Description Of Place: Greystone Park is a huge imposing Victorian style building with 673,706 total square feet with exterior balconies, walkways and stairways in uneven levels of deterioration. At the base of this massive building was the largest alleged continuous foundation in the United States from the time it was built in 1876 until it was surpassed by the Pentagon in 1943. However, many other Kirkbride asylum buildings (such as the Ohio State Asylum for the Insane) also lay a claim to this fame, and it has not been verified if this local claim is true. Designed to the specifications of the Kirkbride Plan, the building has a characteristic linear arrangement; the main building has a center section that was used for administrative purposes with three wings radiating out from the center, each about 140 feet or 42.7 meters long, set back from the previous one so that patients could enjoy the beauty of the outside surroundings. Each ward was initially set up to accommodate twenty patients and furnished with a dining room, exercise room, and parlor. Other amenities included Victorian stuffed furniture, pianos, pictures, curtains and fresh flowers, though not all wards were created equally. Wards that housed the most excitable patients were sparsely furnished for safety with sturdy oak furniture. The rooms were to be light and airy with only two patients to a room. To reduce the likelihood of fires, Greystone and other period Kirkbride asylums were constructed using stone, brick, slate and iron, using as little wood as possible. The Greystone campus itself was once a self-contained community that included staff housing, a post office, fire and police stations, a working farm, and vocational and recreational facilities with an on-location cemetery. It also had its own gas and water utilities and a gneiss quarry, which was the source of the Greystone building material. Below the building, a series of vaulted tunnels and rails connect the many structures. Today, the structure is a shadow of what it once was with heavy vandalism and uneven levels of neglect and degradation, such as crumbling walls, outdated medical gear cluttering rooms, occult trash and graffiti, scattered medical files and signs of small fires by vagrants trying to keep warm.

Ghostly Manifestations: Every state is proud of its notoriously haunted and deserted mental asylums and tuberculosis hospitals. They are great places for setting their local horror stories and for bored teenagers to spray paint obscenity and occult symbols and inject lethal substances into their bodies between crashing through the weak floors and unstable wood staircases the three floors into the basement. Is it any wonder the most common urban legend between them is that teenagers go in to never been seen again. They're mazes and labyrinths of dark rooms and corridors. It's easy to get lost in them. Among them, California has Vannacutt Sanitarium, Kentucky has Waverly Hills Hospital, Massachusetts has Danvers Mental Hospital, West Virginia has Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Ohio has Athens Mental Health Center, Pennsylvania has Pennhurst State Hospital, Montana has Creekmore Insane Asylum, Washington has Northern State Hospital and just an hour's drive from New York City, New Jersey has Essex County Hospital and Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. From behind their beautiful and attractive facades to the public, it is no surprise that many of these locations are often condemned and derelict yet crowded with forgotten records, equipment, patient belongings, preserved body parts in glass jars and ruined furniture to temp even the most choosy pickers, urban explorers and metal scrap collectors.

Michael Healey is one of just under twelve people with legal permission to venture out to the grounds and spend time in the old sanitarium. As a former surgeon and now medical advisor at nearby Morristown Medical Center, he is also a medical professor at New Jersey Northeast University, and he has taken young interns on tours of the derelict asylum, but he has also spent hours by alone and with others cataloging and re-examining the files and equipment left in the old hospital. Although he is often hesitant to confess the place does its best to unnerve him, even he can't explain some of the strange sounds and sights he has had here.

"Is it haunted? Many believe so." Healey confides in us during a walk-through examination of long corridors, dingy rooms, inane graffiti painted on walls and occult symbolism by bored vandals dabbling into the occult. Much of the first floors are almost intact, but as one goes further from the location, the sensation is like the literary Alice of Wonderland fame entering the underworld. Trash and debris litter rooms, private belongings from years before still rest where they left behind in rooms and sinister totems like the heads of dolls hanging from the ceilings of rooms or a solitary dollhouse is left abandoned in barren rooms. Along the way, messages like "Turn Around" are left to greet nonspecific future visitors, mannequins and dolls are left in human-like death poses and objects like chairs are left in odd places to greet people on sight upon entering rooms and corridors. The entire location has an undoubtedly sinister presence, and all these imagery together forces guests to wonder if they are not quite alone here.

