Today, it’s called the Arbours at Eagle Point. A quiet, attractive over-55
community located in Philadelphia. But the grounds have a dark secret…
Let’s turn back the clock, to when this patch of land was host to one of the darkest locations
in American history, an insane asylum that puts any horror movie to shame.
Dare you enter the halls of Byberry Mental Hospital?
The year was 1903 when the hospital opened its doors, at a time when mental health treatment
still had a long way to go. Most were still called names like “lunatic asylums”, and politicians and
the public were just happy to have the mentally ill far away from them. No one was looking too
closely at how they were being treated - and that allowed unscrupulous doctors and staff to treat
their residents poorly. The authorities weren’t going to check up too often, and even if a report
did get out, who were they going to believe - the doctors, or someone in a mental hospital?
But Byberry had humble beginnings.
In 1903, the land was purchased as a work farm for mental patients,
hoping that the environment would bring out the best in them compared to a traditional asylum.
It worked - maybe a little too well, as the overcrowded and understaffed local mental
hospitals started offloading patients there. And soon, Byberry - officially named the Philadelphia
State Hospital - had to expand. Gone were the few simple buildings and the rustic farm.
In their place was built a sprawling campus with multiple buildings.
But for the patients, bigger wasn’t better.
The hospital, now a large facility, soon ran into the exact same problems as other hospitals in
the area - namely, a lack of staff. Working at a mental hospital was hard work, often dealing with
unstable and potentially violent patients. The wrong staff member could make things worse - and
unfortunately, Byberry would soon have a lot of the wrong staff members. Desperate for employees,
their applications process was more like a cattle call. You showed up and they gave you
a uniform - with no checking if the person had the personality to work with mental patients.
They were about to get an infusion of workers - for better or for worse.
In 1936, the hospital was turned over to the state, and Pennsylvania authorities
were shocked by the conditions at the hospital. Reports of patient abuse, unqualified workers,
and even torture came out, and in response, the state did...nothing. For the authorities,
Byberry was fulfilling its purpose - a place to hold the inconvenient members of society.
Byberry might have been a horrible place, but all most people cared about was that it
didn’t lead to escapes. And on that front, it did its job very well during this era.
But that was about to change.
World War II changed everything, as it did in most areas. It was one of the largest mobilizations in
American history, and young men were quickly sent off to war - with the exception of one group.
Conscientious objectors, those who felt their religion or beliefs would not allow
them to fight in war, were often assigned to work back on the home front. One of the most
common jobs was working at mental hospitals, and Byberry was a common site for them to be
assigned. They walked in - and these pacifists were immediately horrified by what they saw.
One man decided to do something about it.
Charlie Lord, a Quaker man from a religion with a long commitment to peace,
met with several other conscientious objectors who worked at the hospital. They bonded over their
mutual views, over the abuse they experienced from other employees there who saw them as
shirking their duty - and over their disgust at the treatment of the patients. Together,
they hatched a plan to document the horrors of Byberry - and expose it to the world. As
Lord was the one with a camera, he would be the point man to expose the pictures.
And it all came down to a twist of fate.
Lord’s camera wasn’t originally his own, and it was barely in working order. The young man
had borrowed it from a friend to take on his honeymoon - and promptly dropped it in a lake.
When he returned he offered to buy the camera from his friend in case it no longer worked properly.
That tiny Afga camera would become one of the most important cameras in American history - it
would expose the terrible state of mental health treatment to a larger audience for the first time,
and shock the conscience of the country.
But getting those pictures wouldn’t be easy.
Taking pictures of the conditions inside was strictly prohibited, and getting caught could
mean not just termination but arrest. Lord would smuggle the camera in by hiding it in
his jacket pocket. When he saw an opportunity to take a picture, he wouldn’t be able to look
through the viewfinder - he would try to aim the camera blind and capture as much as he could
without being seen. It took him months to fill up three rolls of film, and they
captured often blurry and imperfect images of a harrowing world that most people had never seen.
And soon the whole world would see them.
Lord knew he had to find the right people to show the pictures. If he showed them to the
wrong person, they could wind up confiscated and he would never get access again. But fortunately,
he had exactly the right person in mind - former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,
only a few months out of office following the death of her husband. She had long been a
progressive on mental health issues, and she agreed to a meeting with the conscientious
workers at Byberry. She was horrified by the images - and her support led to the
pictures being published in the popular magazine Life, seen by millions of horrified Americans.
Slowly, the truth was starting to come to light.
The pictures made clear how neglected the facility was. The lack of staffing had kept
it from being properly cleaned, and it was common to see human feces lining the halls.
It was also massively overcrowded and the residents weren’t cared for properly. An
image showing a large group of naked men huddled together shocked people, with some
describing it as more like a cattle yard than a mental hospital. During a tour of the facility,
journalist Albert Deutsch even described it as reminding him of the Nazi concentration camps.
But even more disturbing was the abuses the inmates suffered.
The patients could get unruly, but the techniques used to subdue them often resembled torture.
