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Location DB > United States > Indiana > Evansville > Evansville State Hospital > Memories of the State Hospital

Story Info
Tue, Feb 27th, 2007
posted by Kiishka
Memories of the State Hospital

Main Headquarters/Ward
My first time in was during the day in the late summer of 2005. My boyfriend had been in the building before with his older sister, her boyfriend, and some of their friends, though the main purposes of these missions was to have a good time- this generally involved as much vandalism as exploration. I was stunned at the sheer size of the building we approached; the building extended at least 200 yards in either direction, tapering off into curved corners on either side. A bleary childhood memory, still yet unidentified, tugged at my mind as I saw the four limestone columns, perfectly unadorned and rectangular, guarding the building’s front doors. A symmetrical set of steps rose on either side to a sort of giant limestone veranda. I didn’t see the driveway-tunnel underneath this until John led me there.

There was a semicircular driveway that arced towards the building, passing underneath the portico. The grass was tall and overgrown, and the massive flowering hedges buzzed dangerously with insects, but we walked into the tunnel unharmed. There was a narrow grate at the entrance to deflect rainwater, and I could see a window, then a door, then another window against the side of the building. Beyond it was the exit of the driveway-tunnel. The door stood wide open, gaping dark and ominously into the hot summer air. We had brought no flashlights, and the entrance was a good ten feet underground with no outside windows. As a virgin explorer, I was understandably intimidated.

As I stood in front of the door, John pointed out what he knew about this tunnel and the things beyond it. Behind me, directly across from the open door leading to the basement of the building, stood another door. This, he said, had at one point led to a building across the small road, on the green, but it had been torn down and the tunnel between the two had been filled in with dirt. The dead-end door yawned open behind me, and I grew nervous.

He asked if I wanted to go inside. My response was mixed. Yes, I did, for I was gradually growing fascinated... but entering a dark, abandoned mental hospital was not my idea of a good time. And the sign lying in the dirt stating the dangerous of asbestos in giant red letters did nothing to boost my confidence.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“Positive. I go in here all the time with Alice and Ethan.”

In the end, he went in by himself to explore it. And as he disappeared from sight into the pitch black of the underground, I edged my way just inside the door and waited. My eyes gradually adjusted to the lack of light, but I wasn’t comforted by what I saw. Exposed piping and wiring streaked across the ceiling. Large tubes, possibly carrying electricity for construction crews or simply having fallen from the ceiling, littered the floor in places. Large black spaces opened ominously on either side. What turned out to be ceiling tiles were scattered indiscriminately across the floor. And I could feel the dampness, and John’s footsteps splashed occasionally. I felt a chill as I saw him come back around the corner, his white shirt glowing faintly.

It took him nearly 20 minutes more to convince me to go further than three steps inside. I followed close behind him when I did, head twitching from side to side as I saw the empty spaces left by open doors on either side of the wide hallway. I stumbled over a pipe on the floor and got my feet wet, but I wasn’t too bothered by that; I had just noticed the massive, terrifying void of a hallway, too wide for a person to touch the walls with outspread arms, open up on either side of us. To the right, a stairwell glowed from ground-level light.

The stairwell, he said, led straight up to the first floor where there would be more light. But be careful, he warned, the steps going down are gone and it’s just a big hole going down. [Note: this is incorrect. There were no stairs going down, for we were on the lowest floor. This was merely a deep shadow that looked like a hole, and he didn’t care to investigate.] I clutched for his hand as we headed up the shattered concrete stairs.

I don’t remember anything else from this trip, for it has long since blended with other ventures into the building. It was all the same, anyway; long yellow hallways littered with debris from the ceiling, light shining in from the courtyard windows, broken stairwells on one flight and perfectly preserved ones on the next... the place seemed to have been destroyed indiscriminately.

