Pennhurst opened in a remote area of Pennsylvania in 1908 as a school for those with developmental and physical disabilities, many of whom spent their entire lives within the confines of its walls. The hospital eventually gained a reputation for abuse and neglect, with two supreme court cases on behalf of residents and a 1968 exposé entitled “Suffer the Little Children” by journalist Bill Baldini that brought to light the lack of staff, neglect, abuse, and sexual assault that residents suffered. Pennhurst played a significant role in the patient’s rights movement, with it ultimately being shut down in 1987, twenty years after the abuse that occurred there was initially exposed. After the initial asylum closed, the property was abandoned and much of the hospital equipment was left inside.2
Pennhurst serves as an example of an abandoned asylum that was eventually repurposed for something other than mental health care. It is also, significantly, an asylum with a dark history that it is well known for and this has resulted in criticism of its repurposing. This criticism is further increased by the fact that rather than being repurposed for a museum or unrelated private use, Pennhurst is now used to host an annual haunted house set in an asylum and throughout the rest of the year, the owners open it up to amateur ghost hunters.
In 2010, the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance was formed in order to create a national museum in the former asylum; however, the state instead sold it to businessman Richard Chakejian for $2 million. Chakejian initially created a composting operation on site, but when he found that to be unprofitable, he instead began to work with local haunted house creator Randy Bates to create a haunted house in a number of the abandoned structures on campus. Despite reassuring local concerned parties that the theme of the haunted house would have nothing to do with history of the site, the concept Chakejian and Bates came up with blended the history of the Pennhurst with a fictionalized story of an Austrian scientist named “Dr. Chakajian” who conducted experiments on patients. The video included below is the advertisement for the 2023 haunted house at Pennhurst, and it gives an impression of the types of imagery and narratives utilized by the creators. When speaking to a reporter, Bates explained that the choice of creating a fictionalized story was made with the intention of avoiding any correlation between the experiences of former patients and what occurred in the haunted house.3
However, the Pennhurst haunted house (to differentiate between Pennhurst the asylum and Pennhurst the haunted house, the later will always be referred to as a haunted house and references to Pennhurst on its own will only refer to the former hospital) has faced criticism for the way that it blends the history of the asylum with its fictionalized narrative, frequently without making a clear distinction between the two for its visitors. For example, clips of “Suffer the Little Children” are mixed with a video made to tell the story of the haunted house, and there is not a clear distinction made between the “museum” providing the history of Pennhurst and the staged rooms. This is criticized as “cheapening” the abuses exposed by “Suffer the Little Children” in order to make the fictionalized story seem more credible. The haunted house is further criticized for its rooms that take clear inspiration from the imagery shown in “Suffer the Little Children” and include real equipment for electroshock therapy and pulling teeth that was abandoned with the hospital. In these rooms, both the patients and the doctors/attendants are portrayed as evil which, while a subversion from the typical trope where mental health patients are characterized as scary and threatening, is still dismissive of the real power dynamic that existed in Pennhurst. These criticisms are additionally echoed by those who were formerly institutionalized at Pennhurst who feel that the haunted house is upsetting and recreates their trauma in a way that they do not want, with the attraction being described as “the final insult, the final indignity.”5
The other primary permitted use for Pennhurst is investigations by amateur ghost hunters. One such example is a series of two videos by a popular ghost hunting and urban exploration youtuber Exploring With Josh. These two videos, with a combined total of approximately 1.8 million views, do provide some history of the site, including a tour of the campus by an employee in the first video and a brief summary alongside a number of clips in the second video. However, this discussion is often sensationalized, with frequent creepy music playing as they stress with little elaboration how haunted the site must be with the number of deaths that occurred there. The name of the asylum itself being misspelled as “Penhusrt” in the title card of the second video gives little reassurance that an adequate amount of care was put into understanding the topics discussed in these videos.6
The ghost hunting itself in these videos plays into the exploration of the dynamic between patients and employees, but rarely beyond a superficial level. Upon entering a new space or encountering what is believed to be a new spirit, the ghost hunters always ask if they are speaking to a patient or a doctor, and if they are speaking to a good or evil spirit.8 However, outside of these questions which then are not expanded upon, little is done to consider the environment or social dynamic of an asylum and how that should factor into how one would engage with the ghosts there. Furthermore, beyond an encounter with an evil ghost named “Skippy” who had allegedly been responsible for the abuse of patients and who was reported to still harass women who visited the building in which he resided, very little of the videos beyond the tour itself have much to do with the negative reputation of Pennhurst and the abuse that occurred there, despite that being the reason that it is associated so thoroughly with ghosts and Halloween.9
Pennhurst is seen as the archetype of the haunted asylum trope, but those who engage with it do not undertake the work to analyze what that connection really means. Rather than being an honoring of the suffering that occurred there as they are often framed to be by those perpetuating them, these endeavors do not examine it beyond a surface level and both exploit and disregard it in doing so. This is defended by Chakejian, however, on the basis that it is profitable and brings jobs to the area.10 The money that the haunted house brings to Pennhurst allows the site to be preserved, and when considering Allentown’s fate and that of other abandoned historic asylums that historic preservation groups wanted to transform into museums, that argument is more compelling.
- Pennhurstasylum.com (image), accessed October 29, 2023 ↩︎
- Emily Smith Beitiks, “The Ghosts of Institutionalization at Pennhurst’s Haunted Asylum,” Hastings Center Report, 42, no. 1 (January/February 2012), accessed September 11, 2023, https://web.s.ebscohost.com/chc/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=87264231-6d7e-4aff-9b37-7de8393a41e7%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9Y2hjLWxpdmU%3d#AN=82190459&db=cmh, 22. ↩︎
- Beitiks, “The Ghosts of Institutionalization,” 22-23. ↩︎
- Rogues Hollow Productions, “Pennhurst Trailer 2023,” Youtube Video, 0:39, September 27, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGDgpmBIgA4&t=1s. ↩︎
- Beitiks, “The Ghosts of Institutionalization,” 22-23. ↩︎
- Exploring With Josh,“Exploring World’s Most Haunted Asylum | Terrifying Experience,” youtube video, 1:00:48, October 31, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fOawW_4gaQ
Exploring With Josh, “Our Return To World’s Most Haunted Asylum (Gone Wrong),” youtube video, 1:09:37, September 11, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykK0bHMmWgI ↩︎ - Exploring With Josh, “Our Return To World’s Most Haunted Asylum.” ↩︎
- Exploring With Josh, “Exploring World’s Most Haunted Asylum.”
Exploring With Josh, “Our Return To World’s Most Haunted Asylum.” ↩︎ - Exploring With Josh, “Exploring World’s Most Haunted Asylum.”
Exploring With Josh, “Our Return To World’s Most Haunted Asylum.” ↩︎ - Beitiks, “The Ghosts of Institutionalization,” 23. ↩︎
