• Interesting stuff about Danvers State Hospital & patients from my grandmother
    2 replies, posted
I'm sure any of you who are even remotely interested in UE have heard of this behemoth, and some I'm sure have had the good fortune to explore this beast: [img]http://www.opacity.us/images/db/22/resource/danvers_east_aerial.jpg[/img] In my opinion it's one of the most widely recognizable locations in UE, but I digress. In the late 50s to mid 60s my grandmother worked as a bus driver for the entirety of Essex county, in Massachusetts. A lot of her work was shuttling people from government/public works places to meetings and such, but she also had another arrangement with the faculty of Danvers State. Whenever they would go on "field trips" with some of the patients, they would call the company my grandmother worked for and they would drive them around. So every once in a while my grandma would take the drive up to Hathorne Hill, walk to wherever she needed to in the building, then drive them to places such as the beach. She said that most of the patients she came across were kindly and good natured (attributed to the fact that the closer to administration you were held, the less dangerous you were) but they had a nasty tendency to want to touch you. On the bus, patients would freely walk up and down the bus aisle for no reason and occasionally had to be restrained until they got to their destination. They'd try to pet my grandma's hair as she would drive, but the bus she would drive had a special curtain installed, so she would be able to close it for some driving privacy. She used to go up and down the fire escapes at the hospital to avoid getting caught up with talking to a bunch of people in the wings. One interesting story she told me was that one time, as she was going up, a large group of unsupervised patients were coming down. This gave her quite a scare, as at that point you have no idea whether these patients could be benevolent or violent. So she walked all the way back down the 5 flights of fire escape stairs, waited for them to leave, then climbed back up and into the wing. I dunno if any of this is very interesting or not, but I've had a certain infatuation with Danvers since 2007 and I just heard all this stuff yesterday.
Looks epic to explore
gone since 2006, it's all apartments and condos now
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