Of those who have investigated the location, evidence collected here has included pictures and videos of orbs, shadows, mist, apparitions, and various other unidentifiable anomalies. Rumors of screams still emanating from the hospital catacombs date back to the 90s before hospital ever closed. Shadows are rampant, often setting off proximity sensors or appearing in windows.

"One does not have to go inside to feel the presence of this place." Healey continues. "Just standing outside and looking up to the place has unnerved many, while others have seen figures wandering from window to window, somehow avoiding the interior walls between windows."

As if the atmosphere wasn't bad enough, the location is littered from end to end with dolls strung up from the ceiling and mannequins left in life-like poses in desks, stations and beds to further unnerve those who trespass. No one knows who started leaving them, but Healey has removed and taken down many of them, sometimes ten to twelve at a time, but then he'll come up a few days to a week later and they'll all be put back up or posed in new locations. 

"I've spent a lot of time working here." Healey adds. "There is one ward that was closed and locked since the place was closed down and another worker and I were sent there to do a visual inventory of the rooms and the contents. There were two parts to this ward. The first and main part was a long corridor with rooms on either side, like a normal hospital ward. However, behind the rooms on the left hand side was an old balcony area that was like a separate ward. This was sectioned off with doors, but these doors were not locked.

"Anyway, my associate and I had been picking up and sorting the old patient files dumped on the floor in the old nurses station when he announced that he was going out for a smoke. The light was getting dim in there, and I was doing what I was doing when after a few minutes, maybe no more than four or five, I heard foot steps coming from the balcony area and saw shadows through the glass as if someone was walking back and forth. I thought it was Ted trying to scare me. That area of the hospital was well known to a few people and caused a lot of people some discomfort. I stood in front of the doors and waited until the shadow was right in front of the doors when I opened the door expecting to see Ted standing there, but I was instead greeted with only a cold gust of wind and silence.

"A lot of the people I've told this story to have asked me if I was scared. Well, the answer is no, because I thought it was this friend and associate I've known for ten years. Why would I be scared? I mean, I was obviously unnerved that he wasn't there, but can I really jump to a conclusion and claim that what I experienced was really a ghost. It could have been a reflection or an optical illusion, but when I mentioned this to one of the security guards who had walked that area, he told me that he too had had an experience in the same spot."

Over the last few years, there has been a high turnover in security guards at Greystone. Most of their duties are in chasing out teenagers and would-be ghost hunters, and to a lesser level, keeping the location locked up, secure and reported damage; however, intruders still somehow manage to make there way in. It is hard enough to find witnesses with legal permission to be here to go on record about their experiences than to get people hesitant to confess to prowling the hospital wanting to tell their ghost stories.

"To tell the truth," Ty Wolowitz is an amateur photographer and urban explorer who has admittedly confessed to have snuck into Greystone at least four times since 2008. "I've been to the top floor several times and lost in the basement at least twice as many times. There are a lot of legends about college students going in Greystone that were never heard of again, and when you wander around that maze of halls and rooms and locked doors, it quickly becomes obvious that it is possible to get horribly lost and disoriented there.

"I was on the second floor with by best friend there." He continues. "I'll call him Pete for the sake of the story, but he'd heard about the ghosts there, and I had told him I'd been inside and he wanted me to take him inside the next time I went. It was the second week in December and there was snow on the ground, and we had made it up to the end of a long hallway on the second floor. For some reason, I had looked down to the end of the hallway, and I saw a man staring at me who had on a gray jumpsuit kind of suit and was kind of pale and faceless. We knew we were supposed to be alone, but for some reason, I had this really weird feeling that he wasn't the security guard. I mean, you just know that kind of thing. He didn't look real, but we didn't go running out like a Casper cartoon. We looked up at him, looked at each other and back, and he wasn't there anymore. Pete decided he wanted to go and I, well, I couldn't agree with him more so we headed back down the stairs and slipped out the way we had got in, but for some reason, we kept looking back. For some reason, we felt we were being watched and escorted out. Pretty freaky. I know what I saw, and I don’t think I’m crazy, do you?"

