Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.

by Rob Delaney

  The hospital had closed some years before and was falling apart by this time, but my uncle Johnny was on the Danvers Board of Historical Preservation, so he thought he could probably get us in there for a tour. He added that there were developers who were very interested in tearing down the hospital and turning it into condos or stores and that its days were likely numbered. He suggested we just drive up as close as we could and check it out. And so we did.

  I’d heard scary stories about the hospital over the years; one childhood neighbor of my mother’s had been committed there. And my friend had told me this horrifying story: He knew a receptionist at the hospital who operated a switchboard. One day someone forgot to lock a door behind her and a female patient, who was both insane and the size of a linebacker, opened the door, grabbed the receptionist’s head, and smashed it into the switchboard, breaking most of the bones in her face.

  Historically Danvers State Hospital was also famous for the number of lobotomies it gave. In the early part of the twentieth century, doctors would give lobotomies to people for the tiniest reasons, like depression or having a “bad temper.” Not that there ever is a good reason to stick a scalpel behind someone’s eyeball and swirl it around. If there isn’t something in the Hippocratic Oath that directly forbids using a “swirling” action with a scalpel, there should be. Is there a lazier motion? Swerving? Fiddling? One famous Massachusetts lobotomy of the early twentieth century was the one Joseph Kennedy ordered up for his daughter Rosemary when she was twenty-three years old. She’d suffered from mood swings, so he had her lobotomized without even consulting his wife. It makes me cry to think about these people, especially when I’ve been the beneficiary of such wonderful modern psychiatric care. We can and should complain about certain horrors of the modern world, but when it comes to the treatment of mental illness, the advances made in the last hundred years have been far more significant than the space program, nuclear fission, or even The Wire, for so many fortunate people.

  Danvers State Hospital also had a field of unmarked graves where patients who died and were left unclaimed were buried. I like to imagine that those dead, unloved nutjobs became friends under the earth and have a little crazy corpse community where they show one another the kindnesses they were denied while living.

  My mother, uncle, and I exited off the highway and drove through some beautiful New England farmland studded with huge old maple trees that were covered in bright green April leaves, each one big enough to cover your privates in a sixteenth-century-style Christian painting. We headed toward the looming black spires and passed a still-active residential psychiatric facility for kids. We began to climb the hill that leads to Danvers State itself but had to stop at a locked gate that closed off the road. We pulled over and parked. Uncle Johnny thought it was a good idea to continue on foot and my mom and I, for some reason, agreed.

  I should mention that Johnny is insane and had he been born a century or even seventy-five years earlier, it would not be difficult to imagine him as a resident of the hospital we were now approaching on foot. He’s a loud, flamboyant man who will break out into song in a powerful bass voice for no reason at all. He owns an insurance agency in Beverly, Massachusetts, and has a massive old house to which he’ll occasionally add a new wing as the mood strikes him. The great room in the center of his house is co-commanded by a grand, ornate chandelier he bought on a whim in Argentina and an extended Steinway concert grand piano. Just so we’re clear: This piano is larger than a grand piano. Did you know there was a piano bigger than a grand piano? Well, there is, and he plays it beautifully. He’s also active in community theater; he once shaved his head to play Daddy Warbucks, and he actually painted himself dark brown to play one of the Wise Men in Amahl and the Night Visitors. A few years ago, he also decided that he was a painter and almost immediately began producing shockingly good landscapes. He just doesn’t do things halfway.

  That’s why Johnny was, not surprisingly, the leader of this field trip. That my mother was a part of it is beyond bananas. While she’s funny and fun to be around and very curious intellectually, she is the OPPOSITE of physically adventurous. She might happily read and discuss an article about a family trespassing on the grounds of an abandoned mental hospital, but I would have bet all my paper-route money that she would have told you to fuck off if you invited her to actually join such an endeavor. But join it she did.

  As I said, we surveyed the road ahead and the hill that rose up on our left, leading to the hospital. It was obvious that it would save time if we left the road, got out of the car, and just climbed up the hill. In fairy tales, we’re told it’s a bad idea to leave the path. That’s because it’s often a bad idea in real life. This was one of those times. Immediately upon leaving the path, the ground was weird. It looked like a normal grass-covered hill, but the ground yielded in an odd way under our feet. Instead of walking up the hill, we were scrambling. I fell at least once.

  I joked to my mom, “Even the ground seems haunted.”

  She forced a weak smile as if to say, I’m not terrified!

  We continued our climb for fifty yards or so and then crested the hill, broke through the strip of trees, and beheld the formidable Danvers State Hospital in its full majesty. It was glorious. Seen from the air in photographs, it looks like a mighty bat, or perhaps a flock of carnivorous geese, flying silently in a soulless black V through the stratosphere. There is the central heart and head of the building and then it spans out and back to each side in receding wings. For sheer internal volume the only non-skyscraper building that could compare would be a major city’s National Guard armory. It was massive. It was bigger than your urban high school plus your first apartment building plus the theater you saw your first concert in. It was FUCKING HUGE. And until recently it had been packed full of people who needed to be encouraged daily that they weren’t, for example, Henry VIII, or that they shouldn’t insist that everyone on the trolley sniff their genitals. There were a few other buildings on the grounds—staff residences and a church. But they were all dwarfed, or perhaps shamed, by the main hospital building’s utter magnificence.

