwell family members to discreetly lock them away. This also happened in the 1800s, of course, and 1900s, with a famous example of the Roya family sending away two first cousins of Queen Elizabeth to an asylum because they had learning disabilities. The poor disabled or mentally ill in the 1700s still had to rely on religious institutions that were funded only by charity. But many ended up in workhouses or prisons. Just in case you're unfamiliar with what a workhouse was exactly, a workhouse in the 171800s was an institution that provided food and shelter to the poor in exchange for dangerous or grueling labor, like breaking stones and crushing bones to produce fertilizer, chopping wood, washing laundry with lye that would make you go blind eventually. Essentially a nightmare by design, its awfulness was intended to keep most people in need out and meant to be used as an utter last resort for a poor person. The charitable institutions for mentally ill people in the 1700s were truly horrible. They were often overcrowded, unclean and horrifyingly inhumane. Common treatments Were harsh and included physical restraints like straitjackets, isolation and cold water immersion. This is where a patient is dunked in freezing ice water without warning or sprayed with it, like in that scene in Dracula. They would also endure bleeding treatments to remove the bad blood believed to be infecting the brain. These were dungeon like places that were cold and dark and intended not for offering any kind of health care as much as confining the mentally ill like inmates in a prison for the purpose of locking them away from society and keeping them in line once they were there for a very long time. And frankly, still, in some instances, mental illness was considered either a moral failing or even a demonic possession, not something that could be cured. And the treatment of these people was cruel on purpose, a punishment for their evil. I find an interesting more modern parallel in the resistance of many in law enforcement in the 70s to the concept that some killers were beginning to be scientifically psychologically profiled. It wasn't just evil insanity that made Manson do what he did, for example, There might be something else going on. If it's a mental illness or personality disorder and not just evil, you can't feel as good about locking them away forever or using cruel and unusual punishment punishment or giving them the death penalty. These new rigorously studied mental health diagnoses seemed like an excuse for people like Manson to many people. So it actually took considerable work to convince both law enforcement and the public that a mental health diagnosis wasn't like an absolution of a person's crimes. But it also wasn't just evil insanity that made these men do what they did in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Oh God, in the 90s. I think Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hard Stark on my favorite murder put it perfectly when they said the 80s just needs to go to jail. Just throw the whole decade in jail. So it makes sense why for such a long time mentally ill and disabled people were treated, and in many ways still are treated with so much violence and incorporated inhumanity. Their disorders were just considered to be their fault. In the very late 1700s though, due to the horrifying inhumanity experienced by mentally ill people in charity run institutions, the moral management movement began in France and spread to the rest of Europe. This was a movement to create a system for the mentally ill predicated on compassion and the very beginning of the concept that many of these so called insane people were mentally ill. That phrase wasn't used. But in other words, the idea that some folks could actually be cured of their mental afflictions if Provided compassionate care was just kind of beginning to blossom. A social campaigner in the early 1800s, her name was Harriet Martineau said of the pauper asylums. We see changes and strait waistcoats. Three or four half naked creatures thrust into a chamber filled with straw to exasperate each other with the clamor and attempts at violence or else gibbering in idleness or moping in solitude. She and many critics of the time said specifically that the use of restraints demoralized and brutalized not only the patients, but but the orderlies who would often be attacked while trying to force a patient into one, only causing more dysregulation in the patient and fear for all. Patients would often be strapped to their beds at night to keep them from wandering. And in 1829, a man named William Scrivenger was found strangled to death by his own restraints at Lincoln Asylum. This incident persuaded authorities to abolish restraints altogether at Lincoln. And this started a movement to eliminate them from all asylums. Events like this one initiated a flurry of legislation regarding the operations of asylums. It was no longer acceptable to keep mentally ill people in workhouses or prisons. So state run asylums were founded rather than just the private institutions for the wealthy or charity funded institutions. And there was an unprecedented program of founding asylums on the latest scientific and medical knowledge of mental illness. A man named William Tuke, who founded a private mental institution in the late 1700s, called his asylum a retreat. He developed moral treatment techniques with a non restraint policy. He believed that the mentally ill benefited by