Another urban explorer and self-confessed Greystone expert is Alex Wraith, who has accumulated numerous stories from other explorers and witnesses who have visited the old hospital and other NYC-area structures. Among the stories, traditions of apparitions, shadows, voices, footsteps, doors slamming shut and other activity has been reported. Alex believes the place is haunted, but he is also not yet to fully reject the theory that someone could be living on the premises.

"There are rooms on the premises that still have clothes and personal possessions on them. I've noticed things moved and carried from room to room. Rolling chairs are left in hallways, and doors are heard closing by themselves. The location might be haunted, but I'm not entirely convinced it's haunted." He reports.

"I'm not completely opposed to the fact that cult worshippers are frequently violating the place. " He continues. "I think they're responsible for the dolls, the symbols, the dark graffiti and possibly for holding dark rituals here, which really irks me. This place is unnerving by itself without wondering what sort of dark energies these idiots are leaving here. I'd much rather deal with ghosts than fear what sort of evil presence here could follow me home.

Alex believes the apparition of an aged old woman reported here is actually demonic in origin. She appears in one of the rooms of the mental ward standing and staring from her seat, and she reappears following visitors to the place, especially people looking for ghosts. A raspy throaty voice from the third floor has been attributed to her. She's also been connected to the banging noises, footsteps and the clatter of objects being thrown.

"The apparition of a naked young lady has been seen on the premises as well sitting in a window or staring down from an upper landing in the staircase." Alex casually remarks. "I think she's also the old woman in just another form to lure guys deeper inside." 

In 2012, Alex met film-maker Sean Stone, the son of director Oliver Stone of "JFK" fame. Based on Alex's stories of the place, Sean wanted to film a movie at the location and acquired legal permission to film in the structure. Joined by actress Antonella Lehigh and a small crew, they turned op at Greystone to explore its legends and somehow got lost in it for almost three hours. Along the way, they experienced strange sounds, odd shadows, moments of confusion and visions of what looked like others traveling through the place and vanishing. At some points, they felt they were going in circles, and in other places, they felt hopelessly lost. Upon getting out that night, Stone testifies that he recalls looking back to the location and seeing a figure at the end of the hallway near the chapel staring back at him.

History: Originally opening on August 17, 1876, the hospital was once known as the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum at Morristown with the asylum officially receiving the familiar Greystone Park moniker in 1924. The idea for such a facility was conceived in the early 1870s at the persistent lobbying of nurse Dorothea Dix, an advocate for better health care for people with mental illnesses. Because of her efforts, the New Jersey Legislature appropriated $2.5 million to obtain about 3.007 square kilometers (743 acres) of land near Parsippany for New Jersey's second "lunatic asylum." The land Greystone was built on was purchased by the state in two installments between 1871 and 1872 for a total of $146,000.

Thomas Story Kirkbride participated in the design phase of the main building at Greystone, though the two main designers were architect Samuel Sloan and Trenton State Asylum Superintendent Horace Buttolph, a friend of Kirkbride's. Kirkbride believed in a philosophy that the mentally ill could be cured or treated if they were in a suitable environment designed to deal with them. The building was constructed and furnished according to Kirkbride's philosophy, which proposed housing no more than 250 patients in a three story building.

At this time in history, New Jersey's state-funded mental health facilities were exceedingly overcrowded and sub par compared to neighboring states that had more facilities and room to house patients. Greystone was built in part to relieve the severely overcrowded "lunatic asylum" in the state, which was located in Trenton, New Jersey. In fact, Greystone's initial 292 patients were transferred based on geographic distribution from the Trenton facility to Greystone, setting precedent for the location to become the facility that would generally accept patients whose residences were in the northern part of the state. However, this proved to be the very reason why Greystone quickly became overcrowded in the heavily populated northern part of the state over the comparatively sparsely populated South.

In the just four years after Greystone opened, the asylum was already accommodating around 800 patients in a facility designed for 600, and by 1887, the exercise rooms and attic space were converted to dormitories to create extra rooms for the influx of new patients. In an attempt to relieve the further overcrowding, the Dormitory Building was built behind the main building in 1901, but even that wasn't enough to alleviate the problem, and in the same year, the dining rooms on each floor had to be converted into dormitories as well. It would seem this might be a local problem, but across the country, mental hospitals were struggling to figure our what to do with its mental patients. One might wonder on the broad standards used to designate mental patients at the time. In 1914, Greystone housed 2,412 patients in rooms with an absolute maximum capacity of 1,600. As construction started to alleviate the crowding, numbers peaked even more after World War Two with soldiers being diagnosed and treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. Greystone was one of the few places in the country capable of treating such patients.

