Willard State Hospital Part 1: And what did you do this weekend?

I'll tell you what I did. I toured the Willard State Hospital. And it was awesome... For a little background information, Willard was a mental hospital that was open from 1869-1995 for people with chronic mental illnesses. Nowadays Willard houses a drug treatment center, a shock camp for people who committed minor crimes and a day care center. Though a lot of the buildings were put to use, many more have been left to decay.



Yesterday, some of the buildings were opened to the public for tours to raise money for the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Daycare, which is on campus. Former employees were at all the buildings to talk about the history, which was nice. The tours themselves were pretty disorganized because the campus is so huge you have to drive to many of the buildings. Jaime and I lost our tour after the first building and decided to just look around at our own pace and that worked out better.

Some buildings were in better shape than others. Hadley Hall is still used by the Department of Corrections for training, so it was probably in the best shape.



Inside was a very nice auditorium and gym. The woman who we talked to there said that they actually had a lot of colleges come to give performances for the patients and the staff. But the coolest thing here had to be the bowling alley in the basement.


Yup, a real bowling alley. Jaime was really excited to see this. They used to have staff and patient leagues. Patients worked at the bowling alley setting pins and maintaining it. Sadly, the picture doesn't show the Brady-esque yellow carpeting. The scorecards and old ashtrays were still there. It was like they closed up in the middle of someone's game...
Anyway, that's just some of the tour. I'll start getting into the creepier stuff in part two...