being treated like ordinary people. They ate meals at tables, they were offered tea and encouraged to make conversations with attendants and do chores that benefited the institution, like cleaning or doing laundry. The role of the psychiatrist, otherwise known as the alienist, was developed in this time and their role was to encourage rational behavior. They provided simple rewards to patients for good or healthy behavior, enforced rules of the institution and used restraints only if necessary to protect the safety of the patient or others. His system, unlike systems of the past, separated patients by conditions rather than just putting everyone into one single space. Like placing people who had down syndrome with psychotics or people with epilepsy, for example. This man kept folks separate by their severity of their conditions and specific conditions which made caring for these folks much more streamlined and orderly. Another lovely sounding institution from the 1830s, the Hanwell Mental Asylum, implemented similar methods of William Tuke's asylum, but included more work based therapy, not for profit, but to keep patients engaged in working with others and developing senses of Pride. There was a farm on the grounds, a bakery, a brewery and other cottage industries that made the asylum as self sufficient as possible. When Harriet Martineau visited Hanwell, she described it as such. Quote, in the bakehouse are a company of patients kneading their dough, and in the wash house and laundry, many more equally busy, who would be tearing their clothes to pieces if there was not the mangle to be turned. End quote. Patients were often offered plays, concerts and parties as required rewards for good behavior, and also simply to make the environment more welcoming and nice. So why is it that we have such terrifying, horrifying and inhumane depictions of these Victorian asylums in our popular culture? Well, this very progressive and compassionate care didn't last long. So after the break, I will discuss exactly what the decline of the lunatic asylum in the Victorian era was like. As mentioned, by 1850, the compassionate Victorian asylum was in serious decline with rapid population growth in England, especially between the early to mid-1800s and the general instability caused by plagues and diseases like tuberculosis, cholera, syphilis, which attacks the brain. These institutions were quickly becoming overcrowded and attendants quickly becoming overwhelmed. So the restraints returned, padded cells were used for isolation, and sedatives were increasingly being used to keep patients quiet and manageable. By the end of the century, the optimism surrounding the lunatic asylum had entirely diminished. And Hanwell, that lovely place that I mentioned by 1893, was described by an inspector as gloomy, with an absence of decoration, brightness and general smartness. With a want of sufficient ventilation, it would be astonishing to find that any cures are ever made there at all. End quote. And it is here, friends, that this episode is about to take a deeply upsetting and dark downward turn. Don't worry, I will pick it back up at the end. But I will talk briefly about what patients in this time period in both Europe and the United States were forced to endure. These are just a few of the quote unquote treatments that were popular in mental institutions in the mid to late 1800s. As mentioned, in pre 1800s institutions, it was often believed that causes for mental illness were an evil spirit or immorality. And this belief made a comeback in the 1850s after years of progress. Patients were subjected not just to physical abuse as punishment for their evilness, but quote, unquote, talk therapy, where they would be forced to engage in conversations about their immorality to overwhelm them with feelings of shame and guilt, much like gay conversions therapy still disgustingly practiced today. Another little known treatment, and this is fascinating, I never heard this before an Australian psychiatrist named Julius Wagner Jaurig began introducing fevers to cure people of symptoms of certain conditions. He started by injecting syphilis patients with malaria infected blood, which would cause extremely high fevers. And it actually worked to kill the syphilis bacteria in some people. Then medications would be provided to treat the malaria. This actually was the syphilis treatment until the introduction of penicillin. He actually won the Nobel Prize for this. But he wanted to test a theory that you could infect a person with schizophrenia with malaria to boil the disorder out of them with fever. But not only did this obviously not work, 15% of the patients died of malaria. Because the medications intended to treat the malaria didn't work, there was hydrotherapy. Again, this would be dunking people in frozen baths, sometimes for hours at a time. Some would be mummified in wrappings and soaked with cold water or sprayed with cold water. The purpose of this being to subdue the person having a manic episode. This therapy lasted well into the 1900s. Marilyn Monroe was subjected to this abuse while having a mental health crisis. In the 50s, restraints came back with a vengeance. Straight jackets, manacles, waistcoats and leather handcuffs were often used to prevent patients from moving, but also to keep them tethered to the walls or chairs for hours on end. There was something called the cock swing, a rotating chair suspended to the ceiling that a patient would