  We approached the main building silently, the way you would approach a cathedral or a butte in Arizona at sunset. It was four stories tall and made of red brick. It had a slate roof, just like my elementary school. My fourth-grade science teacher once held up a piece of slate that had fallen off the school roof and said, “This could have cut your head off.” Never, not ever again in my life, have I seen a slate roof without imagining a slate coming loose, skittering down the incline, gaining speed, jumping over the gutter, and then sailing a few stories through the air before it neatly decapitated me. IT IS SO CURIOUS how hearing something once in your youth can dictate a thought pattern all the way through your life. I was nine, a man said something nonchalantly, and now when I see slate at age thirty-six, as far as I’m concerned, its primary use is for beheading boys. Once that’s done, it can be used for roofing.

  We stood reverently and took in the building. All the windows on the first story were boarded up with plywood that had been painted the same shade of red as the building’s bricks. The windows on the second, third, and fourth floors were caged. A school desk with an attached chair had been thrown through a window on the fourth floor, smashing it, but the cage had effectively “caught” it, so the chair teetered, swaying back and forth in the wind, using part of the window’s surviving frame as a fulcrum and occasionally banging loudly into the cage. If you were directing a horror film and the art director had placed the eerie old school desk in the window’s frame so that any breeze would bang it menacingly into the mental hospital’s anti-escape and -suicide cage windows, you’d say, “Okay, Terry, that’s a bit much. We don’t want to go overboard on the creepiness right away. …” I mean, I want to believe that some idiot vandal broke in and did it, but it’s also possible that it was the only reminder of a frustrated and terrified seventeen-year-old’s final attempt to escape a pair of burly orderlies who’d
been sent to spirit him to the basement lobotomy lair. My mom and uncle and I looked up at the desk and then at one another. It was as good of a “You Should Not Be Here” red flag as I’ll probably ever see, but we ignored it totally.

  We milled around the outside, exploring all the while, making sure no cops or security guards were about or, worse yet, former inmates who’d gone feral and occasionally snuck back out of the woods to grab and eat trespassers.

  The main entrance was barred, boarded, and impenetrable, but after a bit of casual exploration I found an auxiliary door at ground level. Where its padlock should have been, there was a twig. I removed the twig and cracked the door. Though I was twenty, I ran back to my mom and uncle like a four-year-old and said, “Look, Mom! Look what I found! An open door! Do you wanna go in?” I should add that I asked them if they wanted to go in because I felt that it was my duty as an allegedly adventurous young man to do so. I hoped, however, that they would say, “Fuck, no. Are you crazy?” I really, really only wanted the right to say, after the fact, that I’d asked them to go in but, old farty wet noodles that they were, they said no. BUT THEY SAID YES! My insurance agent mom and insurance agent uncle, who should have done a speedy risk analysis and assessed the likelihood of us getting kidnapped and turned into human beef jerky, said yes! So I had to say, “Okay, terrific, because I really wanted to go in too!”

  We marched quietly to the door and entered Danvers State Hospital. The doorway opened onto a hallway at the base of a staircase, which, like the windows on the outside of the building, was caged. I hadn’t seen a caged staircase before, and for those who haven’t, it’s disturbing. You can walk up and down it, like any old staircase, but if you wanted to jump over the railing at any point or jump between the flights as the stairs go from floor to floor, you can’t. Right away, Danvers State announces itself as a place with a strong “No suicides, please” policy. Commendable, I think.

  The paint had peeled off the walls in sheets and flakes. It decorated the floor in ugly constellations. The afternoon light came in shafts through any windows that weren’t boarded over, so we were able to see reasonably well. Opposite the bottom of the staircase was an open door from which you could see the top of another smaller staircase, leading underground. I approached the door but gazing into the basement of the dilapidated mental hospital that I’d broken into with my mom—where hundreds of lobotomies were performed and where, if you died, you might literally be thrown into an unmarked ditch out back—induced paralyzing fear in me. The BEST-case scenario was that not less than ten thousand rats lived down there in the darkness and had birthday bowling parties with the skulls of former patients. The basement was dark, but not dark in the sense that it was “not light.” It was so dark that it gave the impression we were under crystal-clear water and the basement was filled with squid ink that stopped right at the door frame, held in place by an invisible membrane that appeared to pulse against the light. I have never seen a blacker black, even with my eyes closed at night in the cedar closet of my childhood home where I would sometimes hide among the raincoats, old costumes, and my dad’s uniforms and fatigues from Vietnam. This was a dark that knew things. I’m sure it would have loved to envelop us and tell us its stories, but I was one hundred percent certain I didn’t want to hear any of them. I backed away from the darkness of the hospital basement’s mouth and rejoined my mom and Johnny.

