81: The Horrors Of Pennhurst Asylum
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On a gloomy afternoon, George Murrow pulled up in front of an imposing brick building. He got out of his car as construction workers passed by him carrying bricks and cement, and he took the whole view in.

The massive, French-inspired building was now under his control. He was the new property manager, and the first order of business was to get this nearly 100-year-old building back in tip-top shape. His eyes scanned from the workers patching up the brickwork to the gardeners shaping the landscaping. Within the next few weeks, they'd all be joined by movers who would be tasked with pulling old, rusted medical equipment out through the front door.

Yep. Through the building's beautiful entrance would roll squeaky gurneys, ivy bags full of dark, unknown liquid, and mattresses that looked like they had the shape of a person forever imprinted into them. This building, beautiful as it may seem, has an incredibly dark past.

Before George took it over, it was known as the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, a softer way to say that it had been an asylum. And when Pennhurst officially closed its doors in 1987, it's believed that this past stayed trapped inside. As George's eyes moved from the front of the building up to the giant windows of the second story, he noticed that there was someone standing inside.

peering out past the curtains. That was odd, he thought. No one should be inside the building just yet. Movers weren't supposed to be here until next week. He pulled one of the construction workers aside and pointed up to the second story. "'Is that one of your guys?' he asked. The construction worker looked up at the window, clocking the strange figure standing there, looking back down at them. "'No, shouldn't be one of ours.'

Shoot. George called his partner and asked him to come check out the property with him. Someone may have been squatting and he was gonna have to deal with it. Together, the two men searched the foreclosed building. Dripping could be heard echoing in the distance from an unknown source. Paint peeled on the walls, including a brightly colored mural from former patients. The two climbed the old staircase to the second floor and entered the room where the person was seen.

The knob was basically rusted in place and covered in spiderwebs. They pushed open the door, half expecting to find someone living inside the room. But what they found was nothing. The room was full of furniture covered in sheets and cobwebs, but no one was inside. George couldn't believe it, but it's what he saw over by the window that made his heart drop.

There was a giant safety barrier that had been placed around the window, most likely from its original days as a hospital. It would have been impossible for someone to even touch the window, let alone stand right up against the glass as the figure they saw had been doing. The men turned and ran.

Little did they know, stories like this were common here. Scores of people who visited the property before these men and since have all reported similar occurrences. Figures in the windows, footsteps and disembodied screams coming from nowhere, unexplainable cold spots and echoey laughter from children.

It's no wonder Pennhurst is often called one of the most haunted places in the country. Its time as an asylum was one full of horrors, deaths, and torture. Today, we're going to talk everything Pennhurst, both the dark history and the ghost sightings. But first, we're going to take a quick break. And as always, listener discretion is advised. This episode is brought to you by IQ Bar.

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Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaitlin Moore.

Today's episode is going to be a heavy one. I know a lot of our episodes here are heavy, and I also know that a lot of you listeners use Heart Starts Pounding as a kind of comfort podcast. So everyone definitely has their own tolerance, but today we're talking about a place that embodies the dark history of mental health and disability treatment here in this country. But I promise, if you listen and stick around to the end, we do end on a lighter note.

Also, you're all very darkly curious people and dark history enthusiasts, so I know I don't really have to explain this to you, but this episode reflects the opinions and practices of people at Pennhurst between 1908 and 1984. It does not reflect the feelings of myself or anyone at Heart Starts Pounding. You may hear some words that were common medical terms at the turn of the century that are no longer used today, and those will be in quotes from doctors, journalists, and laws being passed at the time.

After you listen to this episode, be sure to join me in an episode of Footnotes on Patreon, where I'll be going over the case file for Pennhurst, including photos and videos of supposed hauntings with Leo. There's one video that I show Leo that captured something I still have nightmares about, so don't miss it.

Before we dive in, though, let me say thank you to everyone who's listening, all of the loyal members of our rogue detecting society. Now, I do know how some of you found this show, and that's because Apple Podcasts was kind enough to feature us here in the U.S. recently, and I'm so grateful for that.

And that really helped us move up the charts, which is so fun to be featured next to huge podcasts like Morbid and Smartless and Crime Junkie. And also maybe you caught it, but we were next to the Kelsey brothers on the charts for about a day. And that was also a very fun one to experience.

