Narrator (8:37)
My favorite class in college was Intro to Psychology. It explained so much to me about why we think the way that we think. And without going so far in depth as to sound like actual science, it was, but it didn't feel like it, if that makes sense. Anyway, my favorite lesson was about functional fixedness. It's a term for the phenomenon that we can't see past the intended use of things. For example, the coconut oil in your kitchen cabinet is the same thing as the coconut oil in your bathroom cabinet. But most of us would never grab the coconut oil from the bathroom to throw in our frying pan. Or how when you look at tennis shoes, you don't often see how they could be tied together and used to weigh something down. Or how chewing gum can be used as a weapon. That kind of thing. And my favorite example of functional fixedness involves the mentor of my Intro to Psychology teacher. He was an elderly professor close to retirement, and every day on his lunch Break. He'd go into the back stairwell and smoke a joint. And this was during the early 2000s in Georgia, back when you had to pick out your own seeds and stems and grind it up yourself and roll it on your sister's coffee table and make sure you got all the crumbs out the cracks before her shift was over. High stakes is what I'm saying. So after the stairwell filled with smoke, someone inevitably called campus security and that elderly professor would wait until the moment they showed up, step on his roach and swatting at the clouds all around him, he would say damn kids and campus police ran past him every time. They never suspected him for a second, even though he was there every time they got a call, even though there was smoke all around him. Because this burnout they were looking for couldn't possibly be a professional, respectable academic. He couldn't possibly be old. Let's go back in time. 120 odd years. It's the turn of the century. 1901. President McKinley has just died of an assassination. Attorney I say attempt because he survived the initial bullet he took in the gut during his speech. He died of gangrene a few days after his surgery. So that's where we are in terms of medical science. The President just died of gangrene after surgery. Keep that in your back pocket. I have a point, I promise. Also in 1901 in Connecticut, Amy Archer and her husband James Archer were hired to care for an elderly widower, John Seymour. When he died three years later, John Seymour's descendants converted his home into a boarding house for the elderly. It was actually a pretty smart economical move. This was 50 years before Medicare began and 35 before Social Security started in the United States. So the elderly had even less support then. A lot of middle class people saved for their retirement. But private nurses are expensive. So even if they were able to pay for their room and board without a huge strain, it left a lot of elderly people still feeling like a burden on their families. And that's those who had families to burden. Not to mention, I mean people have a hard enough time now with resigning their loved ones to elder care. Back then there were no real options and definitely no good options for families who couldn't physically care for their elders. So when the Seymours saw that hole in the market, they capitalized on it and they kept Amy and John Archer on as caretakers for years, which both subsidized the Archers rent, paid them a fee and gave them a lot of experience. After a few years though, the Seymour heirs sold the house. And the Archers used their savings to buy their own house in Windsor, Connecticut in 1907. They converted it into a business, the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm. The Archer business plan had two options for the residents, or as they were called then the inmates. In M. William Phelps book the Devil's Rooming House, which is the book on the Amy Archer Gilligan case, he says that inmate was, quote, a socially acceptable term used at that time to describe residents of psychiatric hospitals, institutions, insane asylums, prisons or nursing homes similar to Amy's. We're going to hear from Phelps himself later on in part two of this episode, so stay tuned for that. People at the time didn't see anything weird about calling them inmates like you or I might. But back to the Archer's business plan. In exchange for shelter, food and medical care for the rest of their life, residents at the Archer Home had two options. Option one, they could pay a weekly rate of between 7 and $25, according to one advertisement. The other option was to pay a one time flat fee of $1,000, which Amy called her contract for life care. Now, I'm not a business expert, but some quick calculations tell me that $1,000 would pay for around a year of care at that time. That's less than three years at the weekly rate max. And that's the gross, not their net. And yes, of course it's disgusting to put a monetary timeline on someone's life, but if you're running a business like the Archers, then you have to think about these things, right? Plus, the Archer home was not end of life care. It wasn't a hospice situation. It was a boarding house. Most people who stayed at the Archer home weren't in bad health. There were hospitals for the infirm. The people at the Archer home were mostly just old. That meant there was a good chance that they'd live longer than three years. So from a business