be strapped to and quickly spun to induce vertigo, causing a patient to vomit, which was thought to purge insanity. Also believed to increase blood flow to the brain and treat hysteria in women. This was a catch all term used for women experiencing anything from postpartum depression to anxiety, speaking out of turn to her husband or father, or just simply not adhering to the very strict gender roles of the Victorian era. Many psychiatrists, or alienists again as they were called, believed that there was a particularly healthy way that women should behave. And if they weren't behaving that way, then they obviously were mentally ill. Oftentimes, psychiatrists were hired by husbands and fathers to treat these ladies insolence and strangeness, often admitting them to asylums where they would never escape this condition. Hysteria was treated in a number of ways, some not so bad, like rest or massage, but also isolation, hypnosis. Toxic smelling salts that were intended to drive the uterus back into place. As you see, the womb wandering around the body was thought to be a potential likely cause for this condition. So treatments like placing leeches on the abdomen or hanging women upside down was thought to realign this perfectly placed organ. And of course women would be forced to endure a hysterectomy, hysteria being the root word of hysterectomy, where they would remove the womb from a woman altogether. It all goes without saying now that all of these therapies deeply traumatized patients and did little if anything to treat nor certainly cure anyone of anything. There is a wonderful website called storymaps a-gis.com with a collection called People Not Patients and I will put this link in the show notes where you can find find very detailed notes on people who were committed to asylums in the late 1700s to 1800s. You can select the name of a person and see a detailed history of notes taken about them at that time, like why they were there and details about their treatments. It really gives you a profoundly deep insight into what these people were experiencing. There's one woman I found, for example example named Harriet Jane Gray. She was committed in 1830 to the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum on April 5. She was considered a pay patient, meaning she came from a family of financial means. She had three young children and had previously lost a child of 22 months and another who was only eight months old very shortly before her committal. Her diagnosis was quote, hysterical insanity brought on by intemperance in the use of spirits. This was more likely self medicated depression, either postpartum or perhaps just depression from having lost that child who was already almost a year old. For this diagnosis of hysteria she was prescribed emetics and drastic cathartics which were tonics that induce reduced vomiting as well as warm baths. There's a note from the attendant that says she complains of nothing, talks coherently, but manifests undue feelings of distress and grief at her situation and especially on account of her children, end quote. These very normal emotions were considered insanity. She's also treated with bloodletting, ingesting of liquid mercury and arsenic tonic. On April 17th she became so noisy as to require the dark room, end quote. She remained in dark isolation for a month. Both mercury and arsenic ingestion lead to brain damage by the way, among a number of other horrible conditions. Oh, oh honey, I am really sorry to have to do this to you, but if you would follow me down this dimly lamp lit, putrid smelling, freezing empty hallway. There's something else that I want to show you. This hallway is empty only of people. It is otherwise filled with restraints and ropes chained to the walls. It is late fall 1887, 6am it is still dark outside the few barred windows. This is a terrifying place. But I am taking you to meet a very powerful and inspiring woman. Although she is currently in a very compromising position at the moment. We are walking past the room where rotational therapy is often used on the patients of this Blackwells Asylum. And we are now coming to a room on your right where if you look through the barred window on the door, you'll see a row of straight back chairs, women restrained to them, silent. Some sit above puddles of urine as these women aren't allowed to leave these chairs until 8pm every evening. And just there in front of us through the door sits a woman named Nellie Bly, the 23 year old investigative reporter who feigned insanity to be admitted into this asylum, who will write a damning expose once her bosses at the New York World newspaper get her released in a few days that will shock the nation and beyond about the horrors experienced by the women here. Step back with me over here for a minute and I will tell you a little bit about Nellie Bly and her impossible to imagine level of courage. I spoke briefly about her in episode 23 and I promised to revisit her. And today is the day. For years, rumors about Blackwell's Asylum swirled about abuse of patients and squalid conditions. So she took it upon herself to feign insanity to get herself committed in order to investigate the location herself. She told her bosses at the New York World what she intended to do and they promised to personally get her released after 10 days. Which still I cannot believe. The level of trust that she had in them. That alone is astounding to me. Once they agreed, she set out to