It's residents dealt with atrocities unimaginable to most people today, though it didn't begin that way.  The Gothic style structure with its protruding wings is the result of Thomas Kirkbride's dream.  He had a vision of a place that would help mental patients flourish with it's lush scenery, fresh air, and normal behaviors, such as gardening for the patients.

The doors opened in 1878, with a capacity of 600 if full, yet they expected to average around 450 patients.  The worst patients were to be in the farthest wings from the center administration building.  With his healthy environment, Kirkbride predicted an 89% cure rate.  Well, it looked good in theory...

At least twice in it's history, Danvers was a leader in humane treatment.  Between 1888-1898 and again in 1903-1910, under the guidance of superintendent Charles Page, MD, a non-restraint policy was instituted.  In most places, such things as straps, straightjackets, threats, and even chains were used on patients.  In extremely bad conditions, barbaric methods such as insulin injections, blood letting, tooth pulling and leeches were employed, depending on the patient's specific illness.  Unfortunately, the early history of mental institutions often carried the belief that insanity meant no feelings, which therefore allowed guilt-free experiments.

While Kirkbride's architectural dream was originally realized and all went according to plan, basically, it wasn't too many years before Danvers became a combination of a melting pot and a dumping ground.  The population swelled to 2,300+ patients by November 1945.

Everyone from alcohol addicts to the severely mentally ill were brought to reside there.  In one instance (and likely many more), a patient never spoke a word of English, yet none of the staff spoke his language.  He wasn't insane -- he was picked up for vagrancy and dropped off by police.  Can you imagine being foreign and never have an explanation as to why you were brought there?  For one young child, Danvers became his life-long home, simply because his mother no longer wanted to deal with him.

In this manner, the hospital became a catch-all, filled with tragic stories.  Because of the enormous amount of patients and meager staffing, Kirkbride's vision eventually became diluted in the name of population control.  Understaffing brought on the employment of the same primitive and brutal methods utilized at lesser reknown institutions, and then some.

Early shock therapy was a frequent favorite, back when it was in the early experimental stages.  Men, with all of their so-called intelligence, strapped patients down, shoved a leather strap in their mouths to avoid a severed tongue, and proceeded to administer jolts of electricity through their body.  Each person's body is different, so they'd experiment with various settings.  Patients would sometimes convulse so badly, they wound up with broken bones.

Such famous people as Sylvia Plath, Vivien Leigh, and Ernest Hemingway received ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) for severe depression.  This is still used today in extreme cases, but only with patient consent and by physicians with much more training than a switch-throwing executioner.  Often, it hinders the patient's memory in varying degrees.  Such was the case with Ernest Hemingway.  He consented to about a dozen treatments.  He found the loss unbearable and shot himself a few days later.

Another useful tool at Danvers:  hydrotherapy tanks.  Sounds harmless enough.  Water can be soothing, relaxing... until you're locked into a tank of ice water to hopefully prevent seizures.

The worst "treatment" has to be the lobotomy.  It's said that Danvers is where the procedure was 'perfected.'  The mental giant behind this is Friederich Golz, who sliced the frontal lobes out of living people's brains in 1890, simply because he was curious!  Again, this was experimented with.  In the case of the lobotomy, it was done by first slicing and then hoping they got it right.  For awhile, they were forced to practice on chimps.

In the 1930's, Dr. Walter Freeman revolutionized the process and made it so much simpler.  Just shove an ice pick through their eye socket and move it around a bit to sever the frontal lobe.  This was only done once the patient was restrained, his head braced in a vice of some sort to prevent escape.  In 1949, 5000 United States citizens received this fate.  From 1944 to 1963, 4500 Swedish people were forced into it against their will.  Forty percent of lobotomized patients were pronounced "cured," one in twenty died from it, and some were turned into vegetables, as in the case of John F. Kennedy's sister.

Rosemary Kennedy underwent the procedure via Freeman's ice-pick technique because of her father, Joe.  She supposedly suffered from mild retardation and this was supposed to fix her, according to Freeman.  Instead, it was terribly botched and Rosemary lived her life from 23 onward as an incoherent, paralyzed, incontinent vegetable.  In later years, her mother suggested that Rosemary wasn't ill, but instead, a willful young adult.

Frances Farmer became another victim of Freeman's torture.  Hailed as the up-and-coming Garbo, she continued the rest of her young life with the intact memory of having a sharp object thrust through her eye, in order to cure her of being a Communist sympathizer and disorderly conduct.

It's amazing that such extreme ideas were wildly embraced, yet when psychotropic medications came onto the scene, doctors shied away from such untested options.

While the grounds of Danvers, closed in 1991, are patrolled by security to prevent urban explorers from entering the broken-down and potentially dangerous building, those that have visited the property on tours claim it's taken on a spirit of it's own.  Perhaps it's those that have died there and left their impression and ghosts behind.  The property contains two cemeteries with a total of 768 graves marked only by small metal stakes with numbers.  Due to lost records, all but around 250 have been identified.

Jeralyn Levasseur grew up on Danvers grounds, because her father was the hospital administrator at one time.  She remembers footsteps in a hallway above her when no one was upstairs in their cottage.  her brother and sister reported seeing an apparition in the attic, and Jeralyn's covers were yanked off of her by something invisible when she was a teen.

It may even go back farther.  History states Salem Village, not Salem as it is today, was the setting for the infamous witch trials.  The village was near to the Danvers grounds, and Judge Jonathan Hathorne who held proceedings of witch trials during the 1600's lived in a house right where the Castle on the Hill was later built.

The grounds are steeped in history and saturated with the woes of those that met their demise there.  Tours of the inside are not given, but after many letters to the state and being granted permission, a movie called "Session 9" was filmed on the site, including inside.  The movie accurately captures the ambience of the setting, including tidbits of the torturous treatments that some received there.