Pennhurst State School and Hospital

In 1968, a young television reporter named Bill Baldini walked into a state institution in the countryside outside Philadelphia with a camera crew.

What he filmed there was broadcast on Philadelphia’s Channel 10 in a five-part series called Suffer the Little Children. Viewers saw children and adults with intellectual and physical disabilities sitting on bare floors in vast, crowded day rooms, rocking back and forth. Some were naked. Some were tied to beds or chairs. Some lay in cribs, unattended, in their own waste. The smell, Baldini said later, was unbearable. Staff were so overwhelmed that some residents went for hours without anyone speaking to them at all.

The institution was called Pennhurst. And what Baldini showed the public that year would eventually lead to one of the most important legal decisions in the history of disability rights in America.

Built for Exclusion

The Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic opened in November 1908, on a rolling hilltop campus of red brick buildings near the Schuylkill River. It was built in an era when many American doctors, politicians and reformers believed in eugenics — the idea that people with disabilities, mental illness or even poverty were “defectives” who should be separated from society, and prevented from having children, for the good of the human race.

A state commission report of the time described people with intellectual disabilities as unfit for citizenship and a menace to society. That was the founding philosophy of Pennhurst. It was not a hospital in the sense of a place where people went to get well. It was a place where people were sent so that the rest of society wouldn’t have to see them.

Many residents were brought there as small children and lived there their entire lives. Some had severe disabilities. Others had mild ones, or none at all — orphans, immigrants who didn’t speak English, children whose families couldn’t afford to care for them, people whose only problem was that someone had decided they didn’t belong.

Overcrowding

Pennhurst filled up quickly, and it never stopped filling up.

By the 1950s and 1960s, it held around 3,500 residents, far more than it had been built for. The staff was small and poorly paid. Residents were packed into enormous dormitories with beds jammed together. Many received little or no education, therapy, or even basic attention.

Some residents were put to work — in the laundry, the kitchens, the farm — for little or no pay. Others were left idle for years. There were reports of physical abuse by staff and by other residents, of injuries that went untreated, of residents who were restrained or sedated to keep them manageable.

Those who survived Pennhurst later testified about what they had endured there. Some described being beaten. Some described being locked in isolation. Some described never being taught to read, or to speak, or to dress themselves — skills they might easily have learned.

The Lawsuit

In 1974, a lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of a young woman named Terri Lee Halderman, who had been a resident of Pennhurst, and others like her. The case, Halderman v. Pennhurst State School & Hospital, argued that the conditions at the institution violated the constitutional rights of the people who lived there.

The trial produced harrowing testimony. In 1977, Judge Raymond Broderick ruled that Pennhurst was not only providing inadequate care, but that its very nature — segregating people with disabilities from society — violated their rights. He ordered that residents be moved into community-based care, where they could live in homes and take part in ordinary life.

The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled on narrower legal grounds. But the core decision stood, and the push to move people out of large institutions continued. It became a landmark in the movement for the rights of people with disabilities, and helped shape how such care is provided across the country.

Pennhurst closed in 1987.

The Empty Campus

After the residents left, the buildings sat empty for decades. Windows broke. Ceilings fell in. Vandals and urban explorers came and went. Paint peeled off the walls in long strips; toys, wheelchairs, medical records and personal belongings were left behind in the decaying rooms.

And the stories began.

Urban explorers who crept onto the grounds at night reported hearing voices in empty buildings. Children laughing. Someone calling their names. The sound of crying from the old dormitories. Some described figures moving at the far ends of hallways, or faces looking out of windows in buildings that had been empty for years. In the old tunnels that connected the buildings, people said they felt something following them.

Several paranormal television programs filmed on the campus. In 2010, part of the property was turned into a commercial haunted attraction called Pennhurst Asylum, with actors and special effects.

A Different Kind of Haunting

That haunted attraction has been deeply controversial.

Disability rights advocates, former residents and their families have objected strongly to turning Pennhurst into a horror show. They point out that the people who lived there were not monsters or lunatics, as the attraction’s marketing sometimes suggested, but human beings with disabilities who were failed by their society. Turning their suffering into a Halloween fright, they argue, repeats the very dehumanization that Pennhurst was built on.

A group called the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance has worked for years to preserve the history of the institution and the stories of the people who lived there, and to create a proper memorial and museum.

I think they’re right. And I’ve tried to write this chapter in that spirit.

What Haunts Pennhurst

I have no doubt that people feel things on the Pennhurst grounds. How could they not? Thousands of people lived out their whole lives in those buildings, many of them unseen, unheard and unloved. Some died there and were buried in the institution’s cemetery, in graves marked only with numbers.

If there are voices on the wind at Pennhurst, I don’t think they belong to the kind of ghosts you see in horror films. I think they belong to children who were taken from their families and never taught to read. Adults who sat for decades on the floor of a day room. People whose names were written down in a ledger and then forgotten.

The truest haunting at Pennhurst is the knowledge that this happened, in America, within living memory, to people who had done nothing wrong — and that it took a television camera and a federal judge to make it stop.