An expose in a Philadelphia newspaper talked about how an attendant took a towel and soaked in water.
After wringing it out, they wrapped it around an unruly patient’s neck. They formed a noose - and
pulled slowly, choking the air out of the inmate’s lungs as they begged for mercy.
The torment continued until the patient’s eyes bulged and he struggled to breathe.
Eventually, he fell down on the bed, chalk white, seemingly not breathing. It was an
extended period before he roused again, and the staff viewed the patient as successfully subdued.
But no one knew if he had sustained brain damage due to this harrowing treatment.
So how did the staff get away with this horrible treatment?
This disturbing “Water treatment” had one distinction from other forms of torture - it
didn’t leave any marks on the body. To anyone examining the patient afterwards, they would
have no physical signs of abuse. And the workers at Byberry were careful to preserve their secrets,
especially when the conscientious objectors entered the hospital. When attendants wanted
to abuse a patient, they would make sure they weren’t seen, often going behind closed
doors - and then taking out the firsts or even weapons to brutalize their charges.
After the exposes, people said something had to be done - but
getting it done would be a much longer process.
Despite the outcry, Byberry remained an open mental hospital for decades.
From the 1940s to 1970s, the population started to decrease and scrutiny increased,
but unfortunate patients were still sent to the house of horrors. But as reforms became
more common in the 1970s, an interest in the Philadelphia hospital increased.
Doctors and other personnel who worked there were more willing to share their stories - and one,
a Psychiatry trainee named Larry Real, shared stories that chilled people’s bones.
Because in Byberry, even the doctors offering help would torment their patients.
Every mental hospital needs some doctors on hand because the institutionalized will have
minor medical issues and it’s easier to treat them there than to take them to a hospital.
But in Byberry, a visit to the doctor or dentist would be enough to give anyone a medical phobia.
The doctors were sadists, pulling teeth without novocaine or even trying to stitch a patient up
without giving them any painkillers. Why did they think that was possible? Because the
doctor had been taught that Schizophrenics didn’t have the ability to feel pain.
But when it came to other drugs, the problem was overuse.
One of the easiest ways to pacify patients is to medicate them, but modern mental hospitals are
more interested in helping people learn how to deal with their condition. At Byberry, though,
heavy medication was the rule rather than the exception. The goal was to keep the patients
as quiet and docile as possible, and drugs like Thorazine were used as tranquilizers. A powerful
pharmaceutical company even had a lab inside Byberry, and the patients were commonly used as
test subjects for new drugs - without getting proper consent or even notifying the family.
And the hospital soon racked up a terrifying body count.
Full records of how many people died at Byberry aren’t available thanks to the hospital’s poor
record-keeping. However, at least fifty-nine deaths are known of and attributed solely to
patient neglect. Reports indicate that hundreds of patients may have died in the drug trials,
but those studied by Smith Kline-French are even harder to get ahold of.
Many of the patients who died were poor or homeless before being institutionalized,
many didn’t have family members, and their deaths were easy to cover up.
And not only were the patients in danger, but some were also the danger.
Byberry had one of the biggest problems of mental institutions in spades - they were a clearinghouse
of all types. A homeless man behaving erratically might be in the same facility as a troubled teen
placed there by their parents, alongside a violent criminal undergoing psychiatric
testing to determine if they were fit to stand trial. In 1944, a patient sharpened
a spoon and proceeded to stab another patient in the neck - barely missing his jugular vein.
And the female patients were in even greater danger from violent male inmates. Sometimes,
patients would just go missing - their bodies only being discovered months or years later.
It seemed like a new report of horrors would emerge from
Byberry every few months - but getting it shut down would be a long process.
Over the years, the population decreased. The place stopped being the overcrowded danger zone
it once was, but it remained an underfunded, understaffed place of misery. Calls to shut
it down continued - but it was one brave woman who struck the final blow. Former patient Anna
Jennings, diagnosed with schizophrenia, smuggled letters out to her mother sharing stories of the
abuse she experienced. Her mother worked in the mental health field and pushed to open
a committee to investigate. On June 21st, 1990, the asylum of horrors closed its doors for good.
But it would continue to fascinate and disturb people for years to come.
The patients and staff were gone, but the hospital stood abandoned. Soon it would be taken over by
looters and vandals, who stripped the building of everything valuable and left it a desolate husk.
For daring urban explorers, it became a place to break in and take pictures.
They would find a vast network of tunnels, perfect to get lost amid the haunted history.
But others reported dark things going on in the ruins. Were Satanists holding rituals there?
Were people finding mysteriously slaughtered animals? Was Byberry truly abandoned? If
you looked at the internet, countless people would tell you something was haunting Byberry.
And its neighbors had more than enough.
It would be 2006 when the ruined facility was finally demolished. People celebrated,
and soon construction began on the open-air adult community that stands there today. But if you ask
those who know the story of Byberry, every one of those residents is living on haunted ground.
For more cursed locations, check out “Most Haunted Prisons in the World”,
or watch this video instead.