We're a growing community of the Darkly Curious, and I love that no matter where or when you're listening, in the car, on the treadmill, in a haunted hotel room, there is probably someone else or maybe a lot of someone else's doing the exact same thing. So let's jump right into this episode.

Pennhurst Asylum was never intended to be a dark stain in American history. In fact, it was believed to be ushering in a new enlightened phase of American society. And if you were to pull up to the original Pennhurst when it opened in 1908, you may have been tricked into believing it.

Then you would have found brick buildings sitting on a manicured lawn that looked like an esteemed university. You would have found a dentist's office, a barbershop, a greenhouse, social workers and psychologists. It may have looked like its own community positioned to care for people with intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities.

One family that was excited to take advantage of Pennhurst was the Heights. Their nine-year-old son, Robert, sat silently in the back seat as they approached Pennhurst.

We don't know what Robert was struggling with exactly. They probably didn't have the language at the time to define it, but it seemed Robert wasn't progressing as quickly as the children around him. Though he was nine years old, he hadn't reached a lot of the milestones other kids his age had, and schools at the time just didn't know what to do with children like Robert. There weren't many options for his parents who wanted him to live an enriched life. Pennhurst promised they could help.

Robert's parents, like so many other parents, were charmed by the vision of the asylum's founder, Dr. Charles Frazier. Dr. Frazier was the head of Penn Medical School in 1908 when he opened Pennhurst, originally called Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic. He felt that, quote, feeble-mindedness was on the rise in Pennsylvania. He was a

Feeble-minded was a term popular at the turn of the century and was defined in the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 as a condition in adults that is, quote, "...so pronounced that they require care, supervision, and control for their own protection or the protection of others."

And in children of school age, it was a condition, quote, "'so pronounced that they by reason of such defectiveness appear to be personally incapable of receiving proper benefit from instruction in ordinary schools.'"

Obviously, that term is very vague. People could have anything from ADHD to epileptic seizures to cerebral palsy to schizophrenia, etc. All very different conditions that require very different things. But would you believe in 1908, they lumped them all together under one offensive term?

So Pennhurst opened as a place to provide long-term services to these people. It offered meals and clothes, activities, counseling, haircuts to those who resided there, jobs to those willing to work. And it seemed like a godsend for people who didn't know what else to do with their loved ones. Take, for instance, PolySpare.

Polly gave birth to her daughter at a time when nurses were not allowed to deliver babies without a male doctor present. This was the 40s, by the way, not that long ago. When Polly went into labor, the doctor wasn't available, so the nurses pushed her legs together to keep the baby inside until he could get there. As a result, Polly's daughter was deprived of oxygen and suffered a brain injury from the pressure put on her skull.

As she got older, her motor skills stopped developing and she had trouble speaking. She wasn't succeeding in school, so Polly made the difficult decision to bring her to Pennhurst. And so you can imagine, as nine-year-old Robert Height's parents were driving away from Pennhurst, watching him in their rearview mirror be led inside, they felt like they were doing the absolute right thing for him, just like Polly thought.

But all of that changed the first time they went to visit their son. Two and a half weeks after they dropped Robert off, his parents drove up to the asylum again, excited to hear about how it was going for him. Instead, they were met with a little boy who looked like he had gone through hell.

Robert had scrapes and bruises all over his body. It looked like he had tumbled down a mountain. There was dried blood on the side of his mouth, and most disturbing of all, he didn't recognize his own mother, which it was later discovered was because he was given such heavy doses of medication. It also became apparent that Robert's language and motor skills had regressed.

The Heights packed up their son and immediately brought him home. Mrs. Heights said she wouldn't even leave a dog in conditions like that. Robert's parents got a rare peek behind the curtain of the nightmare that residents at Pennhurst faced. Operating as a safe haven was a total facade. In reality, Dr. Frazier had something much darker in mind for the asylum.

See, he believed that because there was more and more, quote, feeble-minded people cropping up in Pennsylvania, he needed to create a space for them so they would be out of the gene pool.

Frazier was a eugenicist, and Pennhurst existed as his holding cell. He didn't actually care about the quality of life of anyone inside the asylum. Frazier incorrectly believed that these disabilities, be it blindness, hyperactivity, or even promiscuity in women, were passed down from parents. So as long as his patients weren't having children, his job was done.

But he tricked a lot of people into believing that he was actually helping. From the moment Pennhurst opened, it was overcrowded. There were beds in hallways, outside of rooms that didn't have enough space for them. Children were often restrained to their beds so they didn't wander off. Bathrooms had no privacy. Dining halls were infested with rats.

