What happened
In 1874 Massachusetts bought 500 acres of farmland on Hathorne Hill outside Danvers, 18 miles north of Boston, to replace an overcrowded asylum in South Boston. The Boston architect Nathaniel J. Bradlee designed a hospital on the Kirkbride plan, the model that dominated American asylum building after the Civil War: a central administration block with a tower, from which long wings stepped back on either side so that every ward had light, air and a view. Danvers was built in red brick in the Gothic style, with a tower of about 130 feet, at a cost of around $1.5 million. It opened on May 1, 1878, as the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, and admitted its first patients on May 13.
The hospital was designed for about 500 patients. It added a nursing school in 1889, a pathology laboratory in 1895 and, in the 1920s, clinics that tested schoolchildren for what was then called mental deficiency. By the late 1930s it held more than 2,000, with patients sleeping in corridors and basements, and later accounts describe shock treatments, lobotomies, heavy sedation and restraints being used to manage a population the building could not hold. From the 1960s, as drugs and community care emptied the state hospitals, the census fell. Danvers closed on June 24, 1992, in a round of budget cuts under Governor William Weld. The buildings were left to rot.
What came after
The hospital had been added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, which did not protect it. In 2005 the state sold the site to AvalonBay Communities, and in January 2006, over a lawsuit by preservationists, demolition began to make way for 497 apartments on 77 acres. Most of the Kirkbride complex went. The brick shell of the administration block and the two nearest wings was propped up and rebuilt from the inside, with a replica of the original tower, which had been taken down around 1970. On April 7, 2007, at about 1:50 a.m., eight of the new apartment buildings, still under construction, caught fire in a blaze visible from Boston; six firefighters were burned and the state fire marshal and state police investigated. The complex was finished and opened anyway. What remains of the hospital today is the facade, the cemeteries where patients were buried under numbered markers, and sealed sections of the tunnel system that once linked the buildings.
The haunting
Danvers acquired its reputation as a haunted place during the fourteen years it stood empty. Urban explorers who got into the wards through broken windows photographed peeling paint, abandoned wheelchairs and gurneys and the long tunnels, and the pictures circulated online with stories of voices and figures in the wards. The 2001 horror film Session 9, shot inside the real hospital, fixed the image. The claim that Danvers was the birthplace of the prefrontal lobotomy is repeated everywhere and supported nowhere; the operation was introduced in the United States at George Washington University in 1936.
The Lovecraft connection is thinner than the legend has it. H. P. Lovecraft, who lived in Providence and set his stories in a fictional North Shore, mentions Danvers in passing. In “Pickman’s Model” (1927) the narrator says the painter’s theories were wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum; in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” a character is said to have gone mad and been sent out to Danvers. That is the extent of it. Arkham Sanitarium, the institution in his stories, is never described in any detail, and the chain from Danvers to Arkham to Batman’s Arkham Asylum is a fan genealogy, not a documented one.
Where it stands
Nobody has conducted or published an investigation of a haunting at Danvers; the stories are the ordinary residue of a large, grim, abandoned building with a documented history of suffering. The verdict is legend. The hospital was real, the overcrowding was real, and the dead in its cemeteries were real. The ghosts are what people brought with them.