become insane. And I mean this literally. For three days she wandered the streets, refused to sleep, ranted and yelled incoherently, and even practiced looking insane in the mirror for hours on end. Within days, the matron of her boarding house summoned the police. Lai claimed to be a Cuban immigrant suffering from amnesia and she was sent to be judged as insane or sane at Bellevue Hospital by a judge. The judge and doctors believed that she was insane. They diagnosed her as having dementia and other psychological illnesses and she spent a short time there at Bellevue before leaving Blackwell's Asylum where she found equally terrible conditions for patients, spoiled food and squalid living conditions. She was transferred by ferry to Blackwell's Island Asylum. The island is now called Roosevelt island in New York. The building was originally only built to hold a thousand patients, but was cramming 1600 people together when Nellie arrived. Just like at Bellevue Hospital, massive budget cuts to asylums were responsible for the overcrowding and the employment of only 16 doctors to care for the 1600 patients at Blackwell in the late 1800s and in 1887, when Nellie came to the island, the patients weren't just still considered immoral, broken, mentally or spiritually diseased. They were considered curiosities, not just in the United States, but in England as well. For a small fee, people could visit these hospitals for entertainment purposes and view the mentally ill the same way that they would view a circus freak show. Nellie quickly befriended other inmates who told her of the rampant physical, mental and sexual abuse that they were forced to endure. Hydrotherapy treatments were often administered and patients were forced to sit in cold, wet clothing for hours, often making them sick. Some of them were tethered together with ropes, forced to pull carts like mutual mules. Their food was often rotten and water was dirty. If they complained, they were beaten. Nelly was subjected to this treatment herself. In her book Ten Days in the Madhouse, she writes, quote, for crying, the nurses beat me with a broom handle and jumped on me. Then they tied my hands and my feet and throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around my throat so I could not not scream and thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water. They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless. What shocked her most of all was to discover that most of the women there were not mentally ill at all. Many were just recent immigrants that could not speak English. Many had simply fallen through the cracks of society. She said, quote, I was would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6am until 8pm on a straight back bench. Not allow her to talk or move during these hours. Give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings. Give her bad food and harsh treatment and see how long it will take to make her in insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck. End quote. Luckily, the owners of the newspaper had her released from the asylum after 10 days. And she quickly penned a bombshell expose that exposed the entire asylum system. One month after her expose was published, a grand jury panel visited this asylum to investigate. But by this time, the asylum released or transferred most of the inmates that were mentioned in her piece. The staff denied her accounts entirely. Fresh food and water was being served to the women there and they had the entire location scrubbed down. Despite these efforts though, the grand jury found that this charade was nothing but a cover up. Shortly after this A bill was pushed through to add nearly a million dollars to asylum budgets in New York. Abusive staff were fired, translators were hired to assist immigrant women who were committed, and a thorough audit was done. A Blackwell asylum to ensure no patient that was not actually mentally ill remained there. In 1894, just six years after Nelly's expose, the entire hospital was closed. Oh, that was a lot. That was a lot to take. And luckily it ended with some good news. But here's something to make you feel even more Nellie Bly's expose not only changed this one asylum. Her investigative journalism shocked the public and highlighted the mistreatment of mentally ill individuals, sparking widespread outrage across the country, leading to reforms and control, contributing to the broader movement for mental health reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She also set a precedent for women in journalism, proving that their perspective mattered. She went on to cover World War I and I love this quote from the book Nellie Bly, daredevil, reporter, feminist that says, quote, she was the first woman to do it all, risk arrest as a British spy, visit the war zone, climb into a trench and almost get herself killed. She hated the cold and filth, but abandoned her fur coat, which weighed 50 pounds, when it kept her from moving quickly from front to front. She was in her mid-50s and in her element, end quote. She also went on to report on the women's suffrage movement, accurately predicting that women would be given the right to vote boat in 1920, which she lived long enough to see. Nellie died of pneumonia in 1922 and is interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please rate it, Comment subscribe and don't forget to follow my new podcast, Dark Poetry. Be kind to yourself and I will see you in your nightmares.