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Recommended: Mystery ghost stories
Glenn Dale Hospital
Background
Over the recent break, I mentioned to a friend that I needed to write about a ghost-related urban legend. He offered to tell me about Glenn Dale Hospital, which is supposedly a famous ghost legend in Maryland. Since I am a lifelong Maryland resident and did not know about the hospital, I was eager to hear the story. The story was told in the living room of a house by a 19 year old white male native to southern Maryland. He is from a middle class family and his father and mother are a construction worker and a homemaker, respectively. He heard the story from another friend who claims to have visited Glenn Dale Hospital.
The Story
So, in the 30s and 40s they used to send tuberculosis patients to the [Glenn Dale] hospital for treatment. [normal relaxed tone] Eventually it was converted into an insane asylum and it became notorious for its treatment of patients. The staff experimented on the patients and locked them up all day. One day, all the patients revolted and the doctors ran out of the hospital and boarded up all the doors and windows. [talking faster] The patients were left inside to die and the hospital was abandoned. The insane still wander the halls. Today, if you sneak in the hospital you will be chased by the ghosts of the patients and catch tuberculosis. My friend went there and swears he saw a ghost watching him from the shadows, and he won’t go near that place anymore [gestures with hand in horizontal motion]. The cops arrest anyone they catch trespassing, but they say the cops won’t go in the hospital after you if you need help.”
Context
There is evidence to support some of this story. According to a Washington Post article from December 10, 2006, Glenn Dale Hospital does exist on over 200 acres in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In fact, it did house tuberculosis patients starting in the mid-thirties. However, that is essentially all the truth in the story. The article states, “It [Glen Dale Hospital] was never an insane asylum, as urban explorers and paranormal researchers suggest on the internet.” Since it was never an asylum, the idea of a revolt and the insane wandering the halls must not be true. Since tuberculosis does not last for decades without human hosts, it is impossible to catch the disease just by exploring the hospital.
I was told a story about one of Cloudcroft's more famous ghosts when casually lounging in the undergraduate student physics lounge at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a group of students during a lunch break before class. This occurred during early April, 2005. I inquired whether anyone knew any ghost stories or folklore. A friend of mine volunteered that she knew several ghost stories from her travels. The storyteller was a 23-year-old Caucasian female from an upper-middle class family in Baltimore. She currently lives in Crofton, MD, and is a physics and astronomy major.
I have lived in Baltimore for quite some time now, and it is impossible to live in the area and not know that there is a ghost story associated with the Admiral Fell Inn at Fell Point (a section of Baltimore located right on the harbor). The man who told me this story is a very well educated, 61 year old credit union CEO. He told me the story over dinner, with me trying to shush the rest of the guests because they all wanted to tell their own versions. I have included his version of the Ghost of Admiral Fell below, excluding only names and comments from others:
The first hospital was built in a quiet farming town later named Kings Park. In 1885, officials of what was then the city of Brooklyn established the Kings County Farm on more than 800 acres to care for the mentally ill. Kings Park was only a small part of what would later become a giant chain of connected mental hospitals on Long Island, each with over 2,500 patients at one time.(Bleyer,2)
In April I sat down with a friend at my house and asked about any urban legends or ghost stories he had encountered. After a couple legends he had seen in movies, he mentioned a haunted bridge about ten minutes away from downtown. He is a twenty-one year-old White male; his father owns an appliance store and his mother helps out with the books. He first heard this story in the ninth grade from a couple of friends. Supposedly, they had heard from kids who had actually been to the bridge and heard strange things at night. The bridge is located off of Uniontown road, between a couple old farms. He has not encountered the bridge first hand but still remembers the story surrounding it:
“I’m dead, serious about those other wards; M.P.’s won’t protect you, because they’re craziest of all. I’d go with you myself, but I’m scared stiff. Insanity is contagious. This is the only sane ward in the whole hospital. Everybody is crazy but us. This is probably the only sane ward in the whole world for that matter”(Heller 8).
As the narrator of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden, a paranoid half- Native American Indian man, has managed to go unnoticed for ten years by pretending to be deaf and dumb as a patient at an Oregon mental asylum. While he towers at six feet seven inches tall, he has fear and paranoia that stem from what he refers to as The Combine: an assemblage whose goal is to force society into a conformist mold that fits civilization to its benefit. Nurse Ratched, a manipulative and impassive former army nurse, dominates the ward full of men, who are either deemed as Acute (curable), or Chronic (incurable). A new, criminally “insane” patient named Randle McMurphy, who was transferred from the Pendleton Work Farm, eventually despoils the institution’s mechanical and monotonous schedule through his gambling, womanizing, and rollicking behavior. McMurphy’s dereliction of Nurse Ratched’s rules not only provides entertainment for Bromden and the other patients, but also acts as an impetus for their own reb...
There’s this really small highway town in New Mexico called Cimarron, and it’s small now but in the late 19th century it was a bustling crossroads for all sorts of people – gold speculators, ranchers, oilmen, and especially those vagrant characters, like Billy the Kid, seeking refuge from whatever lawman was on his tail. In Cimarron is this hotel, the Santa Fe Hotel, and they say that this place is the most haunted hotel still in operation, in the west. The lights flicker on and off, and people, visitors just say they encounter really weird things – like if you go in this one room, you might see a woman out of the corner of your eye, sitting on the windowsill and looking out for someone. And when you turn to face her, she disappears, but all of a sudden you smell a subtle waft of strawberry-scented perfume. Weird – yet you still not sure if this is true? Sounds sketchy, I know. Oh – I should say this hotel is haunted because 23 people have been shot to death in the hotel, either from a bar-fight or card-game or something. Well I went to stay at the hotel for a night, before I headed on to a nearby Boy Scout camp. I went with my troop, and we all got our own rooms. Guess what room I got – the strawbe...