  The caged staircase seemed to draw us toward it. We slowly, nervously climbed to the next floor, all the while secure in the knowledge that the caging surrounding us would thwart any spontaneous suicidal urges. We reached the second floor and rounded a corner, revealing a long hallway lined on both sides with cell-like rooms. The hallway was bare; there was very little garbage or extra furniture or just general detritus one might expect to find in a condemned hospital that had stood for well over a century. My guess is that anything the state hadn’t taken away to other, still functioning hospitals or thrown away had been taken by scavengers or trespassers like us. If my mom had any hopes of getting her hands on a vintage trepanning drill, she was out of luck that day.

  We stuck close together, because fuck you if I was going to get separated from my mommy in that place. Moms are comforting and moms are safe. Even as an adult, if I really, really go deep in my psyche to search for the “safest” feeling I can, it remains me as a four-year-old, resting my head in my mom’s lap as she cleaned my ears with a Q-tip. We poked our heads into one of the residential rooms that lined the hallway. It was empty, in the sense that there was no furniture or any physical items in the room. But it didn’t feel empty. It felt full, the way you feel deep underwater when your ears need to pop. Although the room was as modestly sized as a college dorm room, the ceiling was absurdly high. Not only could you not touch the ceiling if you jumped up in the air, an NBA center couldn’t have touched it. Really the only place a ceiling should be that high is in a ballroom or a cathedral. All three of us agreed that the oddly high ceilings made the room feel like a horrible tube at the bottom of which any resident would just be waiting for a giant hand to tear the roof off, reach down to root around the room, grab its inmate, and toss him or her into its maw. My feeling was that if you were not crazy when they put you in this room, you would become crazy pretty quickly as your mind’s contents unspooled and were drawn up toward the roof in the cyclonic weather pattern the room’s design encouraged.

  We exited the room and continued down the hall. More rooms lined the hall, like a terrible hotel. We declined to look into any others. At the end of the hall was a large and open room that looked like a locker-room shower and changing area, except that all the fixtures had been removed, so it was just a lot of white tiles and porcelain, with bathtub- and sink-shaped holes here and there. It reminded me of the famous bathroom area in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where wild man Randle P. McMurphy tries to tear the hydrotherapy console out of the floor and throw it through the window to escape from the mental hospital where he was a guest. There was a hole in the floor we were walking on that was reminiscent of the one produced by McMurphy’s friend, the Chief, when he finally succeeded in tearing out the console and breaking out.

  After milling around the shower facility, imagining patients being hosed off en masse, my mom, Johnny, and I decided to make our way on out into the sunlight and hit the road. We had an Easter ham to deliver, after all.

  On our way out I spotted a booklet on the ground against a wall. It was dusty and had acquired the color of its surroundings, though when my fingers’ oils had lifted away some of the gray it appeared to have once been green. I picked it up and leafed through it and I am so very glad I did. It was a guide on how to convert the hospital into an emergency safe house that could shelter thousands of people from the surrounding communities alongside its normal insane residents IN THE EVENT OF A NUCLEAR WAR. It was from the 1960s, when people were genuinely concerned about the possibility of global nuclear holocaust, but still, come on, man! Can you (even if given twenty minutes and a cool, quiet place to think with no distractions) POSSIBLY think of a more bananas scenario? A functioning, fully occupied gothic mental hospital that had witnessed countless human lifetimes of horror, throwing open its doors to offer shelter to the “normal” people from nearby towns during a nuclear fucking war? No! No, you cannot come up with something crazier. I mean, maybe, if Auschwitz had opened its doors to house local Polish families in the event of a global zombie outbreak? But this Danvers Crazies ’n’ Normies Side by Side in Nuclear Harmony COULD have happened! And clearly a consulting firm sat around and wrote a fucking guide book about it that had survived a few decades and sat there for me to find! Of course I put it in my back pocket and took it home to study.

  Somewhat surprisingly, this was the thing that finally upset and frightened my mom. She felt that a physical item from the hospital would have ghosts or evil spirits attached to it, and that they would roam our home at night and crawl inside our heads and make us crazy. And that’s not a joke; she would always
say when we were younger that she wasn’t afraid of things like Jaws, because if you could just get to shore, your problems would be over. But things like The Exorcist could get into your head and control you and how the fuck were you supposed to combat that? To be fair, I was nervous about having the book in our home too, so that night I put it in our back hall closet by our boots and coats and umbrellas. Come morning it was gone. My mom had thrown it away. So I remain unschooled in the ways of converting a mental hospital into a bomb shelter.

  To date, that remains the last time my mom and I broke into a mental institution, abandoned or otherwise. If you haven’t done it yourself, you really must. We got to experience fascinating history laced with genuine terror on that spring afternoon in Danvers. And unlike most people who’d spent any time there, we were allowed to leave.

  Not long after, the hospital was razed and replaced with bland condominiums, whose residents surely share their beds with lobotomized ghosts who sing them to sleep with the saddest lullabies in the world.