perspective, after a while, each resident would start costing the Archers money. Amy and James didn't seem to realize that, though. The Archers seemed less concerned with the accounting and more concerned with the really important work they were doing for their community. And it was important work. Everyone in town thought so. Windsor's residents really respected the Archer's resolve and dedication. They especially revered Amy. After James died in 1910, three years after the Archer House opened, James official cause of death was the sudden onset of kidney disease, which most people in those days usually suffered from for years before slowly dying. And it was rarely fatal, even to an elderly person, unless they had pre existing Conditions. James wasn't elderly. He and Amy were both in their late 30s or early 40s. So it was shocking to the town when he died. And it inspired people to respect Amy even more. She worked so hard to keep their business afloat all on her own, with a little help from James's life insurance payout. After all, the people of Windsor could see the hard work. Amy looked so worn down. Because while Amy wasn't elderly, she definitely didn't look like she was in her 30s. Okay, to a degree, every photo of someone from a historical period makes them look old. You know, just based on the styles alone. Like, Amy wore the high collared dresses and puffed sleeves of the Gilded Age. Her hair is. The best way I can describe it is by the Martha Washington thing we used to do in the swimming pool where we let it drip forward and then fold it back and pose like we were in a daguerreotype. So, yeah, the styles have aged her, but she actually looks like she could just as well be in her 60s. From her thin lipped, clenched jaw to her furrowed brow. The people in town, especially the socialites, the ones who decided what everyone else should think, called her sister Amy. They rarely saw her without a Bible in hand. And she definitely looked like someone who would clutch her Bible all the time, like as a weapon. They watched her dedication to the elderly, some of whom I'm sure they assumed probably nagged and bothered her constantly. And she had a little girl whose father had just died, too. I mean, that does sound pretty tough. That is, it would be tough if that was true. As I mentioned before, while the residents at Amy's were older, they could take care of themselves. They mostly just couldn't take care of a full house and themselves, so they wanted the extra help. But to the town who didn't know any different, Amy seemed close to saintly. Not everyone in the home was as convinced that the Archer house was a place of God, though. Because they had a problem on their hands. People kept dying, remember? And I've said it a few times, the residents weren't sick most of the time. So these frequent deaths were weird. They seemed to hit out of nowhere and they were happening to healthy people. Then they, Amy would have their bodies moved out of the house in the middle of the night, so no one really saw them. Amy said she thought it would be disturbing if the other residents woke to find their friends dead. And fair enough, that definitely would be disturbing. I mean, imagine you were running Archer House. I don't think I'd move the Bodies like that, it definitely comes off as sort of brushing death under the rug, if not something actually sinister. But anyone who has worked in direct care will tell you you can never do enough. You can never be fast enough, caring enough, sweet enough, smart enough, good enough. You have to make some tough calls. Calls that just can't please everyone. It's not really surprising that some of those calls ended up iffy. And when it comes to death, dying and grieving, no one can do anything. Perfectly. By the way, we are now squarely in the Victorian era when there was a whole fashion element to grief and grieving correctly. At this point in time, no one could do anything regarding death well enough. It's also no surprise that there were deaths. Even though the people at Archer House were in good health, for the most part they were elderly and well, you heard what kind of medical care the president got. And he was the president. Still, residents insisted there were far too many people dying. Something was very wrong at Archer House. Someone they said was killing them. The town socialites were having none of that. They rallied behind Amy's pristine reputation. Scandalized that anyone could suggest something untoward about an organization run by a saint. Not only was it impossible, but the audacity to them. Amy was basically doing charity work, but for money. Sometimes she even set up funeral arrangements and sent bouquets to grieving family members. Of course she was contractually obligated to do that, but most people didn't realize that. They also didn't realize that although she claimed she had taken it upon herself to pay for her residents funerals when they couldn't afford to, that was a straight up lie. So while the townspeople might have been obsessed with Amy and totally convinced that her organization was a flawless reflection of God's love on earth, the people closest to her physically, her residents refused to be gaslit out of their suspicions. And as more and more Archer residents died, those suspicions only grew. Until one resident, Franklin Andrews, became convinced he knew exactly what was causing all this death. Or rather, who.