The facility, per Frazier's request, had no connection to the outside world, with its own power supply, food sources, and a rail station to directly import anything it needed in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Parents could commit children against their will. Patients with extremely different needs were often forced together. For instance, violent patients roomed with nonverbal autistic patients, and you can imagine the issues that arose there.

Patients on suicide watch were sometimes paired with hyperactive minors. Shockingly, or not shockingly, depending how you look at it, most of the people committed there were women of childbearing age who were thought to be promiscuous. But promiscuity wouldn't be a problem at Pennhurst because relationships were strictly banned. Men and women were held in separate units to ensure that everyone's gene pools died in the building.

And as an added layer of protection, forced sterilization was used as punishment. Pennsylvania was the first place in the US to sterilize using a procedure called the ophorectomy, which is ovary removal. And maybe you're thinking to yourself, "But Kaylin, how could they do this? Surely all of that was illegal."

Well guys, in 1927, our Supreme Court decided in the case Buck v. Bell that forced serialization of the quote, "unfit," which included the disabled, was not against our US Constitution. One justice even went on the record saying, quote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

The overcrowding led to rampant patient neglect. At times, it was estimated that two or three staff were overseeing 80 patients. And for a population that needed to be cared for, neglect could be deadly. One patient died after eating a state-issued sock that they had received. Another dove headfirst down a laundry chute.

And worse than neglect, as maybe you already imagined, was the abuse. The staff were not well-trained at all and often resorted to force and cruel punishments. One doctor in the facility, ironically named Dr. Jesse Fear, said that he had a tactic for children who were misbehaving.

There was a building called the Q Building, and the second floor, called Q2, was where children who were deemed to have the lowest IQs were kept. To punish other children not on the Q2 floor, they would lock them in a room with the Q2 kids and just leave everyone to their own devices.

Dr. Fear thought that this would, quote, downgrade the higher IQ kids, aka lower their intelligence, which would make them less hyperactive. And if they were still hyperactive after this, he would just drug them to calm them down. And here he is admitting that.

One child, Johnny, who faced this punishment, really suffered the effects. He was bullied by the kids in Q2, which Dr. Fear actually said was good for him, but he also started losing his language skills and confidence.

And it's true that the Q building has some of the darkest history on the grounds just by its nature. And perhaps that's why even today it's considered to be one of the most haunted. And I'm going to share with you a Q building ghost sighting right after a short break.

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A woman named Brianna slowly approached the Kew building one night with a group of friends. It was after Pennhurst had officially shut its doors as an asylum, but before it had gone through any restoration. So the building sat abandoned, waiting for someone to come in and remember what happened there.

This was where all the children had been held. This was where Johnny had been punished, where kids were left to their own devices, where Dr. Fear would inject any child who got out of hand. The group held candles as they passed through the crumbling column entrance to the three-story brick building. Weeds and brush climbed towards the shattered windows on the second floor. Once the group made it inside,

They saw what years of abandonment had done. Chipped paint from the walls littered the floors. Windows were boarded up or were covered in spiderweb cracks. And old rusted hospital beds still sat in the hallways. Ones that once held the kids that didn't fit into rooms. Perhaps if the group had looked closely enough, they would have seen the restraints on the bed frames.

but they didn't have the chance. Because out of nowhere, a breeze blew out all of their candles. A heavy silence enveloped them, and they could hear their own heartbeats in their ears. And then, just down the hall, Brianna heard something else. A sound that definitely was not coming from one of her group. It was a little girl laughing. Oh!

And her group heard it too, because the others stood frozen in place. What happened next, Brianna could only describe as an intense sense of sadness and desperation that washed over her, unlike anything she had ever felt before. It was as if years of abuse and neglect that had taken place in the building was washing over her, as if she was in the head of someone who had lived there.

The group dropped their candles and ran out of the building. And later on, once they had made it home and were going over their experience, trying to figure out exactly what happened, one of her friends admitted that they too had felt the overwhelming sense of sadness. It was the feeling of wanting to leave, but knowing they couldn't, like they would be there forever.

In 1968, a special aired on NBC 10 called Suffer the Little Children. It was a four-part expose aimed at showing the world what had been occurring at Pennhurst. Because remember, Pennhurst was intentionally set away where no one would be privy to the abuse. Most people, aside from a few loved ones, didn't know what the conditions were like.