Come with me as I take you inside one of the most haunted locations in the United States today. It is a journey down dark hallways and into rooms painted by both shadow and light where spirits talk and phantoms walk. St. Albans Sanatorium is a destination known by serious paranormal investigators as a place where they can seek answers to the mysteries of what lies beyond death. Some of these investigators were able to find resolutions for themselves to a number of these age old riddles through their experiences at the sanatorium. The frightening and true stories found within the pages of this book are about these inquisitive investigators’ encounters with The Ghosts of St. Albans Sanatorium.
I. Intro. - Imagine you are sitting home one night with nothing to do. Your parents have gone away for the weekend and there is absolutely no one around. So you sit around that night watching TV for awhile but find nothing on worth watching. You go on upstairs to your room and get ready for bed. Turn off the lights, lay down, and close your eyes. All of a sudden you here a crash of glass in your kitchen. You rush to your feet and put your ear to the door listening to what’s going on downstairs. You begin to hear the voice of two men as they start going through the living room, making their way to the stairs, right outside your room. What do you do? You aren’t going to confront them since its just you—remember you thought you heard two of them right? Well you are really stuck in your room and all you can do is sit there hoping that they leave soon and don’t harm you. Now if it were at my house things would be a little bit different. For starters I would get out my shotgun from my closet and begin to see what is gin on down stairs.
The story was told to me by one of my high-school classmates, who is a resident of the town of Atco. The nineteen year old young man is currently a sophomore at Clemson University and describes himself as being a Roman Catholic of half Italian-American and half Irish-American decent. The young man also noted that he is normally very socially conservative and a staunch Republican. His father is employed as a general contractor and his mother runs her own catering company. He describes himself as a “self proclaimed expert of all things related to the Atco Ghost.” He cannot remember the specific date when he first heard the story, but stated that he can remember knowing most of the details to the story for most of his life. He also claims to have attempted to see the ghost on only one occasion and after what he saw, he refuses to ever go back to that area of town at night. The following is an almost word for word account, which he checked to ensure its accuracy, of the lengthy story as he retold it to me ...
A reader in 1855 would find ?The Old Nurse?s Story? to be extremely frightening as the setting is located in a typical 1855 town, so people could imagine such events occurring in places they lived. The location is typically ghostly as the story it is in an isolated, large house during bad weather. However, this gives the reader comfort as not few would live in stately houses. A contemporary reader would not find these as scary as they?re used to the special effects being used and in comparison, the ghost stories don?t seem scary.
Although she had just recently moved to Jamesport, she lived most of her life on Long Island and was surprised she had never heard of the restaurant. She began asking her waiter some questions about how new the restaurant was and about the owner and such. She was told that the mansion was built in the 1800s and was obviously somewhat restored. It was recently purchased by a local townsperson and had somewhat recently opened up. The waiter began teasing that the mansion was supposedly haunted because it was so old and there were generations of families who lived and died in the house. He was new to the restaurant but the chefs and other staff at the restaurant claimed they could hear people walking around and opening and closing doors. He told her that the staff generally liked to leave at the same time of night to avoid being alone in the mansion, being that it was haunted. The waiter made a point of claiming that everyone else says it’s true as well. He had never heard the ghosts, but he was sure they existed in the mansion.
The Nelly Butler hauntings is referred to as the first recorded ghost story in American history (LiBrizzi 5), and possibly the most exciting hauntings to date as there are still many unsolved mysteries. The apparition appeared on more than 30 separate occasions to over 100 witnesses in Sullivan, Maine, just over fifteen years after the American Revolution (5-6). Although the Nelly Butler apparition is one of the most convincing ghosts of all time, it was subject to suspicions of fraud. These claims turn out to be groundless as the evidence reveals the ghost to be genuine.
Goodfriend, Wind. "Mental Hospitals in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”." "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" Psychology Today, 22 May 2012. Web. 01 May 2014.
Nurse Ratched has such a control on the ward that she has gotten he patients to believe that their conditions are a lot worse than they actually are. The patient’s ultimate goal is to leave the hospital mentally stable and healthy, being told that their conditions are worse than they were before only strikes a panic. McMurphy is desperate for an escape from the ward but he knows the only way out is through Nurse Ratched. He knows that she can keep him in the ward for as long as she pleases, and he worries that will be a very long time. “Doctor—do I look like a sane man?” (Page 30). McMurphy has been set up to believe that he is extremely mentally unstable. This forces him to seek confirmation in his doctor. McMurphy does not let it show, but he deeply fears that is mental state will deteriorate during his time in the ward. Asking the doctor whether he thinks that he looks sane is McMurphy’s way of admitting that he is desperate for a release from the hospital and from Nurse Ratched’s controlling ways. “You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane."(Page 19). The way in which Nurse Ratched addresses the mental institution resembles her dehumanization of the patients in the ward. Nurse Ratched speaks of the mentally ill as if they should be ashamed and punished for something they have no control over. The nurse inflicts pain onto those whom are mentally ill as a way of treatment. McMurphy, who is originally the most mentally stable of the patients, is given pain treatments prescribed by Nurse Ratched. The treatment, in which Nurse Ratched gives McMurphy, is a punishment for not being in the right mental state. Because McMurphy’s mental state has not yet deteriorated tremendously, the pain treatment does nothing but make him internally fight with