I’ll simply go through and describe things as they come to me, in no particular order; I’ll explain them all thoroughly. The stairs were always interesting to me, for they seemed to change every time (this is merely because the building varies in height from place to place.) Some stairwells led from the basement all the way to the top floor, while others only went up one or two floors. As we would arrive on each floor, the wall directly across from the stairs would have ‘PISO 1’ or another number scrawled on the yellow tiles in red spray paint; I found out later that this was to aid the asbestos-removal workers who all spoke Spanish. ‘Piso’ means ‘flat’ or ‘floor’, and the number corresponded with the level. All the stairwells were two flights with a window on the wall as it changed direction; if the stairwell continued from the first to the fourth floor, the windows were enormous and extended the height of the entire building. All had interwoven bars over them, painted an industrial/prison grey, and had built-in gold colored locks.

My next few visits were all done in the dark by flashlight, and every visit drew me further and further into the building’s history. The building we were exploring was a headquarters/ward built in 1943 following the massive fire that destroyed the original 1890 Victorian-style building. It was built in the shape of a squared off figure eight, with the columned entrance at the front and a massive cafeteria at the back. A central hallway connected these at a height of one story (first floor); most of the building was three stories tall. [note: half a story must be added to every dimension I give, for the basement is half-above the ground. There are floor level windows that help light the basement rooms.] The ‘wings’ of the figure eight were wards; I’m not sure if one was for men and the other was for women. The wings were both three stories high. The front of the building was four stories, five in one spot where a small machine room extended up to allow access to the roof.

Because the building was in the process of being demolished, certain portions had to be destroyed to accommodate the construction crews and their equipment. The parts of the building that had been demolished by this point were limited, thankfully: the lowest part of the central core had been plowed through, revealing both the first-floor and basement-level hallways inside (though the hallway doors had been closed.); also, the left-most corner of the figure-eight in the back of the building (beside the cafeteria) had been completely torn down and filled-in. This had at one point been a walkway connecting the first-floor promenade of the Main Ward to the side-door of the separate Men’s Ward; by 2005 the foundations of this structure had been eradicated, leaving only the scarred sides of the buildings to testify for its existence.

It was stupidly simple to get into the building. On a day when the ground wasn’t muddy, there were at least fifteen unlocked, propped-open doors and one accessible ground-floor window to climb in through. It was almost as if the old building, like a lonely patient, wanted visitors.

We had innumerable late-night adventures in the ’43 building; on one particular night we brought walkie-talkies and decided to play flashlight tag in the halls. It was a spectacular failure as a game but a real learning experience as far as the structure of the building was concerned. We made three teams, all with radios and flashlights, and started out in a first floor corridor. One team would head out alone, and then another group five minutes later, and the last five minutes after that. It was a good plan, but unfortunately we had radio trouble; the radio John and I had would not connect with the other groups’ radios, so we were effectively isolated.

The experience was strange in many ways; I had never before thought of the place as a threatening entity, but crouched in a supply shed with Jon, staring at the windows across the courtyard for the tiniest hint of light, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of fear. The moon was nearly full, and the light of it glinted faintly on the windows on the opposite side of the courtyard; never had I seen the building look so massive and threatening, like it was leaning over us on the brink of collapse. Occasionally we would duck back against the corrugated side of the shed as a flashlight beam shone out a window, but we never were found.

Another nighttime experience was one of group discovery. It may have been the same night as the flashlight tag (I honestly don’t recall so long after the fact), but we had close to the same group of people with us. We had been exploring the building together, just wandering up and down the stairs with no real destination in mind. When John decided to go to the basement, however, he had to convince another party member to participate (she has a slight fear of the dark, and even with the flashlights the basement was little more than a void.) But after a bit of coaxing and bribing, the entire group headed down a badly shattered flight of stairs and into the dank air of the basement.

We discovered many things that night. A massive claw-foot porcelain bathtub, flipped onto its side, was found in a boiler room. We found the morgue with its walk-in freezer, and a makeshift museum, complete with x-ray equipment, medical antiques, and an original telephone switchboard. Rather sentimentally, I discovered the underground front doors of the building through which John had coaxed me inside the first time. And in an unexpected stroke of luck, we found ourselves in a hallway flooded with light. It was an eerie experience, walking down a pitch black hallway and finding the sloping, day-lit corridor to the right that led to a dead-end door. Both sides were lined with stained glass in shades of yellow and red and blue.

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