The Seventies and Eighties finally saw some weight lifted from the overcrowding with a trend toward de-institutionalization through drugs, like Thorazine, and the use of community homes for halfway house-style living. In 1982, twenty independent living cottages holding two patients each were built, and by 1988, all the patients had been moved out of the the main building used mostly for administrative purposes in the center section.

In 2000, it was announced that Greystone was going to be closed by 2003. The reasons were two fold. One: there were many concerns over the aging buildings, and, two: rumors of neglect and impropriety with the patients were being leaked by employees. There were rumors of sexual assault in a hospital elevator, patients committing suicide, patients becoming pregnant, and a twice-convicted rapist who escaped. Patients were slowly transferred to other locations even as plans and funding for a new Greystone location was being built. Ground was ceremonially broken on November 16, 2005, for the new psychiatric hospital on the Greystone campus with the expected date of opening as October 2007. The new hospital is two-thirds the size of the Kirkbride building and can house about 450 patients, with another 100 patients living in hospital-run cottages on the grounds around the main building.

Until 2003, the future of most of the historic buildings was uncertain. Many of the buildings are vacant and need major repairs. Preservationists have been working for several years to guarantee the survival of this complex of buildings with the cooperation of Morris County negotiating with the State of New Jersey to take over vacant structures for non-profit agencies. In 2003, Morris County finalized plans to purchase about 300 acres of Greystone Park from the state including many of the vacant, dilapidated buildings. By the summer of 2008, the Curry building and the surrounding vacant buildings were demolished. The Kirkbride building and surrounding patient houses are heavily patrolled by the Morris County Sheriff's Office and are inaccessible to the public.

Identity Of Ghosts: There are a few candidates for the figures said to haunt the location. Supposedly, one name is a former nurse named Maria who allegedly guards a spiritual portal and warns the recently deceased to stay away from it. Another entity is believed to be a former patient named Wes Johnson (alias - real name unknown). In life, he suffered from Alzheimer's Disease. Legend goes the confusion he struggled with from his condition latched on him in the afterlife. He is known to stay close to his room and the outside hallway. He is also known to have a friend of a darker nature that tags along with him. Other supposed phantoms include: Gordon McAllister, a self-proclaimed "werewolf" who attacked three kids and sadistically murdered a fourth in 1943, Eugene Milk, a manic depressive with bouts of violence, Grace Arbuckle, who tried to drown her son in a sink of dishwater and later divorced herself from reality, Walton Bailey, a schizophrenic mental patient obsessed with violent movies and an unnamed vagrant who died in a fire in the library, but no ghost is more prevalent here than that of William "Billy" Lasher. No records exist for Lasher. According to oral tradition, he was born in the hospital, and no documentation was made to substantiate his life. He grew up to be emotionally deprived and prone to extreme violence, once attacking a nurse and setting himself on fire. His ghost is said to wander the location wearing a gas mask and rattling chains dragging behind him. No historic basis can be found for his apparition, and it is believed his story is a local variation of a so-called "boogeyman" specter, similar to William Worley of Dark Forest, West Virginia and Freddie Krueger of Springwood, Illinois.

Source/Comments: Greystone Park (2012) - Activity based on the movie and from the following locations Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York City, New York, Letchworth Mental Health Sanitarium near Letchworth Village, New York, Linda Vista Hospital in East Los Angeles, California, Old Greenville Tuberculosis Hospital in Greenville, South Carolina, Old Spartanburg Tuberculosis Hospital in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Old Logan County Memorial Hospital in Guthrie, Oklahoma, Hillcrest Sanitarium in Howell, Michigan, Old Mercywood Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Maplecrest Mental Hospital in Whitelaw, Wisconsin and other cases.

• Freddie Krueger from "A Nightmare On Elm Street" (1984)
• William Worley from "The Hitchhiker" (1973)