But in the 60s, Americans were fighting for the rights of people that had been denied them, the civil rights movement, Stonewall. It felt like it was time to expose Pennhurst. The footage from this expose is incredibly hard to watch. It starts with a spiteful and sarcastic quote from the journalist at the center of it all, Bill Baldini.

In the 18th century, the mentally retarded were often ignored, punished, and exploited. Today, things are supposed to be different. Modern 20th century man is much more scientific and civilized. Today, we no longer punish the mentally retarded. We don't exploit them either. We have come a long, long way.

Now we ship them 25 miles out of town to a state-operated institution and forget them while they decay from neglect. As he speaks, people on screen rock back and forth in agony, barely dressed. Flypaper is shown hanging from the windows, completely caked in flies. Hands tied to beds form aggravated fists.

In this expose, it was revealed that Pennhurst only had eight doctors and two psychiatrists on staff full-time. That was for 2,781 high-needs patients. It was also revealed that the facility was only equipped to hold 1,984 patients, so Pennhurst was at 140% capacity.

They also discovered that only 7% of the children were in the asylum's rehabilitation programs, meaning only 7% had any chance of ever getting out of Pennhurst. 93% were expected to stay there for their entire lives. And in 1968, the broadcast interviewed adults in Pennhurst that had been there since the building opened 60 years prior.

They interviewed a man named Abe, who was dropped off at the facility in 1909 at just five years old. Abe's parents were Russian immigrants, and once they filled out his intake forms, they never came back to see him.

Abe spent the entirety of his life residing, but also building and sustaining Pennhurst as a worker. He had a number of essential jobs during his six decades stay at the facility and was known for his positivity. He was famous for saying, "Hello, my friend." Pennhurst tried to use Abe as an example of someone who loved living in the facility when they would come under criticism and they would talk about how he never wanted to leave.

But Abe surprised the journalists in Suffer the Little Children when they interviewed him because he told them that he would love to live somewhere else. He had always dreamed of leaving Pennhurst. The documentary also interviewed Dr. Fear, who went a bit more in depth about his torture practices. Here's him talking about how he chose to punish a patient he felt was being unruly.

So about 1 o'clock a DTM man came in and I asked him what the most painful injection was that he had that wouldn't do any harm to the patient. And I set this up and got him over on his cottage about 7 o'clock that night and I forced him. I mean, I talked him into getting down in bed. I didn't use any abuse on him at all. I gave him this injection. He really hit the ceiling over that.

The documentary shocked and appalled viewers. Like I said, it was the first time most people were made aware of what was really going on. This did lead to some changes at the facility, but not all of them were necessarily positive.

So unpaid labor was eventually outlawed in Pennsylvania in 1973. So Pennhurst shut down their farms and took away jobs from patients. They were using patients for a ton of free labor. For instance, it's estimated that in 1953, patients did 5 million pounds of laundry, unpaid. And they could have been paid. The farms were providing pork, eggs, and dairy that were making money for the facility.

The people who ran Pennhurst just chose to not pay the patients. And yes, patients should not be doing unpaid labor, but taking away this work from the patients also took away their sense of purpose and left them with little to do each day.

The mistreatment also continued. One story that came out of Pennhurst at this time was the story of a woman who was physically restrained for 2,692 hours across the span of four months in 1976. And for reference, there's only 2,920 total hours in four months. She was free for less than 10% of the time.

Eventually, in the late 70s, a cop named Cliff Shaw went undercover at Pennhurst. He felt like doing this would prevent doctors from giving PR statements and patients wouldn't be afraid to say how they really felt. A lot of the patients in Suffer the Little Children are talking to camera in front of the officials that worked there, so maybe some of them didn't feel safe explaining exactly how they felt.

This undercover investigation that Cliff Shaw led seemed to be the final nail in the asylum's coffin. He found that at night, older patients would prowl around floors looking for weaker patients to brutalize. A lot of the violence was encouraged by the staff. He even heard from one patient that staff would pit the patients against one another and make them fight for the staff's entertainment.

They also found that children were being experimented on using mercury and some of the kids even died from this exposure. This undercover investigation led to seven indictments of Pennhurst employees with six convictions of criminal assault. The 70s and 80s also saw an onslaught of lawsuits brought against Pennhurst, one of them being from Terry Lee Halderman's family.

Terry was admitted at age 12 and stayed at the asylum for 11 years. In that time, she lost teeth, some of which were extracted by staff, which was a punishment they would use if a patient was biting. She suffered multiple fractures from her jaw to her fingers to toes and was covered in lacerations, scratches and bruises.

Her lawyer argued that Pennhurst not only didn't help patients get better, but subjected them to an environment so poor and abusive that it, quote, contributed to losing skills they had already learned.

Nicholas Romeo's family also filed charges against Pennhurst. He was admitted in 1974 at 26 years old. He had severe cognitive disabilities, and after his father died, his mother just couldn't manage his care alone. When he was finally discharged, he came home with 50 welts on his stomach, and he had 200 wounds or injuries caused by himself or others during his stay.

Other aides who witnessed his beatings testified that many of these injuries came directly from staff. Eventually, Pennhurst closed its doors for good and discharged all of the residents inside. Today, it remains dilapidated and some areas look like they haven't been kept up at all since the day the doors closed.

It now has private owners who are renovating the estate and have converted some of the property into a haunted house amusement attraction, which people do find controversial given the real suffering that did happen here. Regardless, the people who worked at Pennhurst since it was converted into this haunted house have all reported experiencing paranormal things. Take

Lizzie, for instance, who worked at the attraction in 2020. Her most terrifying ghost experience happened when she was working in the containment wing full of gurneys and wheelchairs.

She was covering someone on their break, waiting for a new batch of haunted writers to come. And while she was alone, she decided to lean on a gurney. Meanwhile, there was a fog machine being pumped into the room, so she couldn't really see all that well. But then out of nowhere, she feels this big bear hug from behind. She turned around hoping to see her coworker, but no one was there.

When her coworker finally returned, she told her that there was a little girl who used to live in the ward who was tied to that gurney. And that little girl loved to play. Lizzie explained that for the spirits of mournful children, staff would try to comfort them and provide them with toys, but it seemed like they were never fully at rest.

Lizzie also said that there's a dark spirit in the day room of the administration building who one time scratched her. This entity was also known to lock people in lockers. She said that the Philadelphia building was definitely the most haunted. It was eventually closed from touring because people kept getting hit, pushed and shoved down the stairs by spirits.

This all sounds absolutely terrifying to me. The history of Pennhurst is so dark and it seems like the trauma of what happened, spirits and all, might still be locked inside the building. But today, that's not exactly where our story ends. I told you, we're gonna end on a little bit of a lighter note. In the midst of all this darkness, I wanted to find a few good things about this place. And so I'm gonna tell you those after a short break.

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Remember Abe from Suffer the Little Children? He had been at Pennhurst since 1909. Pennhurst was essentially the only home he had ever known and he yearned to leave. Well, eventually he was discharged from Pennhurst and he got that opportunity

At 75 years old, he experienced unincarcerated freedom for the first time, and he lived independently in a community-based group home until he died in his 90s. He had over 15 years of freedom.

And then there's the story of Violet and Leonard, one of my favorites. The two met at Pennhurst in the blind ward in 1967. It was the only portion of the campus where men and women were actually placed next to each other and were sometimes able to communicate. So the two became friends and eventually they were discharged. Later in life though, Violet became ill and her doctor suggested that she return to Pennhurst to recover.

Not willing to lose Violet to that place, Leonard became her caretaker, and the two eventually got married. Despite the years of living in an institution that championed the elimination of people like them, Leonard and Violet found love, and they lived the rest of their 35 years of life together.

But for hundreds, maybe thousands of others, that opportunity never came. And some say that their spirits are still inside of those buildings.

If you're ever able to visit Pennhurst and take a ghost tour, remember the history of what happened there and try to honor those that couldn't leave. And if you do catch something in the corner of your eye or you hear a scream from down the hallway, you'll know that the person you're hearing was a real person with value and was not treated as such. But maybe they're still in there, letting other people know that they lived there.

that they mattered.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding. And actually, speaking of people whose stories matter, next week is one of my favorite kinds of episodes. It's the kind that comes directly from you guys, my Heart Starts Pounding listeners and members of our Rogue Detecting Society. And I think these are going to be some of the best stories yet. So tune in next Wednesday at 7 p.m. Pacific time and 10 p.m. for those listening in Chile. And until then, stay curious.

Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research by Marissa Dow. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. What you're hearing is hardy fiber cement siding living up to its reputation as the siding that handles hail impact with ease.

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